Hopewell Chin’ono: Zimbabwe needs a new unity of purpose and a break with the past

By Hopewell Chin’ono

The last seven days have been action packed with spirited court arguments, a constitutional court ruling and a Presidential inauguration.

Now that we have a substantive president with a political, legal and constitutional mandate, the next thing for the country is to have a ministerial cabinet.

This will signal the direction that President Emmerson Mnangagwa wants to take this country and whether it will be business as usual or not.

It is important not to second-guess the president and his team as they put together a cabinet that would either make him a historical president or an inconsequential political leader.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa is now a president for those that voted for him and citizens that voted for Nelson Chamisa and other presidential candidates.

Yesterday in his inauguration speech, President Mnangagwa said that he would put Zimbabwe first and advance the all-important national interest in pursuit of a better future for his compatriots.

Two weeks ago, his deputy, Vice President Constantino Chiwenga said that Zimbabwe doesn’t belong to ZANU PF or MDC parties.

He said that Zimbabwe belongs to all its citizens regardless of party political affiliation. This is a message and reality that needs continual accentuation as the state and country are being reoriented towards a new vision and direction.

This is the right language that will bring Zimbabweans together regardless of the political parties that we support, we are Zimbabweans first and the country should come ahead of our partisan interests.

However this cannot be left to words and political rhetoric alone, this must be seen in the actions that the instruments controlled by the state take, instruments like the state controlled media.

Robert Mugabe chose to endorse Nelson Chamisa on the eve of the harmonized elections, a democratic right that he exercised lawfully.

Naturally, President Mnangagwa and his party were not happy considering the road that they traveled with the old man. He mentored them and as such, they were bitter that their teacher was deserting them and endorsing their political adversary.

This was quite evident in the video that the president put out in haste responding to Mugabe’s endorsement of Nelson Chamisa.

We saw the war veterans and the ZANUPF chairperson Oppah Muchinguri throwing tantrums and pushing for Robert Mugabe’s name to be stripped off our international airport.

The state media started addressing Mugabe as Mister (Mr) instead of calling him Comrade (Cde) as they did in the past.

When this happens, the natural assumption and instinct is that someone is unhappy with Mugabe in the upper echelons of state power and that they have sanctioned these changes and outbursts.

President Mnangagwa will ultimately be the person who takes the blame or credit for all these things.

Now if the president is for all of us as he should be and if the state-run newspapers are indeed national public service media, why then should they be used to settle party political battles?

Why should a national airport be subjected to name changes on the basis of Mugabe’s choice to support and vote for Nelson Chamisa?

Mugabe’s individual decision to support Chamisa is protected by the country’s constitution?
He therefore shouldn’t be humiliated by his party using national symbols and institutions.

I must put it on the record that I never favored the idea of renaming the airport after Robert Mugabe.

It was a decision taken by Robert Mugabe and ZANUPF as part of his fight to stop Emmerson Mnangagwa to succeed him and it was meant to consolidate his power.

I would have preferred the airport to be named after someone like Herbert Chitepo or Leopold Takawira.

However because we are now here, we should not use national institutions to settle partisan fights.

If allowed, this will mean that whenever a leader is gone, the next leader will undo all the things his predecessor would have done, good or bad, and erase them from history.

If indeed there is an appetite to change the airport’s name back to Harare International Airport or renaming it after another struggle luminary, it should be a collective national decision and not an arbitrary partisan call.

This is what will make the citizens come together and acknowledge that there is change indeed and that the country is headed towards a new direction.

This for me is one of the critical tests for the new president, the nation is now waiting to see whether he is going to be a uniting president or a divisive one.

President Mnangagwa has so far shown that he is willing to travel the difficult road, something that would have been unthinkable under his predecessor, Robert Mugabe.

It would also have been unthinkable in the past to criticize the president openly and still get an audience with him or escape arrest and state media censure.

These are the little things that other nations take for granted but had been denied to Zimbabweans for decades under Robert Mugabe’s difficult and ultimately ruinous rule.

Therefore all Zimbabweans must now give the new President a chance to either nicely surprise us or fail by his own accord, but he deserves that chance.

I say so because every sane Zimbabwean citizen knows that Emmerson Mnangagwa is now Zimbabwe’s president for the next five years. That will not change unless he is incapacitated by nature.

The world came to his inauguration yesterday and for all those who understand geopolitics, that is the end of the matter and the end of the partisan fights in as far as the world is concerned.

It is now up to President Mnangagwa and ZANUPF to govern the country responsibly and for Nelson Chamisa and the MDC to hold the president and his party to account.

Zimbabweans now want job opportunities, clean running water, decent roads, good and reliable health services and cash in the banks.

Trying to sabotage the efforts of the new government will do no favors to the opposition as it will make them irrelevant in the eyes of the ordinary men and women who now have to face the daily economic struggles.

These economic struggles can only be eased if both the ruling and the opposition parties work hand in glove in seeking for solutions to the country’s myriad of problems which are anchored in a history of terrible economic policy making and political repression.

The continued delegitimization of President Mnangagwa will also delegitimize the country and undermine the efforts to turn around the economy.

The pain that comes with that kind of suffering will not chose ZANUPF supporters only, it will affect all of us.

It will not spare the opposition supporters, we will buy in the same shops and stand in the same bank queues and be subjected to the same economic pressures regardless of the political parties we support.

So any sensible citizen would not stand in the way of economic efforts to undo decades of rot and bad policies. Doing so will inevitably punish all of us.

This doesn’t mean that the president and his government shouldn’t be constructively criticized.
In a democracy, it is healthy to do so but constructively, within reason and legitimately.

This recent past election was one of the most brutal in terms of citizen political engagement.
Many chose to resort to insults and throwing vile vulgarities to those that they disagreed with.

This was very unfortunate but it showed the true colours of some of our compatriots.
When cornered or frustrated, the true colour and content of a human being is soon revealed.

This political hatred now belongs to the past and it should be.
There is NO value to be gained by opening old wounds.

As we wait to be presented with the new ministerial cabinet, I also hope that our state media will realize that they will either stand in the way of the President’s new agenda or they will help bring clarity to it through what they publish and broadcast.

The state media should know that Zimbabweans are tired of being divided on partisan lines as this will defeat the president’s clarion call for unity.

We need a new roadmap on how we behave as citizens and we also need the state media to behave responsibly and not divide us on partisan lines.

Each time articles are published which attack, divide or hurt a certain section of our society, it will also undo the call for unity by the president.

Terrible things happened on the 1st of August when seven citizens were gunned down in Harare after the opposition had taken to the streets.

The president in his inauguration speech acknowledged this unfortunate event and added that he is setting up a commission of inquiry that will include foreign commissioners from South Africa and the United Kingdom.

This commission should be allowed to do its job and the grieving relatives should be given an opportunity to learn the truth about what led to their kith and kin’s unfortunate demise.

The government has publicly stated its responsibility and commitment to ensuring the security of all Zimbabweans. This should be followed by a continuation of calls by both President Mnangagwa and Nelson Chamisa for an end to all instances of political violence.

The political class and elites, thought leaders and the media should avoid the tragic “us and them” terminologies, as they are the breeding accessories for the confrontation that ultimately leads to political violence.

This should be coupled with measures to build public confidence in the police force through training and visible reorientation programs.

The police should be given the political will and support by the government to investigate and pursue perpetrators of violence.

In the short to mid-term, inviting partnerships with countries that have reputable law enforcement agencies that uphold human rights will assist in the reorientation process.

The government and national parliament must encourage non-threatening and supportive police engagement with citizens at the community level and apply stiffer sentences for political violent crimes.
This will go a long way in establishing a new culture of political tolerance and a national unity of purpose.

Zimbabwe is ours and it belongs to all of us regardless of partisan affiliation or differences.

We should now put our shoulders to the wheel and start working towards a better future for ourselves, our children and future generations to come.

Zimbabwe groans with huge deposits of natural resources and yet its people wallow in economic penury. This needs to stop, but it can only come to an end if we pull together as a nation.

The world should give us a chance to do just that and we should give the world an opportunity to assist us by doing the right things.

Saying that we have changed and we are Open for Business is not enough to convince a skeptic world.
We must change to We Are Ready for Business and do so through action not just words.

The ministerial cabinet will show the world and its investors whether we are serious or not about turning the corner.

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning Zimbabwean international Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker. He is a Harvard University Nieman Fellow and a CNN African Journalist of the year.

He is also a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Africa leadership Institute. Hopewell has a new documentary film coming out which is looking at mental illness in Zimbabwe called State of Mind.

State of Mind has been recently nominated for a top award in Kenya. Hopewell can be contacted at [email protected] or on twitter @daddyhope