Vultures love to wait when the dying refuse to die

By Tanonoka Joseph Whande

There is something about power that makes African presidents feel invincible – like what we are witnessing with our own president, Robert Mugabe, in Zimbabwe.

Last week, a foreign government provided him with a wheelchair.

We had no idea our president needs the use of a wheelchair while abroad.

Aah! So that is why we are blamed for his fall at the airport when he returned from one of those useless foreign trips of his!

Mugabe fears ending up the way Muammar Gaddafi did.

He might.

We cannot ignore the collective, irrational thinking and behavior of our presidents; their behavior is a syndrome that has caused deaths of fellow citizens.

With Mugabe, we are going backwards.

We have built schools and libraries not only to learn from but to harness past experiences so as to offer some insight in mapping a better future for ourselves.

But, Africa being Africa, the lessons inside those schools and libraries mean nothing to us because history points out fallacies and that is something African leaders do not want. They feel invincible and permanent.

African leaders distort history to glorify themselves; they kill people in the hope of leaving themselves as the only beacons of advancement.

They deny our people the right to choose. They take away our dignity, making themselves masters of our nation’s constitution and destiny.

The fighting for freedom was the easy part; the difficulty, as we witnessed in Zimbabwe, came when we were left “to our own devices”.

Mugabe, a dull school teacher who has never produced any of his former students as having excelled beyond his classroom, considers himself an economist, a political scientist and even a lawyer who never sat for a bar examination in any country or even entered a Court Of Law in practice…just like Emerson Mnangagwa…phonies who never excelled in anything before, during and after independence.

We are no longer in the age of Chairman Mao, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon and all those acclaimed revolutionaries.

They are passé.

We are in a new age which came upon us through our intention to get better than we were yesterday.

Today has come and it is ravaging us. Today is way ahead of us.

In soccer, a goalkeeper, being the last line of defense, always has a cabinet of ten in front of himself to protect the goalmouth. Each of those 10 has a specific role to play, which he executes in coordination with all the others.

For 35 years now, Zimbabwe’s last line of defense was Robert Mugabe.

And, my friends, we have lost just about every match in which we “played” in the villages, in industry, in health, in agriculture and just about all else we were made an appearance.

When the team’s last line of defense rushes onto the field and pushes every player of his team off the pitch, dons spikes, chainsaws, spears and knives, ready to fight outside the rules of the game, then we should rename the game because it is no longer a “people’s game”.

Mugabe has not been playing according to any established rules.

He has proved beyond any doubt that he can only survive, both politically and as a human being, by pick-pocketing people’s intentions at the ballot box, lying, cheating and setting the nation against itself.

When he started farm seizures, Mugabe allowed his party’s supporters to physically intimidate and attack the judges who might have given rulings against his government’s behavior. As a result, the best of our judges left Zimbabwe for SADC countries, with others going far afield.

He pardoned people who had been convicted of the murder or attempted murder of Mugabe’s political opponents.

When his activists kidnapped some people opposed to him and his party, Mugabe ignored the atrocities. Some survived but many were never found.

Mugabe behaves as if he owns our nation.

Touted for his education, he knows no economics, law or governance but thrives on populist statements that undermine not only his cabinet but the nation.

Zimbabwe has paid heavily for his misguided populist rhetoric and the nation is struggling to get back on its feet.

With the turmoil in North Africa, our region should have benefitted. But what person in their right minds would run to Mugabe?

This is the same president who uses undiplomatic language, insults and humiliates world leaders in Zimbabwe’s name.

This is the same president who raided the coffers of the National Social Security Authority (NSSA) to fund his foreign travels.

This is the same president who let his minister, Jonathan Moyo, raid coffers of the underfunded AIDS programme to stage a beauty contest in Victoria Falls.

This is the same president who threatened his own judges and magistrates if they sat to hear legal submissions from his former lieutenants against him.

Mugabe, hiding behind the presidency, has an inferiority complex, feels inadequate, and has done more harm than good to Zimbabwe.

How does a president sink so low as to withhold pension funds and other benefits legally accrued by a citizen through legitimate employment?

The man is bonkers!

This is the President of Zimbabwe, the Chairman of both SADC and the AU.

This is the man South Africans give standing ovations… if they admire Mugabe so much, why won’t they, please, just take him and give him a job in their country?

I find it shitty that African countries are up in arms against South Africa’s xenophobia yet xenophobia has been going on in many African countries, particularly Zimbabwe where Mugabe’s phobia of Zimbabweans long turned into genocide, spread over decades…yet no one in Africa spoke up.

Four days ago, Costa Machingauta, a Member of Parliament for Budiriro, was attacked by ZANU-PF thugs and left for dead for wearing his party’s regalia.

Nothing said.

But let it happen in South Africa, or elsewhere, and the whole of Africa and the world would be up in arms.

The world correctly reacted to so-called xenophobia attacks in South Africa only because other nations, other than Zimbabweans, were under attack.

Mugabe, who, by some dint of continental stupidity, leads both the AU and SADC, had to be cajoled into making a statement against the mayhem in South Africa but only after African countries had made individual statements, having given SADC and the AU time to jump into the fray.

Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Jacob Zuma’s former wife, is AU Commission Chair, could not say anything…conflict of interest.

Mugabe, SADC Chairman who had just returned from South Africa to beg for money to stage a SADC Summit and where he thanked South Africa for giving Zimbabweans jobs, could not say anything…conflict of interest.

We are being humiliated, beaten up and killed by our own president in Zimbabwe but when we come knocking at our neighbour’s door for protection and a little chance to stay alive, our neighbor descends on us with more fury than we have seen from our own Murderer-In-Chief.

We are still looking for Itai Dzamara but we are also nursing MP Costa Machingauta while trying to account for our citizens in South Africa.

It took a while but Mbeki’s African Renaissance is upon us.

When the dying won’t die but the healthy start to die, we must all worry.