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My Turn with Tichaona Zindoga
A long weekend.
Well-deserved.That is if one could afford to rest. There are others who cannot afford that luxury.

For this writer, a long journey to Mozambique retracing the footsteps of President Mugabe as he went to that country to direct the liberation struggle was a sobering experience.

You travel over 300 kilometres to the land of national hero, Chief Tangwena.

The weather and the terrain are inclement, if you come from other climes.

It is worse when you have to walk, which freedom fighters did, as they journeyed east to join the fight for the fatherland.

There is something God-given, lucky, about being “born-free”.

All the worst walks of life would have been walked, literally, for you.

It is like feeding from your mother’s breast.

It requires no effort from you.

But the mother knows just how it feels to raise a child, having endured the pangs of delivery.

It would be foolhardy to ask to relive the experience that your mother underwent.

There is a special kind of pain, a unique experience.

That is why only fools can ask the liberators of this country to return it where they freed it from.

It was a unique, birthing experience.

One can only vicariously relive the experience, never the real thing.

From the land of Tangwena you cross into Mozambique.

The people of Tangwena require no effort at all to make a foray across the border.

It is their land.

The land of the ancestors who were never separated by artificial borders that the white man erected.

So, one can have his fields on the other side of the border and stay on the other.

You can have a wife on the Mozambican side and a wife on the Zimbabwean side.

Which Chief Tangwena did.

There can be hunger in Mozambique and bounty in Zimbabwe, or vice versa.

The people walk on the seamless border.

People walked to Mozambique to get training to fight the enemy.

I pity one Robert Mugabe, every inch a gentleman, and mother’s boy who had to make the cruel journey.

By his own account, he eventually developed sore feet as he walked the journey.

Anybody, save for the hardened “rural” guys would find that taxing.

That is why we are told that it needed people who were dedicated to make the journey, from which some never returned.

If you were a Morgan Tsvangirai you would stay safely home to make tea for whites at the mines.

But to retrace the journey that revolutionaries made gives you a perspective on the country, its past and future.

You get an assurance that the biggest fight yet was fought, and won.

No fight bigger than that will ever be fought again.

The mass graves at Chimoio assure you as much.

The 50 000 wailing black souls assure you.

That is why you do not panic when a putschist cabal takes root in the ruling, revolutionary party and gets kicked out.

Which made last Friday a really Good Friday.

The expulsion of Joice Mujuru from the revolutionary Zanu-PF took us all by surprise and gave us what to eat over Easter – like some bread of a last supper that you are recommended to break and enjoy time and again in honour of some god.

There are a number of reasons one can savour the expulsion of Mujuru from Zanu-PF.

First, it is good politics.

Whoever thought that the ruling party would give us a kind of open sesame of politics?

Zanu-PF showed that it has character.

Now if Mai Mujuru fancies herself a good politician, which she has been touted to be by those in the opposition she can, and should, show us what she is made of.

It is not lost on any student of politics that she has never really stood for anything in all her political career, she that was the wife of General Solomon Mujuru and was minister since 1980 despite her scant education.

She has really never achieved anything.

She will not amount to anything, bet your bottom dollar on it.

She may get all the money in the world from the Americans, which may as well be her poisoned chalice.

She can ask Tsvangirai, who is the infamous millstone around of the opposition despite getting all the money in the world, including money to cruise on legendary seas.

The fact that she has been surrounded by failures like Didymus Mutasa and Rugare Gumbo and may now feel free to openly jump into bed with Tsvangirai makes her an unattractive proposition.

Not even an attempt to pilfer the name of the ruling party will work.

Her name makes a veritable stink for those that are truly Zanu-PF, many of whom were wondering why it took so long for her to be kicked out for her putschist tendencies which resulted in the ignominious near loss of 2008 and the subsequent inclusive Government in which she warmed up to the opposition MDC.

It does not require special talents to decipher that shorn of the cover of Zanu-PF and President Mugabe, to whom she showed legendary levels of ingratitude, she will be exposed.

The same way all others that have left the ruling party from Zanu-Ndonga to Mavambo have gone.

No serious person will believe in the nonsense of “People First” when it is clear as daylight that the likes of Rugare Gumbo, Didymus Mutasa, Temba Mliswa and Mai Mujuru represent nobody beside their selfish, putschist selves.

All of the above, along with their sidekicks, are known to be corrupt and this is clearly, for example, why Mliswa showed no shame at all in asking for a kickback from businessman Billy Rautenbach for alleged “facilitation”, on the strength of his relationship with his equally corrupt uncle Mutasa who is especially notorious for parcelling out land to his many concubines and girlfriends but is now denouncing the same land reform programme.

Times ahead will be interesting.

But we thank God for Good Friday.