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Nathaniel Manheru THE OTHER SIDE
They say when you want to know a man’s in-between economy, just follow his wife’s bitter mouth. I thought the week was loaded enough, thought that the week would yield no more surprises. I was wrong, wrong to forget a Nigerian proverb which warns against writing off a day when there is still an hour of sunlight!

Raging passion, bandaged foreheads

The short week that has gone by has proved unbelievably fraught, again revealing the deep nexus between passion and politics. Elton Mangoma found himself being pelted with allegations scandalously associating him with the wife of a fellow activist. It was a story full of rage, one that bred bandaged foreheads.

Elton Mangoma

Amazing what grief below-the-belly misdeeds bring to the innocent, worst of all the temple and seat of intellect. In one raging swoop, we had the story of immorality and violence, traits now virtually synonymous with the opposition. But that did not seem to matter much, living as we do in an age of high testosterone. Maybe our nation is still in the grip of its virile moment, a moment so profanely heralded by the other Ncube, whose name, ironically enough, is Pius!

The hallmark of that age is a fetish around sexuality, a blind worship of aggressive masculinity. I loathe to agree with one American politician who alleged aphrodisiac properties to power. For the characters involved barely have power, not even an iota of it. Only huge phalluses, huge ambition, defiantly un-tempered by the outward reality of popular rejection and revilement.

I mean how am I supposed to visualise a bashed and bandaged Mangoma ever resurfacing in this life or the one we hope to follow, as my president? In which cupboard do I hide the sordid tales and memories that dog him?

Going up, up for the bottom rung

But he made history, nay, provoked it. He blamed Tendai Biti for the set-up. He thinks he is being scandalised out of the leadership race. And to add verisimilitude to his story, Biti confirms the Renewal party is set for a leadership congress shortly, media seers predicting his uneventful rise.

Tendai Biti

Well, Biti can go “up”, if taking the helm of an anaemic, people-free structure gives height to the movement. Few will bother. What will remain on our restless lips, remain firmly there and very hard to displace, is how fast and frequently the opposition fissures. That is the big tale with so long a shadow, possibly one casting itself far afield into 2018, the year of decision.

Remembering late Chidzero

Once, the late Bernard Chidzero headed a global inquiry into the relationship between the global economy and population growth.

The thought came from ESAP-era thinking when Third World countries were being severely asked to tighten belts and scrota alike. Of course that was long after Bentham and his theory of a population holocaust, and long before the Chinese had taught the world that a huge population can in fact be a key resource and leverage to national economy and for international politics.

Bernard Chidzero

Asked to summarise the problem up for inquiry, Chidzero quipped: when the good Lord exhorted us to “go ye and multiply”, he forgot to tell us at what formula! Now humanity has chosen to do it at the formula of an amoeba. I think the MDC – I am referring to its hardly recognizable root – thinks the Holy Father was making that injunction with it in mind. That is why the story of procreation, or acts associated with it, continue to be a shaping dynamic of this amazing party.

Watch your size for polygamy

Back in the village, wisdom was always packed in the proverb. A man of huge sexual appetite was always challenged to show his granaries to his in-laws. For polygamy meant many stomachs, many mouths and one’s competence, for it was never the length of one’s desires, or of the tool to quench them. Polygamy would always show by the number of smoke-besotted roundavels at the greedy man’s homestead.

No wife ever agreed to share a heath, and when heaths are heated, the smoke of rich broth must soon follow. Figuratively, the smoke stood for life, for food, even for procreation. A “dry” marriage would be a fireplace full of cold embers. And as in all patriarchies, the first suspect was a woman’s loin. A poor family amounted to a household where no wisp of smoke ever twirled the sunny morning. No one ate in that home. And from all that wisdom, Africans distilled a saying that a gluttonous man should be seen by the number of granaries to his name.

Gluttony, in other words, must follow hard work, food self-sufficiency and good food husbandry. Licence for polygamy came from granaries, never from bedroom ardour. MDC, unlike the famed gluttony of yore, has no granary to show, let alone one which does not show its clean, well-wiped bottom! The so-called change party has morphed into a carnal party of crime and passion. And besides siring scandals, it continues to sire more splinters, doing so at a rate that even an amoeba would stand aside to marvel.

What we now know from hot mouths

Which takes me to my point about a man and his in-between economy. In politics splintering parties are the equivalent of divorces. They are bitter, they are accompanied by amazing depths of rancour. But like the proverbial baboon, they may be ugly but they don’t feed at night! Not all is bad about them. The upside is they release impeccable information, and, true to character, the latest fallout in the MDC and Renewal factions have left the mouth of the hive open, spilling precious honey for all who care to lick.

And Zanu-PF has been licking most nourishingly. That is why Magaisa is worried, and hopes to restrain his erstwhile bosses by hawking a sense of generalised threat to all opposition. Like I always warn young couples hunting for new homes, avoid hilltops that peep down the valley. For one day when happiness exhausts in the marriage home, your quarrels shall ring loud to fill the valley where the lesser ones live. And the village will talk.

Joice Mujuru

Thanks to the fallout, we now know of contacts and discussions between People Last, sorry, First, and the splitting Renewal cabal. The Mujuru team, we are told by Mangoma, refused to be renewed by a mere shard, and what is more, one without people in the first place! Rather, Mangoma goes on to say, the Mujuru people are gunning for a link with MDC-T!

And Mujuru’s talkative aide, Rugare Gumbo, leaves very little to further investigations. He confirms the contacts, and his group’s wish to link up with MDC-T! Tendai Biti, too, confirms the same. Zanu-PF needs this rich feedback for battles and for the years ahead. Nothing arms it better than to have opponents who are a renegade group that repudiates the goals, values and programmes of the struggle, while hobnobbing with a discredited opposition. These details are so key to mobilising Zanu-PF’s rural base.

One question to society

To Comrade Mangoma, we are truly grateful. But our gratitude must not blind us to other key revelations, about ourselves and the society we have evolved into. Mangoma should not expect us to believe that he formed his Renewal Democrats of Zimbabwe, RDZ for short, soon after he got scandalised. He might be an action man the nether zones, but forming, naming and launching a political party is no one-day wonder.

There was deep and long premeditation ahead of the launch, and those percipient enough had already seen it coming. The renewal people have been developing deep fractures, which is why Welshman Ncube spat them, why Sekai Holland was only too happy to be rid of them. That is not to take away young Mafume’s gallantly lost fight to keep pasting respectability on a collapsing edifice.

But the behaviour of Mangoma says a lot about this society: it’s sense of morality and capacity to sanction behaviours it abhors. And generally, politicians are a very calculating breed of bipeds. They avoid outrages, confirm convention and expectations. Before they act, they visualise public reaction, whether by way of indifference, endorsement or outrage.

What kind of a society produces a politician like Mangoma who brazenly launches a new party a day after serious allegations that win him bandages all over? Why is such an appalling personal situation enough spur for one to launch themselves politically? Are we that permissive? That promiscuous? Is that our threshold of tolerance for imputations of impropriety on the part of those seeking to lead us?

Gently into purgatory

There is another dimension to the same question, illustrated quite differently. Apart from the virile moment for our Nation, we also have politics that have gently eased into what appears like a purgatory hour for our same Nation. “I am sorry” seems the phrase and lingo of the political moment. Joice says she is sorry for the 35 years which have gone by, the 35 years she ate oily and corpulent.

Biti says he is sorry for collective opposition idiocy, about which he does a lot more than personify. And both feel cathartic, cleansed and renewed after a mere mea culpa, and one done in an inner chapel called the Press, done before a priest called editor! Thereafter, they emerge contended, ready for renewal, for a rebirth.

We have been treated to a charade of confessionals that would leave a Catholic priest greening with envy. And the shared belief – very naive in my view – is that politicians who plead guilty, become guiltless and clean anew, indeed become spotlessly electable like a newborn baby!

A mea culpa burped out loudly, suffused with the stench of opulence, cleanses a political wrongdoer who continues to cling tenaciously to the gains of those 35 years s/he nominally disparages as ill-gotten! Give me a break! May the good God help this nation.

Leading the charge

Is repair work for a contrite politician that cheap, that easy? Is our sense of morality so bending, so bended? Is our sense of forgiving so easily bought by such crass, insincere drama? Is leadership purchased through high drama in fawning? You eat for 35 years – seamless, restless, non-stop – until one fateful day when grief visits you. You recant the self-described misdeeds all those years, then mobilise a tear or two and, kaput, it’s all good and forgiven.

Overnight, you win accolades, headlines. Ahh! You go much further, ask for even greater indulgence: you ask for the next leadership! I spoke about the age of testosterone and purgatory as upon us. To yield what world, what life, what ethos? A new leadership ethos where fawned guilty conscience, not integrity, is presented to us as a basis for asking for leadership?

To yield that world where one fawns abhorrence for a vice or weakness which one carries in abiding abundance, to then flaunt it before my face for my vote? We no longer need alternative vision, alternative social programmes from politicians, only tears and that golden: phrase mea culpa! What a wonderful world! In the twilight of President Mugabe’s leadership, we badly need a frank debate on leadership. I am ready to lead the charge right away, from as early as next week. Or else I quit.

Icho!

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