If you really want to be safe in Zimbabwe, do as those chaps in Zanu PF do, but then you must know the right position from which to do it.
Let’s rephrase it. If you are going to do exactly as the guys in Zanu PF do but do it from the wrong place, then you must be able to stand up for your painful worries on your own.
Do as I do, but from my side because if you are going to do it from a place I don’t like, then you will have do as I say. That’s the thing.
This will make sense if you consider the two cases of parliamentary recalls—one of them aborted, predictably.
In the first case, Sengezo Tshabangu, a shadowy tortoise that found its way onto the top of the CCC pole, did a quick list of the opposition’s 15 MPs and 17 councillors and handed it over to the Speaker of Parliament and the local government ministry.
Next thing, the 15 MPs and 17 councillors were out of work.
The speaker, Jacob Mudenda, urgently announced the MPs had been recalled from parliament on the basis of the list Tshabangu had slid into his hand at some time.
The CCC leadership insisted that Tshabangu was not the interim secretary general in CCC. In fact, it said there was no such position in CCC, but would Mudenda listen?
The technical argument was that he had no standing at all to question who Tshabangu was/is. That’s what the law says, so Mudenda got it easy.
Before you could even say “Sengezo”, President Emmerson Mnangagwa swooped.
He declared December 9 as the date for by-elections to fill the vacancies that had been created by the recalls.
Anything else was going to be drama, including the case the affected 15 lodged with the courts ahead of Mnangagwa’s proclamation of the by-election date.
You would have expected the prezzo to wait till the finalisation of the court application challenging the recalls. That’s what decent statesmen must do. After all, Mnangagwa had done that before. After the July 2018 elections, Nelson Chamisa, then the leader of MDC-A, challenged Mnangagwa’s win.
The president said he would wait for the courts to make a ruling on Chamisa’s application.
He waited, and the ruling was in his favour because the courts said the opposition presidential candidate had failed to prove his allegation of rigging.
The question, then, is: why has Mnangagwa decided to be inconsistent—nay, self-contradicting—this time around?
It looks like, in 2018, the president was sure, somehow, that Chamisa was going to lose the case.
He must have been told that the then MDC-A president didn’t have enough V11s to prove any wrongdoing by Zec et al.
But, in the Tshabangu case, he wasn’t sure what the outcome would be like, so he had to pre-empt the courts by proclaiming the by-elections. Fine and dandy.
Fast forward to the second case of (attempted) recalls. Someone called Tafadzwa Manyika wrote to parliament announcing that he, as the Zanu PF interim secretary general, was recalling 70 Zanu PF members.
That was a smart move always meant to expose the speaker and throw some mud at Zanu PF.
It was designed to put Mudenda in a catch-22 situation.
He would be damned if he didn’t heed the recall notification by Manyika.
He would be damned too if he recalled people from his own party. Mind you, Mudenda is not just the Speaker of Parliament.
He is not just a member of Zanu PF. He is, actually, a very senior member of the ruling party.
Here is the thing. When Manyika, whoever he is, notified parliament of the recalls, Mudenda decided to be damned in the first way.
He divorced himself from the case, completely. He said he had nothing to say about the Manyika recalls.
That contrasts, sharply, with the decisive speed with which he acted on the Tshabangu case.
But then, by not acting, he exposed his predictable hypocrisy. What you give to the goose must also be good for the gander.
Mudenda was supposed to just act on the basis of the recall notification without asking any questions because, as the law says, he must not meddle in any party politics.
Things got really nastily worse. Just this past week, dozens of armed men in balaclavas swooped on a young CCC MP, Tafadzwa Ngadziore, bundled him into an unmarked vehicle, sacked up his face and drove all the way to Mazowe where they severely tortured him.
The abduction was going to remain hazy were it not that one senior official in government decided to let the cat out.
He revealed that Ngadziore was wanted—he didn’t say by who—in connection with a case of forging a Zanu PF signature.
Look here. It was always going to be tricky for the Manyika character to have so much bravado to write to parliament claiming to hold a position that doesn’t exist in the party.
It’s different when it comes to CCC. CCC still doesn’t have structures nor a constitution, so anyone there can claim to be anything and everything and still get away with it.
But because Mudenda was in a sticky situation, something had to be done to solve the problem that he was facing.
That’s where the Ngadziore abduction comes in. They are now alleging he is one of at least two who forged signatures in the Manyika notice of recalls.
It’s clear that they could not locate the so-called Manyika guy, who could just as well be fictitious.
So, the cast must get a new villain.
That’s how Ngadziore gets into the script. We have zillions of cooked up cases that we have seen in a short space of time, from the turn of the millennium.
In any case, if there is evidence that Ngadziore forged signatures, why send truckloads of armed militias to torture him?
Criminal procedure is clear where one is suspected of having committed a crime. You send the law enforcers, not gun-toting hooligans in balaclavas.
It’s easy to see, though, that taking the court route was going to add further complications.
It would have exposed Mudenda in another way.
For people were going to ask why the Manyika “impostor” was being taken for prosecution at a time Mudenda was refusing to act on the recall notification.
The abduction, therefore, becomes the easier option for them. It was meant mostly to intimidate whoever was behind the second recall.
On a scale of one to 10, the notification will not be followed up on by anyone because of the fear that has already been instilled.
The abductors were on a phishing expedition. They hoped to get information on who actually wrote the recall letter to parliament, then deal with him/her/them.
The use of extra-judicial tactics to settle political scores is one big problem we have had for a long, long time now.
Its repetition, though, doesn’t make things right.
As it is, the name of parliament has been tarnished through the selective application of the law and regulations in Zimbabwe.
The case has also tarnished the government’s image. At the end of the day, it’s Zimbabwe’s image that suffers.
- *Tawanda Majoni writes in his personal capacity and can be contacted on majonitt@gmail.com