Trevor Ncube’s article (“Opportunity knocks for Zimbabwe”, October 5) cannot go unchallenged. One would have expected him to make use of his lofty position to differentiate clearly the forest from the trees where the situation in this wretched country is concerned.
Ncube states categorically that “except for extremists on the fringes of the opposition and civil society, few Zimbabweans are interested in pursuing vengeance against Robert Mugabe, the founding president, and many would happily forgive him in exchange for political and economic freedom”. This is so unbelievable that I would challenge him to back up that statement with statistics.
I have always had a niggling suspicion of where Ncube’s sympathies lie; now they have been confirmed in the crudest possible way. To assert, as he does, that a Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) government would be a disaster without any evidence for this statement is the worst possible form of partisanship, bordering on political sloganeering. MDC governing principles are laid out very clearly in the party manifesto.
It is self-evident that the problem in Zimbabwe has always been Mugabe and Zanu-PF. Even if Mugabe were to go today, the country’s slide into oblivion would continue. It is the principles, not the principals. Ncube seems to have been ensnared into the trap of believing that it’s principals who matter. This underlies his suggestion of having Simba Makoni, Strive Masiyiwa, Gideon Gono and so on as compromise presidential candidates for Zanu-PF. Having any one of these men at the helm will not suddenly dismantle the institutionalised system of control and patronage that has melded party and state at all levels of society and ruined a once-prosperous country.
To suggest Gono as a possible future president defies belief. Gono is one of the very worst things to have happened to this hapless country. His reckless printing of money to spend on quasifiscal and quasi-Zanu-PF campaign activities has devalued the currency and so pushed up inflation to stratospheric levels.
For a person of Ncube’s stature to regurgitate the Zanu-PF drivel that sanctions are hurting the common man is a cataclysmic disappointment. I consider myself a common man, with neither wealth nor connections. I shall set forth what is hurting me, and leave the venerable Ncube to tell me if it is sanctions causing it.
We have had no water in the entire city of Kadoma for three months. The Zanu-PF council took money from each ratepayer in the first three months of the year to pay for new water pumps. It is now late October and the pumps still have not even arrived in the country. The council informs us that they are being fine-tuned in South Africa, seven months after they were paid for. The entire city survives on a few privately owned boreholes, and water is now being sold.
I was fired from my job as a high school science teacher because of my MDC activities. I have thus lost the only career which I am trained for; and, of course, my wife and four children suffer. But I am the lucky one. As I write, seven of our MDC members have been murdered in cold blood, and thousands seriously assaulted, since the talks began in South Africa.
We have a serious shortage of sugar, which is not imported. There is also a serious shortage of beer. There are no other basic commodities in the shops because of Mugabe’s Operation Slash Prices. Electricity comes on at about 10pm and is switched off at 4am. So people have to iron clothes and prepare the next day’s meal at night. Of course, that is also the time to go to that borehole to fetch water since the boreholes use electricity.
By no stretch of the imagination can these indignities, humiliations, deprivations, abuses and calamities visited upon us be linked to sanctions.
The farcical and wholly fallacious codswallop that the MDC is involved in the talks only “for political self-preservation” makes one doubt Ncube’s integrity. The MDC had a clear roadmap from its 2006 Congress: to conduct a democratic resistance campaign; to force Mugabe to the negotiating table; and to create conditions for a peaceful, free and fair elections under international supervision. We are now in the second stage of this roadmap.
The tenor of Ncube’s article sounds suspiciously like that of a die-hard Zanu-PF cadre who only wants the removal of Mugabe as president, but with that party remaining in power. With apologists such as Ncube, Zanu-PF has little need for its own spokespeople. In language couched in opposition-sounding terms, Ncube does the job better.
Ncube has missed a glaring opportunity to use his position not only to inform, but to also guide debate on the Zimbabwe crisis among the people of influence who read this newspaper.
Ketayi Makosa is MDC chairperson in the Kadoma district