Dear Emerson Mnangagwa

Dear Emerson Mnangagwa:
Free and Fair Elections!

“What is your name, Skull?”

There are a couple of years at school I want to talk to you about. There is the year we got a really difficult insufferable Head boy at school. He was too strict. Even if you were friends with him, if he found you on the wrong end of the school rules, he will book you for punishment. And I had my full share of these bookings and detentions. Yes, admit I was a difficult student. But what I also realized, even for those who were never punished by this head boy, they still didn’t like him. Deep down all this insufferable strictness, he was driven by a streak of cruelty. He wallowed in cruelty. The students finally realized this about him. Even on issues where the whole student body was fighting for against the administrators, he always found his side with the administrators, yet his other job was to represent the students to the powers that be. So the students ended up resenting him. The students liked his deputy who was a far better person, wished the deputy was the one at the top. This deputy treated us as adults, respectfully. But the deputy never got the chance to lead us. With the end of this head boy’s term of office we selected another head boy. What the old head boy had made us feel was that office was against the students; we distrusted it, so that this new head boy took off with a student body that already despised the office he was taking over. We didn’t give him time to adjust and show us what he was all about. We distrusted him straight off. We shut him out, we resented him. And he responded exactly like the previous head boy. He punished us. He blocked us. He harassed us and we wished his deputy would get a chance to lead us. But the deputy can only become the head boy only if the head boy leaves his office during his term of office. At school that was highly unlikely, so we had to figure out a way to deal with that, and moved on with our lives.

Emerson, you are the second head boy at this school we are enrolled in for all our lives. This school has a name; Zimbabwe. Emerson you have inherited an office that we despise, that we don’t like because that office was made a monster by Robert Mugabe. It is so offensive to us. Robert used that office to punish us, to kill us, to maim us, to destroy out economy and country, to make us feel like we were nobodies in our school. It’s only him we had to listen to and obey. We learned to hate Robert and the office of the president. Don’t be fooled into thinking we only hated Robert. We hated the whole system, the whole government. We never wished for you to take over like we wished those deputy head boys to take over at school so many moons ago. You were Robert. You are Robert. Here is a tale I want to share with you, Emerson

Some time ago, not so long ago there was this man who felt he had shadows he didn’t understand. He told himself there were shadows that spoke to him when he was asleep but never really grasped what they wanted him to do. And then they started to speak to him even when he was awake, when he was listening, when he wasn’t listening. He heard those shadows speaking deep inside himself. The voices of which were an amalgam of light and shadows flickering, sizzling him with restlessness he didn’t understand or know how to deal with. They told him he had to go to a Well by the end of the village, a disused, dumped Well, where naught kids circled, around the close of the day, singing, calling the old prophet to come and awash them with gold. There is a story, a legend that the Well had dried in another lifetime with the death of an old prophet man of this village when he fell in this Well and died in this well. It was said the prophet man had tried to retrieve a blood tree (Mubvamaropa tree) box that was full of gold. So that, even when the villagers managed to retrieve the dead body of this prophet, it was thought the Well was cursed, yet some thought a ceremony dance around this Well helped to soften the restless and hunger inside souls, a hunger of wealth. These kids were propagating this folklore, though playfully, but in this old man the voice kept whispering to him to go to the Well. It told him that deep inside the Well there was definitely a Mubvamaropa tree box full of treasures. The voice told him to go the Well and excavate this treasure trove.

This man, deep in his dreams left for the Well. He knew he had to listen to this voice and free himself from its restlessness. He had to go there to find wealth for himself and his people. In this night the moon was a bruise on the skies, it emitted reddish wounds of flowers of light, the whole night was in bubbles of voices beckoning, wishing him to keep going, to keep moving, and he could only obey these voices. He couldn’t make himself stop. He got to this Well in the early hours of morning. It was surreal, he searched around for the rope the people of that far off time had used to excavate the old prophet man with and he found it was still there, waiting for him like a left over log to use to light up a fire in a world of no trees. He took a small stone and threw it into the Well to measure how deep the Well was; by noting the time it took for the stone to hit the box of treasure. The thumb hit of this mubvamaropa tree told him the rope was long enough to reach the bottoms. He immersed the rope with a hook attacked to its end into the Well. He felt it hit something and he felt it hook it. He starts drawing it out. He felt the weight. He knew he had finally rounded up on his voices. The expectations he had for the treasures. He kept drawing it until something hang on top of the Well’s mouth. It had the shape, not of a box. He reached his hand to touch it, to see it. He was asleep so he couldn’t really see it with his shut eyes, but he used his fingers to feel it, to see it. His hands closed on this object. He touches two holes on its top; and a opening below them belies a mouth. He knew it was the skull he was holding. He asks this skull,
WHAT’S YOUR NAME, SKULL? But the skull didn’t answer him. He was angry and like Moses throwing the tablets on the ground in the bible, he threw it on the ground. He cried to the space above him
WHERE IS MY BOX OF WEALTH, WHY DID YOU SEND ME THIS SKULL?
Nothing answers him. He takes the skull in his hands, he looks at it again with his fingers, and he felt a song in his heart telling him it was the skull of his mentor. The skull looked familiar, like his head on his body. He touches his head, he felt he was touching his mentor’s head. So he looked at the skull again and tears begun flowing down his face. The front porch of his brain knew he was himself in this skull. He was the skull. He asks the skull again,
WHAT IS YOUR NAME, SKULL?
Only he heard his own voice askance
He took the skull and put it on his head, and it fitted him well. He knew he was the skull.

This is how we know you are the skull. It is your story’s life, Emerson. Don’t ask us how we came to know of this, we only know! This is how we know you are Robert. This is how we know we are dealing with Robert’s skull. No, Emerson we are not going to give you time. No, I have no reason to think you will be different from your skull. Don’t forget we know you were with Robert at the Well trying to excavate the box full of wealth in Marange, and that you helped him make us hate the office of the president, the government. Don’t be surprised when everything you do or touch is going to create noise, anger, bitterness and displeasure with the people. What are the sounds for but to hear what isn’t there. It’s your voice you will be hearing. Dear president, our apologies, we will chop you off the living skull on your head.

You are Robert Mugabe. It’s you who hurt us for 37 years. It’s you who destroyed the country for 37 years. The country is empty. I think if I were to go home now and knock on the Zimbabwean blue skies, I would hear the hallow sound of my own empty hands penning this missive in all that Zimbabwean blue. It’s you who stole the elections for 37 years; it’s you who burned down our homes, maimed people who were against you. If you think I am fibbing go to Kwekwe today and ask the people there what they think of you. Ask the Kwekwe people who burned down Blessing Chebundo’s home, who killed a number of activists in Kwekwe. Emerson, it’s you who killed thousands of the Matabele people. Despite the fact that you are always saying it’s not you who led the genocide, ask the Matabele people who killed their families. They know it’s you. The whole country knows it’s you. Yes, we know they were a lot of people involved in that madness (Sidney Sekeremayi, Perence Shiri, Solomon Mujuru and the army, Edson Shirihuru, Kevin Woods, Menard Muzariri, the CIO people, and you Emerson, Robert Mugabe, his deputies and cabinet, even Chiwengwa… all these a closeted plausibility of chihauhaus, come back Joshua Nkomo!). Oh, Chiwengwa can as well say what you saying too, to excuse himself since he was at the 1 Infantry Brigade in Bulawayo not the monster 5 Infantry brigade based in Kwekwe that Perence Shiri lead as they grounded down the Matebele people. Chiwengwa provided support to Shiri’s 5 Brigade. You two can say you were not there when you were there, but we all know it’s a lie. Even a wind takes with it evidence of where it has been. Violence is a product of systemlessness as much as a pillar of lootercracy, Emerson. Who did the target killing of the politicians and leaders of the Gukurahundi? It’s the CIO. Who tried to kill Nkomo as he skirted out of the country in woman dressing, running from your thugs the CIO who were on his tail. You were the minister of security, Emerson. Tell us why Mugabe fired you, if you were not involved. Don’t think we are such fools we will accept you didn’t know what your subordinates like Kevin Woods were doing in the ministry you led. Don’t think we are dump goats we don’t know the army couldn’t have done that work without the intelligence knowledge it got from the CIO. It is the CIO that helped the army extirpates the Matabele. You were the head of the organisation, you crushed them in your hands, you are covered in blood that dripped from the people to become empty shells, like testimony. So don’t tell us lies, no amount of lies will ever make us think of you differently as your skull, Robert. A caterpillar out of botulism does not become a butterfly. Stop trying to persuade us you are clean, prove it. Come out clean. Tell us what really happened in Matabeleland. This experiment is to see who has been killing us, Emerson. The experiment is about a lot I don’t know, the experiment is about silent things talking in the dark of now. You are Robert and the Zimbabweans have no engagement rings for you man; they can’t commit themselves to a thug boss!

Emerson, it’s you who killed your rivalries and Robert’s rivalries in the ZANUPF power soaps we have come to expect over the years. It is you who has pushed out those who blocked your ambitions to one day succeed Robert and come to terms with your voices inside you. It’s you who we blame for the killing of Solomon Mujuru, Learnmore Jongwe, the generals, the political commissars (Movern Mahachi, Elliot Manyika, Border Gezi), and everyone who was against your ambitions and your skull, Robert. It’s you we blame for everything that Zimbabwe is; oh we might as well blame you for global warming! Let my pen reveal what you can’t revel to us and if I am free to speak loosely, the predator could easily be revealed. It’s you who forced Robert to take farms from the whites, you who gutted the white people. Don’t think you can fool us now when you say you have changed, that you now want the white people back. An eagle no matter how much it cleans itself is always black. Do you know each pattern is different, like a snowflake but none is as cold as you are? It’s you who pushed Robert to send our soldiers to the DRC to fight a war that has never benefited the generality of Zimbabweans, but rather depleted every foreign currency reserve the country had and pushed us into inflation. It’s you who looted the DRC of its diamonds and made billions out of that Lootercracy. Ask the United Nations, they know your money was from blood diamonds you looted in the DRC and at that Well in Marange. It’s you Emerson who stole elections that the opposition had won in 2008. Wasn’t that you we heard who told your skull that he wasn’t going anywhere, and took the whole country to ransom as you played with the work of our pens until Chiwengwa’s gun ruled us again? Emerson, it’s you who helped create the securocratic leadership style that now subject us to poverty, it’s you who re-created the monster Joint Operations Command that has run the country, de facto basis since year 2000.

It’s you Emerson who took the country through a coup just a few weeks ago, and hauled your skull to the ground. You opened your big mouth which can only be described as that of a comic book character, gulped everything down at once. Didn’t we hear you from foreign lands asking the skull what his name was? Didn’t we hear your voice in the voice of your chummy Chiwengwa asking Robert who his name was whilst his distance from our streets disagrees with us, by imprisoning Robert in his beautiful blue roof casket? With frightening speed, actions took hold of Robert in a matter of a few days. Didn’t you repeatedly lie to us that it wasn’t a coup, didn’t you say it had no name. You called it operation restore order, you called it a coup which was not a coup, you called it capturing thieves surrounding the president, so why did you capture the skull back into your hands and took it to be yours, why did you fit the skull on your head at the end of the coup. Yes, there was so much love lost between Robert and us. We had buried our love of Robert so many years ago like that village had buried the body of their prophet who had died in that Well. We supported you, we danced around the Well with you Emerson, and we were little children looking for something we didn’t know, whittling away at the silhouette that had kept us captive so that the night of his resignation we all might sail into drinks and talk and the shared adulations of this small army of joy, the vibrations, the vibe, buzz, bizz bizz, the fear, and in the morning the sweepers would follow the parade march. But you hijacked that dream for us too. Even though we danced with you we knew the Well was not clean. We knew you were not clean. We supported you because we felt it was better to deal out one monster at a time. Now Robert is gone, don’t think we are fools to think his Mugabeism is buried with his body, no. You have his skull on your head, Emerson. We still see the shadows. We know ZANUPF is a group of look alikes/ dress alikes/ think alikes/ looter alikes, near insanity Bono rock music look alikes who concocted to distance themselves from their boss when the people called it quits, and your ZANUPF supporters even know you are interchangeable, and that when these look alikes are kicked, other Robert Mugabe look alikes will take over like allusions of the Mussolinis eating Ethiopian checken (chicken) bones in the form of the Mengestus. You are just a new leader of an old sect. We even know you are more dangerous than Robert; that Mugabe’s imaginations have hybridized into monster crops in you! Yet it’s better to deal with the head of the snake than its tails we have been doing all along. Now you are out on the open.

We are going to fight you until you are gone too. We are on you, until we eat your footsteps in our sleep. I cast out a proud call to you Emerson; we will swallow stones, grasses, poison, bitterness, molasses, stuff our mouths with emptiness, depth and height for the next few months until the elections. Emerson, we will consume birds, beasts, locusts, monsters, fish, glue, sadza, wind clay salt, ripples…, until we become this for you, stone and only stone, until we push you out too. We know it is good to be alive, even on a leash, to test our reflexes. You are from ZANUPF. So as far as we concerned we gave you 37 years and you rundown the country. 37, 37, 37!. We are not going to give you another 37 years to ruin us further. We have waited too long for uhuru, and the georgics of waiting beyond now are time as a torn cloth. We know you have nothing to offer us. We know you can only resort to buying our votes in the next 8 months or so until the elections. We see you have started the buying us programme. You think it impresses us that you have refused to use Robert’s chariot of fire, the limousine, gold plated with black gold of the blood he bleed from us over the years as he paraded and cocked all over our roads. Of course your emergence demand a makeover that would seem to impart change, simplicity and maturity, perhaps a whiff of Africa’s present darling, a magufulication! If you think it impresses us you cut back your congress expenditure from 8 mil to 2 mil. If you think we have bought into those promises you made that you are now born again and should be absolved for killings you did under Robert, and that you now want the white people back, now that you have the crown, making it seem as if it was Mugabe only who was wrong all along. If you wanted this done you should have done it yesterday. Everyone knows Mugabe was against farm invasions, tried to fight you and the goons to leave the farms. If you think we can easily buy into this fluffy thing that you now want to compensate the whites for taking their farms forcefully, with what money, Emerson. I will come to that letter. If you want it done right now put pride aside man, and tell us the truth and pray to space. Achieve a better form of purity, Emerson! If you think we have bought into your lies that you now want to resuscitate the economy you destroyed, that you have started by cutting down the number of ministries in your government, and if I may ask you, why is there some process toward militarizing the government. This unassembled cabinet is waiting for its own loot in this mineral rich country. I might come back to that, no promises. Emerson, just know that all that you have done or purporting you will do doesn’t impress us. First thing first, Emerson!

We have an election next year. Make that right, first of all. Give us a free and fair election. Win or lose it fairly, then if you win fairly we will start trusting your good intentions. Rest awhile; we are not even there yet, not even with a fair election. There are sins you have to apologize and pay for, for humankind’s swelling expenses. I will come to that later. Let’s stay on the elections now. I said we know all these promises were to buy us into believing you now care for us as we toward the elections. Whereas your skull gave us food and agric implements, sometimes used panties to cloth up our open business, you thought you could better your skull by offering us what we have clamored for all along to fill up our flesh, thus to flesh up your skull too. I said we know you are not the deputy head boy of this school. You are Robert, the head boy!

On free and fair elections here are the areas I want you to right. Fire Rita Makarau and her gang at ZEC. We know she is the dust that clung around the skull you have in your hands. She is Robert’s lapdog, she stole the 2013 election for Robert, awarding him and his party ZANUPF the two thirds majority they have now. Just think of it. How could your old decaying skull get a two thirds majority in a village that so hated the shadows of your skulls. No, she has to go. The second issue is ZEC should be totally independent, chosen by civil society institutions like the Judiciary Service Commission, or be chosen by the Parly, with equal representations of parties that constitute our Parly. Not by the executive, not by the immediate players, not by oncoming players. The Registrar General is another public office that needs to be removed from your tentacles. Let’s have the Parly overseeing that one too, or the judiciary.

The next reform area is on the military and security establishment. Zimbabwe is now a blank terrain, surrounded by two armies, one wields a gun and another, a pen. We want the army off our political processes. Tell Chiwengwa and his power grabbing goons to go back to the barracks. Tell those monsters to focus their energies on military issues, not political processes. We need a law that makes it clear that its treason for the army to enter our streets to temper with political process, payable by jail sentence. If they have nothing to do at the barracks, they should help in the construction of schools, clinics, roads etc. If they are tired of mooching off our taxes, if they are tired of training without a fight to engage in, export them to the world over, the world is full of strife. It would earn us foreign currency. Employ them to farm the millions of hectors that remain uncultivated every year and grow our agricultural industry and other industries. Apparently those goats are employable and there is a lot that needs to be done to build back Zimbabwe. They should leave politics to politicians, law to lawmakers and judiciary, theirs in military. We don’t have a war in Zimbabwe. Nobody is killing the other in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has next to nothing possibility of degenerating into a war situation like Somalia which your chummy used as the cry call to enter the streets. We are civilized. We don’t kill each other in Zimbabwe. This is not bloody Central or West Africa! Emerson, the military needs to be reformed, and those who have nothing to do should be retired. The heads of the military have to be retired too. We need new thinking, fresh perspectives in this organisation. We have over 30 000 active soldiers- that’s too much for a country as small a Zimbabwe, a country that has no possibility of generating a war. What do we need all those soldiers for? There is nobody in the SADC region who wants to attack us, we don’t even have any territorial dispute with any country in the SADC. And on top of that we have over 22 000 reserve soldiers in the form of war veterans, and these have been used to destabilize us, destroy opposition parties and make Zimbabwe ungovernable by messing with our political processes. Retire all these veterans, too. They have no use. Those who want to be politicians, let them do that on a personal level, not using our taxes to rape us further. We need a small highly technological and advanced force that focuses on their mandates in the constitution. It’s no longer a game of numbers nowadays. Look at American wars for the last few years. They are winning fights without deploying a lot of soldiers on the ground. Cull this lot. We need about 15 000 soldiers for the size of Zimbabwe. Still on security reforms, the police and civil security establishment needs reforms. Their mandates are to protect the civilians and uphold the law. They should move from the police state that they are now and have made Zimbabwe to be, into a people state police. The CIO should focus on country security not politicians security, or party games that they are involved in.

The next reform area I want see done before the elections is on the media. Open up the airwaves. Licence more players in this important field. Make this “fourth organ” of state strong and independent. We need new independent broadcasters. For us to still have 1 TV station, 37 years down the line is an insult on us. For us to still have only 6 national radio stations that are all controlled by the government, one way or another is an insult. For us to have very few local community radio stations is simply bad. Open up the airwaves and leave the journalists and media people to do their jobs in a free and fair environment, not to report according to party lines. ZANUPF is not Zimbabwe. I know that because I didn’t see the memo that changed Zimbabwe to be ZANUPF republic. The media’s job is to serve the people not politicians. Allow free and fair reporting on the national broadcaster, give competing parties into the next year’s elections fair share of airwaves time. Leave the internet alone. Leave people to express what they think in these internet social platforms. Let the information be shared in a free and fair way. It’s laughable you have a ministry that focuses on that. I wonder what flimsy ministry you are going to create next, the ministry for love!

The other reform area is on the commission that deals with constituency demarcation. The job should be given to an independent organisation, independent from your executive power mongering hands. The constituency delimitation and demarcation should be overseen by Parly or judiciary appointed organization. We know how you have used this exercise to give yourself and your party unfair advantage over opposition parties. This is how you got two thirds majority in the Parly now. How did I come to this when I am not a statistician? When I realized the impossibility of counting to infinity the millions in Zimbabwe, I have decided to vomit these numbers. It’s a big flat joke to think that a city like Chitungwiza that crawls with people from every hole, over 1.5 million people, will have 5 constituencies, yet a district like Gokwe will have the equal number of constituencies. And this capital should be damned, Harare, which has plus 2 million people has not more than 20 constituencies yet provinces with fewer people than Harare have more constituencies. Don’t lie to us that three major urban centers (Harare, Chitungwiza and Bulawayo) with more than 4 million people combined together would not even have a fifth of the constituencies of Zimbabwe. 4 million people is almost a third of Zimbabwe’s population. Protest all you want, but there is a grain of truth in these vomits. Let the statistician illuminate this beyond mathematical doubt, if you want. We know you and your party have used this organisation to give more constituencies to rural areas that have more ZANUPF supporters more constituencies than those that are predominantly opposition. Get your power mongering hands off this cake, Emerson.

The next port of call is the judiciary. I find a judiciary that legitimatizes a coup suspect. A coup is a coup, that’s the only name it is known by; otherwise we might as well call it a soup. We all stumbled as we were struck in the shock of it! But a simple truth is soldiers in a constitutional democracy can only come into the streets in times of war or civil emergences, not to right a party. Chiwengwa was clear why he decided to enter our streets from the beginning of it. He wanted to clean up the mess in the ZANUPF party, period. What happened later with major general SB Moyo is known as sanitizing a wrong. I have said it before ZANUPF is not a country. Why didn’t he enter the streets to right the MDC when it had power problems? We have an election to sort the country, not the army. And the sick thing is if a judiciary is blind to how the law works, how are we going to have faith in such an institution like that. Chiwengwa is not the commander-in-chief of Zimbabwe Defense Forces. Mugabe was the boss. So for Chiwengwa to come into our streets it had to be signed off by the president. It was Mugabe who had the right to allow the soldiers to invade the streets and break down government as they did. It doesn’t matter if it was for the right causes or wrong causes. It’s a wrong precedent the army and courts have set. What if the same army decides, in the future, to invade the streets again without your consent and hold the country by the gun? It’s dangerous to have an army that doesn’t operate under the country’s constitution. There is nothing legal about that coup. So we need an overhaul of our judiciary. We want them to be independent of the executive levers and authority, to be able to safeguard our constitution against the monster that invaded our streets. The military that is bend on instituting what they want on the electorate and a conniving ruling party and cowering judiciary. Make no mistake, Emerson; a day will reckon when someone in your party will use the same army to hold you at gunpoint like they did to Robert and call it a coup that is not a coup, and with a stupid judiciary like the one that has just sanitized the coup this army will remove you from power too.

The other reform area is to do with the electoral law. Let’s have an independent justice body that deals with the election contestation issues. Don’t forget every time there was a dispute this judiciary has just sat of the cases that the opposition had brought to the courts. None have been dealt with; some never saw a court date. It took the judiciary 5 years to the next election to not decide the 2002, and 2005 election disputes, and then the cases became null and void as another election became due. We need an election body made up of representatives of several facets of the government, country, parties, experts, civil society, NGOs, local authorities, religious groupings…, and these would decide on elections matters and do so before a president-elect is inaugurated. There is no free and fair election in subjecting the electorate to a president who has won a disputed election.

The last issue I want to touch on is of allowing observers and monitors to observe and monitor our elections. Allow all those who want to come to observe to come. Allow and protect party monitors to monitor elections without fear for their lives. We want to see an election where the opposition can be able to deploy monitors in areas like Muzarabani and Uzumba Maramba Pfungwe without fear for their lives. Without which, don’t lie to us and your cohorts of ZANUPF supporters like SADC and AU that the election has been free and fair

These are areas I want to see tackled before elections next year. As you can see, Emerson, it’s a lot of work that needs your focus, rather than trite issues like you have refused to use the limousine crap. We know ZANUPF party is a master at deflecting people’s views to buy into an illusion that things are now fine to win over their vote. Those are only trapdoors that don’t get us home. Mugabe’s regime was our knowledge pond: we are graduates revolting. Code to the core, Mnangagwa you do so move, always you do so move man, to maim us, and now you do so move, you move to soothe us. We know this gimmick; we know this thing about limousine, of catching the said to be thieves is just useless noise. You are hiding from the election reform issues, cradling to your old ways, hidding, stealing, thuggery... If you are really serious about growing Zimbabwe again, do the reforms first and give us a free and fair election for the first time. If you win as I have noted that before we will support you to the hilt as you rebuilt the country you destroyed. It’s a museum of things for us to forget too, always afraid we might forget the distance we have travelled, the trouble of stopping now. Oh we can’t afford to stop now. There are no stops in these roads of gravel. The angry gestures over our former authorities and current authorities in the letter are only means in the roads we are travelling in. These roads of gravel we are travelling in will lead to freedom of the constructions our dreams. We are in phases of tilling and harvesting, November’s rain fire lures us to our freedoms.

We will accept you on one condition! First of all declare what you have, and how you got it. Tell us how much you looted from that Well in Marange. Everyone in your new government should do that too. If you can at least prove to us what happened to the 15 billion you found in that Mubvamaropa box in the Well in Marange, then we will believe all this noise. I said first of all pay back what you stole, show us what you benefited from through corruption, push your cabal in the ZANUPF to declare what they benefited from through corruption, and then the whole country will do likewise. Otherwise this is just a sad excuse you are using to blindfold us to steal an election with, and when you have won then you will revert back to business as usual in something that is continuous, alooter continue. Oh don’t confuse democracy and alootercracy, even if they both end in –acy…no, not that! Stop it, subjected!

Another gimmick you have narrowed on is the land issue. You know it is an emotional issue. You have promised the white people you are going to pay them for stealing their lands. Who is going to pay for that? I never got a piece of land from that exercise, never stole land from the white people, never benefited from it, in fact the bulk of the country didn’t benefit from that, why must our taxes be used to pay for what we never benefited from. Rather the exercise has made the whole country poor. Those who looted the farms must pay the white people for the loot. We are waiting for the land reform audit. Those who have more than 1 farm, they must return these to the white people they displaced to loot. They are practically hundreds, if not thousands of these farms that can be returned to their rightful owners before you start making us pay for your looting. How can we Zimbabweans be made to compensate white people to allow people like Robert Mugabe, Edna Madzongwe, Shuvai Mahofa to keep more than 5 farms each, farms they are not even using. Don’t forget when you arm twisted your skull to enter the farms and allow your goons to displace the white people you lied to us that you will each only get a farm, not 5, not 14 for one person. If you want to earn our respects, stop subjecting us under taxes we didn’t benefit from. It’s us people who have suffered from these stupid policies like the land invasion. You meted poverty on us. And we have become who we are and learned how to cry and produce material evidence of our sadness. Don’t think we will be patient as you continue subjecting us to this callousness. We are wild now, we are not afraid of your tanks. Look, we are saying, “we are sad”, we are hurt enough, we won’t accept more pain. You and your band of crooks benefited from the land reform, so please payback the whites from the rent you have accrued from using those farms for nearly 20 years. There is no excuse why you can’t payback the white people what you stole from them. We see this for what it is. It’s another election gimmick.

In the meanwhile open up industry, clean up the mess you created with the indigenization programme. Chunk that law into the Robert Mugabe dustbin. Create attractive investment opportunities environments in the country to allow industry to grow. Create free tax zones in the country. Use the Silicon Valley/ Shanghai method that has made China and the USA super rich, allow investors to invest in tax free heavens, especially companies that employ more people, thus this will cut back on unemployment rates and boast government tax base. Focus on creating solid banking structures in Zimbabwe, stabilize the currency, and control the financial sector. Clean up the mess at the mining sector; make it secure for investments and also secure our taxes from the mining sector. We can’t afford to lose another 15 billion dollars. Make tourism and services industries grow. This is an easy cash cow as they are fewer investments involved to make money in this sector, than in industry, mining and agriculture. Clean up our image in the international community. This will encourage more tourists to visit. We have enough tourist attractions sites to make Zimbabwe a world class tourist destination centre.

As you can see there is a lot we want you to do before we warm up to you, and you don’t have time or our patience. Of course we will tolerate you for next few months problematically; don’t forget a hungry educated pen is both a gun and pen. First of all, and I repeat it, give us free and fair elections!

I think I am a no one or nation and this outrage is justified, there is no purpose of nation if it doesn’t allow a frame where happiness zigzags with beauty.

This letter has two distinct cries. One is called Chiduce, an omen of good, and the other is Huitreu, which is extremely unfavourable! Hope you have heard both cries.

Thank you, Ndinotenda, Ngiyabonga

Dear Zimbabweans

Dear Zimbabweans

Bucking the predeterminism trend
“Don’t lose it before you fight for it”

Just yesterday (20th of November) I was talking with my friend on the implications of the situation, now unfolding in ZANUPF party, Zimbabwe, where we see all along that ZANUPF was using the country to play its own games, to right their messy house. We also talked of the likelihood of their preferred candidate, Emerson Mnangagwa, to really embrace democracy and accept defeat when he is defeated in the upcoming elections, will the army now accept the will of the people and let the opposition form a government. He said NO. I felt the same too. It’s ZANUPF we are talking of here. My friend’s reasoning doesn’t stem from the fact that Mnangagwa would have been defeated. He said he would steal the elections; its business as usual, the ZANUPF way. He said already the new registration system for voters in the upcoming elections, BMV system has already been tempered with to make ZANUPF and Mnangagwa win next year’s elections. How, he has no idea, but in his mind the ZANUPF has already stolen the elections. The opposition will not win is a predetermined thing in him. My cousin feels, like a lot of Zimbabweans, it is better for us to concentrate on removing Robert Mugabe, and for Mnangagwa to take over and we should give him time, even when he knows Mnangagwa is not good for the country and will still keep the status quo, that he will steal the elections. My cousin doesn’t want to think beyond removing Robert Mugabe and installing Mnangagwa. He feels Mnangagwa will all of a sudden change and will have the country at heart. He doesn’t think the opposition should be given a chance to win it. It is predeterminism in him that the opposition will still fail against Mnangagwa. My question is; why we are not pushing for what we really want in Zimbabwe? Why are we accepting these as eventualities as if this is all that we can have, and be? Why are we still scared of ZANUPF, to the extent that we still give them our right to determine where we will go in life.

Zimbabweans have gone through the worse process of instilling democracy in Africa, maybe in the whole world. We have fought against one dictator for over 37 years. He was a wily, mischievous, smart, and formidable polarizing figure. No one didn’t even think he will be around for over a week after the army had taken over, fighting for his presidency. The more he stayed the more he dug deeper, the more a lot of people got confused, demoralized, and gave up. After he refused to resign several times, and read one of the most wily speeches ever, telling us to go to hell, the morrow day everyone begin to question the whole process, where it was going, whether it will succeed in removing Mugabe and Mugabeism. We had doubt, doubt with doubting the process of bucking the predeterminism trend. He had to go; either through the purging process, the negotiation process, the election process, though I have to admit, I preferred the election process, but going he has gone now through negotiations. We have lost a great chance to make it worthwhile for the country if he had left through the constitutional processes, that is through impeachment and the election route, than negotiations. That way we could have jailed him later for the crimes he committed on us, and demand that he returns the money he stole from us. If we were smart enough, in the next elections, around July next year, and there was a clean sweep to power for the opposition, then we could also have jailed every other thief and abuser. We could have demanded they be tried for destroying our country, for breaking and making broke the country, and this would have acted as a good lesson to those whom we would have elected to lead us tomorrow. For this status quo to continue, for ZANUPF to continue bleeding us, for us to keep failing to arrest back the country from these crooks is a complete failure on the part of the Zimbabweans and their future.

This letter is a call to every Zimbabwean out there to choose which battle to fight. They are many battles to fight in Zimbabwe now, and most of these do not get us out of our current quagmire. The first battle is to stay alive, to find food. The second battle is to fight against political expediency which the majority seems to fall for most of the times. Some had chosen their battle to be only about removing Robert Mugabe from power, only that! And these were mostly ZANUPF people and a number of political expediency undiscerning people. The others had chosen to fight the battle to install Mnangagwa into the ZANUPF and the country’s political arena. And they also succeeded. Some have chosen the fight to be about the next elections, to fight to have opposition parties take over from the corrupt ZANUPF. And there are millions more who don’t care who wins. They are already convinced nothing will ever change, they are losers of a fight they have no guts to even try to enter. This group consists of the largest chunk of Zimbabwean voters. Here is a simple math to work with. Mugabe has always accumulated around 2 million votes in the past election times; March 2008, June 2008, July 2013, and they has been small incrementals to his tallies for the last 10 years. The Tsvangirai MDC’s, at his strength in 2008 March election, got over 2 million votes too, but in 2013 they went down to 1 million votes. It’s a very simple phenomenon. Most of the voters, young voters who voted for the MDC in 2008 left the country during those tumultuous years and most never returned back. They are no longer counting to the MDC votes, rather if you subtract that, that’s why we see the MDC has lost votes. Everyone knows that most of the ZANUPF voters are old people who have a deep connection with the liberation struggle, and these didn’t leave the country in the last ten years more than the MDC Well of votes. The MDC and ZANUPF both together have polled around 4 million votes in the last 2 elections they competed. If you check the census on 2012, Zimbabwe has still pretty much the same population as in the last decade, meaning they were at least 2 million people who were either registered but didn’t vote or who never even registered to begin with. Usually, in any country that is politically literate, the voting numbers are more than half of the country’s population, and that means our figures of voters should be around 7 million. But a lot don’t bother. They are defeated even before they voted

I know for a fact in the 2013 elections, in my street, Svosve road, in Zengeza, Chitungwiza, those who were registered to vote and really voted were just a third of the total number of people eligible to vote, but they didn’t bother to register let alone to vote. Ask any voter in Zimbabwe, they will attest to this. This story predominates in the whole country. This is problematic. These are people who don’t care where the country goes. These are the people ZANUPF use to stay in power. ZANUPF has made the election process and voting unattractive and painful to these people, thus preempting them of their right to participate. It’s the same as with when a child experiences pain, he may develop different personalities in an attempt to bottle up the suffering. The pain is delegated to one of those personalities which he calls bad, so other characters can be free but neither is evil. Undoing these generations of misaligned educational policies of the democratic process is impossible without an unshakable sense of self, a clear purpose and a lasting commitment. This country they call home has devoured them such that their personhood (agency) is misaligned with relation to spaces of competing orders. Had these people been voting, ZANUPF would be long since gone. The connection between identity, democracy and space would have been purposeful, and the exploration of it (as theme, motif, and trope) in this text is methodical in that we carefully craft these unsettled figures on both competing and complimentary spaces to engage the ever-present theme of predeterminism and constitutional exercise of rights. But place and location has had the ability to devour these dwellers literally and metaphorically. Thus then in this literally text, I propose space as text, a signifying theme that can be both liberating and debilitating. And once these Zimbabweans begun to see themselves as not only the owners of Zimbabwe, but also the protectors of it, they will develop a positive sense of self, and will continue to contribute to the development of the country as a whole. Thus we can spirit-rise our dreams together. This experiment is not about our root systems, but about the space between us that has kept us from achieving on our dreams.

Then among the people who used to vote, and still vote for the opposition, some have given up hope, some skip voting sometimes, some discourage others who want to participate, some are still confused who to chose to fight for in Zimbabwe. this is made all the more difficult by the fact that Zimbabwe has ubiquitous numbers of parties and politicians in the opposition fold, with each dreaming to be the next president; Morgan Tsvangirai, Simba Makoni, Nkosana Moyo, Ndumiso Ndabengwa, Welshman Ncube, Tendai Biti, Lovemore Madhuku, Joyce Mujuru… the list is longer. This has always made it difficult for the voters to decide which leader to vote for to remove ZANUPF. These leaders profess to be against Mugabe, but if you burrow deep why they can’t find common ground to work as one entity, you will realize they are driven by personal ambitions, ambitions to enrich themselves, ambitions to be the next Mugabe, ambitions to be kissed by the populace, and rarely ambitions to right the country.

The cult of personality has also destroyed the country and Tsvangirai and Mugabe have been the high priests of this cult personality politics in Zimbabwe. These were the drivers of this cult personality. Mugabe is now out, but that won’t stop the ZANUPF from creating another figure head, and it seems the new cult will be built around Mnangagwa, and he will become a huge clothe of red-blackened cloud that will continue to shipwreck our ideal country and memories. Going forward baring illness, death or these leaders being deposed from their respective parties, Tsvangirai and Mnangagwa will be the new leaders of these camps, the opposition and the ruling party respectively. These two individuals will continue telling the story of Zimbabwe. We will see soon, when we start again into the elections mode, the ZANUPF supporters will all coalesce around Mnangagwa whether they like him or not, the opposition supporters will break the opposition vote into 20 plus groups and personalities, thus Mnangagwa will win it. If we are really serious about removing ZANUPF, it’s time for us as voters in the opposition, who constitute the majority of Zimbabweans, to take it into our hands and chose which battle to fight, which leader to band around, and give all our votes to this leader whether we like or do not like him or her. It’s getting clear now that for years, even though the biggest chunk of ZANUPF supporters had fallen out of love with Robert Mugabe, they were still voting him to power and that stayed ZANUPF in power. They moved beyond the personal preferences and feelings, and coalesced around one figure and have all benefited with that. They are very few people in the ZANUPF who would say they never benefited from the party through its 37 years in power.

Some got farms, some got jobs in the local authorities, central government and national organisations, some got scholarships to study, some got housing stands, some got government contracts, some got goodies like food, farming and household stuff, some got farms and land such that hunger had taken time to translate itself into anger against Robert Mugabe. They consumed all the food they got, mismanaged the farms, destroyed the government and local authorities they lead etc, as if by accident, without desperation or a mind to conservation for tomorrow and then when hunger had settled in they folded all their fingers of blame at several of their leaders into one pointing finger against Mugabe. Then they started as fog of war against Robert.

But those in the opposition parties have fared with little and saw their country being bled out by the ZANUPF people, thus they suffered worst than their counterparts in ZANUPF. Yet the leaders in the opposition politics could always get donor funding, and abuse these for personal enrichment, and are well-off, but their supporters are poorer. But all of us have fared badly as compared to ZANUPF leaders themselves. I feel it must now stop to be about ZANUPF supporters vs. Opposition parties supporters, we all have suffered. The ideology of Us and Them among us people must end. The fences and gates cannot keep realities separate, the us/them binary fails because the two contrasting worlds are interlocked in a collective experience. We have to achieve the bifurcation of the humanist spirit together, from philosophy, ideologue, identity, economy, education, nationhood, etc… into reality, politics, science, art and poetry... We have to transcend the us/them binary thereby offering ourselves room for collective affirmation and existence beyond the control of party signifies and identity signifies like race, class, gender, sexual orientation… in simple terms this letter serves to galvanize everyone who is against ZANUPF hegemony to work together for the better of our future. This is our country too. You don’t need to have gone to war to be a citizen of a country, there is no requirement like that in our constitution. We were all born in Zimbabwe, we grew up in Zimbabwe, we have stayed in Zimbabwe, we have all built Zimbabwe, we all love Zimbabwe, maybe differently- it’s all our country. It is time to wrestle it away from those who think they won it by a gun for themselves. Let’s band together and fight the new Mnangagwa cult.

At least a number of the opposition figures have put aside their differences and rose above party lines to create an alliance, the MDC alliance. Maybe the best hope we have of going forward is to go with this alliance. Let’s band around this group. If over 4 million voters who do not vote for ZANUPF in every election period all vote for this alliance, then we are going to kick ZANUPF out. Its narrow minded and shallow to think Zimbabwe’s problems were caused by only one man in Zimbabwe as the idea that seem to be propagating. The whole ZANUPF cabal is responsible for destroying this country. It’s better for all of us who don’t like ZANUPF to do this and wait for what happens after winning the elections next year, than to say the elections are already won by the ZANUPF, and wait for ZANUPF to continue to plunder our country. The army boss has said it succinctly.

In the last 5 years there was no development that happened in Zimbabwe other than ZANUPF political soaps and shenanigans. He said he is afraid of Zimbabwe degenerating into the lawless and strife torn that Somalia and the DRC have been. I know he was speaking of the security issues and the possibility of a war here, but make no mistake, with ZANUPF still leading us, we are sure going the DRC and Somalia route, only not in security issues but also economically, if we are not worse than those two countries already. It’s your job and mine to see that we don’t go this route. ZANUPF is not the answer to our future. It’s ZANUPF we should be giving the feeling that they have lost before they even start voting. For goodness sake they had 37 years to build Zimbabwe, why do we want to give them more chances, to do what now. We are now the poorest country in the entire world, don’t we feel ZANUPF has achieved enough by sentencing us to this throne.

Wake up Zimbabweans, let’s have thinking hands like a musician’s hands and vote for the best that gets us dancing after elections to the music of our pens. You attest to be the most literate people on the continent, but you can’t seem to know how to use your education the right way. Why are the most literate people refusing to exercise their right to vote? Why are the most literate people still getting used by ZANUPF? Why the most literate people don’t seem to know what the best way for the country is. Why the most literate people seem to be the most stupid and confused in Africa and the world. What literacy is that? Let’s embrace political literacy and activism, let’s tell every Zimbabwean who has every right to vote to go and vote. Let’s decide now the way forward to our future. Let’s decide what we are going to feed our families with, the schools, the roads, the water, the sanity etc… that we want for our families. When you don’t vote, you condemn yourself to failure. This is your right. Exercise it.

I don’t like Morgan Tsvangirai. Tendai Biti and Welshman Ncube, I don’t like the MDC, but I will still vote for it. I have to position myself as a subject in a multivalent spatial matrix to measure democratic space and practice here. This merit attention; let’s reorder reality at every level for ZANUPF has disrupted our understanding of personhood. The MDC is still our best chance to remove ZANUPF. Zimbabwe politics is still about who has the best chance to represent your needs, not who we like or love. This is our democratic space. Here space denotes more than a marked room or a static enclosure; in fact space finds itself most complexly understood in time, moment and movement. Go to the elections with this attitude and win it for the country, and then we can talk of other opposition parties and the future after voting ZANUPF out. It’s as simple as that. You can look for yourself there is no N’anga (fortune teller) up my sleeves.

Makudo ndemamwe angarwisana pakudya asi papfumvu anorwirana (Baboons’ togetherness is that they fight each other over food but when in danger they fight together)

I am one baboon up for a fight against danger, join me!

Thank you, Ndinotenda, Ngiyabonga

Don't be used again!

Dear Morgan Tsvangirai

Don’t be used again!
“A ball that is a ball will always be a ball.”

Inanimate objects move only in dreams and fables. In this letter I am going to move an inanimate object, that is, a ball. The soccer ball is round and made so that it will roll on the ground in a fair way, and will travel a bit slower in air than other balls like the rugby, tennis, cricket, and American football balls. The soccer ball’s life is unenviable. It travels more that any other game ball, it is overused as it only stays in the hands of players few times, mostly protected by the goalkeeper, if the goalkeeper is not bouncing it off the ground trying to figure who to kick the ball to. It is kicked for 90 plus extra minutes, it is thrown tens of times, handled several times, it travels the pitch more than all the 22 players plus substitutes combined, it is hit, it hits players, goal posts, the ground, gets bumped. And at the end of the game, it is thrown off, left alone until the next game. It become an object at rest, it stays at rest until acted upon by these players again. The 22 plus players, their coaches, the supporters go out, get more out of the work of the ball; limelight, awards, respect, community etc... As the games continue the ball build the players, the coaches. The supporters are happy. Are you happy? Morgan, I feel you are the ball that the country’s players have used each time they play their games! I am sorry for insulting you but I have to write this narrative. It is a narrative that oscillates between the gentleness of the falling showers of rain and the wears of hope after disaster, bringing haunting truth and beauty pulled through memory. It is a timbre of memory of sound, these memories are layered: a sound, smell, a sight: a kind of remembering, a witnessing!

Look at the beautiful years and work you did over the years at Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. How you transformed a small government organisation into a formidable foe to Robert Mugabe’s government. How you went toe to toe with Robert Mugabe who had goons behind his back to protect him against you. For years you fought, you were the ball the workers, the politicos and industry played. Yes, it helped you to form the MDC, and this accorded you a lot of respect in Zimbabwe, so are some other balls in life, like a baseball ball that Jack Robinson, and the basketballs that Michael Jordan etc…, populised. The world over became aware of you, but the games never stopped on you.

You entered another game, and the people of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and his party were now the players. They played you for years on end until you finally had a chance to retire, to wallow in glory like Michael Jordan’s balls. No, not those you are thinking of! You won fair and square the March 2008 elections false ushering in a brand new year at a time when we believed that sort of thing, in scheduled change. Some still say you won enough to form a government, but one of the goons of these players refused you rest. Mugabe’s goons pushed you back into the game and the changed the game on you and other players. They started playing American football, were using the American football ball whilst the people were still using the soccer game ball. I told you the soccer game ball travels slowly in air than the American football ball. And the American football ball is built in way that it bounces off or rolls off unfairly on the ground. Also the American football ball can be thrown and kicked willy-nilly, as long as it is going forward. Also Robert now didn’t care about you, the ball, but the people. American football players rough it more than the ball, and they play rough brutal games on the people who were still playing their soccer ball that you are. Robert cheated you by killing players of the opposition. And then grabbed you into his hands and told the world they had to recognize him as the winner since he had taken you hostage. He told the world he would give the people a few of his substitute players. He gave the people a few ministries to butter their world with a reason why he had to keep you in hostage. The world accepted him as the winner of a no contest game and awarded him the trophy. At the end everyone had to accept these conditions. Morgan, you were so gullible to allow Robert to put you in his personal collections/trophies counters in his Munhumutapa offices. To the outside world, to his opposition, the people; he told them he is taking good care of you as you rested.

But that was all a lie’s white truths, so black, Morgan! He played games with you in his Munhumutapa offices, games he had played and won against Nkomo, whilst he legitimize his wins. He allowed his first team players he kept in the government to play more games on you. And those players he hadn’t kept in the government were set on the people, to turn the people to supporting Robert. You were played left and right until Robert Mugabe felt he could revert back to the soccer game with the people. Until you had cleared the bills and the financial issues that had accumulated whilst Robert slept like a disease and an ill-fitting cure. I mean until you had righted the economy for him in the GNU years, until you had helped him mend his party that was in tartars after the March 2009 elections, until he had won more people to his side.

The people and Robert decided to create a new constitution for their future games on you. But what you never realized more and more of the people distrusted and lost faith in your abilities as a leader. They begin to question the linesman; referee etc, saying the ball they were using had been overused, tempered with by Robert during the GNU years. What Robert did was to deflate you, kill everything that made you strong, and removed air from you, you became floppy and flappy. He allowed you to make stupid flops like those woman escapades, the corruptions of your councilors..., and made capital out of the flops.  All these you did because Mugabe had tempered with you. You became a operatic version of a crow, a blue jay figure skating in a blue custom flying only when the wind blows, and the wind was Mugabe. So when the people decided to the reverse fixtures in 2013, Mugabe trusted you more than the people. The people decided to field a weak team, didn’t even prepare for the match, and were busy scrutinizing you and what Robert had done to you. Robert used this combination of a flattened ball and the bored weak opposition to win the 2013 match, and discarded you as he formed his government with a full team and reserves, taking back all those position he had given the people during the GNU years. You simply didn’t mount to diddly!

He continued with his games in his team. This time he decided to push his team, each against the other. He created a new game association. He created new camps, and the leaders of these camps were Emerson Mnangagwa and Joyce Mujuru. Since he was tired and ageing he decided to rest a bit and created a part-player, part-referee, part-boss on the game association, in his wife. She played the games on his behalf, against Mujuru and Mnangagwa. Robert rested. Morgan, you also rested and nursed your wounds. This new game was vicious and was played with one gun(Robert) in the hands of this player, Grace Mugabe. The other players had no weapons. She played the game of elimination. Grace used the AK47 to kill of half the players and Mujuru in 2014 and replaced these with her favored younger players, some says for sex payoffs, and these were set on Mnangagwa. Mnangagwa was knocked out. What it did was to make everyone realize Mugabe was a ruthless bastard. Grace killed everyone, killed the government, killed the party, and killed the country. Yet Grace and Robert underestimated the power of Mnangagwa as he went scuttling, hiding, it was said he went to a land of strength to the east, and in the eastern lands he returned back wielding battalions and battalions of goons that descended on Robert. Morgan, I know whilst all these things were happening you were now fighting a different game in your party and personally. This game is dangerous too as it involves biological invasions deeply inside your body and party. You are fighting an illness, how it is wearing your body down, gnawing second by second at your will, pounding suffocating pain , surfing away a mountainside, eating you down until escape into the pitch becomes the only lover you want to hold now.

I have heard you are back at work, Morgan- hanky panky all over, strutting like a cock. You have been asked to come back to the pitch again. Those players, Robert‘s team and the people have missed kicking you around. They are telling you that you are the best ball ever. I am surprised you have forgotten you were recuperating, you were not even fit enough to lead your own party, have barely tried to connect with the electorate, to win back all those people Robert pushed away from you during the GNU. You have adopted more new balls in your party to strengthen your chances of not getting picked as you were ill, but they have picked you again. Are you fit to be played for another 5 years by these players who now seem to have multiplied since Robert open the can of worms…, I mean his armpits. Morgan, know that they are going to play you rough for the next 5 years. Know that this time they will kill you one way or another; know that by the end of the 5 years no one will bother about you ever and your new balls. Yes, they you want to legitimize the whole charade and their thuggery of a game they have been playing through you. Yes, you will right the economy for them again, the country, the party etc.., and then they will discard you off for the last time. Nobody will touch you again. This is what they did to Ndabaningi Sithole, Edgar Tekere, to Joshua Nkomo, to everyone the people had loved. A big question on my mind is, are you genuinely in opposition to Mugabe or it’s just been a game you played on us. A boy who caught a falling star in his hands, who liked the way it purpled his palms, deepened the shallow tracks of his lifeline. Why do you keep trying to save Robert and ZANUPF from disappearing into oblivion?

Morgan, you must have said no and refused to enter the GNU in 2009, that was used by the army and Robert to stay these thugs and thieves in power. Understand it is the army that has been playing Robert and you all the last 10 years. It is the army that told Robert not to resign when you beat him fair and square in 2009, and cooked a situation whereby a GNU was a process they used to right the party they so died for. What did the army tell you when you won. They told you Zimbabwe is for the gun, not pen. What did they tell Robert just some few days ago? The country is for the gun. Only those who fought in the liberation war have the right to lead the party and government. What makes you think the army will change their tone when you win. Now see how they have deposed Robert, their leader because he refused to follow their rule. You are nobody to the army, Morgan. You are just some sponge going to be used to stay the goons in ZANUPF. You were stupid to enter the GNU when at that moment you had Robert and the army by their balls. It’s a different kind of balls I am talking of here! In the process you defrauded people of their right to see Robert off forever.

Now you think it’s a different game. It’s easy for you and your other balls to be fooled by the situation and think Robert, Mnangagwa and the army are done. No, they want to buy time to sort their messy home. They have realized this game of bullets they were playing in their party has destroyed the party. What you are going to do is to allow them to defraud the other team, the people, of their right to vote these thugs out of the government in 8 months time. Like I said before, 10 years ago, refuse to enter this charade of a game. Let them finish each other off. Let them destroy the party completely. Stay safe and wait for the elections which the constitution guarantees. Tell your other balls to pump air up, and go back to the people and win them over.  Focus on your party, believe it is broken, and fix it! Prepare your party for the elections next year. Demand for elections to be done next year as per the constitution of the land. Refuse to enter the GNU. I am afraid you would contract a wretched disease that Nkomo contracted- inflamed patriotism of the cerebral membranes, syphilis of spirit, a patriarch of dead organs. They will absorb you into the ZANUPF party and our blessed dream we fought for multiparty democracy will revert back to one party state of ZANUPF/MDC. Insist on the constitution. Now these thugs have messed what you built during the GNU, now they want you to help them stay. You know what’s in the basement of ZANUPF- only an idiot would go down there, and you know equally well, though you believe you are not in fact an idiot, that you are going to go down those stairs again. Tell the other team to stay stronger, tell the people to stay stronger. It’s only a matter of 8 months, and then they can help you clean up ZANUPF, Robert, Mnangagwa and the goons, off our streets. The truth is they are not going to allow you to win after you have helped them stay in power for another 5 years. Do the skies ever open out to transparency. For goodness sake, you never went to war.

Siya vaurayane nokusunguna (leave them as they kill and jail each other). Leave them to implode. Don’t forget its these who destroyed the country and MDC, and when they had succeeded in destroying it, in last elections, why didn’t they ask you join them in government like they are doing to you now. After all it’s the ZANUPF that is dead. Zimbabwe must be fixed through elections, not through building back ZANUPF. Leave Constantine Chiwenga and Mnangagwa to create their own governments and they will be null and void in 8 months time. Beyond that they won’t be recognized by the constitution and SADC. Leave Mnangagwa to create his power hungry cabinet, and leave Chiwenga to continue with a coup that is not a coup. I didn’t say don’t support any moves that do away with the monster Mugabe, no. Support them but don’t be fooled into joining them in the proposed GNU. The letter might seem to be saying you shouldn’t help them destroy themselves, but know that always in accounts of anything, much is left unsaid in order to make what is retained more capable of being focused: don’t enter the GNU! I have cried out louder so that silence won’t betray all that we have worked so hard to avoid: death of multiparty democracy in Zimbabwe. They have only 8 months of constitutionality, and beyond that fight them, get help from the international community, force them to do elections. You will now win; their games have restored faith in your supporters to vote them out. Those goons are done and dusted. Now recuperate and if you fine, go to your party and lead them to the elections. Engage the people. Tell them you have their backs now. Show us how much you have changed. Because if ever we agree to return to your world again, it would be on the condition that you did pass through panel beating, and you are now wiser and changed. Please, stop this tomfoolery. Don’t be used again. Don’t lose this country again. You are our hero. You are endowed with great destiny, which corresponds with the level of your epicness and with the aid of the gods, your success is inevitable. And a character all the more heroic as you are is more inclined towards mastering the forces which lie outside the scopes of your naked human personality like the strident Jeremiahs of the Old Testament. Rule the day, Morgan. Leave the night to Mugabe and his goons, the ZANUPF. All the pain we were subjected to for the last 4 years will be for nothing as we help you build back the goons. You are the bridge that connects us, that should wait to connect us to consciousness again. The elections are around the corner!

I know you and your balls are power hungry like Robert and his thugs but know that posterity will simply laugh you off as a fool who stumbled on a good thing and messed it. I know all these prohibitions in this letter will only be mere echoes in a void, they will fill nothing. Your heart is set on joining the charade again. You gullible hands don’t feel my epoxy melting; will sign off to another GNU, unfurling the illusion again. But I really feel sorry for you, and that’s why I had to write you this letter. Posterity will blame you for allowing power hungry monsters to steal their future. You will become a giant that was destroyed by hubris, like Othello, Macbeth, Kane etc…. your response is predetermined. It is trained like B.F Skinner’s rats. This argument in this letter has everything to do with morality, you have a choice. Try to make people you know happy, this time. The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals. You have no mandate to be party to this. Stay out of it and save yourself and your party.

I am the ball they played more than you, now I refuse to be played again

NB. I want to encourage fellow Zimbabweans to fight this new game in town, to refuse to become party to it, to continue persevering and fighting for the next 8 months to elections, to organize themselves for the vote, to not embrace another shortcut that will be a long way to freedom again. 8 months are not as harsh as 5 stable years followed by another 4 harsh years to another election. Reject this nonsense! Say NO to the monster that the GNU is! The hard work of moving forward must be done as our grief becomes the new homes where we will live until freedom’s breath of winning the elections inspires every house, every song, in every street in Zimbabwe.

Thank you, Ndinotenda, Ngiyabonga

Identification with right!

Dear Robert Mugabe

Identification with right!
“Enough is enough, what is enough?”

I am on the pyre of my thoughts, burning down, deep inside me, walking on broken boulevards of deterred dreams, trying to find voice to my soul that burns in this fire. For some time I have avoided using my pen to deal with this burning, now I have no choice. I have decided to use this paper and pen to write you this letter, Robert Mugabe- to live in defiance again. I would like to ask everyone else who reads this letter, every Zimbabwean, everyone who loves Zimbabwe, every friend of a Zimbabwean to join me in this journey. I know this is too small a ripple in a sea of deliberations, but I offer this as one teaspoon at a time, draining off the ocean. Let’s write letters to Robert Mugabe, to the army, to the Zimbabweans, to the world, and let’s post them on social network sites, news media sites, let’s exchange these letters with our friends, or families, our colleagues, the world over. Let’s use this literary form to protest against Robert Mugabe, our jailer. Let’s be confident that the religion of resistance will always triumph over the technology of repression. Send me your letters too; I will post them on this blog. Post your letters into the wind, and let the wind carry forward your messages to the world over, to the creator. Don’t worry about which language to use, whether you feel you are not a good writer, whether you feel no one will ever read your letter. Just know that even a rock dreams that it was a mountain, that’s why we have stone heads on top of mountains. Instead of reaching outward to change the world and scare off, look inward to experience it, to change yourself, to create authentic power. Just write down what’s in your heart; just write it to yourself, just read it to yourself. When we create authentic power again and again, we become authentically connected and powerful. It is an opportunity for each of us to process the anger and pain we have against Robert Mugabe. The streets are ready for us. Let’s use this process to heal and find peace with ourselves again. It is a chance to love ourselves again, and find faith in this country we call home, which Robert has made his playground. Trust the grate’s fire to again allow songs in Zimbabwean homes!  Let’s speak out!

Human beings are meaning-oriented beings. We tell stories that explain what is really happening in our lives. We are sick and tired of you, Robert Mugabe. It’s not that we didn’t love you. It’s just you couldn’t love us back the way we did you. It’s not that we will never love you again, it’s just that we stopped now. Yes, years ago we loved you, looked up to you and supported you. We thought you were brave, wise, and beautiful, we believed in the ideas you flipped off like gospel, but there is now nothing to love about you. You have gotten long in the tooth. You have taken our love and shitted on it, on us, day after day, for over 37 years. You urinate on us and call that trickle-down effect. All that we have known in our body politic was you as our leader. We were born when you were already our leader, we grew up with you, we became adults, started families, went to college, started careers, only to realize that you had destroyed everything that we fought for, everything that we thought was our country, our future. We have become old men and women with you as our leader, fighting you! Your greedy hands, and the equally greed hands of time moving mercilessly onwards. Leaving us with nothing but sorrow, disappointment, anger, remorse, guilty… So what’s good left in us to love you with?

We fought you for years and years and you still continue subjecting us under your vicious rule. Haven’t we paid enough for allowing you to liberate us? Haven’t you taken everything that we thought we also fought for? Haven’t you made us villains in our own country, refugees in our homes, and paupers in our land? Haven’t you driven us out of the country? You say you fought for us, so did you fight this war to punish us later? Did you fight this war for yourself and your family? We have worked, slaved all our lives and continue to slave under your punitive yoke so that we would earn a living and fund you with our taxes which you use to feed your family; money you steal, money you misuse, money you bastardise, money you use to bleed more from us, becoming an expert in minding your own business. Robert, we have carried you on our backs like lice, whilst you drink our blood dry the way the sun’s light bakes dry the earth. Now you have drained our arteries and veins. Robert, we plead with you to leave our political landscape. Just leave us alone. Let us go, please. We will be fine without you. We don’t need you. Robert, an active partner look for the empty lands inside and between him or her with their partners to fill it up, thus without filling it he becomes a worse, more isolating kind of partner!

Robert, you have destroyed and killed everyone against you from the moment you came into our world. You pushed out Ndabaningi Sithole from ZANU-PF helm, and over years you told us Ndabaningi was a sellout and tribalist. Robert, you killed Hebert Chitepo, Josiah Tongogara, Leopold Takawire. I know you say it was the Rhodesians who did that but this is what we have learned to know you do so well. Everyone is wrong, everyone is a tribalist, everyone else shouldn’t be the president except you and your family, everyone is guilty except you, not even until they are proven guilty! Isn’t that your ideology? We know you pushed out, Nkomo; you killed over 20 000 civilians in Matabeleland, and swallowed Nkomo back, killing him bit by bit for over 12 years. How sad he must have felt all those years working with you his conqueror, and when eventually the creator took him back, how happy he must have been to finally rest far away from your dark painful shadow. You called him a dissident when you fired him. You told us it’s him who was wrong; who was plotting to start a war against you and had arms cache hidden at a farm. You told us it’s the Ndebele people who were wrong. You killed them in thousands, in broad daylight.

You pushed Edgar Tekere out of ZANU-PF. You were so shameless to push out the one who brought you into the party, the one who gave up his position to accommodate you, and over the years you insulted him and frustrated him until he died a broken man. You told us you were the one who was right, that Tekere was a tribalist. You destroyed Morgan Tsvangirai, insulted him, beat him up, call him names like Chematama, jailed him, and attempted to kill him several times. You killed, maimed and pushed millions of Zimbabweans out of the country who supported Tsvangirai, calling them traitors. You killed Tsvangirai’s wife, and thus, you killed him. Ever since, he has been a pale shadow of the Tsvangirai we loved and fought for, the last two decades. You killed, maimed and pushed out the white people, taking everything they built for centuries, destroying industry and agriculture. You called them names. You told us they were not Zimbabweans. You extruded them out of the country. Are you Zimbabwean yourself? Is your father Zimbabwean? Why didn’t you leave too? Everyone knows your father was born in Malawi, so which Zimbabwe were you talking of? Does being Zimbabwean only equate to blackness! You haunted Joyce Mujuru out of ZANU-PF after you had succeeded in killing her husband, Solomon. You burned Solomon to ashes. You told the whole nation Mujuru was plotting to kill you, to remove you from power, was visiting N’angas, and we still wonder how you got to know that if you were not doing the same thing. You made us be laughing stock. The world laughed at us, that we still visit N’angas, that our leaders still take advice from N’angas on how to run a country. You succeeded in haunting her out.

You have killed, laughed and ridiculed everyone who stood up against you like Simba Makoni, Ndumiso Ndabengwa, Lovemore Madhuku, Tendai Biti, Learnmore Jongwe, Welshman Ncube, Nkosana Moyo, Herbert Murerwa, Ray Kaukonde, Dikamai Mavhaire, Shuvai Mahofa, Didymus Mutasa, Andy Flower and The Zimbabwe Cricket Team, The War Veterans, MDC, Trevor Ncube, Jeff Nyarota and several Newspapers personalities, ZBC, Jestina Mukoko… the list is endless. You called all these counter revolutionary forces, you told us they were tribalistic, were plotting against you. You made yourself a victim every of these moment. You called us to support you against these. Are you the country, Robert? If the whole country seems to be plotting against you, there is something wrong with what you are doing. Why don’t you just leave the country so that people won’t plot against you? You have made Zimbabwe your little garden. It’s up to you which tomatoes and cabbages need harvesting for food. You have made Zimbabwe to be the poorest country in the whole world. You have made Zimbabwe a laughing stock to the world. Is this the Zimbabwe you fought for? Is this the Zimbabwe you inherited from your fellow Ian Smith? Is this the liberation you made us help you with? Is this the reason why thousands of our brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers died for? Is this the country your child died for, so that you will make us your prisoners? Don’t you feel ashamed with what you have done to us? Do you have a heart, Robert? Are you human, Robert? What makes you wake up everyday? How do you confront the wounds you have caused on your fellow countrymen and the country you so loved? Why do you want to continue hurting us? What have we done to you to deserve this anger you have on us? Are you not tired of hearing every child crying your name, every man and woman mourning by your name, every old man and woman mourning under your thumb? How do you lie to yourself everyday that the people still love you? Anger, jealousy, vindictiveness, inferiority and superiority complexes are acts of powerlessness, and are painful, Robert. You feel unworthy of us, Robert. You know you are flawed and cannot be fixed. You want to be loved but feel unlovable. You want to love us but feel that you incapable of loving. No matter what you do, you still feel it’s not enough and that you are incurably inadequate, intrinsically and permanently flawed. You are afraid of us people. You are afraid we now see who you really are. You think without keeping trying to win us over to you, we will not want anything from you. This feeling of powerless in power is the most painful lesson on Earth school, Robert. A bland heart is patternless, Robert. It doesn’t smell right once you get a whiff of it. In what hell did you come from? Go back, Robert. Go back to where you came from!
And lately you have pushed out Emerson Mnangagwa. The explanations started flowing in your rallies, explanations that failed to explain, conclusions that failed to conclude. You made yourself into a Moses, the aura of psychic breath, in hot language; you told us he is a traitor, he is visiting N’angas to kill you off. That he was working against the country, that he wasn’t respecting you. Robert, what’s there to respect about you? Why do you want to be respected too much? Why are you forcing us to respect you? Why are you changing roads, airport, and calendar days to your name? Respect is earned, Robert! What respect have you earned from us when we are dying on queues, queuing for our hard-earned cash, dying  in streets trying to sell wares, fruits and vegetables for livelihood, dying in our homes of hunger, diseases, poverty; dying in foreign lands far away from home trying to eke out an existence, dying from stress, cardio-vascular diseases and depression, dying from lack of a horizon to migrate to, dying inside ourselves from lack of opportunities to grow, dying trying to remove you from power, dying trying to pay taxes so that your family would have more to loot from us, dying in shame that we destroyed the jewel of Africa with you, that Zimbabwe was! Like me, many things in Zimbabwe have tired from flowing. Are you not satisfied with the blood you have drunk from us. Uri chikwambo here, Robert? (Are you a Tokoloshi, Robert?). Why do you want to keep draining us, until when? We beg you, Robert, go! Leave us alone! We are tired of you, go! GO! GO! There is no ceiling above you anymore, but open skies full of changes, welcome it, embrace it, leave, GO!

I will continue to write these letters, just to move the air around, until you leave us. I will encourage every Zimbabwean, every friend of a Zimbabwean to join me in this journey. Let’s write letters and share them, until he leave us alone. Write these letters as a form of protest; share these letters with our families, friends, colleagues, and the world over. Post these letters on every platform you can. If you are afraid, use a pseudonym or that sort of thing. Let’s now begin the healing process. It’s now or never!

I am the one you killed quietly, now speaking

NB
Please feel free to distribute this letter, repost it, read it, spread it all over the world. Ask the world to join us in our fight. Send me your letters to mwanaka@yahoo.com We will fight together, I will post them for you!
Chara chimwe hachitswanye inda (one finger doesn’t kill the lice)

Thank you, Ndinotenda, Ngiyabonga