Barbourfields Stadium to erupt into ZAPU songs as Highlanders displays its new bus.

Barbourfields Stadium in Bulawayo 'Emagumeni' is expected to be buzzing with Highlanders Football Club supporters coming to have a glimpse of Highlanders Football Club's newly acquired state of the art bus.

There is going to be a titanic clash of colours at Barbourfields Stadium and a dichotomy between sports and politics. The invigorated Highlanders Football Club supporters will be harshly and passionately waving their black and white flags and wearing their blank and white stripped T-shirts symbolizing their many years of unwavering support for their club. Of significance and quite interesting will be the black and white Highlanders colours blending with the ZAPU black bull sometimes on white T-shirts. The yellow, symbolic to ZAPU, will be an additional visible colour at the Soweto Grand Stand of the stadium.

The Highlanders colours will certainly be flying side by side with the ZAPU colours.  There is no two ways about it. There is this DNA that interlocks and binds the social identity, values and ethics amongst different cultural and social entities in Bulawayo. This principle underpins and replicates the nature of the relationship amongst ZAPU, the people of Bulawayo and local sport. Sport in any party of the world is born from the local communities. Sport is therefore an integral part of a community and a vehicle of propagating local community norms, culture, customs, economic and political beliefs. The ZANU PF which banned political t-shits in sports in 2000 is now shamefully bringing them back. ZANU PF always dribbles itself and scores at its own goal. These little known visitors in Highlanders Football Club circles  will be a mere shadow of themselves and likely to be beaten to the their game with  their heads down. Highlanders Football Club forms part of the intrinsic DNA of people of Bulawayo. One cannot separate Highlanders from Bulawayo neither can one separate Bulawayo from Highlanders Football Club.  Bulawayo intends kept ZANU PF off the terraces and away from eMagumeni during the June by-election. It's a fact.

Highlanders Football Club support has always been located and drawn from the people of Matabeleland and Midlands of which a large number of them come from Bulawayo.  Highlanders has always been known as the people's football club even before the little known Tshinga in football circles not of course taking away his acclaim as a retired soldier. The hallmark of Highlanders Football Club financial support is and has always been located in its genuine sponsors, its supporters in Bulawayo all of whom have suffered abuse in the hands of the leadership of ZANU PF. Opportunists seeing the popularity and numbers of supporters and with their misplaced quest for votes are jumping onto the Highlanders Football Club bus and pretending that they are part of that DNA when they are not.  It is sad that politics has now been allowed to get its hand in the affairs of the club and the result is the destruction of the beautiful game of football.

The Soweto Grand Stand will break into deafening and defining songs very much connecting Highlanders and the people of Bulawayo as they both share a long history, norms and beliefs. The Soweto Grand Stand has always been a sacred place for Highlanders supporters and ZAPU supporters on the other hand that presented them with a safe space and time to express their social and political grievances, anxieties, wants and needs  denied  to them and perpetrated by the well-known menacing violent blood thirsty ZAPU PF.  ZANU PF is a maggot that is now attempting to penetrate into the flesh and hearts of sports to destroy Highlanders Football Club by dragging it into ZANU PF retrogressive politics.

Please join the ZAPU and Highlanders contingent of supporters at Soweto Grand Stand to sing the songs of resilience,
encouragement, freedom and support for both Highlanders Football Club and certainly the people of Bulawayo "Babethi kayibulawe, kayisoze ibulawe (it will not be destroyed)/ Into oyenzayo siyayizonda (we hate what you are doing)/Highlanders ngenkani!  Ezikamaghebula, babebulala obaba (they killed our fathers) etc."

The songs will very much be directed to uMnumzana Tshinga  the lost son of the soil who by making a part financial contribution towards the purchase of the bus using the ZANU PF vote buying fund  now portrays a belief that he and his ZANU PF donated the bus to Highlanders Football Club. These are political highway pirates hijacking and attempting to bamboozle the Highlanders Football Club and its supporters into vote buying chicanery and trickery. Tshinga is attempting an indirect coercive ploy to get Highlanders Football Club supporters to vote for him as if to say if they do not vote for him the bus will be taken away because he bought it. The people of Bulawayo know who they are, they know their problems and where they stand. While it is good for Highlanders Football Club to have its own bus to run its business affairs the problems of people of Bulawayo in general and Makokoba in particular go far beyond riding on a Highlanders Football Club bus. One would assume that Tshinga's initial association with Highlanders Football Club was to become its chairman in future but has changed his mind to run for Member of Parliament when the unexpected opportunity with the by-elections presented its self. It is left to the readers to define the kind of character the man is. Tshinga unsuccessfully ran for MP more than once in the past. The honest reflection is that he is not a people's choice. Retirement in the comforts of his home could be the best thing he needs to do in the circumstance.

The people of Bulawayo understand the meaning of sustainable development not the smoke screen that Tshinga and his compatriots are trying to hoodwink people into voting for them. If Tshinga was a genuine benefactor of Highlander Football Club there was no need for the pomp and fun-fair of parading the bus across Makokoba apart from the objective that he wants to present himself to the people of Makokoba as bringing development to that constituency. Tshinga appears to be completely ignorant of or deliberately ignoring the everyday problems affecting the people of Makokoba. He is choosing the easy way, climbing onto the Highlanders Football Club bus riding it past the mystified Makokoba people and leaving them to bite the dust making them wonder what the hell the man is trying to do.

The following is a free update for Tshinga just to let him know in brief the daily challenges the people of Makokoba are experiencing:  there is the everyday electricity load shading and huge electricity bills, forced water meters on residents and huge water surcharges; potholes and inaccessible roads, leaking sewers and a potential spread of diseases, poorly resourced schools, Impilo Hospital and surrounding clinics have become death zones with lack of treatment drugs and proper care, collapse of local service delivery such as refuse collection, dirty and smelly streets, dark streets without street lights at night, crowded dwellings in Makokoba, no  jobs and business opportunities, and no recreational amenities for children and young people. For all these pressing social and economic problems for the community of Makokoba constituency the intervention according to Tshinga is parading a bus of a football club across the townships right into Barbourfields Stadium and that will be the end. The needs, wishes, anxieties and wants of the people of Makokoba constituency are deep and bigger than just the bus that Tshinga is flashing around.

 Dumiso Gumende chairman of Highlanders Football Club is getting it wrong. That is the problem of accepting money from politicians. Gumede simply got himself indebted to the politicians and there is no escape for him. Gumede in his wisdom is telling the people of Bulawayo to bury the hatchet of the dark days of the Gukurahundi era and accept Vice President Mnangagwa as an authority to preside over the hand over of the bus to his club.  Gumede has allowed the people's club to be ruined by ZANU PF politics of patronage. Gumede is now trapped and taken hostage. Unfortunately he has gone into it with the club and that spells doom. Whatever ZANU touches turns to dust.
The big man ZANU PF mentality  and syndrome of which Tshinga also struggles with of bulldozing into functional and successful business entities has destroyed the economy and the social fabric of the country. ZANU PF interference in Highlanders Football Club will destroy Highlanders Football Club in the same way they destroyed G & D shoes.  In the same way they destroyed National Blankets, Diary Board, ZUPCO, National Foods, Cold Storage Commission, Sugar and Oil Refinery, Dunlop, Vitaform, National Breweries, Woolworth stores, OK Stores, National Railways, and ZISCO Steel. The list is endless.  How many people in Bulawayo would be working if all these companies were still operational? Bulawayo is now a carcass with no industry.

Could it not benefit more young people to get involved in the sport if Tshinga was wise enough and with his newly found love of football to form a new football club of his own? Tshinga will not do that because the culture of ZANU PF is not to create new ventures but to waylay functioning ventures and destroy them.

Tshinga Dube has invited the self-proclaimed killer vice president Mnangagwa which himself professed during the by-election campaign for his wife and one of those believed to be the conspirators of the Gukurahundi massacre of the people of Matabeleland and Midlands in the 1980s. The strategy for Tshinga of presenting the bus with Vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa at Barbourfields stadium is to remind the people of Bulawayo of what will become of them if they do not vote for him and ZANU PF.  This is a fuss that people are no longer willing to buy. The people's quest is now for Mnagangwa to address the crimes and problems that he committed subjugating the people of Bulawayo, Midlands and Matabeleland into indignation and resentment.

The people of Bulawayo see Mnangagwa as the symbol of polarization and under development of Matabeleland and Bulawayo in particular. If there was sincerity in vice president Mnangagwa's authority and influence and  about the desire to help people in Bulawayo and Matabeleland to move on and by using sports as unifying activity certain important things should have been done by now. The report of the Chihambakwe commission of inquiry (1983) should have been made public by now; perpetrators of the Gukurahundi atrocities should have been tried in the courts of law by now; the tombs of the unknown massacred innocent civilians by Gukurahundi should have been identified and those people given decent burials by now; survivors of the atrocities and their relatives should have been supported to move on by now and a national apology by President Mugabe should have been done by now. Industry and commerce should be turning its wheels in Bulawayo providing people with the much needed employment and disposable incomes. Vice president Mnangagwa is coming to Bulawayo to assess how much he and his party have succeeded in marginalizing Bulawayo and Matabeleland.

I cannot recall of any time in the life of Zimbabwe's independence Vice President Mnangagwa coming to address public meetings in Bulawayo later on at any other parts of Matabeleland. There are rumours Mnangagwa has a liquor business interest in Bulawayo, a fitting plan to trap people into drunkenness and alcoholism. This is how Vice president Mnangagwa is bringing development in Bulawayo destroying its manufacturing industry and replacing it with liquor economy, good business for deprived communities.

Mnumzana Tshinga, thank you but no thank you for your financial contribution towards the Highlanders Football Club bus.  Please do not keep going to the Highlanders football club knocking on their offices; that is not the constituency you are seeking to represent. Your performance is below par and not consistent with the people's needs and aspirations. Leave it to the ZAPU candidate Jonathan Ndlovu whose DNA is with the people of Makokoba. He walks amongst them and you don't.