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Let’s shame these hateful lunatics

Opinion & Analysis
PEOPLE — unless they are the worst kind of sadist and psychopath — cannot help, but have empathy (the ability to understand and share the feelings of another) and sympathy (feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune) for main opposition MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai after his announcement that he had been diagnosed with colon cancer.

PEOPLE — unless they are the worst kind of sadist and psychopath — cannot help, but have empathy (the ability to understand and share the feelings of another) and sympathy (feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune) for main opposition MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai after his announcement that he had been diagnosed with colon cancer.

Conway Tutani

Itai-Dzamara 2

There is a time when people across the political divide have to suspend rancour, close ranks and commiserate with each other — and it was such time this week when Tsvangirai’s bitter opponents within both the ruling Zanu PF party and in the opposition extended good wishes and speedy recovery to him. This was in the spirit of being adversaries, not enemies. Tomorrow never knows. You never know what the future will bring you. You only know what will happen when it happens.

Of course, there will be rumours swirling that Tsvangirai was slowly poisoned to gradually develop cancer to eliminate him as the biggest political threat to the regime. That cannot be ruled out and neither can it be stated as fact. But this is not beyond State intelligence services — also known as dirty tricks departments — worldwide doing so at the behest of their political masters or roguishly. Regimes the world over have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to remain in power or murder a rival or political opponent. Behind diplomatic niceties, brutal and evil deeds thrive in the dark corridors of power. Make no mistake about that. Do not be deceived into thinking otherwise.

And we don’t have to go far back in history to illustrate that. The United States, through its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), tried several times — and failed — to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro through poisoning and other methods between 1960-1965. One of these attempts was by his former lover Marita Lopez who allegedly agreed to aid the CIA and attempted to smuggle a jar of cold cream containing poison pills into his room — the bedroom is not beyond their reach. In 1975, the US Senate convened the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Besides attempts on Castro, the CIA has been accused of involvement in the assassination of such foreign leaders as Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in 1961 and Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese Prime Minister, in the same year. The Senate committee uncovered that the CIA and other governmental agencies employed a so-called tactic of “plausible deniability” during decision-making related to assassinations. CIA subordinates were deliberately shielding the higher-ranking officials from any responsibility by withholding the full amount of information about planned assassinations. Government employees were obtaining tacit approval of their acts by using euphemisms and code words in communications.

And there is the case of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was killed in 2006. A public inquiry concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin probably approved Litvinenko’s most excruciatingly painful assassination in Britain — to where he had defected after labelling Russia “a mafia State” — through radio-active poisoning, believed to have been administered in a cup of tea.

Here in Zimbabwe, we have planted storied to the effect that democracy activist Itai Dzamara, who was abducted 15 months ago by suspected State security agents, somehow contrived with the MDC-T to stage his own disappearance. Isn’t that a clear case of “plausible deniability”? We are eagerly waiting for the day when former State Security minister Didymus Mutasa will tell all he knows —as he has promised after being dumped by the regime — about the abductors of other human rights activists such as Jestina Mukoko in 2008. Is the regime aware of the case of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, who was convicted of human rights violations and sentenced to 25 years in prison and his intelligence service chief Vladimiro Montesinos (who got 15 years) for their role in killings and kidnappings by a death squad during his government’s battle against leftist guerillas in the 1990s?

Maybe nothing of that sort of State intelligence service shenanigans happened in Tsvangirai’s case. It could be that cancer genetically runs in the Tsvangirai family. So, there is a purely medical explanation. There can be no “plausible deniability” of that. Thus, there is no need to be adamant that the State could be involved in the face of that evidence. Running away with the “poisoning” theory pointing a finger at the State might make an enthralling, but completely baseless and factless story that will sell newspapers. But in this case, we should let cold facts get in the way of a potentially explosive non-story. Such an anti-climax would be very much in order than to draw a totally wild conclusion. Let’s leave fiction to kitschy novelists who fabricate and exaggerate things.

But, of course, every political party has a lunatic fringe — extremists with eccentric or fanatical views — inclined to hurl all sorts of insults, and these were fired from all directions this week. It’s not new. Remember the morbid delight MDC women assembly chairperson Thandiwe Mlilo, a woman and a Shona, took in Ndebele-born MDC-T deputy president Thokozani Khupe’s conspicuously, but not stylistically bald head from chemotherapy for breast cancer in 2011, saying Khupe had “lost her hair for following a Shona leader”, meaning Tsvangirai? People will ask: How could Mlilo be sexist against her own gender by implying that Khupe had brought it upon herself? How could she be tribalistic against her own Shona tribe by disparagingly referring to Tsvangirai as his being Shona had anything to do with Khupe’s condition? But this happens. Blacks can be racist against fellow blacks especially when they see this as the route to being accepted into white circles. It’s the same operative logic when people attack those of their own ethnicity in vile tribalistic terms. Or when neighbours suddenly attack and kill neighbours who they have lived in peace with for a lifetime just to ingratiate themselves to the ruling Zanu PF.

Mlilo’s remarks and many others that have appeared this week over Tsvangirai’s illness rank as high in the bad taste and crudity stakes as US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s barely disguised dig last year at a female journalist who had asked him tough questions, implying her approach had something to with her menstruating: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” This lunatic is now one step away from becoming the President of the US. Let’s not humour and nurture lunatics of whatever hue and colour.

Such grim realities as cancer that show our mortality — each and everyone of us — have the effect of resetting societal values and bring out that human essence in most of us — with the exception of the tiny, but vocal minority of sadists and psychopaths — relegating political differences to the backburner, at least for a while. We can’t be consumed with rabid politics all the time and expect to maintain our humanity.

But this should not just be a short break from rabidity and political violence. It should become the political norm; the rule rather than the exception. No one is saying Zimbabwe should become a robotic one-party State, but a robust multi-party democracy. Tsvangirai’s public admission and his opponents’ magnanimous reaction should serve as the basis for the beginning of a new political culture. Let’s shame these hateful lunatics by building that new political culture.

lConway Nkumbuzo Tutani is a Harare-based columnist. Email: [email protected]