Why Msipa should shut up

This week began with news reports that Cephas Msipa, voice choking with emotion, is bemoaning the good old days. He is reportedly very concerned that war veterans are losing power and that, in ZANU PF, new politicians are hijacking the revolution.

This theme is a chorus from Msipa in the last few months, especially from the time that he got out a pathetic little book that purported to tell a life story of concern and engagement with freedom and justice. But here is why Msipa rings so hollow that his increasingly shrill words have become a scourge to our ears.

I will briefly illustrate the fundamental problem with people like Msipa and with their crocodile tears (pun intended). A few years ago, after my sister, who is in the diaspora, had been working night and day, she finally sent our old mother and father some money with which we were to get them a stand upon which she would build them a house. The home to be built was meant to give our dear parents some much-needed final reprieve from the two-roomed tenancy in which they determinedly raised us in Mbare.

We scoured the adverts in the newspapers, and we bought our parents a stand in Charlotte Brooke, kwaMsipa, otherwise known as Rumani Estate. The process was mediated by lawyers, and the properties were advertised as titled. Indeed my parents received title to the stand, and they wept with joy as they held this piece of paper - a novelty in their lives, given their struggles to raise us.

Today, so many years after we purchased this stand for my parents, not only has the area remained unserviced, after Msipa pocketed the money of my sister's sweat and the sweat of others; we have even been told that the city council is not recognizing the title to these lands. How were these titles issued? Who is accountable?

Several attempts to contact Msipa's son, who is the key player in this saga, have been ignored.

It is this type of shocking behavior that is destroying people's livelihoods and the rule of law in this country. I don't care to hear that Msipa wants some so-called stalwarts of the liberation struggle to lord it over us until eternity. I care that there is no accountability in our country. I care that Msipa and his son used their influence and access to resources to sell us a dummy, and that they won't be made accountable for their actions.

If Msipa cares for justice and freedom, these are the things he should be addressing.

Whatever his past, if Jonathan Moyo has at least been showing the technocratic passion to run stories against corruption in the Herald when he was at the Information Ministry, to expose the thieving Cuthbert Dube, and now to introduce innovations like STEM and all that, why should I have a problem with his occupation of the political space and the decline in influence of the war veterans that Msipa cares so much about?

I respect the liberation struggle. But don't I and my generation deserve to care about the future more than about the past? And shouldn't I care less about Msipa's stalwarts and more about my parents' stand? What more "livelihoods" can Msipa talk about than that?

Otherwise let Msipa please shut up. He has been part of the corrupt, uncaring system that has been running our lives out of town for the past three decades. We don't care much for his newfound epiphany about the values of the struggle. We care about justice and freedom in the tangible things of our small lives, here and now, in practical things such as when we spend the monies of our sweat to buy stands kwaMsipa, and then find that we were, to all intents and purposes, defrauded.