War veterans, Mugabe and the politics of delegitimisation
By Jealousy Mawarire
The current bickering about war veterans and the statement that they are alleged to have written denouncing President Robert Mugabe brings to the fore the issue of the liberation struggle ideals, the national question, then and now, and the role played by Mugabe during the war and how his post- independence role can be viewed in light of how it has advanced or derailed the cause for which the war of liberation was wedged.
Much as the state media has jumped to attribute the statement to one, Christopher Mutsvangwa, and chose to attack the messenger and totally disregard the plausibility of the message and its import, it seems a futile exercise, the attempts by the state lapdog media outlets to try to delegitimise the message because its source is angry and the shrill voice of its author makes it sonorous.
Yes Mutsvangwa is loud mouthed, in fact his mouth is a mortar bomb launcher, mostly directionless but, like a lot of loose cannons, sometimes his ballistic trajectory takes him to some relevant target.
I am really convinced that Mutsvangwa either wrote the statement or had a major input in its crafting for the things that are contained therein are not alien to his characterisation of Mugabe and the role he is playing in ostracising the real war veterans and destroying the core of the ideals that inspired them to prosecute the struggle.
I don’t agree with the way Mutsvangwa normally portrays himself, especially the role that he played in the savage attack of Joice Mujuru at the height of factional madness in Zanu-PF between February and December 2014.
Mutsvangwa was hired to be the machete that did the hatchet job on Mujuru and he raised issues of legitimacy to bring down the former VP using the state media to vent out unsubstantiated lies that he knew between his teeth, were hogwash.
He played the super patriot, denigrated the role played by Mujuru in the liberation struggle including the downing of the chopper which happened on the 17th of February 1974 when Chris was still learning his way around the University of Rhodesia law faculty.
But that is not the import of my message today because I think Mutsvangwa, despite all his weaknesses, has the capacity to introspect hence deep down his heart, he knows he was driven by vanity, the love for money, power and recognition, to the extent he undermined his comrades, those that really share in his worldview, those that love him and believe in the ideals of the revolution for which they sacrificed their lives.
Mutsvangwa, like many war veterans who did the actual combat, not the ex-detainees who came out of prison with seven degrees and assumed leadership positions at independence, knows that there is something fundamentally wrong with Mugabe, his administration and the way he has allowed crooks, gay gangsters and bootlickers of monumental proportions to surround him, loot national resources, pay tithes to him, his wife and his party Zanu-PF.
Those that have dared to challenge Mugabe, and naturally the war veterans have done that, sometimes as individuals, have been delegitimised.
Mujuru was delegitimised and called all sorts of names. She was caricatured. Her role in the liberation struggle was soiled. She is not the only one. Chenjerai Hunzvi, around 1997, was called all sorts of names by Mugabe because he had mounted a formidable challenge and raised issues that Mugabe had personalised the revolution, was showering his cronies with trinkets when those that fought the war were wallowing in abject poverty.
The same Mugabe delegitimised Joshua Nkomo, called him a cobra whose head needed to be crashed simply because Nkomo was leading a vibrant political party, PF Zapu, that had realistic chances of dislodging Mugabe and his Zanu-PF in a free and fair election.
While Mugabe has mastered the art of delegitimation politics and succeeded in denigrating the roles played by valiant men and women who fought in the struggle, very few people have cared to characterise those still in good books with Mugabe for fear of a backlash from a state media that sees no evil in everything Mugabe does or associate with.
While those that dare criticise Mugabe are characterised as counterrevolutionaries, sell-outs and regime change mules, Mugabe has never spared a minute to look at those that bootlick him and understand them for who they are.
It is now quite apparent that most of Mugabe’s hangers-on today are criminals, horrible social misfits with unrepentant reprobate minds; the kind that the bible, in Romans 1 verse 30 refers to as “inventors of evil”.
They are not war veterans. They are veterans in orchestrating the suffering of the general public to an extent even the diabolic Lucifer, wherever he resides, now feels challenged by their zealous hardheartedness.
Mugabe does not like bona fide war veterans because he knows that the selflessness that drove them to participate in the liberation struggle prevents them from taking corruption and looting to the obscene levels he envisages for himself and his insatiable wife.
I know there are some very corrupt war-veterans but as long as they have a relic of the patriotic and selfless spirit that led them to join the struggle, they, at some point, would pause to think of the people for whom they sacrificed their lives to liberate. That becomes an Achilles heel to the primitive and wanton looting that Mugabe expects from his cronies today. Looting is now an end game that Mugabe realised can be driven by callous and unprincipled crooks in Zanu-PF not the selfless ilk typified by genuine war veterans.
It seems that those that have now found favour with Mugabe and his wife are the profligate, the miserly and patently corrupt quintessential of the Saviour Kasukuweres and their plush 50 plus bedroomed houses. Mugabe today calls for, and dines with the kind of looters who have no shred of morality they do anything for money including playing reverse sexual roles, all for wealth and power.
The ‘heroes’ that Mugabe wants close to him today are those that loot $15 billion and still find the guts to explain its disappearance as under-invoicing. Those that loot the country’s diamonds and buy mansions in South Africa for ZAR185 million and still pretend like its nothing are his modern day ‘freedom fighters’ for they, indeed, fight the freedom that people should enjoy in their country today.
Mugabe now calls for a different war veteran. He wants a diabolic lot who loots the parastatals of billions but still has the guts to go on national television and pretend to be poor. Those are the people that he wants close to him today.
He wants the young, immoral and greed individuals, those that specialise in fraudulently winning government tenders when they own no company. He likes the tenderprenuers who rake in millions of dollars and flaunt that ill-gotten wealth in far-away capitals with his wife leaving a trail of untold suffering in government hospitals, pot-holed roads and high cost of doing business among other consequences of their rampant looting.
What is clear today is that the people around Mugabe have helped us understand the Mugabe that we did not know. We now know, couresy of what he does and the people around him, that Mugabe is not a patriot. Neither is he a Nkrumaist. He has never believed in the Nkrumah pan Africanism that he purports to believe in.
History tells us that Mugabe was a chief critic of the revered Ghanaian leader and an avid supporter of Dr Kofi Busia, a chief Nkrumah critic and rival, and this explains his unceremonious flight from Ghana and even today, he bears some distinct marks of his brush with Nkrumah agents, and those marks stick out visibly on his hands even today, but when it suits him, he masquerades as a Nkrumaist, a pan-Africanist in the order of the late founding father of Ghana.
Mugabe doesn’t care about Africa. He doesn’t care about Zimbabwe. He doesn’t care about all of us. He is selfish, just like those that hobnob with him today. He would rather destroy agriculture in the country if bringing in bananas and cassava from Equatorial Guinea to feed the hungry masses would win him an election.
He would rather have diamonds looted in the country as long as proceeds are channelled to him and his party to win elections.
He can destroy agriculture, appropriate white owned farms under the guise of a land reform as long as that would deal a death blow to the MDC-T inaugural funders. That is the Mugabe we have come to know who is a far cry from the pan Africanist that was sold to us by his propaganda machinery.
Mugabe is not only producing unrepentant looters, he is also creating ‘new war veterans’ by each passing day. That is the reason why, despite the fact Mugabe is losing a lot of war veterans through death and defections to Zimbabwe People First, the numbers that masquerade as war veterans and continue to go on bootlicking pilgrimages to him continue to grow more as the economy continues to spiral into the abyss.
We saw it on Wednesday 27 July in Harare when the so-called war veterans met to pay homage to Mugabe, that most, if not all of them, were nothing but bootlickers, hungry and abused comrades who are dying for a place on Mugabe’s feeding trough. In typical Mugabe fashion, those that did not join him on this senseless and jaundiced excursion were delegitimised, and some arrested.
Jealousy Mawarire is the Zimbabwe People First (ZimPF) National Spokesperson.
