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To build a new Zimbabwe, we must lay the right foundation

Opinion & Analysis
I AM concerned and at this stage worried about the future despite the opportunities that the implosion of Zanu PF heralds, no pun!

I AM concerned and at this stage worried about the future despite the opportunities that the implosion of Zanu PF heralds, no pun!

Albert Gumbo

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When I read about senior opposition leaders saying such and such a group “now realise” their blunders in supporting such and such a person, I am deeply worried for two reasons.

Firstly, how is the wiping out of some 20 000 people three to five years into Independence a blunder? How are Operation Murambatsvina and Wakavoterapapi mistakes?

Secondly, do atrocities suddenly become blunders because your new potential bedfellow is now an enemy of your enemy? It is written is it not, that if you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything! What exactly do you stand for when you put down the actions of war veterans in helping to cement despotic rule down to “blunders”?

We have serious issues people!

Would it not have been better to ask your newly found allies to publicly mea culpa for their eyes-open-wide, willing and enthusiastic support for the regime’s excesses? If you truly want to build a new Zimbabwe, this cannot be a non-negotiable. We cannot lay a sustainable foundation on a blatant lie, lying by omission or commission.

The other issue that greatly concerns me is how everyone claims God. In endorsing Joice Mujuru, no less than People’s Democratic Party vice-president Samuel Sipepa-Nkomo declared that God had sent Mujuru to deliver freedom to the people: http://www.thestandard.co.zw/2016/08/21/biti-endorses-mujuru-candidacy/ Seriously? And he sent Mugabe too? Now where have I heard this before? https://newsday.wpengine.com/2014/03/04/tsvangirai-chosen-god-chamisa/

So when Mujuru was in Zanu PF, God sent Morgan and has now had a change of heart? Come on now! Could the politicians please leave God to the churches and argue on the strength of what they stand for. You cannot play with people’s emotions and beliefs just to obtain political power. You are taking advantage of a desperate people in the same way than many a modern-day prophet has done and it is unacceptable! And what do you say to the atheists?

Must we now imprison ourselves and the Zimbabwean people into perpetual mediocrity because we decline to rise to the standard to which we truly belong? I am sure readers will know of one Viktor Frankly, author of the seminal Man’s Search For Meaning. While a prisoner at a concentration camp, and being a psychiatrist, he concluded that: “Everything can be taken away from a man, but one thing; the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.”

I ask Zimbabweans, how then are we to choose our own way in a society where the leadership are bent on alliances built on a numbers’ game, instead of core values that are good for the nation?

How do Zimbabweans avoid falling into the trap that the promise of post-liberation elections so cruelly tricked us into? For we have been paying that price since then, have we not? Do we wish to put in place a new elite that may or may not do the same? Do we want to gamble with endorsing presidential candidates when we know their history warts and all?

James Baldwin, that eminent African-American novelist, poet, essayist, playwright and social commentator, wrote in his essay, Nobody Knows My Name: “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. One hasn’t got to have an enormous military machine in order to be unfree when it’s simpler to be asleep, when it’s simpler to be apathetic, when it’s simpler, infact, not to want to be free, to think that something else is more important.”

My brothers and sisters, getting rid of Zanu PF is not more important that the future we want to build. The Zimbabwe we seek, is the most important thing and anyone who comes and tells you that God has sent them to speak on behalf of another Godsend is neither good for Zimbabwe, nor the gospel.

I cannot speak for readers, but I am looking for a leadership that has a values-driven plan to set Zimbabwe on the path to a golden era.

Baldwin adds: “A country is only as good… only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become… I don’t believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.”

Fellow Zimbabweans, if none of these leaders know your name, it is time to make yourselves known to the authorities a la Frantz Fanon and Evan Mawarire. Make yourself known by rejecting superficial leadership and organising yourselves under a new leadership, in a new direction born out of the citizens’ movement. It is coming. This is the third way we have been talking about and let no one tell you that God sent Mawarire or any of us.

He was simply a citizen crying out, in a very real and compelling way, about his dire situation. And, he just happened to be a cleric. Zimbabwe, straight or gay, rich or poor, employed or unemployed, religious or not, at home or in the diaspora we are all, but citizens of our home, Zimbabwe, and we are raising our voices to declare that the leadership we seek is a genuine transformational leadership.

If any of the “new” lot seeks to get my vote, they must first admit that they were complicit, actively complicit in destroying our country and prostrate themselves before the people in humility, instead of claiming they did not know what sort of regime they were serving.

The other lot must come clean and say they got carried away with the taste of power during the government of national unity and now, having learnt their lessons, are prepared to take a different path. But don’t tell me God sent you. Perhaps then, we can begin to talk. In the meantime, I will be looking to the third way for a new, vibrant and visionary leadership.

lAlbert Gumbo is a citizen, alumnus of the Duke University-UCT US-Southern Africa centre for leadership and public values. Follow him on Twitter @AlbertGumbo or contact [email protected]