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President Mugabe

PRESIDENT Mugabe on Friday spoke highly of his relationship with his deputy and long-time aide, Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa saying he confides in him as he also took the opportunity to share with the nation the malady that afflicted the VP in Gwanda and the clean bill he had since been given by his doctors.

Said President Mugabe: “Warwara ipapo ndini ndarwara. Ndino suruvara ndiri kuda kunzwa kuti chii. Ndoda kunzwa kuti wakadii ari kunaChiremba; aenda kuhospital ndinoda kunzwisisa kuti ari kubudirira here kana haasi. Imi munenge musingazvizive izvozvo.”

The President spoke a day after VP Mnangagwa dispelled malicious rumours that he had fallen sick after consuming ice cream from the First Family’s Gushungo Dairy, rumours that were clearly designed to put a wedge between the President and Vice President.

And as it turned out, President Mugabe had been kept abreast of developments by the VP who even brought in his doctor of 20 years to meet the President at State House.

The President’s sentiments should serve as a wake-up call to rumourmongers and fifth columnists albeit Johnnies-Come-Lately bent on fomenting divisions and confusion in the rank and file of the revolutionary party.

President Mugabe also spoke strongly against such divisive elements.

We hope they stand put on notice.

Zanu-PF is a party of the revolution that has withstood the Western onslaught launched at the turn of the millennium on the back of a cohesive revolutionary leadership.

The only time the enemy appeared to get a foothold was when the then Joice Mujuru led putschist cabal engineered “bhora musango” that saw Zanu-PF lose its majority in Parliament for the first time since independence in 1980.

Lessons learnt from that sorry episode saw Zanu-PF closing ranks to give the opposition a devastating blow in the 2013 harmonised polls.

That victory obviously did not sit well with Zimbabwe’s internal and external detractors who appear to be hard at work fomenting divisions again.

We take this opportunity to remind the Zanu-PF leadership of the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel.

It is said after the great flood, about three centuries before the call of Abraham, the descendants of Noah had one language and a common speech and were united in purpose when they decided to build a beautiful city with a tower that stretches to the heavens.

The people decided to make bricks, which they baked thoroughly and used to build the tower instead of stone.

They fortified the tower using tar for mortar in the hope that the tower would make a name for them asnd prevent them from scattering over all the face of the earth.

But when the Lord, being a jealous God, came down to see the city and the tower, he said:

“If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. (He said to his angels) Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.

“So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.”

This is why the tower was called Babel (from the Hebrew baw-bel, which means confusion) because the Lord confused their language which spawned conflicts that dispersed them all over the globe.

The site of the tower of Babel is at Borsippa, just south of Babylon, (in present-day Iraq).

Transpose Borsippa for Zimbabwe and Noah’s flood for our independence, the tower for pro-people policies and the Lord for Western detractors, his angels the fifth columnists and the tale would locate the source of the divisive rumour-mongering in the revolutionary party.

It is within Zanu-PF’s capacity to stop the seed of baw-bel from germinating and flourishing.

All the party needs to do is return to source, close ranks and march forward as one for unity, peace and development.

It will be so easy to identify agents of confusion, they will march out of step with everyone else!