We are our own saviours

Ranga Mataire
Writing Black

The past week was eventful. I am trying to turn my head around in understanding why all of a sudden Zimbabweans were stampeding each other to wash their linen on SABC news channel.

It must have offered some kind of amusement to SABC viewers as Zimbabweans battled outdoing each other in gushing vitriol about their country.

Maybe one-day I will understand this frenzy.

For now, as a Writing Back proponent, I feel disillusioned that we seem to have this warped idea that something foreign is more meaningful or impactful.

Maybe the thinking is that South Africa is an important player in regional and continental politics and therefore the need for our voices to be heard.

Whatever the motives, it points to something maladjusted needing rectification in our national psychosis.

The playground must always be local.

Let’s turn back to the death of Patson Dzamara. Death is cruel. It robbed Zimbabwe, the Dzamara family and his friends, a vibrant young man whose full potential was yet to be realised.

Patson Dzamara

It caught everyone who knew him by surprise. Very few knew he had such an ailment as colon cancer.

Death is a thief and this explains the outpouring of grief across the board.

But something curious happened. Rather, something we had secretly wished would not happen happened.

We had hoped that after losing his own mother and uncle within a short space of time, he was one sober up.

But alas, the malaise never seems to cure.

One Nelson Chamisa of the moribund MDC Alliance that some now refer to as MDC America was again at his worst behaviour.

Besides the embarrassing stunt of posing for a picture crouching in front of Mai Patson Dzamara, the man, who aspires to lead this country went on a weird tirade insinuating that Patson had not died of natural causes.

While the whole world knew of Patson’s ailment, which he publicly announced on social media as he sought to fundraise for his medicals, Chamisa sought to use the funeral gathering to regurgitate a tired narrative of blaming the State.

It became weirder. The buffoonery astoundingly comic and shocking.

With the ululating and clapping of hands rising to a crescendo, the highly impressionable Chamisa could not miss an opportunity to tell the mourners of his fond memories as a Cabinet minister in the coalition Government headed by the late President Mugabe.

It turned into a pure moronic narrative in which Chamisa insinuated that the former prime minister could have been poisoned as he liked eating some small cakes that used to be served during Cabinet meetings.

The garrulous Tendai Biti could be heard saying “twainaka” referring to the cakes — all pointing to cherished memories sorely missed.
Chamisa was not finished.

He claimed he was the only one who never ate the cakes and in a way trying to convince his audience how circumspect he is.

He told his bemused audience that Patson could have been poisoned as well.

“Dzamara did not just die, he died because this was planned. If you are critical of the Government in this country, you will meet your fate.

When he would demonstrate against the regime, they were targeting him,” Chamisa said.

Previously, Chamisa had also claimed that the late President Mugabe had poisoned MDC founding leader Morgan Tsvangirai whom he said he had warned against eating at Government functions.

Tsvangirai also succumbed to cancer just like Mugabe.

“I would tell him (Tsvangirai) to desist from eating at the same table with Mugabe’s ministers, but he would not listen. When Zanu PF offers you food, do not eat because they want to end your life and that is what took Dzamara’s life,” Chamisa alleged.

Now, I am not sure whether it is time we seriously consider recommending psychological examination for a leader who at the slightest opportunity of an audience is wired to always blame the State for every death of any MDC Alliance member?

What can we do to someone who so brazenly makes such conspiracies without shame and without an iota of evidence?

Zimbabwe has never had an opposition leader in the mould of this compatriot who prances as a preacher, an advocate and now a soothsayer who ignores post-mortem results to pronounce the causes of death of his members?

In his distorted mind, given Patson’s age, he should not have succumbed to cancer. Is it not given that death does not give a notice and that all humans are mortal?

Ironically, a few days after Patson died, an American prominent actor Chadwick Aaron Boseman died of colon cancer, literally making a mockery of Chamisa’s blatant and careless statement that Dzamara did not die of natural causes.

Chadwick, who rose to acclaim when he featured as the Black Panther in 2018, a film focused on his home country of Wakanda had the social media abuzz with eulogies.

He was young like Dzamara, but sadly succumbed to the dreaded colon cancer.

The last election campaign gave us a glimpse of the thinking process of the MDC Alliance leader who is given to uttering phantasmagorical narratives only seen in Harry Porter films or any such kindergarten films.

What perplexes most people is how such a person afflicted with such a debasing trait pontificates to be the Commander-in-Chief of this country?

It boggles the mind whether the MDC Alliance had some people with the courage to whisper to susceptible young politicians to sober up a bit or at least bring him back from a perpetual Alice in Wonderland dreamlands.

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