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AFTER failing to outline any policy alternatives or ideological direction, elements in the opposition CCC party have now decided to shamefully resurrect Ian Douglas Smith, the last Rhodesian leader who once boasted no black rule “in a thousand years”.

This is the danger of social media where some users take advantage of susceptible minds that converge on various social media platforms and post dangerous de-contextualised titbits meant to sway public opinion.

We are indeed living in an era drenched in data, between fact and fiction. 

Merchants of disinformation take advantage of the instantaneous, seamless, blunt, borderless and far reaching communication via the Internet to poison national discourses.

While it may seem plausible to the uninitiated to resurrect Smith and sanitise his image as a caring, colour blind white Rhodie, those with perspective will see this as nothing, but a desperate attempt to rehash our painful journey to Uhuru.

We are all products of history and we can easily see the deception of presenting Smith’s ghost as just that of an ordinary white man who once ruled this land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo. 

Smith was not your ordinary white man. When the Federalists supported a new constitution allowing greater representation for blacks in Parliament, Smith founded the Rhodesian Front in 1961 and attracted white supremacist support. 

He was an advocate of that racist charlatan, Jan Smuts of South Africa.

Smith was not ideologically innocent as the CCC supporters would want to portray him. His mission was to create a white Rhodesian country where blacks were perpetual second class citizens. 

By declaring the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, Smith was envisioning a country similar to that of Australia where indigenes were almost exterminated.

Ethnic cleansing was at the centre of this plan. How do we know about this? It’s all over in Rhodesian Cabinet files and in numerous books written by white Rhodesians. 

It is fatuous to present Smith as having no ideological sense. He was not an accident of history. Smith was a generational servant of Cecil John Rhodes in both character and vision.

According to Rhodes, black people were savages and he never viewed them as worthy of governing themselves. 

Like Rhodes, Smith wanted the black population to be reduced to an inconsequential figure and took the cover of the war to develop chemical weapons that were used on both civilians and freedom fighters.

Glen Cross’ “Dirty War: Rhodesia and Chemical Biological Warfare 1975-1980”, clearly illustrates how this devious plan was hatched with the full command of Smith.

In the mid-1970s, Rhodesian forces were stretched too thin to suppress the freedom fighters, especially once bases had been established in neighbouring countries. 

Amidst the conflict, Rhodesian military and intelligence services employed chemical and biological agents against liberation fighters and the results were devastating.

Under the guidance of Smith, the Rhodesians employed commercially available poisons, primarily parathion (an insecticide) and thallium (used to kill rodents).

The project was spearheaded by Professor Robert Symington at the then University of Rhodesia’s Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine. As early as the last quarter of 1974, Symington was working with the then Ministry of Defence to develop a system of killing freedom fighters using various poisons.

After consultations with his War Cabinet, Smith delegated responsibility to the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) while implementation was assigned to the Special Branch liaison component in the Selous Scouts.

Thousands of freedom fighters perished after coming into contact with poisoned clothing. A considerable number also died after consuming poisoned water sources and food. A conservative estimate of those who died is put at 2 500.

It is also common knowledge that around 1978-79, there was an anthrax outbreak, the largest in modern history, which killed thousands of cattle belonging to blacks and caused considerable illness to 11 000 people while 200 died.

Again this anthrax “outbreak” was the work of Prof Symington and his team.

The introduction of anthrax into black communities was to infect cattle and deprive freedom fighters a source of food. 

All these details are necessary to illustrate to those who are clamouring for the return of Smith. The same man being waxed lyrical about today actually wanted to exterminate our own fathers and mothers.

If his plan had been carried through to its end, some of those saying Smith was better would not have been alive today because their parents would have been exterminated.

Only a thoroughly brainwashed person would believe that the post-independence government has not undertaken far reaching economic developments to cater for the growing population.

Just the sheer number of secondary and primary schools in the country compared to those in existence in 1980 will show that unlike Smith, the post-independence government has done tremendous work. The same applies to hospitals, dams and roads.

Anyone who is a Zimbabwean and has a sense of history will surely know that whites were disproportionately funded more for education than the majority African population because the Rhodesian government controlled access to quality schools based on race, prejudice and ethnicity.

Although white Rhodesians represented a few percentage of the country’s population, they were allocated about 90 percent of government spending on education. This segregation in terms of funding was most extreme in the 1970s.

Funding of secondary schools was also excessively offered to whites rather than blacks. 

In the 1970s, only 43 percent of black children attended school, while only 3,9 percent of these children had a chance of enrolling in secondary schools.

A country whose sons and daughters perished in the fight to dislodge colonial rule can never return to that bygone era where blacks were second class citizens. 

NEVER!