The Sunday News
Meluleki Moyo
OWING to persistent ego and greed, humanity has always had a disdaining and usually fateful tendency of sacrificing individuality, morals and quality of life for disruptive if not totally destructive grand collective projects.
Biblically, this manifests in Genesis 11v1 when, thinking they had all it took being impatient to wait for God to give them a name, people came together and said, “Come let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
God condemned their project and set out to frustrate their efforts, confused them and they stopped building the city. The project, commonly referred to as the Tower of Babel, was abandoned and fatefully, accounts have it that its top was burnt, the bottom swallowed, and the middle was left standing to erode over time.
With an identical political vocabulary and united for the purpose of just opposing anything, even noble, added to being traditionally tormented by demons of scattering, the opposition parties in their multiplicity, lost patience and refused to rely on God to give them a name.
Regardless of most of the member parties being splinters from the original Movement for Democratic Change and each other and living in some political Utopia, speaking with one vocabulary and united for the purpose of opposing, the Movement for Democratic Change — Ncube, Movement for Democratic Change — Tsvangirai (inherited by Nelson Chamisa), Tendai Biti’s People’s Democratic Party, Transform Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe People First, Zimbabwe African Union — Ndonga and multi-Racial Democrats came together on a short-lived project, as they set out to build a fragile and soon to be abandoned political tower with shattered dreams of it rising up to the state house.
“We are now the MDC Alliance, guys,” they whispered to each other. Haunted by ideological poverty, the ambitious political bloc was bound to nowhere. Dripping with the original MDC violence DNA, the alliance lived up to expectations within its short lifespan.
The deceased alliance will forever regret the day it put the seemingly young and restless Nelson Chamisa on the driving seat.
Evidently working in cohorts with the retired but surprisingly not tired former president Mugabe who took us from Asante Sana to other perplexities, the plot was lost.
Probably oblivious of the Zanu-PF-rural electorate politically cosy relationship arguably dating back to the liberation struggle when the rural folk worked hand in glove with the liberation fighters, lessons from the 2018 Harmonised elections have it that the now tried and tested political kindergarten, riding on false popular appeal and a simulacrum of tolerance, thought the entire Zimbabwean electorate voted on social media, but alas!
With no parental guidance in sight following the sad departure of Tsvangirai, (May his soul rest in peace) the political orphan, a jack of all trades yet a master of none, went to extremes. He even politically bet with his own sister! Some brothers though . . .
Lest we forget, this political dreamer called Chamisa is not alien to inflicting excruciating pain on fellow countrymen. Added to painfully shutting out Thokozani Khupe from his political dreamland, flashback to 2015, alongside Advocate Thabani Mpofu, Nelson Chamisa was part of the legal team that represented ZUVA petroleum in a landmark Supreme Court case whose judgement left employers at the mercy of capitalism intoxicated employers. Subsequently, this triggered mass job terminations and worsened the plight of the workers around Zimbabwe, yet he hailed from a party founded on workers’ grievances.
Hence, having sown seeds of violence and division, perpetually looking up to the heavens for some ideological rain and with no mitigation measures in sight, the MDC Alliance has been confined to the dustbins of political history. Its top has been resoundingly rendered invisible, its support base dwindled and its campaign machinery left exposed and confined to the dungeons of irrelevance over time following their bumper harvest of thorns from the 2018 electoral season.
Realising they had lost the plot and afraid of political darkness to plunge them for the next five years until they try their luck again, the political ghosts drugged and incited innocent and seemingly gullible youths to take to the streets in protest, even before the final results were proclaimed.
As smoke, mayhem and pandemonium engulfed the Harare CBD on Wednesday, the actual perpetrators, some who claim to be ordained man of God, sat in the comfort of their affluent homes, watching the ugly and heartbreaking scenes on TV, and probably sipping the finest of Whiskies and mockingly playing the slain Lucky Dube’s That’s The Way It Is:
Did I not raise my voice high in love for you?
I was running like a fugitive all the time
Dodging bullets in the streets I was there,
Risking rejection from my own people,
Now that you got what you wanted, you don’t even know my name,
It’s so funny we don’t talk anymore!
Sadly, gullible innocent lives were lost.
But the voice of the people is the voice of God
In their totality, Zimbabweans went out and spoke. This they did in the full glare and multiplicity of observers and political party agents, agents who at the end of counting at their respective polling stations, signed the V11 forms in acknowledgement of free and fair elections which went PFEEE!
The bumper figures in favour of the ruling Zanu PF party left the justice bae with no option but to proclaim to the world in the early hours on Friday:
“Now therefore, I Priscilla Makanyara Chigumba the chairperson of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission in terms of Section 110 (3) (f) (2) do hereby declare that the votes received by Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa of Zanu PF party are more than half the number of votes cast in the Presidential election, therefore Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa of Zanu PF party is therefore duly declared elected President of the Republic of Zimbabwe with effect from August 3, 2018”.
@melumoyo86
