CCC: A Triple Legacy for Zimbabwe

 Dying for European perspective

AMUSING if it was not tragic. The European Union, EU, has granted Ukraine candidate status. It's a remote stage along a very long continuum to eventual EU  membership.

In effect, it means the EU condescendingly acknowledges that some good work has been registered by Ukraine towards eventual eligibility to the bloc. But what is the good work done by Ukraine so far? Dying before Russia's overwhelming fire power! Images abound showing a Ukraine that has been reduced to rabble, with more missiles still raining on it.

Estimates are that between 100 and 200 Ukrainian soldiers are either mowed down or blown up by Russia fire and incendiary matter.

This grim and gory performance is what has impressed the EU, apparently. Here is Ursula von der Leyen, EU Commission president: "We all know that Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective." And she added, apparently without any hint of bizarre irony: "We want them to live with us, the European dream."

Apparently Ursula von der Leyen is German, a country and a language community which gave us a very long word: weltanschauung.

That long word means worldview or perspective. Who else but a German national is best placed to reward a people, a country for offering to perish for a weltanschauung? Well done Zelensky!

But for the lady to suggest dead and dying Ukrainians and Ukraine best "live" with the EU, best "live" out the "European dream", is grim and bizarre cynicism. But then, this is the EU pampering suicidal Ukraine!

  Breaking Media stasis

Tired of discrediting themselves for NATO jingoism in the name of covering the special operation in Eastern Europe, western broadcast media networks are beginning to turn to Russia in order to break a narrative in stasis.

It didn't need much forethought: once media become embedded in Statist viewpoint, their coverage become not just reducible, but fast exhaustible. Generally the vocabulary of States is finite, uncreative; it's worse when States become belligerent.

Reality loses nuances; nuances are the basis of fresh news and fresh perspectives which make bulletins worth the reader's while.

Clearly the western media were in some kind of narrative rut. Both their leaders, politicians and their Zelensky have become clichés in human form.

A huge turn off which few endure anymore. It would be interesting to check the ratings for these networks. Because America and NATO stopped content aggregators from carrying Russia Today, RT, that action gave fresh currency to RT, with the world's  appetite for its  . . . er . . . perspective, getting whetted and whipped to acute frenzy. So much about the boomerang effect of human mind-management!

  The world as West's backyard

I enjoyed snippets from Russian President Putin. Snippets because western networks severely summarise him in order to curtail and contain Russia's infectious weltanschauung!

The West has always feared the Russian view since 1917; those of us who read literature know this, including knowing too that America's CIA had to sponsor many Writers' and Filmmakers' Conferences in order to roll back Russian ideology interpellated as critical creative theory. Putin dismissed Western sanctions against his country as "crazy and insane", a characterisation hardly surprising given how the sanctioning West has brutally suffered from these sanctions on Russia, and how Russia continues to make best money ever, since their imposition.

But Putin said something which many races made global underdogs by a cruel history will find irresistible. He accused America, NATO and the West of feigning themselves supreme, with the rest of the world as "their own backyard" or "colonies". Given what CIA's NED is doing here in our Zimbabwe, who would contest this Putinian view and characterisation of global politics as mangled by the West?

 Threat of cancellation

Putin went further: America, NATO and the West are trying to isolate or "cancel wrong states"! Hang on! This use of the word "cancel" is quite novel semantically. I am trying to visualise how a "cancelled" State looks like after cancellation!

Yet there is something very instructive about how old world orders perish, and how new world orders emerge and grow: the clearest indication of this deadly see-saw comes through language and linguistics.

Old words lose currency and expressive potency; new meanings emerge and/or are created, either through new words or old words redeployed for new semantic ranges! Sorry, I am being very technical here; such is the impact words have on me!

        As many Cs, who cares?

Triple C or a baneful triple legacy? No one cares a hoot how many times Chamisa and his goons enjoy repeated use of letter "C"; that's their funeral. Phonetically, phoneme C is palatial; it doesn't have real phonetic presence, the same way phonemes that are plosive do. It's not even that remarkably alliterative to even suggest a musical feel.

And this dour phonetic quality reinforces the sickly yellow colour by which Chamisa represents his value-free thing.

This far, no one cares, frankly! Least of all the State. Children do indulge and enjoy ribaldries; no same parent stops by to ask a five-year old what such streams of consciousness ever mean.

    Burning the whole village

But when the five-year old picks and brandishes a live log from a smouldering fireplace, elders take swift notice.

While the Queen taught us that a burnt child dreads fire, she never told us burning a whole village brings comparable dread in the same child.

If anything, it begins as some amusement whose serious side is only appreciated by long hindsight, possibly one requiring many years to load as one gets to adulthood.

This is why elders move in swiftly, often spicing the speed with a dutiful slap or sharp whiplash.

Only that way does dread then get internalised.

 Chamisa's Triple orgy

This week's triple orgy of violence, arson and destruction visited on parts of Chitungwiza by Chamisa's people amounted to the proverbial live log in the hands of political child-men and women.

We can't say live log in the hands of children; that would exonerate these bearded political infants.

Chamisa's supporters went on a rampage; they sang war, before acting war eventually.

They left a trail of smouldering wreck, including burning structures which housed innocent families they first profiled as Zanu-PF, to make them eligible for destruction, for cancellation.

Images of these fiends abound on social media, including criminal use of vehicles with no number plates, and lorries which should have been carting grain, and thus adding value to our GDP. No, the lorries were used to transfer and visit violence on the innocent. Many lessons deserve drawing up.

    An indicted leadership

Firstly, Triple C leadership — foremost Chamisa himself — stand wholly culpable. They are good candidates for long, remedial remands, followed by long custodial sentences, provided this society truly and wholly disavows political violence.

I fail to appreciate any legal arguments that invoke due process as a civilised value for and in such uncivilised circumstances. It is in the nature of law to dilate, in the process reducing human censorious anger over a clear outrage.

 In fact, the law's delay is a way of inducing and extorting undeserved, time-created extenuation to what is dastardly. As in this case!

Until this society develops and embraces a reflex of swift, even pre-trial punishment on those indubitably shown to have been associated with any acts of political violence, it will never outgrow this cancer.

  Limitations of due process

There are many instances at law, and in several jurisdictions regarded as democratic, where certain categories of offences attract a presumption of guilt, until proven innocent.

Try and be a Taliban in America, and let's see if the wheels of justice even begin to be seen, let alone get turned. You are just put away, even then on a good day. Usually, you are put out of this life, cancelled, unrecorded!

And the bigger you are, the greater the culpability and severity of sentence! The trouble with political violence is that it feeds itself, stokes its own fires into a raging inferno.

We saw this in Kenya, a few years back. Today Kenya will not countenance politics of violence, or violent politics. They have been burnt before.

  When values go topsy-turvy

Second and bizarrely, our value system appears topsy-turvy. Picture this: political parties fought to "own" the body of a slain woman, one Moreblessing.

The foreplay to that dalliance with a severed and mutilated cadaver, took the form of an online campaign to bring Moreblessing back, alive.

It was one heck of a campaign analogous to the compassion of a village witch wishing the ailing long life, so far away from the grave the witch cannot wait to debauch.

There was this quiet subtext of: we-politically-wish-she-is-found dead-so-we-indict! Absolutely no sincerity behind the refulgently colourful online banners that falsely wish the slain lady life after disappearance.  Humanity has deserted this society.

      What society are we inventing?

Worse, while there was this dogfight for Moreblessing's mangled cadaver, there was fawned and simulated revilement and rejection of the alleged killer.

No party wanted to be associated with the alleged killer who lives, although all parties wanted to own a slain cadaver! It got worse: Triple C was ready to kill for the dead woman; it wasn't ready to hunt down or visit vengeance on the alleged killer! And in their scheme of things, those deserving dire retribution didn't have to be the accused; they only needed to allegedly belong to a rival party! We threaten to kill the living for the already dead, while the living who allegedly killed have to deliver themselves finally for long justice! What society are we inventing? One standing on its head?

 Crass retorts

There is more. The retort to the burning structure belonging to people stereotyped as Zanu-PF by Triple C arsonists was: it wasn't a home anyway; who lives in such a hovel.

Hopewell Chin'ono who vaunts himself as brimming with high moral values and probity, put it graphically: his goats had a better abode than the vandalised, burnt and destroyed structure!

And for effect, he juxtaposed the palatial habit for his goats next to the vandalised and burnt structure.

Hopewell's political siblings weighed in: why were they faggots in the structure, if anyone lived there? Goodness me!!

   Where goats deserve better protection than humans

So all substandard structures which are home to the poor are fair targets of political vandalism and arson? And if they are, how does Hopewell's goats and goat pens deserve such protective outcry from here and abroad when hovels of the poor deserve to be burnt?

Did we not see activists, writers, diplomats and telescopic philanthropists rallying behind mere goats and goat pens which some displaced and cheated community wanted to remove? There is greater humanity in goats?

Not that anyone wants lives of Hopewell's goats abridged; it's just that when a goat herder raises goat lives and habitats above the existential question for humans, greater provocation and outrage follows. More so when the argument is being raised by people belonging to a party of supposed "city fathers" which fails to build even shacks for rate-paying residents!

Do we remember arguments against Murambatsvina?

Let's leave Hopewell's goats. Murambatsvina, in those years of the First Republic! Was the outrage over palaces which late President Mugabe's administration had destroyed?

Where they not illegal structures far worse than what Chamisa's goons destroyed? Yet those illegal slums triggered opposition and pro-opposition western hysteria and crocodile tears! What was so special about that goose then, which eludes this week's Chitungwiza gander? I am choking with anger.

 What ZANU-PF must do quickly

Anyway, happily Triple C has shown, quite early in the year and well ahead of 2023 harmonised polls, that it has some appetite for political violence. Zanu-PF must act decisively: it must demand that both the Human Rights, and the Peace and Reconciliation Commissions investigate what happened this week. Fully so we have a record to go by in 2023.

Observers must walk into a unanimous verdict by our Constitutional Commissions. Zanu-PF parliamentarians must do no less; they must sponsor a motion on what happened this week, and have it on parliamentary record. Meanwhile, party delegations must be despatched to all sister political parties in the region who must be properly briefed on this grave matter.

Back in Chitungwiza, the Party must rebuild the destroyed structures, or even better, brick-upon-brick! All these actions run contemporaneous with court proceedings whose outcomes this column cannot dare suggest.

     Triple C deserves a coarse hand

As for Government, the course is very clear.

Triple C must be treated as a grouping of violent political arsonists who deserve no soft hand, now and in future.

It must be handled with a coarse hand, very coarse until it learns that violence begets severe punishment.

Meanwhile, the cleric — I think his name is Bishop Ancelimo Magaya — must have his political sight restored so he sees real evil that merits no dialogue.

We might kick one another for mating in donkey world.

But we never kill, burn or raze the pen to the ground. If we have pent up anger, we bray very loud, bite and stampede, but always mindful we are all donkeys who face a common enemy: humans! Let me bray!