Zanu (PF) did not go for a check-up and ignored the advice of friendly doctors – who did not even demand payment. Zimbabwe is full of well-meaning political analysts who were eager to help sustain this once illustrious revolutionary party. But their advice was ignored. They were labelled sell-outs and enemies of the people. Today the party is sick and on its way out.
Speaking to hundreds of people gathered to bury politburo member Edson Ncube at Heroes Acre, the president admitted that Zanu (PF) risks losing the next elections due to its penchant for violence, factionalism and vote-rigging.
I don’t agree with the president entirely. The party does not risk losing the elections. It is going to lose the elections, full stop. The president’s diagnosis, although correct, has come too late. It is also misdirected in that he is talking about intra-party violence when he should have started talking against the party’s vote-rigging and violence against the people of Zimbabwe long ago.
Also, he should just not have talked about it but acted against it and worked for a paradigm shift. Today Zanu (PF) would not only be healthy but it would have been fit enough to rule for another 32 years.
All that we are seeing today has happened before. Franz Fanon wrote about what he saw in newly independent Africa, way back in 1961: “The big farmers have, as soon as independence was proclaimed, demanded the nationalization of agricultural production.
Through manifold scheming practices they manage to make a clean sweep of the farms formerly owned by settlers, thus reinforcing their hold on the district. But they do not try to introduce new agricultural methods, nor to farm more intensively, nor to integrate their farming systems into a genuinely national economy.
“In fact, the landed proprietors will insist that the state should give them a hundred more facilities and privileges than were enjoyed by the foreign settlers in former times. The exploitation of agricultural labourers will be intensified and made legitimate.
“The national middle class constantly demands the nationalization of the economy and of the trading sectors. This is because, from their point of view, nationalization does not mean placing the whole economy at the service of the nation and deciding to satisfy the needs of the nation. To them, nationalization quite simply means the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period.
A super rich former top official of Zanu (PF) and indigenization activist recently bragged before awe-struck university students, “ I am rich today because I joined Zanu (PF). If you want to be rich you must join that party.” How nauseating. A famous political tactician said, “The more posts and offices a movement has to hand out, the more inferior stuff it will attract, and I the end these political hangers on will overwhelm a successful political party in such numbers that the honest fighter of former days no longer recognises the old movement. When this happens, the mission of the old movement is done for.” Guess who? – the German dictator, Adolf Hitler.
As for violence, the error and misdirection came in the call to “strike fear into them” long after the war of liberation was over. It now meant striking fear into fellow citizens, the majority of them black, just because they disagreed with certain party policies.
This gave birth to the rampant violence which is now turning people away from Zanu (PF). The culture of violence nurtured then is now destroying the party from within. After independence if the slogan had been, “Strike love into them!” Zimbabwe would be a different and better place today. – piuswakatama@gmail.com
Post published in: Analysis