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Temba Mliswa

Reason Wafawarova on Monday

Martin Luther King Jnr once said about stupidity: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” From what we just saw through the recently held Norton by-election and from many similar elections in the past, it would not be over-stretching the truth to assert that in politics stupidity is more of a virtue than a handicap.The whole thing appeared like the louder the sloganeering and singing the greater the vote mobilisation and the more ludicrous the promises, the greater the number of people attending the rallies. Let us leave the slander alone, this thing about gay dating and so on.

So we have some in the MDC-T claiming responsibility for Temba Mliswa’s donated victory against a factional gang of political nobodies who somehow managed to contest the Norton by-election in the name of Zanu-PF. This is the same MDC-T that necessitated the holding of dozens of by-elections across the nation after it unwittingly recalled its sitting MPs — all because of failing to deal with factionalism.

The MDC-T effectively donated all the seats occupied by the recalled politicians to Zanu-PF after deciding not to field any candidates in the by-elections. People like Professor Moyo of the bicycle fame greatly benefited from this gesture.

We were told this was to send a clear message that the MDC-T was not going to legitimise “stolen elections.” Only after implementation of “electoral reforms” will the MDC-T ever participate in any election we are told. Yet one of the party’s three Vice Presidents is reported to have “descended on Norton,” ostensibly to campaign for a bitter Zanu-PF outcast contesting as an independent candidate.

There is no need to worry about these demands and for the simple reason that come 2018, the MDC-T will find a good reason to tell us for contesting.

We need politicians whose lives are committed to the realisation of defined convictions. Instead we have this unfortunate reality where any fool with eloquence of speech and a voice can pull it through the electoral process. We reward mediocrity to our own detriment.

We have for a long time confused cheap populism for revolution and this needs to stop. Our elections are premised on slander and populism, and we have allowed the prevailing of irrationality, gullibility, naivety and plain stupidity.

We are fast approaching election 2018 and it appears the election will be a contest between Nera propaganda and Zanu-PF propaganda. We have no meaningful policies from which to decide the vote.

This will be election number 5 since the dawn of the millennium and there is just no evidence that the election will bring with it any difference for the voter, precisely because our political landscape has within it more stupidity than the earth has oxygen.

We have some Zanu-PF politicians openly bragging about partisan utilisation of national resources and others openly saying investigating alleged criminal misconduct by some Cabinet Ministers amounts to “a national security threat,” while others claim it “undermines the party”.

On the other hand we have a blinkered opposition whose idea of open-mindedness is tantamount to having brains falling out of the skull. Our opposition politicians believe we should all turn up and vote for opposition candidates purely on the basis of their hate for their political opponents in Zanu-PF.

It is a grave mistake to believe that their hate for President Mugabe is contagious and it is equally harebrained to hope delusions of grandeur are transformable into hard reality.

There is no revolution without material transformation — the kind of transformation that resulted in us seeing the mass construction of schools, clinics, dams, roads and the rapid urbanisation drive in the aftermath of national independence.

We cannot meaningfully deride the shortcomings of Zanu-PF today without acknowledging the party’s moments of success in the past and this is something our opposition will need to learn fast.

We must of necessity take stock of our politics and frankly the last 16 years are an amorous embarrassment. We ended the last millennium with the life-wrecking policies of the IMF-prescribed Esap and we chose to start the current millennium with popular people-oriented policies like land reclamation and economic indigenisation.

We have learnt the sad way that there is a whole world of difference between populism and pragmatism. Development is not a political move, but an economic one.

Our politicians love distributing free things for votes and we have ruined our land resource in the process. Simply put, agriculture is not the mere availability of farming land and business is not merely the ownership of shares.

We cannot successfully run this country without production-oriented politics. I have read and heard people debating about the wisdom behind the distribution of free residential housing stands in urban areas by Minister Saviour Kasukuwere and one Kudzai Chipanga.

Firstly, the “policy” is harebrained because it is a privilege policy that can only benefit a few people. One cannot practically nationalise it.

Our land in the rural areas is communally owned, as must be the case, and urbanised land can be individually purchased with title deeds securing tenure. The fairness behind this is one can purchase their legal right to that land, just like all of us can claim our collective legal right of communal ownership of rural land, mutually transferable from generation to generation.

Giving a few hundreds of thousands of people free housing land in the name of national developmental policy is an insult to the theory of public policy.

There is no policy rationale behind such a decision, no fairness on the generality of the population and evidently no sound planning behind the gesture. The only glaring force behind this “policy” is cheap politicking.

It seems like the electorate is running short of the required naivety and gullibility to reward such backward politicking with votes, as the people of Norton just proved. They simply were not impressed enough with the free housing land gesture; not enough to sway their vote it would appear.

We hear one is busy siphoning money from the national manpower development fund in order to purchase bicycles for free distribution to some rural voters, so they can vote for him in 2018 and another is arbitrarily decreeing that the country is suddenly awash with free housing land, only for those who can endear themselves to a section of Zanu-PF’s youth wing — fronted by one Kudzai Chipanga.

We must free ourselves from the ruin of hate politics and the politics of populism. A hopeless opposition inviting ruinous sanctions on the entire country in order to fell the populist Zanu-PF has not been helpful to us as a nation.

Lately there has been a lot of dying in our political leadership community. May the souls of the departed rest in peace. One would hope that the exiting of an older generation comes with the birthing of new ideas.

It does not appear like the young politicians across the divide are even worthy to untie the shoes of the likes of Cephas George Msipa. Nowhere in the political career of that veteran did he resort to be as cheap as promising people limitless freebies, not once did he seem to believe that the vote was more important than people’s lives, more important than national development.

Certainly he did not believe that calling for the sanctioning of an entire country is a good way of promoting one’s political career.

There is no colonial imbalance that can ever be attributed to urban land, and as such it is plain nonsensical for anyone to suggest that the said distribution of free housing stands is an extension of the land reform programme. We cannot elevate electioneering politics to the level of developmental policy and this is why it is important to inform the nation that any policy implementation that rises and dies with the event of an election is nothing more than cheap populism, often very destructive in the long term.

We have had far too many of hardworking urban home seekers fleeced of their hard earned cash by miscreants coming in the name of Zanu-PF. The party simply has to put a stop to this nonsense before the people decide to put an end to the party itself.

How many innocent families have in the past toiled to put up a decent home on these so-called State land stands, only to have their houses demolished not too long after completion? We have a collective duty to revive the standing of Zanu-PF as a revolutionary liberation movement and we have to start by stemming the nonsense of privatising the party through illegal and unprocedural purging of factional opponents.

There is virtually next to nothing in terms of employment, there is a biting cash crisis gripping our economically battered nation, there is a deadly crisis in the health sector and it looks like just everything is not going on well.

Then you wake up to hear that our Parliament has been dealing with this huge national crisis of an MP turning up for national duty in some colourful clothing, igniting a war of words between the two sides of the House, even to the extend of abandoning all proceedings. Certainly shallow minds cannot think deep.

We need to bring to an end this era where the politician banks on the naivety and gullibility of the voter. The foolishness of the politics of slogans, song and dance has seen its day. We have to move on as a nation and start thinking progressively and meaningfully. We have rewarded backwardness and mediocrity for far too long.

Sometimes you go to a political rally and you get this feeling that stupidity is not a handicap in politics; that it is actually a virtue. Hasn’t the learned Douglas Mwonzora turned himself into a self-styled musician to make it in politics? He sings plain bad and dances hopelessly too, but he seems to believe only that can endear him to the masses, not his vast knowledge of the world of law.

I believe Patrick Zhuwao of Zanu-PF has a few good degrees to his name too. It is just another marvel to watch him perform at rallies.

We have put up with attention seekers masquerading as dawning messiahs in our midst. Evan Mawarire had his stint as a momentary living hero in Zimbabwe, thanks to the hopelessness of our politics.

We hear an exodus from Tendai Biti’s outfit of bitterness and there is celebration in the other outfit of red confusion. People who ran away with principle are returning to an ailing bunch of unprincipled numskulls. All because election time is nearing! Hallelujah!

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.