“I don’t believe in black majority rule, ever, in Rhodesia and there will never be black majority rule in Rhodesia . . . not in a thousand years. We believe in responsible government. Government must remain in the hands of civilised people. . . ”, so said Ian Smith, the late rebel prime minister of Rhodesia, in attempting to deny blacks self-rule.
Of course, there was nothing civilised about Smith’s, or his predecessors’ rule in the then Rhodesia.
The very practice of invading the land of another race or people, conquering and subjugating that people and enslaving them is inherently uncivilised.
So is the practice of arbitrary arrests and detentions without trial, abductions and extra-judicial murders that the Smith regime routinely practiced.
And so is the practice of occupying someone’s parking bay and stiffen one’s neck in defence of a clear crime and disrespect for the rule of law and order with impunity.
This should ring a bell to a particular woman whose name I will not mention lest am prompted to do so.
Tenets of rule of law are sacrosanct, woman. But uncivilised rule is not necessarily a preserve of colonists.
African countries under so-called nationalist governments have experienced uncivilised governance which would make the Ian Smiths of this world look like amateurs.
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The more things changed, in black-ruled African states, the more they stayed the same — or the worse they got.
Many wished they had migrated back to white rule. Zimbabwe is in the throes of social convulsions with an invasive culture of violence and a breakdown of rule of law, deliberately spawned by pestilent movers of sedition.
These people are the purveyors of an evil, self-serving, destructive ideology which they conflate with revolutionarism.
Impunity has become the order of the day and the once inalienable right for people to elect a government of their choice is now a thing of the past with some in the military arrogating themselves the right to choose leaders for the people.
Recent attempts by the powers-that-be, to isolate and disown and distance themselves from Brigadier-General Douglas Nyikayaramba’s comments and pretend that his utterances were personal sentiments are disingenuous.
These powers-that-be are, in essence, Nyikayaramba’s fellow travellers who are trying to get us to fall for their claptraps.
They are the the Grim Reapers who surreptitiously send their Ku Klux Klan crusades to engage in acts of untold human suffering. And guess what, they feign sainthood in daytime.
You can tell by how they spare and protect their agents from punishment, vowing to defend them, at all costs.
Nyikayaramba was not the first or the only one to make such statements. He is only repeating what others have said before.
The purpose of our fight for independence and self-rule was so that our land would be the land of the free and all its citizens would have equal rights. Our purpose was not so that our rights and freedoms should be circumscribed and defined by the whims and caprices of some wayward individuals whatever their station in life.
The prevailing situation of lawlessness, political gangsterism, arbitrary arrests, selective application of the law, wayward warlords, intimidation and impunity is a betrayal of the people‘s struggle. Nothing could be more uncivilised.
Those using coercion to impose their will on the people, are the real enemies of the people. This artificial culture of lawlessness and violence has to stop.
We must confront it, symptom and cause, head-on. Our society must be defined in terms of our spirituality, humanity and liberty.
The bogus revolutionary who seeks to establish domination over us and define our ethos in self-serving terms must be trampled under, by the people’s will.
Those within the ranks of our State institutions, who have elected to prostitute themselves in pursuance of selfish interests, must be forced to leave and give way to progressives, so that our institutions are detoxified.
Only then, can we regain our true identity and pride.
Let us dedicate ourselves to taming the savageness of man and end the long night of our captivity and bring back the civilisation that comes with restoration of rule of law.
