Dear Editor,
I am writing to submit a response to Mr Pongo’s latest opinion editorial.
https://nehandaradio.com/2010/01/03/things-can-only-get-better-for-zimbabwe/.
Mr Pongo has a right to air his opinion but it is imperative that he be challanged by those who have countervailing opinons. I hope you publish my op-ed.
By Tsanga Tutankhamen Shanga
Brilliant Pongo, whose attempt to become an internet disc jockey may have flopped disastrously, seems to have found a new hobby, defending Mugabe’s custodianship of Zimbabwe that has, after thirty years of wielding power, flopped disastrously.
One hopes that the dull attempts to imitate the buck-toothed Joseph Chinotimba by Comrade Pongo, oxymoronically named Brilliant, meet the same fate as his bilge-water-type Growth Point Starter Pack tenure.
To accelerate the inevitable emollition of Comrade Pongo’s apparently self-serving indefensible defence of Mugabe’s tyranny, it is instructive to put Brilliant’s spurious charges under the microscope every time he musters the brass nerve to wittingly spread risible falsehoods.
In his latest instalment of words of mass deception (WMDs), the dreadlocked and red-eyed Comrade Pongo irritatingly barks at the imposition of targeted sanctions against members of the ZANU-PF criminal syndicate.
“Some people will be quick to apportion blame on President Mugabe and ZANU PF, but is it all down to one man (sic)?” asks Comrade Pongo.
The answer to that one is simple; it took one patently incompetent, means-spirited and shamelessly exploitative man working in connivance with a troop of hapless cheerleaders, shameless bottom feeders, criminally corrupt sycophants and hoards of brainless thugs specifically trained to constantly bay for the blood of their compatriots.
That, Comrade Pongo, is what brought ruin to Zimbabwe.
In 1980, Mugabe inherited a nation that was ready to take off after the end of a debilitating war. Keen-eyed African leaders realized how fortunate it was for Mugabe. “You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way,” Mwalimu Nyerere advised [see
http://www.sokwanele.com/thisiszimbabwe/archives/category/sokwanele-posts/page/2]
Tone deaf as he is, Mugabe did not listen. He had a more hard-pressing issue to attend to; consolidating all the power into his hands not for any noble goal but just for the sake of it. After a few cosmetic changes like the effortless task of changing nameplates on roads and renaming mountains and rivers, he got the ball rolling on his brutal and wicked quest for absolute power.
Mugabe is monomaniacal when he makes up his mind. Once he has a target, he will go for it full tilt, everything else be damned. So, without surprise, he set out to brutally decimate PF-ZAPU and members of its armed wing, the gallant ZIPRA forces.
Looking back, PF-ZAPU offered an ideological alternative to what would turn out to be Mugabe’s misguided and ill-conceived brand of Marxism-Leninism. ZIPRA cadres, whose patriotism to the Zimbabwean cause was and has never been in question, posed a huge military buffer to his ambition for imperial-style power.
In short order, Joshua Nkomo had to be caricatured as a tribal overlord, liberation war heroes Dumiso Dabengwa and Lookout Masuku had to be broken down. To rally the nation, we were told that Nkomo, Dabengwa and Masuku had cached arms to seize the country.
Subliminally, the Shonas were fooled into thinking that the loathed Madzviti raids were in the offing. It is an old trick that works all the time; demonize your enemy and then pounce. It is even better if you can goad a few miscreants in the other camp to behave stupidly.
It might have been the same approach the ZANU-PF used, goading a few hot-headed ZIPRA ex-combatants to provide a casus belli. That is what happened and so was the beginning of the crime we all know as the Gukurahundi Genocide.
Gukurahundi was a continuation of the power play that started long before Zimbabwe became independent or, as it turned out, Mugabe’s personal fiefdom. Within the ZANU-PF structure, potential opponents of Mugabe’s seizure of absolute power were weeded out.
Josiah Tongogara posed the biggest threat to Mugabe’s quest for power. If Oppah Muchinguri’s recent utterances are credible, Tongogara was assassinated. Cui bono? Who had the most to gain from the murder of Josiah Tongogara?
The same cast of characters that has become wildly wealthy by looting the country’s resources. As Mugabe was busy vasectomizing all opposition, the country fell apart because of sheer negligence. This was long before the imposition of sanctions.
Others have catalogued the unimaginable corruption that Mugabe’s syndicate started as soon as PF-ZAPU had been thrashed into submission. Thanks to Geoff Nyarota and his journalists at the Bulawayo-based The Chronicle Newspaper, the thieves masquerading as our liberators were caught engaging in common theft called the Willogate Scandal.
Robert Mugabe was in it up to his neck. It was Maurice Nyagumbo who implicated Mugabe as a participant in the illegal Willogate shenanigans. Some have said the lovable Mrs Sally Mugabe, the only sensible Mugabe the country has ever known, was also getting Toyota Cressida cars to ship to Ghana. That charge is silly at best and libellous at worst.
Mai Mugabe was too busy taking care of her orphanages to engage in the stealing and shipping of cars. It was the bigamist Mugabe himself who needed the ill-gotten money to support his clandestine mistress.
After the dog-and-pony show, the Sandura Commission, meant to hoodwink the nation into believing Mugabe was against corruption, the looting picked pace. Mugabe also used the opportunity to consolidate his grip on ZANU-PF. Dead men tell no tales so poor Maurice Nyagumbo conveniently committed suicide, as we were told.
Enos Nkala was booted out. Edgar Tekere would soon be shown the door for his pestilent noises about ZANU-PF corruption. By then Tongogara had been long gone from the scene and Ndabaningi Sithole had been reduced to a cartoon character.
Thus, of the original ZANU founders, nobody was left to remind Mugabe of the original ethos of the party. Nobody except the self-deluding Edison Zvobgo who foolishly thought he would one day take over from Mugabe – are you paying attention Comrade Mnangagwa? Comrade Pongo, this was well before the imposition of sanctions.
ZANU-PF was quickly transformed to suit Mugabe’s incomprehensible thirst for power. Cheerleaders soon replaced Nkala, Tekere, Nyagumbo and Tongogara. Like hungry vultures that have spotted a carcass, shameless opportunists descended onto the scene.
The boisterous and show-boating Philip Chiyangwa is a prime example of the vultures that have ruined Zimbabwe. Sanctions, Comrade Dreadlocked Dread, have actually seen the members of the ZANU-PF crime syndicate brazenly steal and embezzle their way into fabulous wealth. The shortage of basic commodities like fuel and fertilizer only made the cartel richer at a quicker pace.
I have previously noted that sanctions have proven to be very devastating primarily because Mugabe has never cared and will never ever care for the wellbeing of the Zimbabwean people. He could have learnt from Ian Smith, P. W. Botha or Fidel Castro.
Despite an energy-sapping war, Smith found a way around the sanctions imposed after the UDI. The Afrikaner Regime took advantage of the natural riches of South Africa to fend off sanctions. One impressive example is the coal-to-oil industry that resulted in the birth of the industrial city of Sasolburg. Sasol, a company born out of Botha’s sanction-busting agenda, is now a multinational company listed on the world’s biggest stock markets.
Castro’s Cuba has been under sanctions for almost half a century and yet Cuba has one of the world’s best healthcare systems. While Mugabe runs to China for treatment, a testament to how far he has destroyed the country’s healthcare system, Fidel Castro is taken care of within Cuba. Incompetent Mugabe, unlike the troika of Smith, Botha and Castro, failed because he does not care.
Pongo laments the detrimental flight of talented Zimbabweans from their own motherland. Brilliant, point that finger of yours at the image of the man on your freaking T-shirt, one Robert Gabriel Mugabe! It is Mugabe that caused the largest involuntary mass dislocation of Africa’s children since the heinous crime of the Slave Trade.
Mugabe is complicit in the re-enslavement of the Africa’s Zimbabwean children by the very same imperial forces that he pretends to hate so much.
One has to wonder if Mugabe’s anger and irritation at the travel restrictions have more to do with his longing to kiss imperial rings in the courts of Europe again. He has been free to travel everywhere else. One would think he would be contended going to places like Beijing and Lilongwe. Mugabe is not happy with that. For a strange reason, he wants to visit Brussels and London.
The inevitable imposition of sanctions was prompted by the nationwide roguery of the ZANU-PF crime syndicate. That Mugabe has vainly tried to exploit the targeted sanctions only serves to reinforce the image of the man’s penchant for not being truthful with the Zimbabwean people.
Mugabe is a failed leader. Sanctions have nothing to do with it. So, give it a rest, Comrade Pongo. Stop barking at the moon.
