The Sunday News
Charles Dube
The Sun Will Rise Again
By George Mujajati
I HEAR the echoes of Joseph Takundwa’s words from last week. Here is a man who fails to recognise his potential as a person. Here is a man resigned to fate. Remember fate is a force over which human beings have no control. According to Takundwa the status quo should remain as it is. Blacks are destined to submit themselves to the whites. Black people should always work for white people, not vice versa. Takundwa says: “A black man ruling a white man? Never!”
He uses an emphatic never to show helplessness. He does not believe that blacks can extricate themselves from the jaws of suppression. Whatever the whites say goes. It is a fact that, “we were born black and we will die black”. None denies this clear reality but that should not be used as a passport to give in to subjugation as stated last week. Takundwa misunderstands himself when he says, “We would never change to become white. Never!”
Fighting for independence did not mean that people wanted to change the colour of their skin to white. This is shallow understanding of independence.
This is an artificial point of view of independence. Self-determination and freeing oneself from the knuckles of oppression does not call for physical transformation from one person to another. This is thinking to the extreme and it shows foolishness of the worst kind. Of course, Joseph Takundwa lived in a world of dreams.
He dreamt the Rhodesian army winning the war against the freedom fighters. He believed in all the propaganda brought forward by the Ian Smith government. News bulletins and newspapers clearly showed that the Rhodesian army was winning that war. Hundreds of “terrorists” were being killed every day. He believed that the terrorists were going to be wiped out before the end of the year. That was the make-believe or appearance versus reality kind of situation for the so called “terrorists” (freedom fighters) were actually winning the war.
When Takundwa realised that the Rhodesian soldiers could just not win the war he suddenly found himself trapped. He felt like the flying bird that has finally reached the solid end of the sky. Takundwa always thought about a black book he heard about which contained names of people who were to be killed for being sell-outs. But that never came to be. He spent some time living in fear that freedom fighters would hunt for him and kill him. But that never was.
“Birds of the same feathers flock together,” goes the old adage. In a war situation we find common tendencies among various people. We find sell-outs as we have shown of Joseph Takundwa. Today we find great pretenders or impostors like Nyati, who also took advantage of Takundwa’s gullibility and used him to his advantage. Nyati pretended to be a great supporter of the ruling party after he had accumulated a substantial amount of wealth through his activities during the war. What activities did he do except to betray the freedom fighters?
Was it not a case of running with the hares and hunting with the hyenas? Nyati makes it clear that he is a turn coat. He is moving with the times.
Obviously, he has not been going with the freedom fighters or the majority as he states categorically: “I am the chameleon with the fangs of a cobra. I have successfully shed off my past and put on the colours of the new rainbow!” You trust people like Nyati at your own peril. He pretends to be innocent like a chameleon yet, he can be venomous and deadly like a cobra.
He lets us know how he did it. At independence he had already accumulated a substantial amount of wealth clandestinely, I suppose, since he does not disclose how he managed to do that. He immediately bought his way into the party. All this is corruption, why not follow the set channels? He would take every opportunity to donate to the ruling party. He would also seize the opportunity to sing praises about the “consistency and infallibility” of the leader. He once went to the extreme as he publicly equated the leader to the second Christ! He claims that was a master stroke. He also made sure that such praise songs would reach the ears of those who matter. What is evident here is that Nyati is calculative. He presents himself to people who matter most in the party so as to get quick recognition.
Nyati’s plan worked well for him for within a very short space of time, the party and his name, Nyati, had become one, both in body and spirit. There was nothing about party policy and ideology that he did not know. Overnight, he had become the guru of the theory and practice of scientific socialism based on the theories of Karl Marx and Fredricks Engels. He became the embodiment of the spirit of socialist transformation: Down with Capitalism!
Down with Exploiters! Abasha Imperialism!
Nyati got deep into politics through with a somewhat tarnished image. The slogans as the one stated above became his trademark. His efforts were not in vain as he was appointed an executive director of a very important government department that dealt with “social services and social transformation”. He opens up to say that he opened a lot of “briefcase companies”, companies of no repute which supplied his department with all the goods and services that it needed.
He boldly declares that it only takes a fool to fail to grab a chance that presents itself in such broad daylight. Within a year he had become a multimillionaire. Nyati owns up to corruption of the worst kind. The 1982 drought presented to him a unique opportunity which he grabbed with both hands. Together with his friend and home boy, Solomon Taneni, whom he had supplied with the tender to supply grain to drought stricken areas of the country, he worked out a fool proof method of overcharging the government.
He was able to harvest a profit of about five million dollars from the drought. By the end of 1984, Nyati was already thinking of retiring from government so as to go into full-fledged business. That was the time when his friend who was a top government official introduced him to the “Sisida” car racket scheme. We will leave the “Sisida” car racket for the other time. But, I want us to be clear that Nyati is selfish. He was on the side of the whites during the war.
Observing the change of the tide, freedom fighters winning the war, Nyati quickly changed sides and sneaked into the majority and pretended to be party of the people’s success story. Money is the root of all evil. Nyati uses money to buy his way into the ruling party even though he was fighting against the same people he pretends to love and support now. This is typical of what happens in all wars and success stories. There are many people who associate themselves with success stories and successful people.
There are many people who claim relation with a successful leader. People like Nyati are dangerous. Remember what he did to Joseph Takundwa. He used Takundwa to kill his own daughter for ritual purposes. We find him pretending to work for the government yet he was syphoning money for personal aggrandisement.
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