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Woe to scribes and pharisees!
Tawanda Mutasah, The Zimbabwe Independent
July 20, 2007

http://allafrica.com/stories/200707200780.html

IN order to feed Italian masses with the propaganda of a leader who still had the stamina to govern, the dictator Benito Mussolini is reputed to have occasionally visited construction sites where he would be photographed pushing and pulling back-breaking debris and machinery.

As soon as the cameras were turned off, the dictator's aides would leap to resuscitate a punting and sweat-drenched Mussolini, who would then spend days on end privately hospitalised to recover from the aches and pains of his bravado.

I never cease to be amazed at the yawning gap between appearance and reality in the lives of political strongmen from Benito Mussolini to Robert Mugabe.

During the many years that his late wife Sally Mugabe was attached to a dialysis machine, Mugabe notoriously conducted an affair with his secretary Grace Marufu, and now we hear him - in remarks that were suspiciously sequenced to preview the serving of summons for claimed adultery on Bulawayo Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube - berating those who are supposedly breaking their vows of celibacy.

The point is not whether or not Ncube and Rosemary Sibanda had a relationship between two consenting adults in what, if they did, they - or one of them - may have believed to be their private space. Nor whether, if it happened, they had entered into the relationship with the same motive.

If there was no relationship and Ncube has been systematically set up in the well-known patterns of the Mugabe regime, we are outraged. If there was a relationship, whether or not Ncube and Sibanda were set up in the process, or one of them was, we are nauseated by the callous attempt to distract the attention of a nation on its knees through cheap, scout-camp theatrics.

These "half-round chicken kicks" do not put a slice of bread in the mouths of hungry Zimbabweans.

Whatever exists or does not exist between Ncube and Sibanda, the families and individuals concerned must take responsibility for their decisions in the private moral realm and with God and their consciences. They would then use the civil law as appropriate, whether for claimed adultery damages on the part of Sibanda's husband, or for possible defamation damages on the part of Ncube, or to seek other relief.

On the other hand, contrary to the intentions of Mugabe and his cohorts, the matter does not for once confuse Zimbabweans and the world about the veracity and importance of Ncube's public moral voice on the morass that Zimbabwe has become, and on Mugabe's responsibility for the state we are in.

At their Harare rendezvous, whereat Edgar Tekere linked up with Mugabe to drive towards and cross into Mozambique to join the liberation struggle in 1975, Tekere's book, A Lifetime of Struggle, records that "as I got into the car, I saw a small figure slowly climbing the security fence at the rear of the garage. It was Robert Mugabe. He was coming from the home of Abigail Kurangwa."

Because, according to Tekere's account, this event happened after Mugabe had committed to Sally before leaving Ghana, presumably it is these experiences that inspire the designs of Mugabe to govern Zimbabwe through the stage-management of sexual intrigue.

Unfortunately for him, just as he found Zimbabweans to have had the sophistication to see through the massive propaganda on which Ian Smith propped up the Rhodesian state, the nation today knows that being fed sensational intrigue about Ncube does not cause inflation to come down, nor essential commodities and medicines to appear on the supermarket shelves and in the hospital dispensaries.

Rather, Zimbabweans are able to question how much money might have gone into setting up cameras in Ncube or any other man or woman's bedroom and where that money might have come from.

They are able to question how much of Zimbabwe's resources were spent rigging cameras in the Canadian offices of Ben Menashe to entrap Morgan Tsvangirai, and whether those resources could not have sustained the pest-control services at our mortuaries in one of which a child's body has recently been reported to have been bitten by rats.

Zimbabweans are able to wonder how many dip tanks in our rural areas would have been kept functioning by the US$1 million spent on Baffour Ankomah's New African magazine to lie about the events of March 11.

In fact, Zimbabweans know what the big moral questions of our day are.

They aspire to a decent life of more than the pitiful 37 years of life expectancy in the country. Zimbabwean adults aspire to enter into consensual relationships that are faithful, non-violent and mutually nurturing, and if God grants it, to found families where children that may come of those unions have educational and life opportunities enabled by their government.

They know who is shattering those dreams.

How many widows were created by Gukurahundi, tearing asunder the moral fabric that Mugabe today pontificates about? How many families were separated by Operation Murambatsvina?

How many couples today live apart, with partners having found no option but to escape the hunger in Zimbabwe, leaving loved ones behind? How many young women have been forced into dangerous liaisons - often with the belching fat-necks that eat at Mugabe's trough - on account of an irrational economy where one's monthly bus fare alone exceeds one's wages?

These are critical moral issues that Ncube is consistently helping to keep alive in our national conscience.

The moral questions of the day also include all of us choosing either to opportunistically line up at the trough of patronage for the sake of our own tummies, or to speak out on the side of the oppressed, unfortunately becoming ourselves, our lives and our reputations, individual targets of the wrath of a dying dictatorship.

Pity you, the Scribes and the Pharisees. In addition to the laughable spectacle of your well-fed TV newsmen lumbering themselves to the alleged crime scene, even though if we gave them a basket of stones they could not conceivably cast the first one, the oddities of your case are myriad.

At the very least, we find that we all live in a strange country where the head of state makes remarks that anticipate adultery court summons 10 days in advance, and where TV cameras escort those who serve court summons wherever they go.

As you sit down to devise the next scheme not to protect and facilitate the livelihoods of us who voted you into office, but to distract us and to muzzle our voices of conscience, take a moment to remember the great denunciation of the Scribes and Pharisees in Matthew chapter 23, where Jesus denounced those who "are like whitewashed tombs", those who "inside . . . are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness", and those who, at verse 23, "have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith".

* Tawanda Mutasah is a friend of Archbishop Pius Ncube.

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