Luke-ing the Beast in the Eye: The Presidency is a strait-jacket: No to dry parody
By Luke Batsirai Tamborinyoka
Today is Friday the 13th, that day again!
It is generally referred to as an unlucky day and the fear of the number 13 has been given a scientific name, triskaidekaphobia.
In keeping with the inauspicious nature of Friday the 13th, today I reminisce about how unlucky we are as a nation to have a caricature of a man occupying the Presidency, even though he pilfered his way into that chair!
My piece this week is about that infamous statement of 9 January 2002, when the command element of our uniformed forces issued their infamous and grossly unconstitutional statement to the effect that the Presidency was a straight jacket. On the eve of the 2002 Presidential election, the then Zimbabwe Defence Forces commander, Vitalis Zvinavashe, infamously said service chiefs would not salute anyone without liberation war credentials.
The statement was effectively a coup against Morgan Tsvangirai, who I am certain won the disputed plebiscite. It is instructive that the verdict of our late icon’s court challenge of the 2002 Presidential poll result is still to be delivered, 18 years after the contentious ballot.
Almost two years into the stolen tenure of this caricature of a President given to cheap and dry jokes, Zimbabweans wish to state that the Presidency is indeed a straight jacket, albeit for very different reasons from the treasonous utterances of Zvinavashe.
Forget the cockroaches remark and many other laughable antics that are no longer comic anymore but have actually become tragic. It is now very clear to every rationl person that we have an unhinged man holding the levers of the State.
Mnangagwa recently boasted that he constructed a state-of-the-art mortuary in Kwekwe before giving a ‘prize’ to a bereaved family who were first to place their relative in before burial.
“I constructed a state of the art mortuary with 12 bays, very cool inside. I told people in Mbizo that there is price for the family that brings its dead first,” Mnangagwa said recently.
This is a dead joke–deceased humour, literally speaking. The Presidency is a venerated office the world over but under Mnangagwa, the office has hit a new low. It takes a lot of effort and unparalleled incompetence to surpass Mugabe’s record but even the murderous Mugabe was not this inept.
Mnangagwa’s arid jokes (dry is an understatement), makes a compelling case for the invocation of Zvinavashe invective.
Indeed, the Presidency is a straight-jacket. The people of Zimbabwe will not respect a leader who not only has a blood-soaked legacy, but who mounted a coup, is competently incompetent and is given to dry jokes that are no longer a laughing matter.
The plumbing depths of ED’s incompetence have tainted the image and reputation of lawyers, perceived in some political circles to be a profession synonymous with towering competence and high aptitude. The Presidency is a straight-jacket and anyone given to cheap parody that is often in bad taste should be banned from ever occupying the highest office in the land.
ED has bastardized Presidential standards, even by the lowly coup route that ushered him up the rungs of political power. With the mortuary joke, one can tell that the man is simply a death merchant, an unstinting peddler of human blood, hence his jovial reference to a mortuary as if it were a five-star hotel.
Should a people get prizes for losing one of their own? With a prize for every corpse in the family, is this man trying to incentivize death and murder?
With this scarfed idiocy in the Presidency, Zimbabwe has simply hit new lows.
Luke Tamborinyoka is the Deputy National Spokesperson of the MDC. He is a multiple award winning journalist and a former secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists.
He is 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.
