Zimbabweans and their strange choices - invites ridicule from onlookers

For some strange reason, Zimbabweans have become notorious for their paradoxical choices. They embrace and kiss the Devil and reject the Benign. At every crucial moment of truth in their history they have always made weird choices; decisions that have invited ridicule from onlookers and other sober minded people. These are the people who in 1979 overwhelmingly voted for the politically disoriented Bishop Abel Muzorewa but a year later, dumped the Bishop and opted for the wild and rabid Robert Mugabe. Not even the affable and rational Joshua Nkomo whom they fakely called 'Father Zimbabwe' was given his deserved honour to be the first black Prime Minister of independent Zimbabwe. Many claim that the 1980 elections were a tribal census in which votes were methodically allocated based on tribal ratios. Tribal affiliation had already been whipped up, fanned and promoted by ZANU since 1963 and sustained by their military wing (ZANLA) in the populace throughout the liberation struggle with its climax manifesting itself in the 1980s in the fom of the Matabele Massacres by the Triumvirate of Robert Mugabe, Emmerson Mnangagwa and Sydney Sekeramayi.

There are three great misfortunes which befell what is now called Zimbabwe in the past 130 years. The first one was the colonisation of the country by Cecil Rhodes' in the 1890s. The second one was the conception of Robert Mugabe and his subsequent birth on the 21st of February, 1924 in the Zwimba Tribal Trust Lands. The third one was the formation of Zanu in 1963 which according to Ellert (1989) was formed with the help of the Rhodesian Special Branch for the sole purpose of destabilizing Joshua Nkomo's political dominance in the struggle to liberate Zimbabwe as he was viewed as an impregnable unifying African resistance figure against colonialism in the eyes of the Settler Regime as well as a symbol of the so called 'perpetuation of an ethnocentric leadership clique favourable to Ndebeles' by the majority Shona. This was despite the fact that both the NDP and ZAPU leadership structures were dominated by the Shona ethnic group.

Another strange paradoxical decision was in 1972 during the Pearce Commission hearings. Under the British supervision, the colonial administration in Rhodesia set up a commission to measure the preparedness of the black people for political independence. Many Africans had been coached by Zanla guerillas to reject independence under a Black Leader who at this point could only have been Joshua Nkomo. They told the Commission that they were not ready for independence under a black government. This had been preceded by a document that urged 'majority tribes; in Zimbabwe to resist independence under the leadership of Joshua Nkomo. Even more perplexing was the ZANU decision in 1976 at the Geneva Conference where they rejected immediate independence in favour of a delay by at least two years from the date of the talks against Nkomo's demand for an immediate settlement.

From many sources including Mugabe himself, we learn that when ZANU engaged in the struggle for national liberation, defeating the enemy militarily was not their intention. What they intended was to use the presence of their armed forces among the people to mobilise for the inevitable elections leaving Nkomo and ZAPU to sweat it out militarily with the enemy until its grip on power was weakened to the point of acceding to a negotiated settlement in which the ballot, not the bullet, would count. Mugabe's army was consequently thrown into the country to decampaign rival nationalist movements and browbeat villagers into supporting his party whereas Nkomo's army infiltrated the country in order to subdue the enemy and push him closer to the negotiating table without guarantees to electoral victory.

Most beneficiaries of Zanu PF rule may feel that Robert Mugabe has raised them economically through the land reform. In reality Mugabe should be seen as a political criminal and a dwarfish thief who dressed himself in borrowed robes and reduced a jewel nation to a ruin and scattered an entire population over the whole globe as economic refugees.

Through Gukurahundi Robert Mugabe and his ZANU PF government executed a Rwandan style genocide in Matebeleland and the Midlands provinces (Mthwakazi) which remains as the worst genocide in Southern Africa since the Herero Massacres by German colonial authorities in Namibia at the turn of the 20th Century. Although they attempted to blame the 'dissident elements of the army' who were allegedly sponsored by Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU, a Catholic Commision for Justice and Peace (CCJP) report revealed that of the total killings, 88% was by the Five Brigade, 6.5% by the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), 4.5% by the Zimbabwe National Army and 2% by the dissidents. All the four perpetrators were under the command of the ZANU-PF government. Rather than seek to unite the country in the aftermath of a bloody war of independence which left the people divided along racial and ethnic lines, Mugabe, driven by ethnic bitterness and revenge, plotted to exterminate the Matebele people and wipe them off the face of the earth.

More strange choices have been witnessed in the past 20 years in which the masses have preferred to place the fate of the country under the dictatorial leadership of a senile old man who was fast driving the country into the precipice of destruction. In 2002 when faced with a choice between the then promising Morgan Tswangirayi and the clearly clueless Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans chose the latter, a feat they repeated in 2005, 2008 and 2013. In the past three years the country was slowly but surely drifting to Grace Mugabe's presidency despite her suspect emotional stability and shallow intellect. If it wasn't for the 'selfless' intervention of the Army, Grace Mugabe would have easily found herself the President of Zimbabwe without any hustles!

Just recently, when one beast fell, they celebrated, and when another one, potentially more vicious, was rising, they applauded. It was quite nauseating to see placards conferring a hero status on Emmerson Mnangagwa, the Butcher of Matabeles. Emmerson Mnangangwa, Sydeny Sekeramayi, Prence Shiri, Constantino Chiwenga and many others of their kind cannot be heroes of anyone in Zimbabwe except their accomplices in the Matabeleland Genocide. They are as guilty as Robert Mugabe himself, their master. We must all fight and resist the substitution of a witch with her hyena.