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NELSON CHAMISA

A fraudulent intent, however elaborately crafted, will in the end betray itself.
Zimbabweans have for the past 15 years been flooded with self-serving adulations from the lips of MDC politicians — ranging from the bombastic rhetoric of “we are a democratic movement” to the vaunting slogan “We are the party of excellence,” Nelson Chamisa’s favourite catch phrase.

Much of addiction to power and control is due to illusions of control, and this explains why a man of little virtue will stick it out in politics even in the face of glaring unpopularity.

It also explains the delusions of grandeur that make people like Morgan Tsvangirai claim to be life’s “main actors”, or to proclaim that “there is no MDC without me, and you know it”.

The fraudulent intent in politics is always camouflaged in moralistic deism, and politicians will do all in their power to portray their standing as morally supreme.

This philosophy is premised on the simplistic view that says voters will always take to political glory those that lead good and decent lives.

Mr Tsvangirai

The moralistic belief will make us judge politicians with an arbiter that defines the central goal of life as the sacrifice of oneself for the cause of all others, or the denial of oneself in pursuit of the collective welfare of all others.

Zanu-PF politicians play amazingly so well the moralism card, preaching vigorously about the undiluted purity of intent the liberation struggle was, and anyone that sees Zanu-PF in unfavourable light is summarily dismissed as disrespectful of the legacy of the liberation struggle, including those that actively participated in the same struggle. Departed war heroes are venerated and lionised not exactly for the cause they died for, but more for contrived glory meant to go the direction of the praise singers. We were there with them when they died so to us be the glory, so goes the logic.

The logic is that the survivors of the deadly war of attrition that brought us independence must enjoy the credit of heroism that comes with the sacrifice and self-denial that led many of their colleagues to lay their lives for the sake of our independence, and this credit overrides any blemish that could be a result of the present day shortcomings of the war survivors.

This explains why the MDC is so desperate to create its own dead heroes. Dead heroes provide a sense of moral uprightness for their admirers on the one end, and on the other they condemn to demonic levels the character of those perceived as having caused the death of the departed.

We have seen the vainglorious attempts to elevate the sad and tragic death of Learnmore Judah Jongwe to martyrdom, and some characters smitten by identity crises have even tried to canonise and immortalise the late politician, not for the benefit of the Jongwe family or that of any of those that truly cared about the man, but purely for the purpose of siphoning political mileage from the legacy of a dead man.

“We are the party of excellence”, is a slogan coined to create an illusion of some high moral ground, and the crafters of the slogan were most probably victims of immense bliss, completely oblivious to the glaring shortcomings within the MDC leadership ranks.

Listening to the searing exchanges between Nelson Chamisa and Jacob Mafume in the wake of the raging wrestling for power within the MDC-T, one can easily conclude that the fraudulent intent that gave us the MDC in the name of democracy is now remarkably betraying itself. The party has always been an ideology-free, Western-sponsored regime-change project driven by clueless power mongers enjoying the support of ill-intended imperial forces from the West, and we have in the past made this point abundantly clear.

It is most amazing to hear Obert Gutu and those aligned to the beleaguered party leader Morgan Tsvangirai deriding Rhodesians and Western imperialists in a way that leaves Zanu-PF spin-doctors green with envy. Below is part of a rather furious rant taken from Obert Gutu’s Facebook page.

Obert Gutu

“These (Rhodesian) racists will never respect a black person; they will never consider a black person as their equal. They will use you and manipulate you. They will parade you as a beacon of common sense and logic and even bankroll your nefarious agenda. But deep down their hearts, these racists have nothing but absolute contempt for you and your kind.”

One can be forgiven for thinking that this was a statement from Zanu-PF’s commissariat department, the party perceived by MDC sympathisers as anti-West, or even racist.

Some of us stand blacklisted and flagged at international airports for writing milder criticism on the agenda of Rhodesians and their Western allies in regard to the political affairs of Zimbabwe, and Obert Gutu ironically took the trouble of writing endorsement documents in support of our persecution here in the Diaspora.

Now he is lecturing us all on the evils of people whose funds propped him in Zimbabwe’s political landscape, and of course we must desist from making any form of disparaging observations — the way Gutu has developed this miraculous ability to see only holiness in the life of Morgan Tsvangirai. No one does this better than Chalton Hwende.

What Obert Gutu is doing is quite similar to what some Zanu-PF politicians are doing, posturing in desperation trying to disown their own party’s policies because they are dying to appease the stick holder strangulating the country with the scourge of sanctions.

Francis Nhema is very good at telling us what the indigenisation policy is not, and hardly ever makes an effort to tell us what it is, and he knows too well who will be pleased with the disclaimers he is making, perhaps motivated by the calculative need to create an image of moderate thinking.

This approach can be called the therapeutic belief, where unlike the moralistic belief, the central goal in politics is not to sacrifice, or to deny oneself. Rather the goal is to captain one’s own fate, and to mastermind the means to safeguard one’s personal interests. The therapeutic belief teaches us that politics is a platform to create for oneself glorious avenues leading to unmitigated wealth, that politics provides us the highway to quenching our unbridled ambitions.

While our proletariat is dooming itself in prophetic deism, hunting for miraculous fixes to the pervasive challenges of poverty afflicting our people in their daily lives, our elites are on the other hand driven by this moralistic-therapeutic deism where privileged people in the upper class attribute their position to their own intellect, savvy and hard work. Even prosperous church leaders brag about the same virtues once they accumulate enough wealth to be counted among the elites.

Of course, the reality is more complex. Our elites owe their position more to nepotism, family environment, political connections, favouritism, and in many cases, outright corruption and plain crime.

We are all products of genetics, environment and personal choices. While we can hardly ever do anything about our genetics, our environment and our choices can be manipulated or even abused; the choices for a common Zimbabwean have been drastically reduced to levels of destitution by deadly political environment largely created by our most uncaring politicians.

We can be as simplistic as telling others: “You can be anything you set your mind to,” but it is unkind to say that to an illiterate 80-year-old who yearns, more than anything else, to be a rocket science professor, or to a university graduate looking for a job in a market where there are more unemployed graduates than those in some form of employment.

So some of our politicians use their political privilege to accumulate ill-gotten wealth and then credit themselves as having exceptional business acumen. Our bureaucrats manipulate public tenders for corrupt personal benefit and they account for their ill-gotten riches by posturing as men and women of exceptional intellect, or as self-made beings born out of the nobility of sheer hard work.

This explains the childish clamouring for the title “Dr”, where even semi-literate people have been seen vaingloriously posture in PhD graduation attire pretending to be full of knowledge and complex intellect. Even church pastors have developed this shameful habit of pretending to be doctorate degree holders by parading dubious certificates awarded for three months of cheap online assignments disguised as coursework.

Even genuinely learned people like Obert Gutu will invoke the title Dr as a prefix to Tsvangirai’s name whenever this dear leader is faced with a crisis of legitimacy or credibility. Well, Tsvangirai, in fact, holds two genuine doctorate degrees in puppetry awarded to him by two competing South Korean universities on behalf of his former Western handlers, who are now biding for his political oblivion.

We want to appear like we are in control even when we are clearly losing everything, and this illusion of control has been our bane as a nation.

Our politicians will pretend all is in order and will not resign or relinquish in failure, and where they are obliged to explain themselves they always come up with highly impressive scapegoats.

Just about every failing politician in the Zanu-PF Government can freely blame Western sanctions for their shortcomings with the confidence of Hercules, much as every misfortune that befalls the MDC can freely and by definition be blamed on Zanu-PF and the CIO.

The truth of the matter is that no one is in control of anything at the MDC as things stand, and this is precisely because the fraudulent intent upon which the party was founded has finally betrayed and exposed itself.

The illusions of control in Tsvangirai’s head are no worse than those in Tendai Biti’s head, but both men will choose to die first before they can admit the game is over for their brand of politics.

We are stuck as a nation when we look around and we see people with political control of land and have zero-economic control of the same. Sitting on an uncultivated piece of fertile land is not synonymous with having control over the land resource. It cannot be.

Rather having control over resources is being capable to create a tangible economic benefit out of the same resource. It is a contradiction in terms to talk of a revolutionary party with no decisive capacity to deal with the scourge of corruption, just like it is laughable to attribute any form of excellence to anything related to the chaos-infested MDC.

But our politicians invoke these fabulous superlatives to help create a pretentious image of moral invincibility, and it is sad that the sloganeering sometimes detrimentally goes to the heads of ordinary supporters.

Across the political divide we have a sad scenario of fanatical people cheering at mediocrity, and even elevating plain balderdash to high-sounding ideology.

We now have this sorry state of affairs where political leaders are deified and elevated to superior beings only challengeable by death.
If we cannot tame and control our leaders as Zimbabweans, we would be foolish to imagine that we can control the course of our destiny, or that we can control our country and its resources.

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

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