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Confounding seers of doom

ZANU PF’s elective congress came and lingers on, breaking many editorial and oppositional political bones in its wake. These proponents of conspiracies, so wont to painting hellfire scenarios for Zanu PF and its Presidium, including wild claims the Presidium would split in the middle at the congress, are licking their wounds, bitterly.

Let them be! As always, they bank on misfortunes of the ruling class, largely imagined, not on their inner worth as a cause and party, if one they are. Where no misfortune exist — which is usually the case — they invent it, all to self-delight so they escape the burden of their ponderous ineptitude, including failure to write a constitution, to build structures, to undertake elective processes, to have an elected hierarchy, and to organise.

 Calmer than waters on a good day

As I write, they have not been able to raise a candidate for a ward by-election in Mutoko, ceding it to Zanu PF, uncontested.

A mere ward! Still they fancy themselves as the next government!

Readily, they suspend disbelief, to suck in self-created political fairy tales, which they lick like sweet political molasses.

Until Zanu PF served them a rude nightmare, delivered in two short days of its elective Congress, during which everything proceeded without incident.

Today ED stands re-elected, well-ensconced as the President and First Secretary of Zanu PF.

In fulfilment of their wish-premonition, his re-election was as very rough; rougher than big waters of the ocean on an airless day!

Palaver finish

Worse for them, by dint of that re-election, ED becomes Zanu PF’s sole Presidential candidate in the Harmonised Elections; we are set to hold them some time soon in 2023.

In his tow will be CDNG Chiwenga, the man the opposition and its doting media vainly hoped would challenge his boss and senior, on their behalf.

Equally, KCD Mohadi will be in tow, after a graduated rehabilitation which is likely to see him resume his vice presidency both in a Zanu PF and in post-2023 election Government. Palaver finish, as Nigerians are wont to say.

Story of a shipwreck

The well-choreographed Zanu PF congress inflicted worse damage on Chamisa and his thing.

I am always hard put to find a suitable appellation for it, an fitting name. My naming predicament which reminds me of a comic scene in one Shakespearean play.

The play is the Tempest, and the villain — as racist Shakespeare wanted us to believe — is Caliban, the man-monster on whose island some shipwrecked Caucasians are cast ashore.

Two of these are drunks who wander about on this desolate island, to which Caliban, the man-monster, lays claim by consanguinity and inheritance.

These two butlers or jesters, Shakespeare names them Stephano and Trinculo, possibly to suggest their Italian stock.

They imbibe copious quantities of ale (alcohol) and, as befits Shakespearean comedians, entertain each other and us with bawdy ribaldry.

 The master’s goblins

In their aimless wander, they happen on a terrified Caliban, who mistakes them and their drunken shrieks for goblins which notorious Prospero — the shipwrecked magician-usurper of the island, and subdued Caliban’s new master — unleashes on the refractory Caliban keep him in awe and pliant check.

Caliban has been reduced to doing chores for Prospero, harkening the archetypal colonial master-servant relationship.

The errant and rebellious Caliban thinks the master has set the terrifying goblins on him, yet again.

So, like a frightened pangolin, the refractory Caliban rolls himself into some ball of appalling deformity, under some dirty cloak, in impotent defence against the master’s goblins, he fears are about to maul and torment him for not fulfilling his menial tasks, as required by laws and norms of conquest.

It is in that rolled-up, frightened state and form that the two shipwrecked drunks, Stephano and Trinculo, find him, on open ground, against a gathering storm.

A man or a fish?

First to see him is Trinculo. Bemused, he puzzles over this monstrous creature whose form and shape is nothing closer to what he has ever seen or heard before.

Here is Trinculo, expressing wonderment, in old, prosaic Shakespearean English, as befitted all the bard’s lowbrow characters:

“What have we here, a man or a fish? Dead or alive?

“A fish, he smells like a fish — a very ancient and fish-like smell, a kind of-not-of-the-newest poor-John.

“A strange fish . . . Legged like a man, and his fins like arms.”

Trinculo concludes the creature must be an islander, lately struck by a bolt. He thus decides to hide from the elements by slipping under the “dead” monster’s body and dirty cloak.

Which terrifies Caliban even more, forcing him to plead for mercy in the language of his master, from this one goblin which he thought had stolen beneath him to inflict mortal pain.

The language of the master is also the language of the two drunks who, alongside Prospero, were together on the ill-fated ship before it went aground.

 Nameless four-legged monster

Meanwhile, an equally drunk Stephano then comes by, only to see a double heap of Trinculo who is beneath, and Caliban who is protectively atop Trinculo, both under a dirty cloak, but with their feet exposed.

Aghast, he darts back, to wonder what monster this might be, a monster with four human legs, on this desolate island.

Stephano says: “This is some monster of the isle with four legs, who hath, I take it, some ague (fever). Where the devil should he learn our language? I will give him some relief, if it be but for that. If I can recover him and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he is a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather.”

Stephano pours alcohol into the mouth of the four-legged monster, to cure it of its dementing and delirious fever, hoping to salvage it, before taking it back to Naples as a gift to his king, the same way Venus, the South African Hottentot, was taken and shipped abroad to be quartered in a zoo as a spectacle and sexual object for Victorian Europe.

These things started way back in Elizabethan days.

Familiar and grotesque

Chamisa is our son. His political thing is on our land, part of the national body-politic.

We cannot throw him away, even reflect us, in part. But both he and his thing emit a strange smell of some ancient and decayed fish!

Both are both familiar and perplexing, even grotesque, making naming pretty hard and vexatious.

What do we call Chamisa, by conventions of normal naming traditions?

What do we call his thing, again by same naming norms? And when he slips underneath his thing, all to survive the political gale and tempest which the Zanu PF Congress has unleashed, what emerges but this monstrosity: half familiar, half befuddling?

Smells Anglo-American

He smells. Smells like some ancient Anglo-American fish. Call it Brenthurst Foundation or Oppenheimer Foundation which seeks to re-mould the region’s politics, away from the region’s liberation traditions.

A man or a fish?

Well, a third layer, also Anglo-American, in the form of the British and the Americans who, as before, again coalesce ahead of our harmonised elections, to seek to oust Zanu PF, through Chamisa they hope to install as their puppet. Hazviite hazvo asi! And they know it, which is why they both attack and tantalise, hiding their deadly daggers beneath their false smiles. Zanu PF, beware! Tamba wakachenjera muchinda!

Fratricidal formation

Chamisa gave away something incredibly frank, and political ungainly if you ask me.

This week, he claimed Zanu PF is infiltrating his “party”, and baiting away his senior members through pecuniary offers. Set aside claims of money, or any other mephistophelian temptations as alleged; Chamisa is confirming deep division in his thing; hinting even, at debilitating exfoliation I know is now inevitable.

There is deep disgruntlement in his thing’s ranks. Multiple splits and defections are imminent.

Not because Zanu PF has done anything more than being there, in its highly organised, winning form.

Simply because Chamisa has created a Minotaur: half man and half donkey as in legends of yore!

No one knows what it is they are taking to impending harmonised elections; what it is they hope to offer to Zimbabweans on Election Day.

Their funeral; we have more serious business to draw your attention to, and help analyse!

Biden’s historic address

Biden, the hoary US President!! Whoop, what a speech he gave a couple of days ago, as America forebodingly gravitates towards a mid-term elections.

As I write, Donald Trump has just confirmed he will stand for election as the Republican Presidential candidate.

He claims to have won twice before: in the first poll in which he became President of America; then again when Biden was declared winner and inaugurated in his place!

He goes further to state categorically he won the second bid with the biggest margin ever recorded in American electoral history.

Here in Zimbabwe, we believe in the doctrine of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other States.

We leave Blessing Mhlanga to do that for AMH, the digital State-within-the corporeal State of sovereign Zimbabwe!

America’s inflection point

In his address, Biden said many things, most of which I will ignore. Including his stammer which his transcribing staff — so faithful to detail and manner of presentation — captures with amazing fidelity to detail.

Here is the part which really struck me as memorable; and as timelessly applicable. Stressing America was “at inflection point”, Biden opined: “Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated. And that’s where MAGA Republicans are today (applause).

“They don’t understand what every patriotic American knows: You can’t love your country only when you win (applause). It’s fundamental.

American democracy only works only if we choose to respect the rule of law and the institutions that were set up in this chamber behind me, only if we respect our legitimate political differences.”

We win or we are cheated!

I hope Chamisa is not too distracted by the double buffet of Zanu PF’s elective Congress and an uncontested retention of the Mutoko by-election to have missed this historic address from his American master. Pointed though the comment was, we here in Zimbabwe know who Trump’s alter ego is when it comes to our national politics.

Certainly we know he who thinks elections have only two outcomes: his feigned win or his imagined cheating by genuine winners.

Behaviourally, we have Biden’s avowed opponent here, the only puzzling thing being that Biden supports and funds him in executing the very enterprise which Biden finds displeasing and against the rule of Biden’s law!

Maybe this is one time we must all wish and support Chamisa in his lifelong quest to be American.

What do we have here: a man or a fish? Smells like an ancient American fish. Whichever way, whatever the smell, the donkey will get to know, come 2023!