We just want Mugabe to step down

I have come across a number of people who believe that the situation in Zimbabwe can only improve when Mugabe is dead. In the vulgar, these people want him dead! But I constantly remind them that we don’t have to wait for him to die first for us to be free. We want to be free even in his presence. My question is: What will happen if he doesn’t die for the next 10 years? The point is: I don’t wish him dead but I want him to retire peacefully and leave us alone! It is an undeniable fact that Mugabe has dismally failed to perform to the best of his ability during the past 10 years and it is highly unlikely that Mugabe will restore Zimbabwe to where she was 10 or so years ago. My only hope, therefore, lies in a new Zimbabwe, a new Zimbabwe in which Mugabe doesn’t hold us back. He has since destroyed our lives, dreams, expectations and aspirations without mercy and we wouldn’t want him to be an obstacle to development in our country anymore and I am very serious about this.

And yet some may ask, what is it between this guy and Mugabe? The truth is that I don’t hate Mugabe the person but his actions and policies. I am sure some of you are hearing this for the first time. I was in Form 3 in 1999 when the MDC was formed but to be frank with you, I don’t remember being forced to attend their meetings or buying a membership card. I have attended their meetings and have bought my membership card out of my own volition. I was not forced. The same does not, however, apply to Mugabe’s party. I was forced to attend their meetings from the year 2000 up until 2004. Should I also tell you that our Headmaster, Mr. Chiedza Mafukidze, was unjustifiably suspended for ‘teaching students (opposition) politics’ towards the bloody parliamentary election of the year 2000? I was a Fourth Form student at Hermann Gmeiner Secondary School then. These were just but unfounded and malicious allegations. Ko tinodirei kupa mhaka vanhu vasina mhosva/Why do we delight in blaming innocent people? My eyes have seen a lot and my ears have also heard a lot but within a short space of time.

It was in January 2002 as we were nearing the rigged presidential plebiscite that the ZANU PF-sponsored youth militia was moving door-to-door asking us about ‘card remusangano/party membership card’ and also forcing us to chant that party’s slogan. I was bought a ZANU PF card in the year 2002 by my brother for ‘my safety’ and the issuing officer at the ZANU PF office in Chipadze was Magore. In fact everybody had to have such a card!

It was a terrible experience, my fellow citizens. I was a Bindura (Mashonaland Central Province) resident then and am sure you all know how the province is sensitive in the political sense. This place then was considered a ZANU PF stronghold. Border ‘Madzibaba’ Gezi (the National Youth Service is named after him!), the late ZANU PF Political Commissar and MP for Bindura Urban Constituency and Elliot ‘The Murderer’ Manyika came from this place. Manyika shot Francis Chinozvina and according to eye witnesses he died on the spot. It’s also Manyika who shot Arthur Gunzvenzve on the leg so you can actually see that he never hesitated to murder the innocent hence the befitting middle name ‘The Murderer’. In 2008 after it became apparent that he had lost the parliamentary election he is said to have shot a police officer!!! At the time of his death in December 2008, Manyika was an MP for Bindura Urban Constituency and ZANU PF Political Commissar. How did he get that seat? Your guess is as good as mine!

A number of people including Trymore Midzi and Matthew Pfebve were murdered here. This is the province where the Daily News was banned and later (recently) it was The Zimbabwean. You couldn’t read them freely. There were also roadblocks along major roads i.e. from Bindura to Harare as well as from Bindura to Mt Darwin. These were even found in other remote areas like Madziva and Shamva. We were not free and it was difficult for us to register our anger against this evil regime. I was also very young then and perhaps had not yet gathered enough courage such as the one that I have at the moment. The youth militia also used to come to Ruya Adventist High School disturbing our peace in 2002. They would come into the dining hall during lunch hour holding logs and other ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and I neither liked the experience. I used to ask what these people wanted and I was repeatedly told that yaiva nyaya yemuganhu or the boundary. They thought the school yard had expanded too much to such an extent that it was eating much of their land. Vana vevhu vainetsa ivavo! I am wounded and the anger has been building up all these years.

Like Walt Whitman in Song of Myself, ‘I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded’. I know that a person in pain needs love. Wounded people, broken by suffering ask for only one thing: a heart that loves and commits itself to them, a heart full of hope for them. The same thoughts are found in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians in which he wrote: ‘Meanwhile these three remain: Faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love’ (1 Corinthians 13:13).

People frequently ask me: Are you not afraid? Aren’t they looking for you? My immediate response is that: ‘Cowards die many times before their death. The valiant taste of death but only once’ (William Shakespeare). I also quote Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o who in his book Matigari wrote: ‘Too much fear breeds misery in the land’. I am not afraid of death and when it comes I will face it as and when necessary. As Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, puts it: ‘I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear’. Not only that, I should also tell you that: ‘It is by those who have suffered that the world has been advanced’ (Leo Tolstoy). I am, therefore a ‘wounded healer’ if you should allow me to quote Philip Yancey (Where is God when it hurts?).

Ruthless oppression in our post-colonial struggle for independence and democracy has produced great men and women of courage, of commitment to the people who do not wish Mugabe dead but want him to retire and allow them to have a government of their choice, a government that respects and fulfills the expectations and aspirations of its people. In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: ‘All that the downtrodden can do is go on hoping. After every disappointment, they must find fresh reason for hope’. Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent 8 years in a hard labour camp just for making a casual criticism of Stalin in a letter to a friend! We are taking control of our destiny and our consecration to the cause of freedom is unreserved. All we want is for Mugabe and his trusty henchmen to retire. This is our principled position and I am strongly convinced that it speaks for the majority of the people.

As a matter of conclusion, ‘The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government’ (Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the American Declaration of Independence). The former British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (after whom Ewart Grogan was named) had this to say: ‘The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good and difficult for them to do evil’. I put it to you and I rest my case. The struggle continues unabated!

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