First of all, I would like to send my thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims of xenophobic attacks in South Africa, including Zimbabwean Naume Garusa,
who was decapitated, Mozambican Emmanuel Sithole, who was bludgeoned with a wrench and stabbed with a knife, and the unnnamed Malawian who was burnt alive.
They suffered the most cruel deaths at the hands of misguided, ignorant, stupid and villainous mobs in South Africa. One can only imagine what their families are going through.
Only a person with a heart of stone would not have been angered and horrified by these outrages that match the methods of Boko Haram and Islamic State terrorists who routinely cut off people’s heads and set captives alight for public show. Talk of redefining wickedness! This cannot be justified for whatever cause or grievance.
When a person takes someone’s life in that morbid, cruel manner, that person should forfeit their life. They have no right to live. It is such monsters who justify the death sentence. They cannot claim any human rights because they are sub-humans. They may walk on two feet like the rest of us, but they are a sub-human species. They are evil mutants of humans. The State must not clothe and feed them for life in prison. The ultimate punishment — execution — will do. That’s the only way to deal with such beasts. It’s not about deterring them as they are not deterrable, but about removing them as they are very much removable. Simple as that.
People should get what they deserve. People who work hard and honestly deserve the fruits of their labour while those who break the rules — like the jailed thieving and corrupt pair of Peter Chikumba and Grace Pfumbidzayi who nearly literally ran Air Zimbabwe into the ground — deserve to be punished. In addition, people deserve to be treated in the same way they voluntarily treat others. In the case of those barbarians in South Africa, they killed their victims execution style, so the punishment must fit the crime. Those advocating a blanket ban of the death sentence have not factored in this breed of killers.
That said, the ignorant, inflammatory rantings of Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini served as the catalyst for the attacks. How can you refer to foreign immigrants as “lice” in such a volatile atmosphere? Zwelithini, you have innocent blood on your hands. If we are to be honest about it, Zwelithini, you are much more responsible for those gruesome deaths and more guilty than those monsters.
Back home, Information minister Jonathan Moyo has been emphasising on the Afrophobia aspect — debatable or questionable as it is — of the xenophobia in South Africa. It’s questionable because while the attacks have been largely directed at black foreigners, this has not been solely the case as “illegal” Asiatics like Indians and Pakistanis who, alongside “illegal” black foreigners, compete directly with locals in the poverty-stricken townships for jobs and business have also been targeted.
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Foreign professionals — whether black or white — living in suburbia have not been attacked. If there were white foreigners living in townships in great numbers, they would be attacked as well. Without sounding cold, there are no whites in enough numbers to target in the townships. So, there is really no basis to view this as Afrophobia. It’s basically poor local people taking it out on the nearest foreigners, most of whom happen to be black, with a sprinkling of Indians and Pakistanis. That the majority of victims have been black Africans is mostly due to demographics. It’s about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
But when professional spin doctors enter the ring, issues end up being stilted and politicised because such careerist politicians lock themselves into the positions they already hold, they ideologise everything. Moyo’s response has to necessarily fit in with the Zanu PF narrative of rabid Pan-Africanism, reminiscent of the almost dead South African liberation movement PAC’s “One Settler, One Bullet” slogan.
Moyo’s “findings” are more contrived than actual fact. It’s a mixture of selective erudition (using impressive, educated terms acquired from deep learning) and populism (presenting yourself as propounding ideas and policies that serve “the people” by outwardly putting “the people” first against, for instance, the opposition, whites and the West.
Politicians who feed on populism are not really interested in “the people”. They are far more interested in themselves. That’s why they have resorted to selective erudition to completely avoid or preclude the question as to what has driven millions of Zimbabweans into South Africa?
Selective erudition can be used to hide meaning or desensitise people to issues. This is seen in the condonation of hate speech and atrocities targeting white farmers, opposition party leaders and supporters, and, lately, the Zanu PF camp aligned to ousted former Vice-President Joice Mujuru while condemning the same hate speech and atrocities against foreign blacks in South Africa citing Pan-Africanism. Such “analysts” can make anything mean anything.
“Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit,” said 18th century German scientist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Indeed, mix erudition with populism and you get lies — but of the thorough type, such as delivering exactly 2,265 million jobs as eruditely stated in ZimAsset.
That said, even if we were to accept Moyo’s Afrophobia theory, why doesn’t he similarly and eruditely critique and dissect President Robert Mugabe’s declaration in South Africa shortly after the attacks erupted that: “I don’t want to see a white face”? Isn’t this Europhobia? Isn’t this as hate-mongering and inflammatory as Zwelithini’s utterances?
Xenophobia doesn’t have to be Afrophobia for it to be totally evil.
