By Noah Manyika
When you are dealing with dictators, you cannot simply be waiting for the other shoe to drop.
You must seize the initiative. The only option the MDC Alliance has is to precipitate the kind of crisis that will send the most powerful message about the seriousness of this situation.
It is for its members to resign en masse from parliament now.
Reforms can never deliver what only revolutions can.
That was why the Patriotic Front rejected the reform agenda of the Rhodesian Internal Settlement of 1978 which could only deliver a strange hyphenated creature called Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, but not the free nation Zimbabweans were demanding.
Tinkering with laws to replace POSA with the Maintenance of Peace and Order Act while leaving Zanu(PF)’s machinery of oppression intact, is completely meaningless.
Such “reforms” make members of the opposition sitting in parliament complicit when the laws are used to deny Zimbabweans their freedom.
True emancipation will require much more than electoral reforms.
Future generations have no chance of thriving or surviving as long as Zanu(PF) as a party and its culture and mindset still exist.
We have also lied to ourselves long enough that Zanu(PF) only exists because of the old generation.
Yet the young men and women we see brandishing guns and batons in the brutal images of state violence against its citizens mostly belong to the generation born after 1980.
These members of the vicious Blackboots, Military Intelligence and the CIO carry out with brutal force the illegal and unconstitutional orders that have destroyed their own generations and the futures of their children.
Zanu(PF), like the Rhodesia Front and South Africa’s National Front, belongs in the dustbin of history.
So do those Chiefs and traditional leaders who keep the majority of our people in bondage and have never provided the kind of leadership that has inspired significant development in their Chiefdoms.
As we all know, Zanu(PF) loves to call itself “the revolutionary party,” whilst seeking to criminalize the use of the word revolution by others.
They allow us the use of innocuous ones like reform which reduce the struggle for complete emancipation to the “lawfare” refereed by a captured judiciary and a partisan speaker of parliament which they will always win.
What Zimbabwe needs is nothing short of a revolution, the complete obliteration of every sociological, political and economic structure and sacred cow that keeps Zimbabweans from becoming the most effective agents of their improvement.
We need the unleashing of the full potential of the Zimbabwean to accomplish feats of development that prove that the great architectural achievements of Great Zimbabwe, Mapungubwe and Khami were indeed the result of visionary native leaders and their people, and that we are fully capable of that today.
We need profound top to bottom change of leadership and governance culture that will bring most Zimbabweans out of poverty in our lifetime and make our country a leader of nations
That is something only revolution, not reforms, can deliver.
Dr Noah Manyika is the President of Build Zimbabwe.
