BY Cyprian M Ndawana DEAR President Emmerson Mnangagwa,
Your Excellency, authority of the Office of the President is being undermined by the incumbent.
Oftentimes your speeches are unwholesome and not in tandem with the occasions. They are distortions of the country’s history, apportionment of blame or mouthful threats.
Essentially, it is the hallmark of credible leadership to give credit where it is deservedly due, even if It will be to an opponent. Also, accepting responsibility for failures is a trait that endears a leader with their subjects. After all, you are fallible, like all humans.
Your Excellency, speaking at the burial of the late national hero, Major-General Sydney Bhebhe recently at the National Heroes shrine, you unduly went on the rampage, attacking the late colonial leader Ian Smith. It was altogether malicious to accuse him of plunder, yet at Independence in 1980, Smith handed us the jewel of Africa which included the breadbasket of the region together with a functional economy. All urban roads and highways were tarred, signposted and well lit, with no potholes. Industry was firing from all cylinders.
Public institutions in their entirety were functional. There were no boreholes in urban areas. No citizenry lived in undesignated residential places as the case now. Civil servants never experienced incapacitation. Indeed, corruption and land barons, were unheard of words.
Your Excellency, if Rhodesia was in ruination as the case with Zimbabwe, as I see it, it could have been unworthy of the ultimate sacrifice inherent in joining the liberation struggle.
Chants about the new dispensation are merely pious rhetoric. They are platitudes of an imaginary renewal or rebirth. It has been my fervent conviction since your ascendency to that lofty seat that you were never bound to resemble a Statesman.
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Your Excellency, there are no means you could be Paul without admitting to having been Saul. Your incessant allusions to ushering a new dawn are banality. They are an apparent case of all foam but no brew. It is impracticable for you to evidence a transformed leadership adroit.
Although you intentionally endeavour to profess newness, your traits confirm that you were tutored to being devoutly pharisiacal. Methinks posterity will remember you for a trail of inept democratic patchwork, evidenced in the pile up of statutory instruments you have issued within a record short time.
Unlike Paul who owned up to having been a strict enforcer of the Old Testament laws, your deafening silence on past transgressions are an exposé that unveiled your seamy side. Paul vouched his own account of the severity with which he inflicted on adversaries.
Your Excellency, Paul vouched, under no duress, on having been a zealot who ruthlessly descended on opponents.
“I persecuted the followers of the Way to their death, arresting both men and women, throwing them in prison,” confessed Paul before a crowd of witnesses, (Acts 22:4).
His training at the feet of Gamaliel, the Pharisee of Pharisees, inculcated in Paul, then Saul, the spirit of strict observance of rites and ceremonies. He brooked no divergence from his ancestral heritage. He had no equals in adherence to rituals.
His approval to the death by stoning of Stephen, the first New Testament martyr, was an open and shut decision. He was second to none in enforcement of the law. Mention of his name caused a hurry-scurry for cover.
He was an enthusiastic Jew. Yet, in the midst of a zealous foray, he was transformed through a revelation to the redemption of Jesus. His calling was through a flashing light from God which signalled his anointing and conversion.
Henceforth his conversion, Paul became an embodiment of renewal. His newness shown in word and deed. Sincerity oozed when Paul talked about the new life he now lived, (Gal 2:20). His conversion plucked out his old heart of stone and planted a new one of flesh.
Your Excellency, people were held spellbound by his transformation to discipleship. His preaching and teaching of the faith he once opposed was with aplomb and poise.
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live; Christ lives in me,” declared the Apostles, (Gal 2:20).
His new insights pitted him on a warpath against his former Judaizers colleagues. They violently accursed him of perverting the Law of Moses. He was denounced for being a traitor of the Jewish faith who watered down his message to the Gentiles.
Your Excellency, as I see it, there is an apparent lack of conviction and sincerity in the preachy manner in which you talk about the new dispensation. It is plainly notional, and devoid of earnest motives which stem only from an inwardly transformed spirit.
Obviously, you learnt at the feet of the deposed late former President Robert Mugabe just as Saul was similarly schooled at the feet of Gamaliel. Methinks you treasure beyond measure all he bequeathed you during your decades-long association.
Duly, just as Saul gave approval to the stoning to death of Stephen, you likewise approved of the rollout of Gukurahundi massacres. As the then State Security minister, you are integral to the gruesome post-independence bloodbath.
Little wonder, no sooner had you assumed the Presidency than State-instituted violence claimed lives on August 2, 2018. Despite claims of being a new dispensation, the former subjugation was twice unleashed on defenceless citizenry.
Your Excellency, apparently, unlike the forthright Paul who decidedly discarded his former practice and embraced the new one, you are yet to repent. It cannot be coherent to claim championing new ideals while holding tenaciously to the former ways of subjugation.
Your Excellency, you recently bemoaned your lack of freedom and privacy owing to hordes of security details who surround you around the clock. Ordinarily, a soft as wool listening President needs not be barricaded from his subjects.
Conversely, the security operatives confirm the magnitude of your being haunted by prospects of retribution for the heartless brutalities on citizenry. Yet, Smith, was sufficiently free to ride a bicycle in the city centre of Harare.
Your Excellency, there can never be a new dispensation without a commensurate conversion on your part. It is for the absence of your newness of heart that there is presidental inertia. Even your party membership is restive over the apparent want of incisive thought processes at the helm.
Methinks it does not inspire confidence on the said revolutionary party leader that key posts of second vice-president and State Security minister have been vacant for moons, yet there are plentiful competent cadres with requisite attributes to fill the posts.
His Excellency, the country is apparently hamstrung by inertia. It is in record socio-economic meltdown. As I see it, only an utterly biddable citizenry in general and party membership in particular, affords the luxury of having confidence in an inept presidency
- Cyprian Muketiwa Ndawana is a public speaking coach, motivational speaker, speechwriter and newspaper columnist
