We need to start talking straight

When I hear President Zuma telling our Prime Minister he needs to be more flexible, I wonder whether somebody needs to remind Zuma who we voted for in 2008. Some of you are probably asking whether someone shouldn’t be giving the same message to the Prime Minister. But who is that ‘somebody’? We all know the story of how Everybody agreed that Somebody should do a job that Anybody could do and so Nobody did it. Everybody that is you and me agrees Somebody should do it. Aren’t we that Somebody? Perhaps it would help if we stopped giving him the wrong message.

Too many of us are still calling the man most of us voted for to be president ‘leader of the opposition’. Anywhere else that title is reserved for the man who came second in the election. I know Zimbabwean English sometimes sounds strange to some people overseas, but this puzzles even me. We are the ones who must start talking straight. We must tell them all that, if we can’t have the government we voted for, a government in accordance with last February’s agreement will have to do until they can organise a proper election.

The trouble is, we haven’t even got that. We have so-called government ministers who ignore the agreement that was supposed to make them ministers. There are higher-ups who do the same. We have a police chief who ignores court orders when he feels like it, says he won’t obey our elected government and nobody does anything about him. (Is that the same Nobody who needs to call a spade a spade?)

We have people who call themselves Attorney General and Reserve Bank Governor in defiance of the agreement. We protest and Nobody does anything about it. It is time for us all to remember that we are not Nobody, we are Somebody. We are the citizens of this country who want the government we voted for.

We are the Somebody who should be telling Zuma that any meaningful agreement demands that both sides be flexible. He is only asking one man to be flexible; the one who is already leaning over backwards to please him and is in danger of losing his balance, or worse, if he tries to bend any further.

Of course, we have to recognise that Zuma is only a politician. Politicians always seek the easiest way out of any problem, which usually means the easiest way they can find of avoiding making any decision. That saves the politician’s skin in the short term and might even mean he doesn’t have to deal with the consequences until after he faces another election and we all know the politician is a short-sighted creature who can’t see that far ahead.

So, if Zuma is afraid to push one stubborn old man, then our man should be just as stubborn. If that upsets Zuma, that’s his problem. If it makes him listen to us, he might do something that makes him a statesman instead of just another politician.

But don’t bet on it.