By Tino Chinyoka
We are guilty of many things, as a people, but being uninventive is not one of them. When things went south with our economy, the US dollar suddenly became the currency to have, first in the shadowy realm of the black-market, all but legalised because everyone participated in it, and then finally brought to the fore to become lawful tender.
Unlike the proverbial frog which, if put in warm water will jump straight out but if put in cold water that is slowly heated will stay to its death, Zimbabweans will find a way to survive anything that comes their way.
So inventive are we in fact, that if you went to Tashkent, Dushanbe or Ouagadougou, you will find Zimbabweans, doing what has become the national profession: kutsvaka kurarama. (Makes you wonder about that whole diaspora vote claim don’t it? Given our various conspiracies about voting, can you imagine what stories might attach to a ballot box from Haiti?!)
An admirable quality then, one might say.
Apparently, as it turns out, not always. For it would seem, alas, this quality permeates to everything that we do, good or bad. Take a group of so-called democrats and put them in government, and they adapt, and start talking about how the GNU should have been extended ad nauseam so that they keep adapting.
Put their leader in a government house, and he adapts to its luxury and charms, despite having always rallied against government excess, refusing to go while all the while asking, ‘mansion, what mansion’? (I used to think it was a mansion, but given that Mrs Mphoko and her husband have chosen to stay ensconced in the Sheraton Hotel rather than go into that tiny house, maybe it really is not a mansion after all.)
You have people like Tendai Biti adapting to hobnobbing with Zanu PF stalwarts so well that he sees nought wrong with having some of them as his clients, defending them in cases where they are accused of the very same corruption he used to accuse them of and that led him from an excellent legal career into politics.
Why, even firebrands and voices of workers like Nelsom Chamisa have adapted to their jobs so well that they now represent the bosses in Court against the employees.
Adapting, it seems, is a natural pastime.
And one that is taking us down a slippery slope. We have come to consider it fun to make our President a caricature, laughing at every mishap that befalls him as if tose takazvagwa chembere dzainda kudoro: kuseka munhu mukuru sevanhu vasina kuraigwa!
We have adapted to seeing him not as liberator, but as a figure to be made fun of. A joke, the subject of ridicule when we have nothing better to do. Gone are the days when jokes revolved around Cde Chinotimba saying “what I understand about tripartite is that muZanu tiri pa tight, veMDC vari pa tight, ukuwo hurumende iri pa tight”.
Now we deny the President any credit for anything good done since 1980, but heap all the blame. Rival explanations for our dire straits are dismissed as excuses, but Mugabe did this, that and that. He built nothing, achieved nothing, in fact, one nincompoop even went so far as saying that Zimbabwe yacho ngaaidzose kwaakaisungura tinoisunungura isu’.
Talking of liberation, we have a new narrative, championed by people that were suckling babes during the war or are among those that ran away from the fight to pursue education in the West, suggesting that liberation credentials mean nothing.
This narrative, so poisonous and vile, is not being run by the MDC, as one might suppose. Instead, it is being run by a cabal deep within Zanu PF itself, its membership unstated but obvious, led by contradictory characters who adapt to every situation by application of their silver tongue to worm themselves out of every possible valid accusation.
The press calls this cabal G40. One takes to twitter to announce that they will be enjoying croco-burgers, and we are meant to not see that this is a direct attack on Mnangagwa. At the same time, another sponsors a semi-professional but poorly sourced article suggesting that oh, by the way, Mnangagwa was in fact never part of any crocodile gang.
Of course, given their lack of liberation credentials, there pretenders do not know that the crocodile gang was not one unit, but several, sent to different parts of the country, and did more than just ambush some white farmer and his family and kill him. I for one am glad that the man best qualified to succeed the President was a saboteur and not a killer of white people during the liberation war.
Their agenda is so slick you can tell that they have adapted so well to lying, to double dealing, that it has become par for the course. One is Minister for Indigenisation, and goes around talking about ‘no to Foreign Direct Investments’, then stuffs planes full of his cronies each time the President travels abroad to source for investments.
What message are you sending? Running around showing million dollar BMWs that he then claims were ‘legitimately paid for’. Really? Where is the Zimra receipt showing that taxes were paid during this ‘legitimate’ business process leading to said money being raised, or that duty at the right level was indeed paid?
The irony of it is that these people owe their position to someone who is President mainly because of the war of liberation. How then can they say that liberation credentials are useless? Is he dead? Are they saying his claim to the job is baseless too?
Well, because they too have adapted to something evil: they regard the President as walking dead. He will soon go, they reason, so there is no reason why they cannot start selling their narrative. One can bet that because of their privileged positions so close to the President, they make sure that he never knows what they are saying or doing.
They shield him from all information, and feed him with lies about Karanga plots and whatnot, so that he feels compelled to keep them close. Are we as a people so adapted to being lied to that we actually think that the President reading the same speech twice was an accident? Who has access to the President? Who gets near him?
Surely only they stood to gain from that faux pas: feeding the caricature mill to keep the distracted and clueless MDC preoccupied with a non-event while they plot against their real challenge: Mnangagwa, Chiwenga, Perence Shiri, etc. And the MDC obliged, going on and on about the President’s age while missing the point that as a party of democrats, so-called, they were involved in a serious case of elder abuse and ageism.
What this cabal wants is for us to adapt to this narrative. With a Zanu PF Conference coming up, Mnangagwa must be attacked so that we start to question his very qualification for the top job. Or even his current one, if he can be removed.
And because we have a toothless opposition, they are free to try and pull the wool over all our eyes, even when they claim to belong to a ‘revolutionary party’. Their agenda set, they manipulate every news cycle to paint everyone but their camp as bad for the country.
They think we are all foolish, that we cannot judge for ourselves. They try and suggest that Mnangagwa only got to where he is thanks to their efforts, neglecting to recall that Mai Mujuru only got to where she did because the rules were changed to get a female Vice President at a time when almost all of Zanu PF’s provinces had nominated Mnangagwa to that post. Their claim that he has no liberation war credentials is as vacuous as their counterargument: that liberation credentials do not matter anyway.
They want us to believe that so that they can justify leading Zanu PF while genuine liberators still remain. They want us to buy this because they reason that it resonates well with the opposition, because Morgan Tsvangirai has not such credentials.
They are playing a long con, dancing on the grave of a liberator President before he is even dead, reasoning that since they will never allow him to find out what they are doing, they are safe to hedge their bets and lay down their markers.
Above all, they are betting on the predictable adaptability of Zimbabweans. Zimdollar nosedives, get yourself some Usa. Liberator president passes on, get yourself a political scientist or a corrupt mafikizolo with no real credentials aside from who they know. Or knew.
Why does this matter to people that do not support Zanu PF? Well, like it or not, Zanu PF is the ruling party, and whoever ascends to the top position will run policies that affect every Zimbabwean. So the question to ask yourself is this, while you may have found it easy or tolerable to adapt thus far, to what extent would you be adaptable to a President Jonathan Moyo, or a President Patrick Zhuwawo?
Tino Chinyoka, Zanu-PF UK: still
