The five lies Chinamasa told the BBC

By Tawanda Majoni

Patrick Chinamasa is living a big lie. When he recently fielded questions from the BBC’s Andrew Harding, he made several remarks regarding the likelihood of Morgan Tsvangirai ruling Zimbabwe, all of them utter rubbish.

He unashamedly told the world that Tsvangirai could not win the impeding elections. That was the first lie. Second, he said Tsvangirai had been campaigning and mobilizing us against our interests.

Third, he wanted us to believe that the generals were opposed to Tsvangirai because the MDC leader represented a reversal of the gains of the liberation struggle during which they made sacrifices.

Fourth, he assumed that he had the mandate to speak on behalf of the military, instead of his party. Finally, he claimed that the military could stop Tsvangirai, or any other candidate they might not like, from ruling.

It is stubborn defiance of truth, reality and history to say Tsvangirai has no capacity to win elections. He won the 2008 presidential first round. Surely nobody is still blind to the fact that ZEC, when it withheld the March 2008 presidential poll results, was in fact playing around with the “margin of error”?

What other explanation is there? The error—also read “mistake”—in typical Zanu (PF) fashion, is Tsvangirai and MDC ruling Zimbabwe. That margin, as we all know now, was whittled down to a runoff match between President Robert Mugabe and Tsvangirai, and the rest is history.

Has Tsvangirai been mobilizing against our interests as Zimbabweans? Chinamasa surely should have seen the insult in that utterance. Which section of the population does he conceptualize as “Zimbabweans”? To be Zimbabwean is different from being a Zanu (PF) hardliner.

The fact that I think differently from the likes of Chinamasa, Nicholas Goche, Rugare Gumbo and Mugabe does not make me any less Zimbabwean. Further, why does Chinamasa think that we will so easily succumb to the so-called mobilization by Tsvangirai?

For crying out aloud, Zimbabweans can think independently and Tsvangirai is not some kind of deity whom people follow blindly. Where people think he has messed up, we say it. We have openly done that regarding his messy love life, and so on, and are unlikely to stop doing so any time soon.

Chinamasa never bothered to tell us what express interests of the Zimbabweans Tsvangirai was mobilizing the people against. It is also plain foolery to want to sell us the line that the generals would oppose a Tsvangirai government because they are concerned that he will reverse the gains of the liberation struggle.

These generals are not at all worried about genuine gains of independence, at least not where the general population is concerned.

It is now common cause that, for the securocrats, the so-called gains translate to a fleet of cars in the backyard, a fat offshore bank account built on ill-gotten money from local or DRC diamonds, three or four arms grabbed from commercial farmers, and a chain of upmarket properties.

That is what the generals cherish as independence, and nothing more. And that is why they are so scared of regime change. For the securocrats, most of whom are unemployable elsewhere, Tsvangirai represents a threat to their stolen largesse.

While the MDC might have been inconsistent in its policy articulation, particularly in the early days, I am not sure if it will take away the farms from resettled locals. I thought the party said it was opposed to the manner in which land redistribution took place.

Chinamasa is not helping matters for his party in any way. By speaking on behalf of the generals, he further exposed what we already know: that there is no difference between Zanu (PF) and the securocrats.

Yes, we have heard the generals speak openly about this, from as way back as 2002, on the eve of that year’s presidential election, when Vitalis Zvinavashe et al spoke of a straight jacket. The more they repeat it, the better for advocates of democracy for history shall judge Zanu (PF) on that basis.

Regarding the fifth lie, may someone tell Chinamasa and his counterparts in Zanu (PF), including the military on whose behalf he spoke in his interview with the BBC, that things have changed.

What Chinamasa should have told us—the real Zimbabweans, not his imagined citizenry—is that Mugabe was forced into a coalition government by the fact that his leadership had become discredited in the eyes of the international community.

A coup d’état discredits any subsequent regime, and I don’t see that changing just because we have a red-eyed military junta in Zimbabwe.

Tawanda Majoni can be reached on [email protected]. This article was initially published in The Zimbabwean