Ours Is A Smouldering Dream: A Good 33 Years After Zimbabwe Attained Its Independence

23 December 2013

By Reason Wafawarova

The experience of post-colonial peoples across the world demonstrates that every single day is a struggle for emancipation, and by necessity post colonial people must align themselves only to the principle of social justice, never to the bright colours of the heroism of the foregone era of decoloniality, even if by dint of history we have founded our post-colonial future on the glorious achievements of the colonial era liberation movement.

What post-colonial people need are not liberation heroes wielding the flag of messiahship or heroism. Rather they must of necessity be armed with an ideology whose political line is consistent with the fundamentals of social justice, and this aberrant phenomenon where anyone wishing to impress in Zanu-PF colours tries so hard to appear like a war veteran speaks to high heavens of how post-colonial Zimbabwe has been arrested by the power of history.

The offbeat bragging about proclaimed heroism emanating from one's participation in the liberation struggle must be seen for what it has become — a desperate frisk for legitimacy by a reprobate people so smeared with the stench of irresponsible political behaviour that only the past can endow them with some semblance of nobility. In fact we have this dissimulating of the war veteran by parsimonious characters that one now wonders if the nobility of the role of liberating one's country is not facing the threat of being adulterated to outright mockery.
Most of us have scars from the liberation struggle, even if those scars were just the traumas of hiding in caves as Ian Smith's aerial bombers terrorised our villages, as this writer did a number of times in 1977 and 1978, or the losing of those two precious years to the war in as far as academic life was concerned. However these scars must be no licence to besiege post-war youngsters with mundane demands for coerced respect or submission. That makes no sense.

Zanu-PF is not and cannot be reduced to a museum of the glories of the colonial era liberation struggle. It is the governing party of a modern day Zimbabwe, and as such must seize itself more with the post-colonial call of duty than this vainglorious adoration of a past that should belong to us only in our long gone colonial context — as a historical heritage, not as the ultimate solution to the unlocking of today's challenges.

The liberation struggle has three dimensions: the anti-colonial dimension to which some of our heroes are stuck with an unbridled pride that they so wish all of us to appreciate as a matter of national security and national interest.

There is also the anti-imperialist dimension to which some of us have committed our souls and lives at a significant cost, and finally the class struggle dimension so avoided by most of our post-colonial governing leadership — not least the acquisitive revolutionaries among those fronting Zanu-PF leadership today.

Zimbabwe like any other country mirrors the broader image of the world — a place made up of two antagonistic camps: the camp of the exploiters and the camp of the exploited. We cannot condone or exalt the black exploiter as a measure of improvement from yesteryear's white oppressor, and those black wealth accumulators who believe a black camp of exploiters is holier than a white one must by the wrath of the public be put in their place.

In principle every liberation struggle must be a struggle in the interest of the people, and it should form part of the camp of the exploited. But what happens when powerful politicians who have become so addicted to acquisition hijack a national struggle to the extent that they even believe it makes sense to privatise the ownership of the struggle itself? It is a tragedy.

The ANC in South Africa and Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe are some of the liberation movements smitten by the scourge of patronage politics — all to the detriment of the people's cause. Like HIV/Aids corruption reigns unabated in Zimbabwe, and one can surely be forgiven for declaring that under the current Zanu-PF set up corruption like AIDS has no cure.

Indeed President Mugabe has called for zero tolerance to corruption, but you do not fight AIDS by simply declaring zero tolerance to the HIV virus, especially when the temptation and opportunity for infection remain tolerated by the public.

Zero tolerance to corruption can only be implemented through arrests and prosecutions, and this writer sincerely understands the President's call in this context.

Corruption is killing the country at will, and that is why an obvious move like firing the notoriously inept ZBC management was considered an earthshaking political miracle. In any normal situation any Minister that choses to co-exist with the nonsense that had become the ZBC would be forced to resign, and the political miracle we must be all marveling about is how the former Information Minister managed to survive four and half years presiding over such unacceptable malfeasance.

The struggle against neocolonialism is not enough to keep us from bondage, even this self-inflicted bondage at the hands of our own liberators — or their sidekicks in the notorious game of protection politics or patronage.

This column has a moral duty to bring to its readership the feelings of the poor of post-colonial Africa — the poor of Zimbabwe. It seeks to explain the thinking of all those who in childhood or in mere adult naivety once proclaimed fanatically that the colonial liberation struggle was in itself a force with which colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, racism and class exploitation could be confronted, and that the land revolution and the indigenisation policy were a rumbling force akin to a volcano that would in no time sent poverty packing from Zimbabwe's homesteads, that way enriching every patriotic Zimbabwean while condemning to the fires of hell the injustices of an evil world under the grip of imperialism.

It is now December 2013, a good 33 years after Zimbabwe attained its independence and that good old feeling of certainty, enthusiasm, promise and hopeful satisfaction has been replaced with a feeling of despair, disappointment, failure and utter frustration.
We had a seething dream for emancipation and it is this dream that led so many of our young people to the battlefields against Ian Smith's diabolical forces.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.

 

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