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VP Mnangagwa

Joram Nyathi Spectrum

The reality is that Zanu-PF has individuals who are seized with the revolution . . . But to maintain the illusion of an amorphous revolutionary party is to provide cover for thieves, corrupt officials who soil the name of the party, megalomaniacs and all those who commit crimes under the cloak of Zanu-PF colours.

IF today’s edition of the Spectrum might sound too discursive, it is so because I am a bit agitated. Wild thoughts come flooding into my mind as I try to marshal my ideas around an ominous spectre.

I want to argue why the next election will not be about ordinary national issues — the economy, jobs or food security or human rights or democracy.

They will be less about Zanu-PF too as an institution.

Instead, the next election is about one Robert Mugabe.

That is why we must know where the rain began to beat us, Mr Manheru, why Mugabe is the target, why Mugabe must go.

In the past this column has made passing reference to the way we Africans love to see our signatures, to sign documents we haven’t read, let alone draft, which later on become our Achilles heel.

I have also made passing comments on the need for a strong ideological anchor as a ballast for making judgment on national matters.

On this I am often guided by Thomas Sankara’s observation that; “A soldier without any political or ideological training is a potential criminal.”

To this we can add Steve Biko’s equally enduring observation, when he says; “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Both Sankara and Biko point to the obvious: most of our battles are fought and won or lost in the mind.

The Herald of August 29, 2015, carried an interview between Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Baffour Ankomah of New African magazine. The interview raised a number of issues related to this country’s past, present and future.

What struck me outright was the VP’s comments on why the national youth service was abandoned.

Other people raised more pressing matters about the interview, and I quietly put aside the notes I had made then for the Spectrum.

VP Mnangagwa was asked whether in the past 35 years Zanu-PF had put in place systems for the next generation to continue the revolution.

e said initially the party had introduced youth service to preach and teach patriotism, “to instil a culture of commitment and the upholding of the values of our revolution into the people . . .”

Quote; “We felt that every child, as they grew up in this country, should put the country first and their personal interests second. We felt that the best method was to introduce the youth service where when our children had reached secondary level education, they would go and be taught the elements of patriotism. That as a nation we are where we are today because we have stood up and are ready to shed our blood for what we believe is ours. And that we must, day and night, remain masters of our destiny and resources . . .”

Responding specifically to the question of inter-generational continuity, whether he was satisfied future generations would continue with the revolution, VP Mnangagwa said; “We believe that they will, that for the foreseeable future we shall lie quietly in our graves.”

As if suddenly aware of his own uncertainty about that future, VP Mnangagwa told his interlocutor Government was working on bringing back “our youth service programmes, and two, to change the curriculum in our schools so that the history of the revolution is taught, and taught well”.

Why was the youth service programme abandoned in the first place? VP Mnangagwa’s response was, “down the line, we did not have the resources to sustain the programmes at the youth service centres”.

In my notes on that day on August 29, I simply wrote, “strategic blunder! It is like neglecting agriculture because we have no resources to sustain it.”

That’s how those comments struck me. They immediately reminded me of Sankara and his soldier without “ideological or political training”.

President Mugabe and his war time comrades know what they stand for.

They have the political and ideological training.

War veterans have the same values.

They appreciate fully the concept of sacrifice and what they want or wish for their country.

But there is clearly a disjuncture between those who sacrificed to bring about independence and the post-independence generation.

Those who fought in the liberation war are now serving their terms. We have “future leaders” who don’t have the political and ideological training and are expected to naturally continue to uphold the values of the revolution which the revolutionaries failed to instil because “we did not have the resources to sustain the programmes”! Gentlemen?

Experience and circumstance tell us that with time the revolution itself loses its fervour. There are many comrades who have lost zest for the revolution, and here I am talking of people who initially had both “political and ideological training”.

The same experience and circumstance teach us the more we are educated, the further we get alienated from our roots, from the soil, from our adults from whom we should learn about the ways of this dangerously ideological world. It is not a world in which we can ever hope to “lie quietly in our graves” when we have abandoned those who succeed us to drift like straw in the wind, lacking the political and ideological training to withstand the ephemeral glory the devil promises them from the top of the mountain, if only they will fall down and worship him!

When such youth and intellectuals encounter temptation, they behave like a foolish woman who visits her neighbour’s house. She gets charmed and mesmerised by the glittering possessions. But instead of asking the neighbour how she did it, she wants to stay and become the second wife.

That is the mentally of the current generation and often we the parents are complicit: the Holy Grail of education is to go to London or New York or Canada and never to come back.

Until things have changed. Changed by who? To what?

The auctioning of a Zimbabwean property recently in South Africa to meet the legal costs of a court case by 78 white former farmers changing the land reform brought out the best in our Saturday columnist, Nathaniel Manheru. That’s what reminded me of the Mnangagwa interview and national youth service.

He said those who were deployed to act for Zimbabwe against the white challenge lacked urgency, the skill, sense of gravity for the task before them, and overall, were lackadaisical in their approach to the matter. In his own words; “That was fatal. We have to learn to cost matters, learn to read their implications, to give them full status and regard.”

Zimbabwe’s leaders can’t sleep quietly in their graves without a revolutionary youth.

The fire of the revolution has cooled, things are taken for granted and many now are complacent and believe it is not possible to reverse the land reform. Simply because the Constitution says so. Others have abandoned the farms they got under the land reform or are willing to provide cover for white former occupants. Revolutionaries have gone to sleep and national issues are not given their due weight in gold.

That is why the next election is about Mugabe the person. He is viewed as the biggest stumbling block to the restoration of apartheid Rhodesia.

A little truth will not hurt. And I hope Government has a sense of urgency when VP Mnangagwa says they plan to bring back national youth service.

There is currently an illusion about “Zanu-PF” being a revolutionary party. The private media mockingly echoes the mantra and one hopes party ideologues realise they are being lulled to sleep. The reality is that Zanu-PF has individuals who are seized with the revolution. It has also executed revolutionary programmes. But to maintain the illusion of an amorphous revolutionary party is to provide cover for thieves, corrupt officials who soil the name of the party, megalomaniacs and all those who commit crimes under the cloak of Zanu-PF colours.

That is why we need broad-based youth service.

What has distinguished Zanu-PF from fellow liberation movements is that, in embarking on the land reform programme and other black economic empowerment programmes, the party challenged the gods of our universe to a fist fight. The nature of this universe is such that the gods don’t die and they don’t sleep. By stopping national youth service Zanu-PF decommissioned those who should fight its war and threw away the ideological armour, the only dependable protection in times of temporary adversity in the war.

The best of our brains, minus the soul, are taken from us for indoctrination abroad, seduced with scholarships and further education.

They have nothing positive to say about their independence.

They become the moderates, like the “moderate” rebels America is always training and arming overseas to fight their own governments.

Those deemed not so intelligent to be taken by the enemy we abandon to the whims of foreign NGOs.

That is why Mugabe has become the centre and purpose of the next election. The reckoning is that without him, the revolution, and obversely, the reconquest, is possible and near in Zimbabwe. That the end of the war of resistance to colonial rule is close.