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NewsDay

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Echoes: It’s not unZimbabwean to ditch Zanu PF

Opinion & Analysis
SOME things start accidentally, but then prove to be highly beneficial in the long term.

SOME things start accidentally, but then prove to be highly beneficial in the long term.

By Conway Tutani

The rupture between war veterans and President Robert Mugabe, for instance, began as an internal party wrangle, but could now finally open Zimbabwe to genuine democracy by giving rise to wholesale realignments, as people reach out to each other across the hitherto unbridgeable political divide.

Not to mention that First Lady Grace Mugabe has been more trouble than her political worth to Zanu PF.

Her imposition onto the very top has not been matched by political return, but loss in support. It has severely weakened the party. It has accelerated the beginning of the end.

Since when did unelected persons claim such power to rule over people? Since when did they order the ousting of duly-elected party officials? These are the questions Zanu PF members and supporters have been grappling with.

Because Mugabe has a messiah complex, Zanu PF has been reduced to a cult, but more and more supporters are rebelling against that after seeing many of their comrades suspended and hounded out on the most dubious and flimsiest of grounds. Supporters started by reluctantly distancing themselves from Mugabe’s increasingly erratic ways.

Now they are openly doing so — and this was inconceivable only months ago. But, only last week, Godfrey Tsenengamu, the former Zanu PF Mashonaland Central youth leader, said he now regretted being used as a pawn in Mugabe’s power games. “My attack on former Vice-President Joice Mujuru and the then leadership of the party . . . on Friday, August 15, 2014 at State House was a well-rehearsed piece with the President himself . . .” Yes, Mugabe, that supposed paragon of virtue, was the choirmaster, the conductor.

It’s a ringing indictment that a man, who projects himself as Africa’s most eminent statesman, can stoop that low. How many other grand lies and distortions have been orchestrated from the highest office in the land?

It’s sad and tragic that Mugabe has allowed personal squabbles to subordinate people’s interests. A political party is not an end in itself, but a means to an end to serve the people. What’s happening is more in the personal interest than national interest.

That’s exactly the essence of him that was highlighted by war veterans in their communiqué angrily rejecting everything he stands for. This has diminished the authority and appeal of the President. People now share the desire to punish the regime. It could be a pivotal moment. This has a knock-on effect.

Now you have youths like Tsenengamu exposing the Head of State for what he is.

Mugabe has only succeeded in making his mounting losses personal because of this unseemly fight.

It’s unbefitting and undignified for a whole Head of State to get embroiled in slanging matches with anyone and everyone. There is a point at which people will say this is not a person we can support. It’s no more about historical loyalties, but rational choices.

Many people enter politics with genuine intentions and manage to hold on to their integrity despite the system. War vets are, at least, trying to recover that modicum of integrity after years of uncritical acceptance of every order from Zanu PF or its now debased, rotten mutation. If a reality check forces you to do that, then so be it.

And if it incidentally benefits the nation at large, so be it. That’s why we should embrace those war vets, who have finally seen the light or have finally unshackled themselves from that system after years of murmuring and muttering under the breath.

It’s not that the war vets’ anger is newfound, but that it has been seething under the surface. And the war vets’ combative leader, Christopher Mutsvangwa (pictured), has ably articulated that.

Admittedly, some people are put off by Mutsvangwa’s grandiloquent and somehow ostentatious nature, but others enjoy his arrogance because he is someone who can back it up.

It takes someone like him to stand up to Mugabe. In these noisy and dangerous times, we need someone who says things that need to be said without holding back.

Conformity causes people to stifle or suppress their true feelings in order to be socially or, as in the case of war veterans up to now, politically accepted. Through careful manipulation, regimes get everybody to clap at the same time, to laugh at the same time, and to be angry at the same time, if I may paraphrase renowned film producer Steven Spielberg.

War vets have now freed themselves from that. Up until now, war vets in general, had been too afraid to criticise Zanu PF, its policies, its mistakes and its openly illegal activities.

So, at this very juncture, what’s important is to find a working formula with the war vets. A coalition is not a merger, but a grouping of substance, which factors in the balance of power dynamics that will deliver democracy.

Enter Mutsvangwa and his war vet colleagues, who have now declared boldly and correctly that it’s not in black Zimbabweans’ blood — or DNA — to be Zanu PF, as the regime would have it.