Detoxing Zimbabwe's political atmosphere

Our political differences should be differences of ideas, vision and ideology. There is nothing personal about it. Leave children out of it. The translation of verbal violence into physical violence is one of the easiest transits which happen seamlessly.

Zimbabwe got its independence less than three years after Ian Smith executed an atrocious raid on a ZANLA camp in Chimoio in an operation coded Operation Dingo. One can only imagine how bitter ZANLA troops were when they were integrated into the same army with the people that had killed thousands of their unarmed brothers and sisters. But it was not Chimoio only, was it?

On August 9, 1976 in Nyadzonia, an operation called, Operation Eland saw thousands more killed, maimed and traumatised in another raid. There was carnage as lots of refugees were mercilessly mauled in cold blood. It left the masses, guerrillas and their leadership bitter.

Independence came less than four years after Nyadzonia and slightly more than two years after Chimoio. And right when the bodies had hardly decomposed in those mass graves, President Mugabe declared a policy of National Reconciliation.

What a call! The wounds were still weeping. Some were still being measured for wheelchairs and crutches. Some wives were still adjusting from the role of a wife to that of carer and trying to reconcile the person that was presented to them and the one that left a few years earlier.

Now they were being asked to forge their "swords into ploughshares" and work with the very people that had poured poison in watering holes and had laced clothes with parathion and canned beef with thallium! The leader of the new independent country declared that all was forgiven.

That is life. Right now someone is thinking, "why are we even talking about this?"

Well, we are talking about this because that "Swords into Ploughshares" speech set the tone for our politics and removed the bitterness between former foes. But now it seems to have crept back into our politics.

Our politics is mortally poisoned again. People wish each other dead, some are even declaring that there will be reprisals if Zanu-PF lose power. Our politics has so much hatred between blacks and whites and so much bitterness between rivals in different political parties. That should not be the case. We need to find our way back to the nation's founding speech.

There was an effort made to heal this nation during the GNU when there was a very powerful National Healing Task force represented at the Vice President Level. We are tragically back to the zone when bitterness is back in our politics.

Simple ideological differences and antagonism have turned into animus. Is it morally right to celebrate that Morgan Tsvangirai has cancer? If not, why is it right to generate lies about the demise of President Mugabe and then rub their hands with glee?

One thing that has really gone morally belly up is our language. It managed to achieve the fit of being both pharisaic and uncircumcised at the same time. People are threatening each other all over the place. Especially those who thought their moment had come. They went into this mode where they said they were making lists of members of Zanu-PF. God help us if such people get anywhere near power.

Our politics should be a free flow of ideas, not a free flow of threatening ideas. By its nature, multi-party democracy is a conflict zone because there is a contestation for power and a contestation of ideas which by its nature breeds political tensions.

But we are talking of incitement to harm here. And incitement to harm includes intolerant campaigning for a child to be deported from where they are pursuing their studies. Their future has to be blighted because of who their father is? Once you make such a campaign with a lot of vitriol expressed against the father you are deliberately exposing a child to danger. How far is your hate going to extend in order to execute what you believe is your own version of justice.

The other day we had a young politician threatening the President's children who are adults and free to make their own political choices. And that choice is not as automatic as people think because based on the example of this columnist's own family, there are siblings who have different political choices. Some of them quite diametrically opposite.

There are even siblings who are in the same party and have different preferences of future leadership. Some would put it differently by saying siblings who are in different factions of the same party. What it means is you cannot stereotype families therefore you should not transfer your hate of one person to their child or brother.

Of course, despite their different politics, mature family members are still able to get along very well that the public might never even realise the difference in their political preferences. One wishes that those families that have managed to do that at microcosm level can help be an example to the nation to see that we can look beyond our politics and focus on making this nation a better place.

This columnist has great friends in the opposition. And make no mistake, no apology is going to leave these lips for it. Our politics should not define us as human beings. Neither should our politics define us as Zimbabweans. In fact, it is our politics which should be defined by national interests. Now national interests behove us to get along and still differ in our views. So there you go. This columnist chooses national interests over narrow and parochial definitions.

Political parties have rivalry and it comes with the territory to exchange barbs. What is wrong is deliberately fomenting hatred. On Facebook, everyday pages like zanu-PF-UK experience people that demand to see the faces of the administering team saying they want to identify/"unmask" them so that they can deal with them in the "New Zimbabwe". This is some way of political intimidation.

But lest the reader is also keen to know, the writer of this column is one of the five people that updates that page. So the problem is not that anyone is worried about the threats. It is the mind-set of trying to intimidate those that have chosen a different pathway to the one you have chosen. It is the idea of trying to target certain people because of political choices. That should be politics of yesteryear. We can't continue to brew and foment political hatred.

Clearly some of the hate speech that is witnessed in Zimbabwe is meant to create a herd mentality among those that have failed to wrest power from Zanu-PF. But without a positive progressive message hate speech does not translate into votes. At best it dispirits some people and results in apathy.

Some have said that zanu-PF signature slogan which ends with "pasi . . ." Is an incitement to the extermination of someone? But others have also said that the MDC-T slogan in which they call for some one to be lifted and smashed on the ground (Simudza mudenga, rovera pasi bwa-aa hezvoko!" is catalysing violence by simulating a very atrocious physical smashing up of an opponent.

Whether one or both or none of these slogans do indeed legitimise violence is for the reader to conclude. What is clear is that whoever is a subject to them goes into some kind of trepidation.

There are some in the party of the columnist, who at some point, suggested that the subject of the "pasi" should be a system rather than an individual. An example would be Pasi nemasanctions, pasi neWestern hegemony and so forth. But this was a sacrilege to some and the names of people came back again. Pasi neChamatama, Pasi neMDC. Does this poison our political atmosphere?

Our political differences should be differences of ideas, vision and ideology. There is nothing personal about it. Leave children out of it. The translation of verbal violence into physical violence is one of the easiest transits which happen seamlessly. Let's circumcise our lips and detoxify our politics. Pasi nepolitical violence.