International Women’s Day 8th March 2015
By Nomazulu Thata
A fifth letter to all women in Zimbabwe in preparation for the grand boycott!
“Passive resistance”
This is the fifth letter, a week before the actual boycott starts. This time we ask not only men/ husbands, brothers, sons, men friends to assist us in the boycott but the women and men in the police- and the armed forces of the Republic of Zimbabwe as well.
Dear police and soldiers, how much money are you getting a month, an average of 200.00 US dollars a month? Does that money sustain your families and extended families or are you living at a wage far below the datum line?
Why do you accept this pittance of a wage and you are not doing anything to change this or have you accepted your meagre life as normal? We are asking you not to shoot at anybody but to march in the streets of all towns and cities of Zimbabwe and tell the government that we people of Zimbabwe have had enough of the sufferings, the dismally poor government administration.
This miserable life cannot go on like that, we need to change it. We cannot march with you because we shall get harmed by those who will be on the wrong side of the boycott. Please we ask you to be on the right side of the boycott and see us through this by just marching in the streets of all towns in Zimbabwe and setting us free from the yoke of oppression.
I am sure this makes a lot of sense if you marched as you are the ones who have the arms that can harm the population. Think it like this, if we matched into the streets of Zimbabwe, Mugabe will ask you to go and harm us with live guns, but if you marched into the streets of Zimbabwe, you will paralyze the corrupt system overnight. So to bring change is more in your hands than any other group of people in the country.
Dear police- and the armed forces of the Republic of Zimbabwe. We ask you to help your mothers in this boycott. We are the mothers of this nation called Zimbabwe. We nurtured you when you were young and we sacrificed everything to be where you are right now so that you go to school and be able to read and write.
Please we appeal to your assistance to be with us throughout this period of March 2015. While we cannot go in the streets, you can do so by defying all rules that oppress all of us in the land and free us by telling the government that things can’t go on the way they are.
You cannot serve a fraction of the nation with security and the rest live in absolute poverty, abject poverty. Zimbabwe is not safe for women and girl-children, because there are no resources to reinforce security effectively for the poor citizens.
2015 should be a year of reckoning to all citizens of the land, sons and daughters. We want a new dispensation that will cater for all and not a few. We are tired of our raucous envy, seeing the elite families dwelling in wealth unimaginable in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is two worlds in one country, Beverley Hills style of life of USA on one hand and near Democratic Republic of Congo slums in central Africa on the other hand. We see them in pictures living big in far off places making holidays, splashing the very tax payer’s money and looted diamonds, the diamonds national treasure of all citizens of Zimbabwe.
Look at how Mbare/Makhokhoba is like today, look at the streets full of sewage water and children playing in the sewage water, do you think it’s normal? Look at some of the flats in Mbare/Makhokhoba, the so-called bachelors flats; can that be called the quality of life of human beings?
Look at the dirty streets and alleys, dirty market places, dirty public toilets, never cleaned for months and months, in almost all towns and cities of Zimbabwe. It is better to relieve oneself in the bush than to use a public toilet. You see street kids in those large numbers begging 90% of unemployed citizens of Zimbabwe, is that normal?
Who bothers to ask how these unemployed people, 90% of the work force survives with complete absence of designated department of Social Services that will give them unemployment benefits to live on?
Have you seen street kids basking in the sun collapsing to death because of hunger, there is nothing in the bins to scrounge food from, there is no food-rests thrown in the bins to scavenge anymore. Is that normal?
Why is electricity shortage so bad and getting worse every day? Have you seen young girls of 11 years, 12 years and thirteen years hitting for the red lights to generate cash through prostitution? Have you seen blind people held by their children lining the streets in all towns and cities of Zimbabwe begging from the motorists for money just to exist ever? Can that be called normal?
Zanu PF is a government that does not know its job description; physical and mentally challenged citizens are the responsibility of the government. What about the flood victims who are still in temporal places since 2013, they are squatters in their own country and nobody cares about them from the government side.
Instead the money that was given to them by the benevolent donor agencies was looted by the very “rich hands of trust,” the government servants. Have we ever asked the people who have swam and crossed the flooded Limpopo River, what it is like to risk and surrender your life to cross a river infested with crocodiles and at the same time the fear of being caught by the South African border police with their vicious dogs?
What makes them do that is the abject desperation at home and the hope that somewhere else not home, life is better, elsewhere, and there is some perspective to risk one’s life for. Did you hear of women who went to deliver babies in government hospitals and they are detained together with newly born babies for not paying hospital fees?
Have you heard of families who never claimed their dead relatives because there was no means to bury them? Have we asked people, young people who have been working in South African white farms for a straight period of three months and they are cheated, told to leave the farms without a single payment done to them.
If they complained the white farmers report them to the immigration and are deported back to Zimbabwe, hungry, just dumped at the Zimbabwean border in Beit Bridge? Do you know what it is like to squat in a church in Johannesburg with 300 other inmates using one toilet for three years in the hope of getting a permit to work?
Have you ever been told skin-peeling stories of Zimbabwean women who are being raped in high density shanty townships of Johannesburg? This is the daily struggle of the people of Zimbabwe in the Diaspora, they can risk everything and anything because life at home has become unbearable, there is nothing to hope for.
In the UK it’s equally worse, but you always think that those that went to UK are better than those at home in Zimbabwe. On the contrary it is not so dear soldiers and police forces. When Zimbabweans enter the UK, they are sent to designated refugee homes, go through very bitter and humiliating processes to ever settle and work and support the people at home.
Given that Britain was a colonial master once upon a time, here we are knocking on their door asking them to assist us, give us shelter and give us any work a Zimbabwean can do. “Bwana go home” mantra is long forgotten. We are even ashamed to repeat it as we see UK as a solution and a better alternative to our very government that told us they liberated us from the white colonial rule.
Give us the opportunity to live normal lives like all other global citizens and not this constant migration to faraway places, not the humiliation Zimbabweans suffer in the Diaspora, not the risking of lives in horrendous situations unimaginable by common sense.
The number of women we are targeting to boycott work is small indeed. If the country has 10% of the working force working in the formal sector, 3% of them are women. They work as civil servants, teachers and nurses and in public/private institutions and wholly private sector.
We cannot expect women in the informal sector to boycott their activities as there is nothing to boycott work. We are directly targeting the government of Zimbabwe and its institutions. That said, it is then important to ask our men partners to assist in this boycott. We appeal to the policemen and the soldiers, the critical work force in the country to assist the women in their plight to change the government.
They are equally getting peanuts to survive on their daily lives. It makes sense to ask them to assist women, their mothers to change the rotten government of Zanu and hope for a better dispensation that will serve the people and not this looting machinery for the past 35 years. Let it just be that one and final push that will bring down the regime.
It is also very important to say at this juncture that this call to total boycott is a call to all peoples of Zimbabwe regardless of their political orientations. I am not calling this boycott on behalf of my party but on behalf of the women of Zimbabwe whose voices have been silenced.
It is a call to all citizens of Zimbabwe to assist the women’s call to bring change in Zimbabwe. How long shall we wait for miracles to happen? The miracles are on our hands now to really bring change by whatever means on our disposal.
We know that Zimbabwe was liberated by the barrel of the gun. We are asking you, please, never to use the live guns at all but to march to the streets of all towns and cities while your mothers are at their homes, a good strategy!
You will also know that immediately after the famous Lancaster talks, heads rolled. Those soldiers who were true to the struggle were eliminated and some were sidelined and those who were at the periphery of the liberation struggle came forward and hijacked the reigns of freedom, they rule us to this date, false liberators including Robert Mugabe.
If you march to the streets you will make those gallant liberators proud in their graves. They will tell themselves, at least they did not sacrifice to fight for the liberation struggle for nothing.
Josiah Tongogara, Lookout Masuku, Herbert Chitepo, Jaison Moyo, Nikita Mangena, Thenjiwe Virginia Lesabe, Mai Chirwa, Joshua Mqhabuko Nyongolo Nkomo, Dzinashe Wilfred Mhanda, Josiah Chinamano these gallant true liberators will smile in their graves if you brought change in the form of a boycott, a revolution without shedding any blood on your side. These true liberators wanted a true liberated Zimbabwe and it is for this reason they were eliminated or suffered untold humiliation at the hands of Zanu PF.
“I repeat; peaceful protests and industrial actions are the only way that is going to bring a change of government in Zimbabwe. Forget about the ZANU PF controlled ballot system.” Zanda Shumba
Let’s meet in one spirit and truth on the 8th of March 2015. It will be a big day as it will be celebrated by women and our men folk assisting their women counterparts, just by being part of the grand boycott. I rest my case!
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