“I move that the House take note that tomorrow (Thursday) I will move a motion to nationalise and prescribe all Marange diamond fields.” The year was 2011; the month was October, slightly over the first week of October. The speaker was Eddie Cross.

Another view another day
“The ministry responsible for the indigenisation exercise, launched in 2007 by the then Zanu-PF government, two weeks ago published another set of regulations that would, if implemented, have effectively nationalised all firms in the country . . .

The Thursday judgement by the Supreme Court gives legal weight to the call for early elections, does it not? Of course the judgement relates immediately to three constituencies. 
Yet its ramifications extend well beyond the three, to suggest many possibilities, all of them favourable to Zanu-PF. The floodgates have been opened and it does not require any clairvoyance to predict the direction of events henceforth. Only a little memory will help one recall that Zanu-PF has

I am happy that lately, the management team for Copac has been making tremendous “progress” at their level. But the team is the pre-penulti­mate, the penultimate being the principals, the ultimate being the people who will pass the final verdict through the referendum. It remains to be seen whether or not that progress which the manage­ment committee has made stands to wash with the principals. Only then can we then say we are close to wrapping up this vexatious matter about consti­tution-making.

A few months back I wrote a piece in which I drew a distinction between those who govern and those who rule. I asserted that both before and after the inclusive Government, Zanu-PF continued to produce ideas that rule, ideas by which Zimbabwe has been governed.
I was even more daring. I asserted that in the inclusive dispensation we are under, the two MDC formations were heavily indebted to Zanu-PF for the governing ideas, never mind that they were failing to implement them. I gave the example of dollarisation, a policy which Zanu-PF adopted well

In the early eighties I had a friend who worked in the security establishment. He was in charge of VIP protection. One day he was tasked to ensure a VVIP was transported to Kushinga-Pikhelela, transported safe and sound. And because the VVIP was pressed for time, my security friend raised the Airforce of Zimbabwe for a helicopter. A while after the request, the Airforce phoned back to regret that the helicopter meant to ferry the VVIP had developed a technical fault and thus would not be available for the trip.

I was most amused to hear Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC-T president threatening Generals for political involvement. He, of all people! Just two weeks before, the man had met with one General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), also known as FOB, Friend of Bill, following his ill-fated decision to run for US Presidency in 2004, with full backing from Bill Clinton.

Both were Rhodes Scholars, something linking the two men, and then with Tsvangirai, to the imperial settler political legacy personified by Cecil John Rhodes. All are benefactors of Cecil John Rhodes, the first two directly, the lonely last by lineage legacy. And given Clark’s dubious title as the general to

As I write, South Africa is boiling with anger, divisive anger. Never in the history of mankind has a society debated so heatedly, has a society been divided so sharply over a matter so private, a matter so obscene, so revealing. Some white man, one Brett Murray, produced something to which one places a label as they see fit: a work of art for some; graffiti for others. Some even described it as an assault by some leftover of apartheid on a man who happens to be a president, a man who is an African.

All those multiple identities of the supposed victim gave wider meaning to Murray’s product — a giant phallus abutting, jutting out, or drooping from the made-to-fit rainment of an otherwise iconic representation of visionary, decorous leadership, a representation in the mould of the leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladmir Lenin.

With such a sensitive organ obscenely appended to this painting that clearly resembling one Jacob Zuma, President of the Republic of South Africa, Murray’s thing immediately thrust itself into a fiery din of public controversy sure to impart and guarantee immortality to it, sure to stand erect in the annals of South African and wider African history.

As the story of TB Joshua rages on, rages towards its denouement, I have been reminded of the church politics in England of the late middle ages. And of course church politics necessarily meant the Catholic Church with its many Orders, its vast real estate, its ever swelling coffers, all set against gargantuan appetites of its supposedly holy, otherworldly inmates, starting with the Pope.

Far reaching reforms suggested for the Church in the 12th and 13th century had come to spectacular grief, as dictates of happy secular life got the better of monks and friars, got the better of church dogma, philosophy and vows to a life of devotional privation. Gone and gone for good was the devotional self-abnegation of the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th centuries which had given these religious figures and orders a higher spiritual plinth, well ahead of ordinary men and women of their time. Wealth had slowly but inexorably driven out single-mindedness and the devotion of yore, bringing with it “the world’s slow stain”, to quote A R Myers.

I thought they were thick-skinned. I thought they were courageous. Last week my instalment made a passing reference to the health status of those in the MDC-T aspiring for presidency. No name was mentioned, not a single one. Boy, what a panicky response! I had touched a raw nerve, in the process exposing deep-seated health-anxieties within the MDC-T hierarchy. I liked a jibe from a contributor on one of the websites: atya chatikwatara ndeane chiturikwa. Translated it means he who fears a thud is one with a poorly hung secret!

Why is the Prime Minister sounding irritable these days, hardly a fortnight into his latest engagement? One would have thought with a coolant right in the home, our foremost minister would approach life sedately, approach it with coolness, calmness. Not this week. He used the World Press Freedom Day to detonate fresh farts of anger and frustration, wholly aiming it at Webster Shamu, the Minister of Media, Information and Publicity. He did much more. He doled out threats, empty threats against a minister towards whose appointment he has zero say. He admitted to as much, in the process revealing his own effeteness in the inclusive Government. He did much worse. He divided the inclusive Government, thereby abjuring the little symbolic authority he could have invoked for some modicum of control, for some modicum of empathy.

One stubborn day in April, the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twelve, President Mugabe stolidly walked back to Harare, clearly defying Press and prophecy.
The week before had been abuzz with rumours. He was seriously ill, the Press, in big bright banner had joyfully proclaimed.

He was going through his last gasps, read the same proud Press on the morrow. No, in fact he had just passed on, wildly wailed the same suitably sad Press. The ailing Air Zimbabwe had already dispatched a plane to bring home his remains, continued editorials. 
The dire reports came in quick succession. All these dire reports were set against words from a prophet, one TB Joshua, a