Flogging President Mugabe by Proxy

By Bvumavaranda MuRozvi

Reading the meme written by Amai Jukwa, published by the New Zimbabwe, the new scribe, and apparently a new addition to the usual choir of ZANU(PF)’s praise-singing rented agents, I could not help but think about Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.

In it, there is the memorable scene in which Marcus Antonius stands before the assassins of Julius Caesar promising not to praise Caesar but to bury him.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” says Marcus Antonius, “I come to bury Caesar but not to praise him.” A man of alluring eloquence, Antonius ends up doing the exact opposite.

That is precisely the same approach we witnessing as we watch Amai Jukwa, only she is playing the role of Marcus Antonio to her Julius Caesar, Minister Kasukuwere. Says Amai Jukwa, and I quote:

“Saviour Kasukuwere is a politician of muddied reputation. His acquisition of a stake in Interfresh remains a thing of controversy. In addition to those charges of impropriety, his public persona is poorly served by his boisterous style of delivery, a bulky well-fed frame and repeated accusations of corruption.

You see, the Youth Development, Indigenization and Empowerment Minister paints quite the picture of the villain archetype, a rogue fat cat who represents everything opposition forces rail against.”

So, there you have it. Minister Kasukuwere is metaphorically kicked in the groin right in front of everyone. It is a clever ruse, but I am jumping ahead of myself.

Up until Amai Jukwa said it, it had never dawned on this son of a poor peasant woman that Minister Kasukuwere was actually bloated with the flatulence of corruptly acquired wealth.

Oh my goodness, to think that all along I simply thought of and felt sorry for the minister because his physical frame was a result of a genetically acquired predisposition to getting bulky rather than the bulk of a “well-fed frame,” to use Amai Jukwa flowery description of the hefty minister who she calls corrupt!

I am still disposed to believe that it is an inherited genetic issue rather than the result of a porcine-style ravenous feeding at the slops of the publicly funded feeding troughs, as Amai Jukwa apparently reveals. Surely we cannot be so insensitive to publicly scold people because of their genes, can we?

Now, mark this, the public humiliation and denigration of Minister Kasukuwere has all the quintessential fingerprints of Marcus Antonius’ verbal theatrics. All the verbal gymnastics by Amai Jukwa are simply meant to act as a preface to the ensuing spirited defense of Minister Kasukuwere.

In the Manichean world of Zimbabwean politics, there are only two sides. You are either on one side or you must be with adversary. The enemy must be attacked. It has to be a brutal public evisceration. The best way to defend your side is attacking the other side.

That is the essence of Zimbabwean Manichaeism, the very same Amai Jukwa is using.

Enemies have to be identified and then subjected to a barrage of withering aerial sorties. The target of Amai Jukwa is none of the usual soft targets; you know the perennial agents of regime change always lurking in the shadows as they wait to pounce on the self-described and self-adulating Zimbabwean patriots. Nope, it is none of these usual suspects or the sanctions-imposing strawmen. It is not even the hapless Gideon Gono who is the target.

Of course poor Gideon Gono —– or must we now salute him as Dr Gono —– is getting beaten like a village thief caught stealing a chicken. The target of that thrashing is none other than President Mugabe. Gushungo is getting a public flogging by proxy.

Our forbearers left us a very memorable proverb, one that they coined after observing this phenomenon over a period of thousands of years. They told us; kurova imbwa vakaviga mupinyi. That is the main point of Amai Jukwa’s latest verbal bromide. Actually it is the sole point. That piece is the proverbial cannon shot across the bow of Gushungo’s ship.

President Mugabe must have said a few choice words that have left some elements within his party in a state of seething disgruntlement. Simply put, Amai Jukwa is apparently verbalizing that fury. Hell hath no fury like a reactionary squad scorned, I presume.

The internet is thick with the electric buzz that Minister Kasukuwere’s tenancy on the perch of fame, power and comparatively easy access to national resources, the kind of rewards typical of an out-of-control patronage-driven socioeconomic order, is precariously teetering on the edge and is on the verge of toppling over.

President Mugabe openly questioned the handling of the indigenization agenda by Minister Kasukuwere, effectively calling him bumbling and clueless.

By reading too much out of this stunning poor appraisal of the minister’s performance, some people’s teeth are set on edge and others are gleefully rubbing their hands but this Zimbabwean thinks it is much excitement over nothing of substance.

It is all political drama, the proverbial kicking up of a lot of dust just for the sake of leaving people with the deliberately false impression that something serious and meaningful to the lives of ordinary people is afoot. I am buying none of it.

Reading all this as a spectator, I can say the kerfuffle is not about the failed indigenization effort. Since it was conceived as a political policy meant to give quick but transient gains, the policy was doomed to fail right from the moment of inception anyway.

By putting the responsibilities of this much-needed policy into the hands of Minister Kasukuwere, the president effectively let everyone know that the policy was driven by political expedience rather than noble economic gains and the overarching social justice.

This was a policy that should have been entrusted to a group of competent Zimbabweans without any burdensome political ambitions or inhibitory political ideologies at stake, people who put love for humanity, country, community and family over and above party loyalty and political ideology.

The president did none of that.

As a result of the politicization of the policy, failure was the only option. That failure is announcing itself now. Rather than blame Minister Kasukuwere for the inevitable failure, the president has to take the blame on this one. Firstly, like I said above, he chose to make it a political issue when he had a better alternative.

Secondly, it was the president who put the responsibility of formulating and implementing the policy onto the lap of a minister who was clearly out of his depth. This was uncharted territory for the relatively youthful and inexperienced minister. When faced with hard-knuckled international businessmen who have been engaging in cutthroat deals across the globe, youth and inexperience were bound to bear no dividends for us. They did not.

This clearly shows that the usual jambaja-style of smashing and grabbing other people’s property, regardless of the dubious legality of how that property was original acquired, makes for good political drama but everything coming out of it will be nothing but disastrous.

It is one thing to smash and grab your way onto a farm of maize and tobacco or a plantation of mangoes. After all, mankind has been farming since the dawn of time. Farming may have gone commercial but all the sophisticated equipment of industrial-scale farming cannot erase the fact that one can still engage in relatively successful farming using rudimentary equipment like a hoe and an ox-drawn plough.

Mining, however, is a totally different proposition. You cannot simply go to Mr Multinational Mine Owner and say: “Hey mister, look here! You have 100 mine shafts on my ancestral land. I have the military and police power at my beck and call, as well as the political authority, to smash and grab each and every one of those 100 mine shafts. There is no need for you to fret, though. I will be reasonable. From now onwards, I own 51 of the mine shafts.”

The clever international mine owner, one who has been through this smash-and-grab experience before, is likely to respond with the politeness and smile of a hungry leopard dealing with a fat and naïve goat. “By all means, minister, get the 51 shafts. Take your pick.”

It is the classical trap, the kind of losing deal that Shylock received. You take your pound of flesh; exactly a pound, and no more and no less than that pound of flesh with not even a jot of blood to be shed in the process.

The mine owner knows it takes highly intelligent personnel with degrees in mining engineering from renowned mining universities like the Colorado School of Mining. To run a successful mine requires a constant supply of electricity. It takes skilled and vigilant safety engineers and personnel.

The sophisticated equipment must be repaired and replaced at regular intervals. In this day and age, a successful mining operation is a computerized undertaking. You must have properly trained computer operators on site each and every hour of the day.

Without a good and well-thought out plan, you cannot conscript some functionally illiterate youths drunk on the exuberance of youth to go and smash and grab your way into a mine shaft. That is the easy part.

Once you are in that shaft, only God or Emmanuel Makandiwa, can help you smash and grab your way out of that mine shaft. A pick, a shovel and a wheelbarrow are not going to help you get out of the belly of the earth.

It is all well and good to wrest a mine shaft, the Shakespearean pound of flesh, but it is no good without the appropriate resources, personnel and equipment. Like poor Shylock discovered, it is futile —– maingofunga kuti magwaro amaiverengeswa zvaingove zvekudhoma kuti mukunde bvunzo kanhi?

Bereft of functional equipment, skilled and experienced personnel, as well as access to modern technology, there is no way you are going to run even a shallow mine without facing clear and ever-present danger. If that mine gets flooded, you can kiss it farewell for good or for worse.

Heaven forfends if your supply of electricity is cut when you need your pumps running to keep water out of that shaft. A mine shaft has a low supply of oxygen. It takes pumps to ensure adequate fresh air circulation in those shafts.

If you send people down that mine shaft without adequate protective measures, you are all but committing outright murder because the miners will get asphyxiated to death faster than Nathaniel Manheru can shout ICHO! A mine is not just an innocuous hole in the ground, you know.

None of this was put in place before lunging headlong into the implementation of the indigenization policy. The reason is fairly simple. Training people to go into commercially viable and self-sustaining mining operations takes time and resources.

If there is one commodity that politicians always find to be in short supply it must be time. For this reason, and this reason alone, the president needed to avoid making the policy political, but then it can be logically argued that he is a politician who will act as he knows best, acting as a politician almost by default.

For all of Amai Jukwa’s Shakespearean verbal jiggery-pokery, what our ancestors called kunakurirana nyoka mhenyu, the truth cannot be peppered over. That truth is that the president has now realized his agenda is announcing its own failure.

Amai Jukwa, and all the rented cheerleaders, much like Nero’s well-compensated praise singers, are denying the truth staring them in the face. They cannot directly use the standard talking points to the effect that, like the usual soft targets, President Mugabe who now says the indigenization agenda is a flop, is a sellout.

Do not get me wrong. They are aching to call him a sellout but, for now, they are content walloping him by proxy. Poor Dr Gono, and I do not have material poverty in mind here, is being used to vicariously flog President Mugabe. Let them get their solace and gratification from it. I think Sekuru Gushungo will take that in stride, at any rate.

At the end of the day, the public wrangling has very little to do with the failed indigenization agenda. It has a more frightening under-tow cause personified by Julius Malema and the manner he was publicly flirted with in the past two years prior to his spectacular but predictable fall from his plinth.

I said it before most people in ZANU(PF) realized it or wanted to hear it, that hifalutin boy from Limpopo Province was a walking and talking human form of a lethal radioactive mass better off sequestered in an underground storage facility deep in the bowels of the Yucca Mountains.

If, indeed, President Mugabe is now fed up with Minister Kasukuwere’s antics and performance, which I do not believe is the case, Julius Malema, the cabbage farmer, is the issue here rather than that fated-to-fail indigenization agenda.

For humanity, country, community and family, I’m Bvumavaranda MuRozvi.