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Zimbabwe-s hate generation
Rejoice Ngwenya
September 24, 2012

If you were born and bred in Zimbabwe between 1985 and 2005, you are in the unenviable 20-year hate zone of national bewilderment. Satellite reality television, GPS, smart phones and close-up photographs of planet mars are no consolation for your unfulfilled expectations. You are the HG20 group: a product of conflict, vengeance, empty shelves, genocide, unemployment, child-headed families, poverty, perforated education system, internal displacement, greed, expropriation, corruption, false ideology, state sponsored propaganda, teacher strikes, tribalism, xenophobia, factionalism, cholera, cross-border abuse, power outages, farm invasion, ballot-cheating, acute budget deficit, typhoid, false prophesy, dry swimming pools, illegal imprisonment, diamond smuggling, power outages, kidnapping, electoral fraud, dry taps, torture, petrol shortage, political chicanery, rape, pot-holes, dysfunctional hospitals, bribery, forced emigration, property plunder, gold panning, political deception, money laundering, militarisation, pyramid schemes, tyranny, food insecurity and dictatorship.

All six million of you - the HG20 cluster - an unwilling product of ZANU-PF-s vindictive twenty years of primitive accumulation and one-party state hegemony. For you to attain a level of humanity and normalcy - including us your parents - you require extensive and intensive therapy to be exorcised of ZANU-PF induced national trauma. The HD20 is a huge block of citizenry going about in self-denial, carrying subdued DNA of hatred and anger. Like an IED, it will explode at the slightest of unintended provocation.

And so how do we citizens and the HG20 begin the journey of breaking out of this undesirable, life-threatening emotional logjam? Are there lessons to be gleaned off the German or the Rwandan post-genocide experiences? Inspired 19th century Adventist author Ellen White, in her testimony entitled 'Ministry of Healing- says: "We are not to let the future, with its hard problems, its unsatisfying prospects, make our hearts faint, our knees tremble, our hands hang down." But: "It is not wise to look to ourselves and study emotions. If we do this, the enemy will present difficulties and temptations that weaken faith and destroy our courage." To supplement this 'spiritual perspective-, we need to invest in functional institutions of truth, reconciliation and healing that constructively engage both victim and perpetrator. Despite its high exposure to the grandeurs of 21st century high-tech, HG20 has no regenerative capacity of science fiction action heroes. "One of the surest hindrances to the recovery [of the sick] is the centering of attention upon themselves", warns Ellen White.

Germany and Rwanda may still encounter social hardships inherent to modernization, but they prevailed over the pain of the past. ZANU-PF continues to torpedo efforts by progressive citizens to constitutionalise healing, reconciliation, truth and forgiving. They care little for the emotionally desecrated HG20 whom they flaunt as guinea pigs of failed ideological experiments. They exonerate themselves by merely passing the blame on sanctions, colonialism and 'IMF-imposed neo-liberalism-.

If we continue to evade truth and national reconciliation, it only takes one spark to ignite the latent volcanic emotions in HG20 for Zimbabwe to be engulfed in the ash and lava of revenge. Nothing short of 'electoral amputation- will save Zimbabwe from the contagious cancer of ZANU-PF-s intransigence. The reconciliation ball is in ZANU-PF-s court. They must play it and spare the nation another life-sapping revolution. If they think they will evade national retribution, they-d better read from the Book of Numbers chapter 35 verse 33: "So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye [are:] for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it." Hope abideth for HG20.

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