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Morgan Tsvangirai

Joram Nyathi Spectrum

Here is a man who has staked his rise to power on making the economy “scream” telling us on Heroes Day that he cares about our welfare. How do you bring democracy to Zimbabwe by subjecting it to the will of those against its colonial liberators?

LET’S start on a lighter note. Well, perhaps not so light.

President Mugabe’s tenure as Sadc chair comes to an end next week. In that one year, he has attempted to resolve the intractable crisis in Lesotho. There is still simmering discontent there. He has also dealt with attempts to impeach the president in Madagascar.

Clearly, the tenure of the chairmanship doesn’t lend itself to great accomplishments, so it is often hard to judge an incumbent’s performance in resolving political crises which demand negotiations and cutting deals.

One is reminded of that British imperial frontman, Cecil John Rhodes’ bitter regret about there being “so much to be done, so little time”.

President Mugabe is handing over the rotating chairmanship to his Botswana counterpart, President Ian Khama, now described in the local private media as “a bitter rival” and an ally of Morgan Tsvangirai.

It is the media’s attitude to the new chair that one finds interesting, if somewhat ludicrous.

When President Mugabe took over last year, the event was dismissed with malicious contempt as merely “ceremonial”.

With Khama taking over, we are now told this will give the regional “bloc some long-sought teeth (sic) to reject dictatorship, rights abuses and electoral fraud . . .” and “to deal seriously with issues of human rights, gay rights included, and corruption . . .”

All this in a space of one year from a “ceremonial” post! Either we have a miracle worker in Khama or a deluded and frustrated opposition activists who will pick up anything so long as the aim is to hit Mugabe.

It would be interesting to count Khama’s teeth at the end of his tenure as Sadc chair this time next year.

But if he were to play to the gallery of petty brinkmanship, there is a risk of him weakening Sadc more than any leader before him. We don’t believe that is the legacy he wants to leave behind given the small size of his country and its dependency on the region.

On a more serious note beyond the petty prayers of a useless private media, in the one year he has been Sadc chair President Mugabe has championed a more solid agenda than limiting himself to “incidents” and political flashpoints.

He has made a very strong case for regional integration and industrialisation as the foundation for development and market competitiveness.

He has made a strong point for value addition and beneficiation of the region’s abundant natural resources as a basis for employment creation and getting more value from our resources. That is why France doesn’t want to see him near its Colonial Pact vassals in West Africa, that post-colonial scar under which Africans are expected to pay in perpetuity for their enslavement and colonisation.

President Mugabe has called for more investment in infrastructure such as energy and transport networks to ease communication challenges on the continent. He has also challenged Africa to set aside resources to fund its own development agenda and reduce dependency on foreigners whose priorities and interests are always at variance with those of the people. The African Standby Force for deployment in political hotspots is almost a reality.

These are long-term agenda items which go way beyond pettifogging about Obama’s gay rights which were recently rejected in his own Kenyan roots.

Mugabe’s trailblazing land reclamation and indigenisation policies may not have been grabbed with open arms by regional leaders, but there is no denying their resonance with the masses across the continent. That is all because most of them live in abject poverty and President Mugabe has tried to break the mould — it is not enough to gain political independence and foreign direct investment. Developing countries must control their natural resources and ensure that those resources are exploited for the benefit of their owners first before filling the already overflowing pockets of foreign investors.

That should be simple, not arcane science. But it seems to escape the minds of those who claim to be independent thinkers. Their god is in white America and white Europe. Being born of a British white mother, Khama is seen as possibly the only one with the right genes to represent that white god on the African continent. Anybody who challenges this ordering of the world automatically becomes a heretic, dictator and all things black.

God save Africa from the curse of self-denigration!

Honouring our heroes

The narrative seems inherent in politics deployed to serve foreign interests.

It colours the reasoning of otherwise rational members of the opposition in Zimbabwe, hence my disappointment when I read a piece by Prof Welshman Ncube this week in which he talks about a “blissful” life in the mining towns of Kwekwe and Shabanie when he was growing up. Back then, he claims, young people were always assured of jobs.

It is an illusion which can be said about all the towns simply to inflame the imaginations of desperate youths. He doesn’t say, of course, that one couldn’t live in town without a job. That was a place for whites. He doesn’t say that the bottleneck in the education system screened 90 percent of blacks out of the clerical and messenger jobs. That meant the transport network of buses and trains was sufficient for the few Africans working for whites in the “yards” and travelling between towns.

He doesn’t say, of course, that nearly all Africans produced their own food in communal lands and so didn’t depend on white farmers for livelihood. The climate was conducive. It is a picture which seeks to romanticise colonial rule. (Remember Tsvangirai reminiscing nostalgically about bringing in 1974?)

It is a narrative which tells the naïve that colonial rule was better, that our problems came with the blackman in 1980; that Africans are incapable of running a country and that the heroes who went to war were political malcontents because life was “blissful”.

Morgan Tsvangirai could not be outdone. The Heroes’ and Defence Forces’ commemorations are supposed to be solemn occasions when the nation should reflect on where we came from and where we are going.

It was on this solemn occasion that Tsvangirai chose to “stand on the shoulders” of heroes such as Masotsha Ndlovu, Josiah Magama Tongogara, Solomon Mujuru and Joshua Nkomo, among others, to tell us about leading “a proud post-liberation movement, not opposed to the sanctity of our previous struggle but formed merely to complete the unfinished business that remains outstanding to this day”. That business is reduced to “democracy”.

How does one who opposes the land reform programme and the whole ethos of black economic empowerment claim to stand on Nkomo’s shoulders, Nkomo who told us if you turn around lima it will give you imali in support of the land reform? How does a man who gave us Zidera in 2001 and still insists there are no Western sanctions on Zimbabwe claim to cherish what the men and women who lie at the Heroes’ Acre sacrificed their lives for?

Here is a man whose party is looking for sponsorship from the same countries which maintain sanctions on Zimbabwe telling us he knows what people like Nikita Mangena and Herbert Chitepo stood for! This is the same man whose sanctions harvest of closed industries populate the streets of every town with vendors and has been hoping that they will rise against Government so he can land at State House by default!

Is this not sacrilege?

But the statement was not entirely hopeless. It was a crafty piece of work. For the first time Tsvangirai dedicated a third of his statement to the praise of war veterans, the police and the army. The same man who over the years has complained bitterly against budgetary allocations to the security sector, this time he was telling us they need more resources.

Hear him speak: “For the record, I as Morgan Tsvangirai and the party I lead will not create a new army, a new police force and a new intelligence unit.” Why?

Further down: “We have noted with serious concern that most of these respected men and women have torn uniforms and worn-out boots unbefitting of their dignity while their salaries and benefits remain woefully lower than the magnitude of their national responsibility.” Why this sudden concern?

A Martian might take him seriously, not knowing the man is on a campaign trail and believes he can beguile the security sector to his side, to use and dump once in power. He is still bitter about the crimes this sector is supposed to have committed against him in 2008. Nothing is forgiven.

Since then he has been talking about so-called security sector reform. A key reason for his party’s decision last year not to participate in all future national elections is lack of security sector reform. That is a shorthand for a purge of all those men and women in uniform who were involved in the liberation struggle and have thwarted efforts for an unconstitutional change of power. It is the same men who said the Presidency was “a straitjacket”.

Here is a man who has staked his rise to power on making the economy “scream” telling us on Heroes Day that he cares about our welfare. How do you bring democracy to Zimbabwe by subjecting it to the will of those against its colonial liberators?