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When owls fly in broad daylight . . .
Geoff Nyarota
July 21, 2006

http://www.fingaz.co.zw/story.aspx?stid=471

"WHEN you see an owl flying in broad daylight," the celebrated Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, opines in his famous Things Fall Apart, "you know something is after its life."

When a series of unusual events occur in quick succession, chances are that certain prodigious happenings are either under way or are about to take place. A fine example of such an unusual event would be the sudden acquisition of an impeccable command of the Queen of England's language by an otherwise semi-literate Harare municipal policeman-turned-politician.

Hard in the wake of that most regrettable and mind-boggling incident, the violent attack in Mabvuku on opposition politician Trudy Stevenson, the Member of Parliament for Harare North, a series of strange events occurred.

Stevenson immediately identified her alleged assailants by name. The MP for Mabvuku, Timothy Mubawu of Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC was accused of having organised the attack.

This revelation was made at a press conference which raised eyebrows on account of the speed with which it was organised, considering the nature and extent of Stevenson's injuries.

Professor Arthur Mutambara's breakaway faction of the opposition MDC, the political organisation to which she belongs, responded swiftly. Through statements issued by secretary general Professor Welshman Ncube, considered by many to be the de facto leader of the party, and Gabriel Chaibva, the secretary for information, Tsvangirai was fingered as having orchestrated the dastardly attack. Also fingered was MDC official Eddie Cross, who was accused of having harboured some of the culprits in his Bulawayo home before they were allegedly spirited out of the country and out of the reach of the long arm of the law.

Not that the said long arm of the law was proving effective back in Harare, where rather miraculously, those members and officials of the mainstream MDC identified by Stevenson and duly exposed in the media as having attacked her were allowed to remain at large for four days.

Meanwhile the case was publicly tried in The Herald and elsewhere. In the process, the self-confessed Godfather of Jambanja or violence, Joseph Chinotimba, one of the masterminds of the ferocious farm invasions which left scores dead, hundreds either maimed or homeless and our economy in total ruin, crafted a lengthy and eloquent statement which he caused to be published in The Herald.

"Members of the European Union (EU), George W Bush and Tony Blair," Chinotimba waxed lyrical in his expressive treatise, "I would like to bring to your attention the recent act of violence by the Tsvangirai-led MDC faction that attacked the MDC legislator for Harare North constituency Trudy Stevenson and four other high-ranking officials of the Mutambara faction for allegedly turning against Tsvangirai.

"The recent violent acts by Tsvangirai's faction can at best be described as barbaric and intolerant conduct and such attacks should be condemned with all the admonition they deserve."

This cannot be the same Chinotimba who marched in front as war veterans not only caused loss of life but also created total mayhem on the commercial farms before he personally stormed the dignified chambers of former Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay, causing him to resign almost immediately thereafter. In his published statement Chinotimba assumed the mantle of chief justice and hastily cast to the wind any question of the matter being sub-judice.

"It is apparent," he said, "that Stevenson was only exercising her right to join a political party of her choice and Tsvangirai is denying her, her legitimate rights."

Even Stevenson must have squirmed at this rather unexpected show of solidarity from a person who is not exactly renowned for his respect for the rule of law. Chinotimba's bone of contention was that neither Washington nor London had criticised Tsvangirai for attacking Stevenson.

"Can we interpret this to mean that you are allowing whites to be attacked by your 'good boy' in Zimbabwe?" he asked.

With this simple question, the now supposedly erudite Chinotimba unwittingly gave away the whole plot. The prodigious length and rare eloquence of Chinotimba's dissertation prompted speculation that the ruling ZANU PF party had pooled all its linguistic and literary skills and resources to craft the said critique. Tsvangirai may have to call a press conference to explain why he rendered the task of his rivals so easy by orchestrating an attack on Stevenson at a time when they were desperately hunting for evidence that he was prone to violence.

The citizens of Zimbabwe do not want any politician with a disposition towards violence to aspire to be President. If Tsvangirai is, indeed, a violent person, as alleged, then he must be exposed. The focus of any police or journalistic investigative work is the establishment of the motive for any criminal or reprehensible conduct. Which political organisation stood to benefit most from an attack assigned in broad daylight by Tsvangirai on a frail white politician belonging to Prof Mutambara's breakaway faction of the MDC?

Prior to Chinotimba's outburst ZANU PF has rarely been known to articulate any principled condemnation of political violence. When thousands of innocent and unarmed peasants were massacred by the Five Brigade in Matabeleland and the Midlands ZANU PF did not protest. When MDC activists Talent Mabika and Tichaona Chiminya were brutally murdered in broad daylight in 2000 in full view of police officers at Murambinda in Buhera neither Chinotimba nor ZANU PF uttered a word.

To date, Joseph Mwale, a CIO operative and Kainos Kitsiyatota Zimunya, a ZANU PFelection campaign activist, the alleged perpetrators of the dastardly act, have not been brought to book. When Macheke farmer, David Stevens was killed in cold blood by war veterans in 2000, ZANU PF never expressed any outrage. When Martin and Gloria Olds were brutally executed by war veterans on their ranch in Bubi-Umguza in Matabeleland North in 2001 Chinotimba never issued any statement. When former Gweru Mayor, Patrick Kombayi, was disabled in a vicious attack by a CIO agent and a ZANU PF activist his attackers were tried, found guilty and sentenced to prison terms. President Robert Mugabe immediately pardoned them.

Chinotimba was apparently still too illiterate to pen any eloquent and effusive protest for publication in The Herald.

The Stevenson case highlights a remarkable deficiency of Zimbabwe's present-day body-politic; an absence of professional police investigators, as well as a total lack of a cadre of skilled and dedicated investigative journalists to unravel such mysteries. There appears to be a new breed of journalist in Zimbabwe whose professional creed is:

"Why allow logic and the facts to stand in the way of a damaging scoop." A combination of too many unsophisticated politicians, especially within the ranks of the opposition, and a rather gullible public at large compounds the sorry situation.

The simple-mindedness of politicians such as those who so very easily jump to conclusions and instantly make public such conclusions has no place in the Zimbabwe that we must build after Mugabe.

To place the issue of violence such as the recent attack on Stevenson in its proper perspective it is necessary to take a trip back into the history of political violence in post-independence Zimbabwe. In spearheading this exercise my objective is to illustrate how ill-advised it is for observers of acts of political violence to jump to instant conclusions in seeking to identify the alleged perpetrators.

During the run-up to the first democratic elections leading to our independence in 1980 the infamous Selous Scouts and other agents of Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front regime mounted a relentless campaign to stage-manage acts of violence in a bid to discredit Zanu-PF and its armed wing, Zanla, as well as the organisation's leader, Robert Mugabe, just returned from years of exile and struggle in Mozambique.

Because the ultra-efficient Rhodesian propaganda machinery had portrayed Mugabe as a Marxist terrorist bent on destroying the Christian faith in Zimbabwe after independence, the Selous Scouts mounted a campaign which targeted Christian churches for attack.

Two operatives, Lieutenant Edward Piringondo of Mbare and Corporal Morgan Moyo, blew themselves to smithereens when the explosives they carried in the back seat of their car detonated prematurely as they approached St Michaels's Church, Runyararo, in Mbare. An official Rhodesian security forces communiqué announced, amid much official embarrassment, that two Selous Scouts had died in action in Mbare. Mbare had not been the scene of any military action during the just-ended war. The incident occurred, in any case, at a time when all Rhodesian troops, as well as both Zanla and Zipra guerillas were confined to their barracks or to the assembly camps, respectively, in terms of the ceasefire agreement then in force.

Had the explosives destroyed St Michael's Church, as intended, with Piringondo and Moyo making good their escape, Mugabe would never have been able to convince anyone, least of all the local and international press that Zanla had not been responsible for the attack on the church. The story would have hit the headlines in Harare, London, Washington and elsewhere.

A similar masterpiece was hatched in the Midlands capital of Gweru, where a fake issue of Moto newspaper hit the streets. The allegations published in the fake issue in question against the Zanu-PF leader, Mugabe, were so scandalously defamatory of him that I dare not repeat them in the columns of a respected business and family weekly.

Under cover of darkness on that ill-fated night, two agents approached the premises of Mambo Press, the publishers of the newspaper. They carried heavy explosives in their car.

The plot was to destroy the press that had printed the newspaper that had made mincemeat of the Zanu-PF leader. No sane person would have failed to jump to the conclusion that the enraged Zanu-PF leader had commissioned the attack.

As fate would have it, just before the agents reached their target their payload detonated prematurely. Both men died in the explosion. To the mortal embarrassment of both the government and the security forces, one of the deceased turned out to be a full-bloodied Selous Scout of Caucasian origin. Had this particular mission succeeded, it most probably would have signalled the end of Mugabe's political career and Zanu-PF might have lost the 1980 elections to either Dr Joshua Nkomo's PF-Zapu or Bishop Abel Muzorewa's United African National Council (UANC).

Zanu-PF's alleged campaign of violence, as orchestrated by the Selous Scouts in 1980, was not entirely without its moments of hilarity.

A bomb was planted outside the Roman Catholic Cathedral along Fourth Street in Salisbury, as the capital city was then called. The device failed to explode and was defused. Scattered at the scene were several posters which bore the hastily scrawled legend: "Pamberi naMugabe", meaning "Hail Mugabe".

For some inexplicable reason, white Zimbabweans learning to speak the indigenous Shona language have a problem distinguishing between the prefix "ne-", which means "with an object" and the prefix "na-", meaning "with a person".

Even Joseph Chinotimba, with his severe handicap in terms of literary skills, would never write such a grammatical aberration as "Pamberi neMugabe." But for this tiny error in the execution of the plot Mugabe would never have been able to explain his way out of an attack mounted on a church by assailants who extolled his virtues in written posters deposited at the scene of the crime.

In any case, by that time the majority of the Zimbabwean electorate, eager to go to the polls for the first time in a free and fair atmosphere, had become politically circumspect. They had learnt never to jump to conclusions in trying to establish the identity of perpetrators of acts of political violence. When the elections were held they voted overwhelmingly for Zanu-PF, despite the massive propaganda mounted against the party in the Rhodesian media.

One cannot help but wonder whether the successors to the Selous Scouts in the current Zimbabwean security establishment did not inherit some of these stratagems that can befuddle gullible politicians and members of the public, who have a tendency to jump to conclusions at the slightest excuse.

Saying of the Week: "It is a tragedy that this Mabvuku attack has enabled Zanu PF to point fingers at the MDC." - Trudy Stevenson (New Zimbabwe.com, Monday July 17, 2006)

*Geoff Nyarota is former editor of the independent Daily News. He can be contacted by e-mail gnyarota@yahoo.com

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