|
Back to Index
This article participates on the following special index pages:
Inclusive government - Index of articles
She is in the Intensive Care Unit
Mutsa Murenje
August 22, 2009
She emits a constant groaning, a cry for redemption and restoration.
She is led by a group of people who are controlling, manipulating
and exploiting the common people simply to keep themselves in power
and ease. She has seen too that out of that group has emerged a
single dictator-Robert Mugabe-who has become a tyrant and is organizing
her simply for his own aggrandisement.
She complaints
that her society has been founded upon violence, murder, corruption,
theft, et cetera. As a result, she has inevitably become an instrument
in the hands of the minority for consolidating its dominance. She
finds it unfortunate to be associated with a ruling clique made
up of people who are so capricious, unfair, people who delight in
watching others squirm. Her people-s perennial question is:
Why do our leaders stamp out human beings like cigarette butts?
She has seen
her people being denied their humanity, denied their dignity, denied
opportunity, and denied all human rights. Her people have effectively
been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped
of their right to make decisions concerning their life and destiny,
they have been subject to the authoritarian and whimsical decisions
of the ageing dictator Robert Mugabe. She knows in painful detail
that her young people haven-t had the chance, the opportunity
to enjoy their youth, the springtime of their life and to get the
best out of it. And yet she also knows just like Roosevelt that:
"Necessitous men are not free men. People who are out of a
job are the stuff of which dictators are made".
But hers is
not a completely hopeless situation. She has seen the emergence,
from amongst her own people, of a robust movement of great people
who are extremely disciplined, and are capable of exercising wise
restraint- a people renowned for their majestic courage and resilience.
This movement is made up of people who are wholly committed to seeing,
coming to an end, the political bickering and fighting that waste
so much of the nation-s wealth. I feel greatly humbled, yet
tremendously gratified to be part of this movement.
These are the
people who have flatly refused to be the pot that just cooks but
never tastes the food, to be trained to obey without questioning,
to learn by heart, to abandon curiosity and to avoid independent
thinking. They ask humbly but with authority for a just social order.
They are, forever, against injustice, the domination of the minority
over the majority. These people constantly seek to establish a reign
of justice and rule of love across the whole nation. Theirs has
been a long and arduous struggle for freedom and justice.
They are attempting
to answer the crucial political and moral question of their time:
the need for them to overcome oppression and violence without resorting
to violence and oppression themselves. They have assured us that
they are not seeking to rise from a position of disadvantage to
one of advantage, but that they want to create a moral balance in
society where democracy will be a reality for all people from all
the corners, nooks and crooks of Zimbabwe. These people want her
to be a national institution, a supra-class instrument of universal
justice and harmony. Her citizens are fighting for the achievement
of their just aspirations for freedom and human dignity.
Ask her about
what she thinks about the Government of National Unity. The most
likely answer is that: This is an intricately complex problem in
the political sense. It-s the first time that such a remedy
has been tried in my land since I gained independence from Great
Britain in 1980. It-s conspicuously different from the December
22, 1987 Unity Accord between ZANU PF and PF ZAPU which led to the
latter-s demise. I doubt not the MDC-s sincerity but
I trust not ZANU PF although I have given them the benefit of the
doubt.
I asked her
where she sees herself in the next five years and this is what Zimbabwe
told me: "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere
can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture
for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.
I believe that what self-centred men have torn down, other-centred
men can build up . . . .I still believe that we shall overcome.
This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the
future" (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr). I rest my case and I
put it to you.
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.
TOP
|
