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Things Zimbabwe should have lost in the fire
Tabani Moyo
May 23, 2011

There are certain things we should have metaphorically lost in the fire if Zimbabwe is to progress. Instead we risked the future of the nation rescuing such valueless things since the day we got our independence.

Certain characters and mindsets should have been burnt in the fire especially in ZANU PF and its subcultures. The agenda of Zimbabwe was supposed to be clearer. This is given the fact that its freedom came after a protracted battle that took the lives of those we loved most. Those who had to be buried in shallow graves with the hope that the Zimbabwe they were fighting for was going to be in safe hands.

The Zanu PF politburo have re-ignited the calls for an election this year, subjecting the entire country to yet a foreseeable blood bath, definitely not acting in the public good of the country. In essence such thinking and character should have been left in the fire burning and never to recur in our body polity.

With the character and mindset of such cultivation we are trapped in the never ending circle of going nowhere slowly. In its decree, ZANU PF is hopeful that it will keep the nation focused on such fallacies of an election this year and dribble the nation away from the hard questions of nation building and development.

The energy and zeal on calling for elections should be channeled towards building on the national economic stability, injection of a life line in our education system, revitalizing the comatose health system and above all moving away from lip servicing the civil service crisis of poultry remuneration.

With the levels of political violence engulfing our political institutions, we cannot allow the political order to frog-march the civilians into a blood bath trap of an election. We are a literate nation which has better priorities rather than auto playing a stuck gramophone on elections which produces catastrophic disputes.

Because of such thinking, our intellectual space in the media has been robbed with the hectares of print and broadcasting space reciting the tired mantra which is non-attainable. In the process the media has become a readily available conveyor belt on political parties- messaging without a close analysis on the society which is being re-engineered.

We burden other nations with our limitations and failures to run the affairs of our nation. Our leaders pride themselves of reporting to other nations on how they are failing to administer their country with straight faces.
In essence through such leadership, we have retrogressed in our notions of developing new ways of thinking. The future of our nation was cast in front of us after the attainment of independence but day in and out we squandered the hopes and aspirations of the nation with arrogance and impunity. We lost our levers to run our state without consulting presidents through our own commissions and omissions.

As Wole Sonyika expressed it in his memoirs of 2006 entitled You Must Set Forth at Dawn, "Most of the time however as we ran eagerly to welcome the protagonists of African Renaissance we were bombarded by utterances that identified only a flamboyant replacement of the old colonial order, not transformation agents not even empathizing participants in a process of liberation we were not prudish . . . "

Is this not the behavior which is emblematic with our politicians in present day Zimbabwe? Citizens are related to like second class to political parties- narrow interests? The struggle for liberation robbed us bit by bit, the humanity element which triggered it into motion in the first place. This was followed by the flammable struggle against ZANU PF hegemony which in its own way has started eroding the very same fundamental principles that human beings can differ in peace. As we proceed ahead with the struggling of the Zimbabwean masses, the quest for pure knowledge on our humanity, our way of life and that of national progression shall be distorted.

Through the present day discourse, our current levels of discourse have become borrowed and meaningless at times to the progression of our country. Zanu PF is stuck in the Marxist discourse which the party no-longer understands. The MDC is stuck in the democracy debate which it seems to be failing to translate it into tangible deliverables. Democracy or Marxist theories are meaningless to the struggling peoples of Zimbabwe. The quest for pure knowledge requires that the political actors understand the people-s voices, where they are coming from and where they want to go. They need to understand their realities and start from such a position building upwards.

Because of this still birth in understanding the peoples- reality we see with our naked eyes the evolution of the 'liberators- devouring the 'liberated- because we allowed our political order to build immortals, whose stature should outgrow that of the nation. This is why there are helpless people out there who are standing on top of their imaginable mountains and shouting the loudest that elections in Zimbabwe are going ahead in 2011. They must be stopped. In essence the country should have metaphorically lost such thinking and characters in the fire soon after independence. Zimbabwe was going to be better off.

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