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The
Alternative Voice, The Alternative Strategy
Mackenzie
Ndebele
February 09, 2005
Society should
take the opportunity and use informal spaces to denounce the violent,
ridicule the power hungry and reprimand the misguided in a deliberate
bid to save and improve lives.
It is a truth
universally acknowledged that human beings primarily strive to live
a better life and it is their mandate, responsibility and challenge
to come up with their home grown initiatives to address any hindrances
that curb their yearning for a better lifestyle. There are a lot
of hindrances that humans meet. It is rather unfortunate that most
of them are man made. Such hindrances are the main causes of conflict
and these could be: lack of resources, lack of tolerance and the
unavailability of an effective conflict resolution system. It is
disturbing however, when life-threatening conflict is brought about
by conflict over national power politics at all levels.
Zimbabwe is
currently going through a leadership crisis and in the process a
lot of lives have been put on the sacrificial altar of power. In
a bid to get a better life humans need to achieve a common understanding
of issues and in the process design a common strategy. Peace and
God loving citizens and residents of Zimbabwe are being denied the
space to address common issues by the powers that be. Formal meetings
and public gatherings have ceased to be safe strategies because
of legislation and the attitude of our uniformed forces. Reliable
and honest forms of media are not easily available to concerned
common citizens. It is time to make use of our own local informal
environments to define a revolution of resistance and say NO to
the furtherance of sacrificing human potential and quality of life
for the greed of power.
In our day-to-day
activities we meet various people and discuss various issues. These
small informal spaces are the most effective to address issues.
One does not need to get police clearance and the discussions, being
informal, would be highly participatory. This is to encourage people
to provoke discussions on anything that affects their lives and
the need to resuscitate democracy in the country. There is a lot
of wasted space in the kombis, at funerals, at church, work and
in shopping malls. True, people are bound to differ but the underlying
issue is the idea of creating a non-violent space to show each other
our differences and talk about them. When everyone participates:
women, children, students amongst others, this kills apathy and
we can agree that these issues are not reserved for only ‘politicians’
to speak about. Everyone is a politician – that is why we have a
right to give a political decision by way of participating in the
electoral process, either as a candidate or as a voter, or both.
It is only the misguided candidates that abuse the electorate especially
young people and students as campaign fodder.
Society should
take the opportunity and use informal spaces to denounce the violent,
ridicule the power hungry and reprimand the misguided in a deliberate
bid to save and improve lives.
In a scenario
where people have their rights deprived they have every right to
regain their sovereignty. There are many strategies that could be
used but a non-violent approach has all the potential to give back
to the people their God given rights. People should own the process
of leadership and governance. This gives confidence to the people
themselves and together with their leadership they can agree on
a leadership code of conduct. The only way that people can own the
process is to fight and create an alternative way of exposing and
documenting the happenings around their leaders. This encourages
accountability and gives a challenge to the state owned media that
may deliberately give a blackout to the evils of those in the "protected"
zone on the things they do out of negligence and malice.
It is interesting
to note that there are a lot of resources that are underutilized
by society that could be turned into platforms for the deliberation
of fruitful ways of non-violent action to express grievances and
to address anomalies. The starting point should be the conscientization
of the fact that in as much as some meetings may be said to be illegal,
they may not necessarily be sinful. We must avoid our grandchildren
asking in years to come the following question: Where were you when
the country was being destroyed? There is no way anyone will offer
an appropriate political environment unless we start creating our
own.
*This essay
was written during a Kubatana motivational workshop, 9th
February 2005
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
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