Hopewell Chin’ono: The dishonest behaviour of Zimbabwe’s government and its many imaginary enemies

By Hopewell Chin’ono

These are the people that our government teaches us to hurt, folks like former American ambassador to Zimbabwe Harry Thomas! I have known Ambassador Thomas since about 2016 when he was America’s ambassador to Zimbabwe.

Another brother friend of mine, Nigel Munyati introduced me to Harry and from that day he became just plain Harry, a big brother and friend.

We share a love for whiskey, so we would meet Friday evenings and share a new type of whiskey that we would have bought from our many travels around the world.

His love for Zimbabwe and Africa in general knows no bounds, he has done more for Zimbabweans than some of our political elites can ever do! Yet our government has been teaching some folks within our midst to hate folks like Harry and to insult them needlessly.

Harry Thomas was called all sorts of unpleasant names by folks like Jonathan Moyo and many other politicians in ZANU PF for telling them the truth that they were raping their country through corruption, theft, incompetence and political nepotism!

Unbeknown to ZANU PF politicians, Harry and many like him have been doing a lot to try and mitigate the disaster that was authored by them under the stewardship of Robert Mugabe and now Emmerson Mnangagwa!

When the coup happened in 2017, I was in London, I spoke to Harry almost three to four times a day for updates, I could feel his emotion when he said to me that he hoped this was a positive turning point for my country.

Even when it turned out that the coup delivered a fake new dispensation, he has never given up or lost hope for Zimbabwe, he continues to hope for the best and to wish our country and its citizens well.

He is now teaching at Yale University where he continues to quietly help young Zimbabweans to thrive both home and abroad.

In this picture he is with two members of the Zimbabwean band, Mokoomba who are staying with him and his wife at their home in the U.S., his home has become a stopping point for Zimbabweans in the U.S.

These are the people we are taught to hurt and to thoroughly despise by our ruling elites because they face them up with the truth!

Here is the joke, I have seen as many ministers and politicians in Western ambassador’s homes dining and hanging out socially as I have seen ordinary folk.

These are the stories you never get to hear about, the political elites encourage their kids to become friends with ambassador’s kids and they play golf together and yet publicly they call them names and encourage us to hurt them.

Why? Because they are lying hypocrites who know the truth from the fiction that they sell to a gullible lot within our communities.

Successive British Ambassadors were called names by ZANU PF elites but when Catriona Laing was part of assisting the ascendancy of Emmerson Mnangagwa, suddenly Britain became a darling of ZANU PF and yet before that anyone seen with British officials would have been called a sell out.

That is how grossly dishonest our political elites are and that is how they use the lumpen to fight their battles whilst they enjoy the proceeds of corruption, theft and political nepotism.

Just this past week there are people who were demonstrating against U.S. sanctions at the U.S. embassy in Westgate, which is a great act of democracy in exercising their constitutional rights to protest, the sanctions were imposed on Zimbabwe in 2001

Try and demonstrate against the ruling ZANUPF government’s incompetence outside the ZANU PF Headquarters and see what will happen to you!

Those are the duplicitous behaviors that we are subjected to daily by the ruling party any yet many within our midst fall for such empty rhetoric and run with it.

I took a drive to the U.S. embassy to just see what was going on and to understand how much the demonstrators knew about the subject matter they were demonstrating against.

I also wanted to document the demonstration for historical purposes as such events assist in explaining issues when we make documentary films.

It turned out that the demonstrators were promised payment for the demonstration and they were threatening not to leave until they were paid what they were promised!

Folks like Harry have long told our political elites that sanctions will go away if they start to attend to the contentious issues that caused the stand off in the first instance!

When President Emmerson Mnangagwa came into power in November of 2017, he promised anyone who cared to listen that he would implement all that was asked for in ZIDERA because he argued that it was actually good for Zimbabwe.

Our political elites know what to do to get these sanctions removed and yet because of their selfishness and dishonesty, they chose to call Harry “Uncle Tom” for telling them that they are hurting their own people, our government responds by paying locals to demonstrate for political optics!

It shows how disconnected they are from the real world where this stand off affects the poor and vulnerable not them, if Mnangagwa’s kids could not go to school because of sanctions he would have long done and implemented the reforms.

What is stopping us from professionalizing parastatals, bringing media plurality, removing repressive laws (and not replacing them with another set of repressive laws) and adhering to the rule of law and not invading private property as what happened at Gaika mine in Kwekwe.

Issues cited in the Sanctions Act include the economic mismanagement by government, the breakdown of the rule of law, undemocratic practices that are embedded in our system of governance, rigging of elections and our inability to meet international lending organizations loan repayment terms, lack of respect to ownership and title of property, costly deployment of troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the involvement of the military in domestic affairs.

These are issues that concern any sane and sensible Zimbabwean and yet the only ruse that our political elites and their unwitting puppets invoke for emotional purposes is the talk about Land as the main basis for sanctions.

Land was taken and that chapter is closed and irreversible, so the idea that land will be given back to white farmers or that Zimbabwe will be re-colonized is plain stupid and yet we have citizens that believe in that whilst forgetting that there are over ten issues that are meant to be addressed by the sanctions stand off!

I am lucky because I started off my broadcasting career at the British Broadcasting Corporation as an intern and that helped open major doors for me.

Had I been in Harare after graduating from Journalism School, I would have been at the village tilling the land or hassling in town like everyone else because my government refuses to open up the airwaves, so that we can have more television stations and create employment in that sector for media and journalism graduates.

Today my work is showcased abroad in foreign cinemas and television stations and yet that work tells Zimbabwean stories that should be heard here first, but alas, the government won’t open up the broadcast media space consigning us to the 1960s.

They would rather thousands of trained media and journalism graduates coming out of our universities yearly sell air time vouchers than allow media and broadcasting plurality that would create jobs for these kids.

Yet you will find some ignoramus defending that backwardness on account of some comical and pathetic feigned patriotic doctrine devoid of any common sense!

If General Constantino Chiwenga, Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa’s health depended on Parirenyatwa, Mpilo or Harare Hospitals, those public health facilities would have been fixed a long time ago.

It costs US$10million to run Parirenyatwa and Harare Hospitals efficiently with Medicines and equipment available, how much has been spent by our leaders getting treatment in Singapore, South Africa, India, Dubai and China?

Today the whole public health care system has NO cancer radiotherapy machine working, all five are down and yet all that is needed is less than US$100000 to get them working.

How much has been spent on perdiems/allowances of the bloated delegations that President Mnangagwa moves around with?

When one brings these things up they are called a Western puppet and foreign ambassadors who try and assist by reminding our leadership that they are screwing up the common man and woman are called names.

A father who condemns his kids to a twenty year act of suffering, as our government has done, because the neighbors have withdrawn their plough and he won’t do what will bring back that plough so that he can farm for his kids is not worth being called a father.

More so when he goes to Food Lovers to buy maize cobs which he eats alone in his bedroom whilst his kids are starving!

I hate sanctions because they affect the poor and vulnerable, I also hate the irresponsible acts that attract sanctions.

If the political elites and their families were denied opportunities by the laws that they have created in parliament, those laws would have long been long removed!

I will not be taught to hurt foreigners when the solution to fixing our problems lies in our government here in Zimbabwe, I am not a puppet and will not be an unwitting one for that matter on behalf of a dishonest government!

I love and respect my country all the time and my government only when it deserves such love and respect.

Foreigners don’t owe us anything, successive ZANU PF governments authored Zimbabwe’s problems here at home, the solutions also lie here!

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning Zimbabwean international Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker.

He is a Harvard University Nieman Fellow, CNN African Journalist of the year and CNN Television Journalism Fellow. He is also a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Africa Leadership Institute.

Hopewell has a new documentary film looking at mental illness in Zimbabwe called State of Mind, which was launched to critical acclaim.

The late superstar Oliver Mtukudzi wrote the sound track for State of Mind.

It was recently nominated for a big award at the Festival International du Film Pan-Africain de Cannes in France, in the UK at the Heart of England International Film Festival and in Texas at The US African Film Festival (TAFF).

You can watch the State of Mind trailer below. You can contact Hopewell at [email protected] or twitter @daddyhope