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MY TURN WITH TICHAONA ZINDOGA

When Evan Mawarire, the face of the anti-Government #ThisFlag “movement” came back from the United States where he had sought self-exile, the ensuing discourse of his action was typically apoplectic, polarising and politically charged.It had been understood that the man of cloth had fled Zimbabwe fearing for his life after his political agitation catapulted him to global attention as he carved a niche as a new breed of politician exploiting new communication technologies and social media.

While his actual impact on politics was yet to be measured and tested, his influence on the virtual world of social media and his status as a pop star politician was not in doubt.

And things happened fast.

In a space of half a year, Mawarire had morphed from the man who cried on video about how he could not raise fees for his children because of economic hardship that he blamed the Government for, to a man who soon enough traversed the world and lived in the opulence of South Africa’s Sandton right up to the US itself.

We were made to believe that he was granted asylum in the US, the licence to stay there in the land of opportunity as long as he faced grave danger to his person and family.

Fighting the “regime” of President Mugabe can be a rewarding (in monetary terms) experience.

Oh, actually it is!

And thanks to that, Mawarire found himself in dreamland, and even found the courage to be contemptuous of people who supported him but questioned why he had decided to go away.

Mawarire called these people “haters”.

He had to stay in the US.

And to illustrate the fruitfulness of it all, his wife bore him a child there.

It will be interesting to know the name of that baby. It may yet provide us with a useful glimpse into the lives of the older Mawarire.

He no doubt enjoyed his stay there — at least on the value of it — and he even appeared to be drifting away from politics and his own chosen media.

People were beginning to forget.

Nowadays people have incredibly short memories.

With social media driven “news” anything is bound to have extremely short a life on the shelf. It is for better or worse.

Hence, until he ghosted in last week, people were on their sure way to forgetting Mawarire.

Many actually wished him well in his silence and presumed comforts he enjoyed in America.

Then he came back.

He was immediately arrested at the Harare International Airport on charges relating to seeking to subvert a constitutionally elected government.

His arrest elicited mixed reactions; his supporters did not, would not, want him arrested.

His opponents saw nothing wrong in the arrest of a man who even carried his agenda to New York where he tried to organise a rally to embarrass President Mugabe and focus undue political attention on Zimbabwe.

Yet a third layer of opinion held that arresting Mawarire, especially upon arrival, was unnecessary; it was felt the authorities had played into the hands of Mawarire and his handlers and given him the publicity he craved.

Mawarire thrives on a mixture of sympathy and guile. Some would say he is likeable. He is an embodiment of liberalism. He is a good actor, too.

Now that he decided to come back, the authorities willed him and routinely, if exactly duly, arrested him, the bitch has been on heat once again.

What has happened and been said in the past week or so is instructive — even when it has demonstrated that Mawarire no longer commands the sympathy he got at the high noon of his political career six months ago.

A critical juncture is the US Embassy statement in which it typically blames the Government of Zimbabwe for alleged human rights abuses and stifling of freedoms.

“We believe that the basic right of Zimbabweans to freedom of speech — be it in public, through print media, or social media — should be protected within and outside Zimbabwe’s borders.

“We fear these recent actions will further limit the right of Zimbabweans to exercise their constitutionally-protected freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly, which are similarly protected under Zimbabwe’s international human rights obligations, and are core values of any functioning democracy.

“The US government also calls on the Government of Zimbabwe to respect the rule of law and legal due process provided by the Constitution,” says the US.

The drift is clear.

Mawarire has become a new cause celebre. He has become the new excuse for the West to predicate hostile actions, including sanctions, on.

Yesterday it was one Itai Dzamara and previously the opposition.

These are all conspiracies and convenient excuses that have to remain fashionable. There is surely to be more of these figures and martyrs, all to sustain and abet hostility. There will always be willing puppets, some of the people being congenital sellouts while others are simply money mongers. Now the West has all but killed Itai Dzamara.

It is almost the same way they come up with figures such as Osama bin Laden who was killed a couple of years ago, as his AL Qaeda seemed to be going out of fashion and struck less grave terrorist threats in the hearts of the ever paranoid (and gullible) Americans.

A new creature called ISIS was created, with attendant blood and grime.

Today it is in veritable terrorist vogue and presents a reason for America to venture into war, spill blood and feed its insatiable hunger for war profits.

(For reference on this there is an article on Politico illustrating this transition in the following terms: “The Islamic State’s brutality and its insistence on apocalypse now and caliphate now set it apart from al-Qaeda, of which it was a part until 2014.

We’re used to thinking of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden as the baddest of the bad, but the Islamic State is worse. Bin Laden tamped down messianic fervour and sought popular Muslim support; the return of the early Islamic empire, or caliphate, was a distant dream. In contrast, the Islamic State’s members fight and govern by their own version of Machiavelli’s dictum, “It is far safer to be feared than loved.”

They stir messianic fervour rather than suppress it. They want God’s kingdom now rather than later. This is not Bin Laden’s jihad.” And the beauty of it is that All Qaeda, at the end of this extract, is being sanitised so that the reader can fully accept the new “threat”!)

In comes Mawarire. One would have thought that a person granted asylum, as is widely believed applies to Mawarire, his gracious hosts would not allow him to a country in which he faced persecution.

Nobody knows what really is his game plan.

It is enough to guess that he is here to set the agenda for the new administration of Donald J Trump which has shown little appetite to take over policies of his predecessor Barack Obama.

The guys in the anti-Zimbabwe lobby are desperate for signs. The desperation has even gone on television; we all saw with disgusted amusement Alec Baldwin on the popular Saturday Night Live trying to agenda-set Zimbabwe for Trump.

That is just the plot thickening.

Or let’s just say trying to thicken.

Yet one has the feeling that these machinations will not work, even if Mr Trump were to continue hostility with Zimbabwe, which is within his rights and sights, we have been down that road before.

Regime change has failed.

The likes of Thomas Harry Jnr need not try too much, even if his black bacon depends on it.

Zimbabwe has seen the worst.