Open letter to George Charamba

By Luke Tamborinyoka

I hope you are well, judging by your ebullience especially after you came back from New York in the United States, ostensibly on a mission to discuss Ebola.

For you and that embarrassingly huge delegation on a chartered Air Zimbabwe plane, shamelessly paraded on national television, the Ebola summit might have provided the perfect excuse.

Your colleagues in government are telling us that the true reason for that huge mission was the hefty allowances that come with such foreign trips, especially given the unpredictable pay day for Zimbabwe’s civil servants nowadays.

Gushungo might be chairperson of the AU, but the size of his delegation did not necessarily have to shame us, as it did.

I am told our delegation was bigger than the combined delegations of the West African countries that directly suffered the effects of that deadly virus.

Eighty taxpayer-funded delegates to a conference on Ebola, when we have not had a single casualty, was like Zimbabwe sending the largest delegation to an international ice hockey tournament when all the ice we have ever seen is in our fridges on the few times that electricity is available in the country.

But that is a story for another day

The reason for my public letter to you is your senseless belief that Dzamara’s disappearance is not a matter deserving of the President’s attention.

Your position that the President does not have to pronounce himself on the missing Itai appeared to confirm our fears that may be senility is contagious, after all.

You could be losing your marbles, just as the President, who is now given to mixing his lines and not appearing to grasp the gravity of the responsibility of his office.

For your information, George, the President swore to upholding the Constitution and to defending it.

Itai’s abduction is the President’s business as the ultimate defender of our Constitution, which now guarantees the fundamental rights to personal liberty, human dignity and personal security.

I see you are taking issue with the use of the word “abduction.”

Any objective mind that has listened to the narrative of the barbers who were there when it happened knows that what happened on that day was abduction.

There is no debate as to the facts: Dzamara was seized and taken into a vehicle with a folded number plate. And when you are seized from your stool in hair salon and thrown violently thrown into a vehicle that speeds away, is that not abduction?

And by the way, we in the MDC have lost many activists in similar circumstances that are synonymous with State security agents.

We have many activists who were brutally killed in broad daylight, even by roadsides and to date, there have been no arrests.

Patrick Nabanyama, Better Chokururama, Joshua Bakacheza and many others have been violently killed by State security agents. There has been no official investigation.

Tonderai Ndira, my late friend, was violently taken in front of his wife and children by State security agents, who identified themselves, took him away and killed him somewhere in Goromonzi. His body was discovered in Goromonzi and was identified because of its unique but familiar bead he wore on his right wrist.

The bid was still there when they discovered his decomposing body.

Again, there has been no official position on his matter, despite the fact that he was abucted in broad daylight by people who identified themselves as state security agents and took him in unmarked vehicles that the State was using in the heinous State-sponsored violence of 2008.

So we know and have experienced seen these things and the culpability of the state is not in doubt.

The Damara narrative of how it happened is familiar and those of us who witnessed as victims the violence of 2008 will tell you that the manner Dzamara disappeared bears the signature of the State.

You might not know it, George, because the hare’s story can never be adequately captured by the spokesperson of the lion, even if that spokesperson is a bull eland.

In any case, George, it was cheap script for you to relegate Dzamara’s issue to security chiefs when the President is the Commander in Chief. By virtue of that title, which you unwittingly harped on ad infinitum during the tenure of the inclusive government, the Dzamara matter is very much Mugabe’s baby as he is the boss of the security chiefs.

Since when has Mugabe conveniently ceased to be Head of State and government and commander- in- chief?

You cannot have your cake and eat it, George.

It was also ironic that you would claim the President will not proclaim himself on the Dzamara matter when in actual fact he was doing so, through you, by threatening to unleash the army on anyone who would to engage in demonstrations over his abduction.

How could the President dissociate himself while at the same time threatening to unleash the security forces on anyone who wished to use Dzamara’s abduction to engage in public demonstrations, which demonstrations are permissible under the same Constitution the President swore to uphold?

So the President has indeed pronounced himself on the matter, George.

Meanwhile, Mhofu, enjoy your allowances for these unending foreign trips while we the ordinary folk, remain worried about one of us who is missing.

And judging by the frequency of these foreign trips, the President needs to be aware of the legal provisions around the Diaspora or special vote.

At this rate of his foreign travels, who knows, he might have to cast his vote for the 2018 election from some foreign country he would be visiting at the time of the election.

Muve nezuva rakanaka, Ziendanetyaka. (Have a good day).

Yours sincerely

Luke Tamborinyoka

Luke Tamborinyoka doubles as spokesperson to Morgan Tsvangirai and director of Communications in the MDC. He writes here in his personal capacity.