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The story of a brain-dead president
By itself, ignorance is not exactly a crime. There is so much of it in the world, which is surprisingly tolerant.
I vividly remember a dramatic encounter between the brainy Robert Mugabe and one American President who shall remain nameless. The only helpful hint I could give is that he is now formally and fully dead. He is the only human being I know to have been late for his eventual death. I will explain later.

Expectedly the Zimbabwean President had prepared for the encounter, budgeting for a decent engagement with the President of a superpower, then still balanced off rather tenuously by the Soviet Union.
Once the Zimbabwean leader had been presented before this mighty man, the American official managing the encounter cued his President to speak, and did so with the grace, efficiency and firmness of a conductor of an orchestra on trial.

What followed was an exquisite act that left me spellbound. Relying on neat notes, the American President addressed his Zimbabwean counterpart with the grace and lucidity of a master actor-king, an oracle-king.
The rendition was flawless. The rendition was remarkable, all put together so neatly, all delivered with contrived naturalness reminiscent of an actor in film verite. There was finality to this remarkable political speech act, a finality which I mistakenly attributed to the awesome power the American President wielded and knew he wielded.

The only day the President was slow
I must make an irreverent confession. For the first and only time, I saw my own President acting a bit slow. Mind trimmed, body taut, President Mugabe sought to respond to this powerful soliloquy from a man of great global power.

He sought to engage, daftly forgetting America had inserted him into a fictional world where he was the only reality, a passive one at that. America expected him to sit in the terrace, demure as a specimen audience. Insensibly, President Mugabe sought to break out of this preordained mould.
“Mr President, I thought I could respond to your thoughts by raising one or two issues relating to our region, Southern Afr . . . ”
“Thank you very much President Mughabi. Unfortunately the President of the United States of America is pressed for time. I am afraid I have to call this off. I am sorry. Mr President, please!”

Willing suspension of disbelief
Both Presidents went up – one haplessly unfulfilled, another feeling thoroughly acquitted – and were firmly led to the door by this no-nonsense official who knew when to stop a “conversation”, when to lead a visitor and his actor-President out of both “conversation” and White House.

So abruptly ended the encounter towards which we had invested 15 hard hours in the air, not to mention all else we had set aside back home, in Southern Africa, at the time burning.
On reflection, I reasoned that the President had forgotten one important rule for engaging the fictional world: you willingly suspend disbelief! Sadly he hadn’t done that. Much worse, he had sought to engage an actor from his audience seat, to interrogate the chief protagonist bustling in the life-size, 3D screen!
Since that remarkable encounter, the Zimbabwean President keeps teasing himself about it, to much amusement.

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The great American secret
America had installed a brain-dead man at White House as its President. But she knew how to make its dead-man-come-to-life President useful in executing the affairs of the Union.
Until such indiscreet revelations from cheeky interlocutors like President Mugabe, how many in this world knew that for two eventful terms, America had put the finger of a brain-dead man on the nuclear button? How many? And when his bodily death finally came, finally caught up with his earlier brain death, encomiums were said and written in his honour. Today he ranks among America’s greatest statesmen.

Keeping one’s fool
Light-hearted as this encounter may have been then, may be today, it taught me one thing: hold your own fool, hold him firmly so he fulfils a designated role, indeed so he has no time to become the fool he is, but the fool he should never be where there are people!

I suppose this is what Dell meant by “massive hand-holding”. Of course he was referring to one of our own, to our own contribution to the commonwealth of dunces.
I have a feeling Trevor Ncube does not seem to know that once you hire a fool, you may not go to the beer garden sevamwe! More so when you perch the fool on the topmost plinth of a cerebral enterprise, which is what the media is. You have an obligation to mind him, studiously too!

Has Chimakure read successive amendments to AIPPA, all done by the three political parties in the spirit of the GPA and its quest for media reforms? And the constitutional amendment which capped this whole effort?

Does he know what that amended law says about the Media Council? Does he know who is in ZMC and how that Commission was constituted?
Does he know that the draft constitution is itself an assignment under the GPA, alongside many others including media reforms? That acts of Parliament do derive from, are subordinate to the supreme law called the constitution? That good public policy-making is well sequenced, that it always takes a firm cue from the supreme law of the land? That it should be cost-effective?

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Read, Mr Editor

As I said ignorance is in itself not a crime, provided it goes cattle-herding, provided it knows its station and limits.
As I said ignorance is in itself not an admonishable crime provided it remains profoundly humble, mute even. In fact with that kind of demeanor, it could very easily pass for wisdom.
It is when it yells, rending apart the solemn silence of a sleeping village, that it becomes insufferable.

Here is a man who has sought and got employment in a cerebral industry, the media. We assume he has it upstairs. We assume he reads, reads, reads, especially well before he writes. For we are sure to judge him by his vocation, which is why Professor Moyo is dead right to place the boy kumakoto, pamwe nezvidhiidhii, the little birds.

When you become an editor, you must be literate, or at the very least knowledgeable. It is not a choice; it is a requirement. As readers we expect no less, won’t complain any less against any show of ignorance, let alone one coming through in such repeated, gratuitous spurts.

When you swallow a pestle
No one is invoking standards of the nunnery to judge Chimakure. We are simply asking him to be properly qualified for what he has voluntarily chosen to do in his little life, namely to deal in knowledge, facts, ideas and viewpoints. He must do it well to deserve respect, to earn ululation from the village which expects and deserves so much from such a role.
For such a role, ignorance is execrable, more so when it puts on the shameless garb of impudence.

Why can’t the man read? Why? A whole editor, getting it so wrong on a law that shapes his industry?
And where is his master, Trevor Ncube?

The Shona people have a very apt saying: when you choose to swallow a pestle, make sure the gullet knows. What is more, make sure you are sworn to sleeping straight and standing!
Trevor, you appointed the boy; please hand-hold him. Massively! Ndapota.

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Our Malawi
Things have been happening in Malawi. Bad things, but things hugely instructive to our region.

Let me make it plain that Malawi is a sister republic and Zimbabwe is very close to that sister to the north of us, has been throughout our long history which saw us connected by the navel, thanks to the white federation.

After the demise of colonialism, Sadc came in to deepen that relationship. I don’t need to refer to deep cultural ties that bind us, including the sporting dimension dominated by football.
In lighter moments, the President of Zimbabwe threatens his Malawi counterpart with total defeat on the pitch, threatening to unleash a formidable Zimbabwe national football team led by players of Malawi extraction, all to tight riffs from Zimbabwean bands, again led by the Zakarias, the Machesos, etc,etc.

This is how interconnected we have become, all to great mutual profit. Unhappy events in Malawi are bound to register as a sharp pull, a sharp tag on the navel.
Staggering to the brink

A week or so back, Malawi was in the throes of civil disturbances. All told, 18 people were reported dead.
The Government there showed a firm hand, with the President making it plain clear his constitutional mandate included ensuring order in the Republic. He would fulfil that requirement without hesitation, he threatened.

That appeared to jolt the national psyche, dousing what could have been raging fires of unrest, partly stoked by fuel shortages, electricity blackouts, against a general rise in the cost of living.

As Malawi staggered on the brink, elsewhere in the world pundits were gauging whether or not the Arab Spring had finally reached Southern Africa, sure to begin as a small smoulder in Malawi, sure to spread as a raging conflagration towards incendiary Zimbabwe, itself the priced trophy.

Yes the spring has broken out, said one group of such pundits; no it hadn’t given that the causal factors are too localised to be exportable, said the other group.
And as this great learned altercation took place, neither side spared a thought for country, people and property, all burning! Who cared? After all this is a small, southern African black state!

Unrest in Eden

Of course for us brethren of the suffering, the dying even, we grappled for explanation. We still do.
The real danger is to be fascinated by gore, forgetting what lies beneath. Or pitying the plummage, while forgetting the dying bird.
Far more important than maudlin sentimentality, far more important than easy condemnations, whether of Government or the raging demos, is the need to surgically know when the rains started beating the Malawians.

The unrest which hit Malawi from 20 July never caused itself, much as the Arab spring pundits want to suggest local factors. Hardly two years ago, Malawi went to the polls and gave President waMutharika a massive landslide mandate. The President has presided over six years of high-paced growth, one underpinned by a spectacular agricultural rebound for which he has bagged awards.
We imported maize from Malawi, to meet our own needs here. Part of that imported maize is still to be paid, thanks to the bickering in our Inclusive Government.

I have been in Malawi repeatedly, all the time marvelling at how Bingu got our agricultural input package model, all to beat us hands down, using very small-scale farmers, mostly women, all using hand and hoe, against our own massive farms on which roars powerful machines that devours the earth.

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Small but with all bodily parts

But one day in February, Malawi picked a great quarrel with that knee-less clan, the British. A leaked cable from the British Embassy revealed an irreverent British view of the Malawi President, calling him “autocratic and intolerant of criticism”.

The President and his Government would not have it. They showed the British ambassador the door, telling him “timba” might be a small bird, but like the mighty eagle, it has all the bodily parts. Malawi will not have it on its soil.

Expectedly Britain saw this as cockiness by a subordinate nation of native urchins, all of them British subjects once in history. How dare they snort at the master? Not another Mughabi in the neighborhood!
Albion reacted swiftly, with the tit inviting a hefty tat. In no time the Malawian envoy to Britain was beating the path home, in a remarkable show of swift, negative reciprocity.

The story of Kenya
Of course those with long memories will remember a similar case involving a British envoy, one Edward Clay and the Kenyan Government, back in July 2004. One day this British High Commissioner decided Kenya had grown intolerably corrupt and decided to say just that publicly.

President Kibaki’s ministers, said the British envoy, were “eating like gluttons”, and were “vomiting on shoes” of donors. Nekukoriwa!
Well, Kenya threatened all manner of reprisals. In the end, it settled for a mere apology, which came eventually. Not with President waMutharika!

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Love gays or else
Britain went further. It cut aid to Malawi, much of it by way of budgetary support. It accused Malawi of mishandling the economy and failing to uphold human rights.
Even more intriguing, the donors were unhappy over how Malawi was handling a homosexual couple!

“When we talk about human rights, we do not only talk about the majority but also minority groups like the ongoing issue of homosexuals which needs to be looked into thoroughly,” said Frank Kufwakwandi, head of AfDB in Malawi who also chairs the donors committee.

They always use us against ourselves!
In no time the IMF followed the British suit, followed by the USA, followed by the World Bank, the European Union, the African Development Bank, Germany and Norway.
The gyre widened, all to great Malawi ruin.
The British wand had split the Red Sea waters, drying budgetary coffers for Malawi. With CABS in place – Common Approach to Budget Support – Britain did not have to sweat to convince the donor league.
All told, US$400 million in aid money was withheld as these donors acted in concert, thanks to CABS and its iron-clad solidarity of the haves.

For a country which relied on donor budgetary support to the tune of 40 percent, or 80 percent of its development budget, this move by the donors triggered immediate, far-reaching repercussions. To cope, Malawi unfurled an austerity package, itself the trigger to the current wave of social unrest.
These are the facts, this is the causal sequence which must never be missed by any of us.

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But Malawi is not alone. Mozambique, another of our neighbours and allies, relies on donors for 48 percent of her budget, making it the world’s eighth most aid dependent country.

Donors who loom so large over our eastern neighbour have neatly organised themselves into what is termed the Programme Aid Partners (PAP), or G19, itself a numerical representation of countries involved.

In 2010, the G19 went on strike, leaving Mozambique hanging on cliff edge. Later they ended the strike and US$472 million trickled in, but not before making it apparent to the Mozambicans that G19 not only meant 19 donor governments. It also meant a “shadow government” of 19 hovering over the official Mozambican Government which you and me vote in, hoping for local policies and decisions.

As in the case of Malawi, the strike had been precipitated by governance issues, allegations of corruption and “flawed” processes in the judiciary. Mozambique’s donors are ADB, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the World Bank, with the IMF as non-signatory but ex-officio member. The G19 is governed by what is termed the “troika plus”, itself a super-government by the West’s little men and women, who become mighty kings here on our continent. As I write, 16 of the 19 donors have promised $379million in the form of aid for 2012………The story of Tanzania……. Mozambique too is not alone. There is the United Republic of Tanzania. In 2009/10 budget, donors accounted for 33% of the budget, making Tanzania’s 40 million people among the continent’s biggest per capita aid recipients. But in the same year, the donors were unhappy and slashed their support by nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, shrinking it to $534million. They did worse things. They also took their sweet time to disburse the little that was coming Tanzania’s way. Fortuitously, Tanzania was preparing for elections. Equally fortuitously too, Tanzania was working on a new mining law that sought to give the country greater say over her mineral resources. To this day, that law has been mothballed, even though already severely expurgated to utter lameness.

As with the rest of her sister republics, the donors were not too happy with governance issues, and the pace of reforms. The immediate result was pressure on the shilling and on the governing CCM party. I do not need to refer to the overall electoral outcome for CCM, or the unrest which rocked the country later……..The three swallows that made a winter……I have already given you three swallows and I am sure you agree they make a winter, an African winter! At the core of what is happening in Malawi is that beautiful country’s precarious position as a highly donor-dependent country. With such a huge dose of donor funds coming under the insidious notion of GBS, general budgetary support, Malawi cannot raise her voice without behaving like a proverbial reckless husband who knocks in the bottom of the clay pot after one heavy meal.

Equally, Mozambique cannot do the same, and has to endure the shadow government of 19 donors, a government accountable to the West, a government which does not go for elections. Today donors want CCM of Tanzania to hand over power, having been adjudged to have governed for too long. The British are busy subverting it, initially through the opposition, now through one of its organs. Without owning your budget, you cannot own your Government, your policies, your politics, your country. You will have commissioned new gods presiding over your affairs. And like butterflies to playful boys, these gods will kill you for sport! For once I am truly grateful to Charles Ray and his sanctions. They make us stronger, independent and self-standing. This should be the ethic for SADC which is why Angola must be a turning point. After all, Zimbabwe has paid dearly as a result of donor policies smuggled through on the back of budgets. Check with what forked tongues erstwhile allies speak against sanctions! Icho!