Luke-ing the Beast in the Eye… Command sweeping: Now is the time for massive people power
By Luke Batsirai Tamborinyoka
First it was the Command Agriculture programme. Then there was command wheat, before it evolved to the command livestock programme. It became command talks after the illegitimate Mnangagwa regime commanded all political dialogue to happen nowhere else except under the ambit of the laughable POLAD platform, a stage replete with election losers.
The command lunacy became Command vegetables and potatoes before a new thespian command sweeping program was laid out to the nation last week.
On Friday last week, Chitungwiza police proscribed an MDC-led clean-up campaign and said all sweeping in the country could only happen on the first Friday of the month when Mr. Emmerson Mnangagwa embarks on his monthly exercise.
Otherwise no sweeping or clean-up campaign can take place outside Mnangagwa’s remit!
This is simply laughable. This whole cocktail of ludicrous command antics must simply be resisted through a massive show of people power.
Or else posterity will curse this our cowardly and jelly-kneed generation for tolerating these derisory Hitlerist edicts even in this digital 21st century.
We cannot allow an Adolf Hitler in Zimbabwe in this age of democracy, twitter and instagram.
Nowhere in the world has a heroic people been coerced Hitler-style into an agriculture programme that has even assumed wheatly and livestock dimensions and still maintained the silence of the grave!
Nowhere in the world has a people been conscripted into only a single form of political dialogue—this meta-narrative of a nodding choir of acolytes sympathetic to an illegitimate leader who brazenly stole an election.
It has not happened before that a party and a leader with a following that runs into millions–even by ZEC’s fudged figures—could be told that he can only sweep on the day that the “president” sweeps.
At this rate, an edict might soon be gazetted exhorting the nation to synchronize all coital and copulation activities in the nation with Mr. Mnangagwa’s schedule.
We have been taken for granted for too long as a nation.
We have been abused ad infinutum, ad nauseam.
This regime has been discourteous and impolite to our collective national conscience; that is why US$3 billion worth of agriculture inputs can disappear without so much as a whimper in a nation that waged a protracted armed struggle against repression.
This regime has shown a penchant of impudence and impertinence towards the people of Zimbabwe that is why this regime can have the affront to say we can only sweep on the day Mnangagwa is sweeping.
For me, last Friday did it.
It is that day when a leader, an illegitimate one for that matter, used a state institution (the police) to communicate the rude message that all sweeping and cleaning can only take place on the day that he does it!
The time has come for the nation to draw the line in the sand.
Mnangagwa must simply be removed from office—by any means necessary.
ED has stoically and arrogantly stuck up the middle finger to all of us. And we have allowed him to abuse us in this demeaning fashion.
And now the maShurugwi menace, authored and patented by Owen Muda Ncube and Emmerson Mnangagwa is wreaking havoc in the entire country, with common thieves taking advantage of the political protection these gangs have to run riot in the countryside.
In my own hood in Domboshava in Marimo village last week, machete-wielding hoodlums came and scared the hell out of innocent women and children, demanding cash and other valuables at three homesteads belonging to Mash Rewu, Ophelia Marimo and Chingasiyeni Marimo.
Now is the time for the nation to act!
With captured national institutions and processes such as the judiciary and elections, the avenue for the exercise of legitimate people power can only be section 59 of a Constitution that we wrote ourselves and affirmed in a referendum.
The time to say no; to rise and exhibit a massive show of people power is NOW.
After all, 2020 is the year of Action.
And this is a promise and not a threat!
Soon. And very soon.
Luke Tamborinyoka is the Deputy National Spokesperson of the MDC. He is a multiple award winning journalist and an ardent political scientist who won the Book Prize for best student when he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science at the University of Zimbabwe. You can interact with him on Facebook or on the twitter handle @luke_tambo.
