Zimpapers Logo

Gibson Nyikadzino

Correspondent

There is a sequence that can be employed to identify CCC leader Nelson Chamisa as a snollygoster!

A snollygoster is a political candidate, usually willing to be an instrument of another country, uses unethical and questionable behaviour to try achieve power, even so, working hard to destabilise the security situation in a country he claims he wants to lead. 

Snollygosters are half beast and half human, they cannot be trusted because they want to appear innocent yet are politically abusive and untruthful. They have changing political colours like a chameleon crawling up a stick! 

Unfortunately, in the national political body, those who follow Chamisa have also had their political resemblance altered in a chameleon manner.

These people no longer possess an identifiable track to tell who they are because they are also just behaving in a chameleon manner.

 If you follow a man without political identity, you end up as one.

If Chamisa’s association with his followers was a marriage, he would be a two-timer. He is dear to people who no longer think in real critical terms and are intellectually captured, yet are diseased with the Stockholm syndrome, a phenomenon in which hostages fall in love with their captors. 

Knowing that his followers are merely harmless and potentially unreasoning in rationale terms, the now CCC leader drew the audacity to call them “stupid” when they chaotically demonstrated in town under his “defend the vote” command and burning property after he was extinguished in the 2018 presidential election. This is an equally dangerous political man! 

But that is not the only thing he has done!

The ‘evidence’ lie, contradictions

After years of continued insistence that he had irrefutable evidence that he won the 2018 presidential race, Chamisa recently told a South African television channel that in those elections “we did not have agents at 544 polling stations in 2018”. Hypothetically if they had deployed three polling agents per station, it means they needed over 1 600 agents on these 544 polling stations. 

The recent confession confirms what Chamisa’s former spokesperson Nkululeko Sibanda said when the MDC-A was preparing its Constitutional Court challenge in August 2018 that they did not have data from a fifth of the nearly 11,000 polling stations used in the July 30 election. There was no data from at least 2 200 polling stations.

In early 2020, there were claims of new evidence to prove that Chamisa had won the 2018 elections. Instead, Chamisa said the evidence was key for the eyes of SADC regional leaders and the African Union (AU), and without that, there could not be 2023 elections. 

“2023 elections are out of question, we will not be able to have 2023 until we resolve the modern day questions. What needs to be done is to resolve the unresolved 2018 disputed elections,” Chamisa claimed in 2020. 

Now that the election is less than six weeks away, he is a contestant after telling his supporters that the 2023 election was out of question, and he will face the second reality that regional and continental bodies do not interfere in sovereign states to determine who has won or lost an election. 

And since 2018, President Mnangagwa has remained the country’s chief executive officer despite the opposition, with the help of the West wanting to topple the Government from 2019 when Chamisa pledged President Mnangagwa would be “gone in five months”. 

Victim of a planning fallacy

There are frustrations that people, along the course of their political or general lives accrue, especially when they cannot get anything finished. Not that they have been idle, but, that they did not have much of positive results coming their way. This is referred to as a planning fallacy.

Chamisa has been like that, enjoying the optic appearances of doing much when in essence nothing is finished or completed. In the 2013 elections, the MDC-T suffered its biggest defeat to ZANU PF when Chamisa was the organising secretary of that party. 

When the committee in charge of the election campaign agreed that they would launch their campaign rally in Masvingo province, when they had won 23 of the 26 constituencies in the 2008 elections, Chamisa resisted that proposal.

He revealed that he had been shown in a heavenly vision that the campaign launch be moved to Marondera, for there, victory was certain. That signalled the beginning of his infusion of his post-industrialist Christian views and politics.

Years later, another mission called the Accountability and Integrity Panel (AIP) was formed with the mandate to investigate corruption cases by councillors from the Chamisa opposition party. The AIP was to come up with “comprehensive reports” that could expose and incriminate the councillors, possibly providing leads to the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC), law enforcement and justice stakeholders to make further enquiries, investigations, arrest, prosecution and sentencing. 

Even so when the AIP was formed when Chamisa was MDC-A leader, the panel failed to continue because from the onset, it was not meant to institute accountability and integrity, for the brains behind that neither had integrity nor accountability.

It is also key to identify that the formation of the CCC last year to date is a half-clothed project. 

This also reinforces the view that nothing in political terms can be planned and completed by Chamisa. Without known values, identity and institution, it is difficult to convince right-thinking people that the CCC has a just cause. By going into this election in this frame, they are set to become the first political entity in the history of post-colonial politics to participate in an election without structures, yet, modern politics can only be properly understood by reference to the great ideological movements: Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism, Fascism and Marxism among many others.

Be reminded that political entities that adopt unpopular positions will be condemning themselves to electoral defeat. Political identities and ideology are always a reflection of the economic system predominant at any given time. Because of a lack of that in the CCC, the followers are not even aware or exposed to their economic philosophy or principle.

Only those who have principles are determined to accomplish what they would have started. Without surprise, in the matters of lack of planning, Chamisa’s principle is to have no principle at all!

Because of lack of institutional planning and the unwillingness to invest in organisational continuity, as things stand, there is not going to be any CCC in the absence of Chamisa, as happened to the MDC in the absence of Morgan Tsvangirai. 

The West’s employee, house slave

From the assessments of this writer (whose views are not immune from criticism), to the mass body of literature available on the political economy of Zimbabwe’s governance system, if Chamisa’s views remain hostile to the founding principles of this country, and his desire to injure Zimbabwe’s nationalist project, leading this nation will be something he will see in spirit.

The political damage he has done to his reputation by associating with countries that want to effect regime change in Zimbabwe cannot be cleansed and whitened even “by the blood of the lamb”.

His willingness to be an imperial instrument should be looked at carefully with many considerations. He bragged going to Europe and influence governments there to tighten and toughen conditions of engagement with Zimbabwe with his “sunga-one-sunga-dozen” mantra. 

During the slave trade in the US and Caribbean Islands, there were two types of slaves, the house and field slaves. The house slave, because he or she stayed in the master’s house, got gifts and favours, was used to further crush any hope of freedom for the field slave. House slaves enjoyed to see field slaves toil under the direction of the white master. 

For so long, Chamisa has enjoyed to see Zimbabweans toil under the yoke of neo-imperialism while himself derives the benefits of cruelty.

He remains an instrument of the West, favoured in their eyes and blindly following the West’s commands. But, like his Ukraine puppet-colleague Volodymyr Zelensky, his political demise will be very painful and hard to forget.

Henry Kissinger once quipped, “it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” Chamisa is in a fatal friendship! He prioritises, not Zimbabwe’s, but foreign interests. There are direct and indirect links that connect Chamisa and his reactionary entity, CCC, to neo-colonialists.

Fake political courage

To think that Chamisa and the CCC will defeat ZANU PF and President Mnangagwa only works in imagination. It is fake political courage because what informs and influences views that ZANU PF will win is scientifically empirical and not theoretical. 

They say courage cannot be counterfeited. It is a virtue that escapes hypocrisy. Chamisa can fake to be organised, he can fake disassociating himself with the West, but he cannot fake courage to face ZANU PF.

This election, ideally and realistically tilting to ZANU PFs favour, is renewing the creation of a network of like-minded and nationalist oriented people advocating for the reclamation of a Zimbabwean identity that can neither be bought nor sold.