via No solution to the warring looters. 12 November 2014 by Magari Mandebvu
Some years ago, there were people who would pay good money to go to Hamburg in Germany to watch overweight women wrestling each other in a pool of mud. I never thought that a very entertaining way of spending time or money, but I was reminded of it when Oppah Muchinguri seemed to be stepping into the ring of our own mud-wrestling contest, whether on her own account or to support one of the wrestlers already there I couldn’t bother to find out.
That sums up my attitude to all the mud-slinging and mud-wrestling going on in the ranks of Zanu (PF). I’d rather keep out of the way of the combatants and prepare for life after Zanu (PF). Now, where a “prophet” like Makandiwa or some self-appointed n’anga throwing bones will tell you what will happen in such ambiguous terms that any possible outcome can be fitted to his pronouncement, I prefer to consider possible scenarios and describe each with moderate precision.
For the moment, consider that among the possible scenarios is one in which, a year from now, not a single person can be found who admits to ever having been a member of Zanu (PF). That is possible; the party, or rather the shell which concealed a faction-ridden body held together by common greed and military force, is busy tearing itself apart. They may not even wait for the demise of the Old Man at the centre of the spider’s web before they complete the job.
Zanu (PF) has served its purpose – to enrich those who got on the bandwagon at the right time. They used the period of the “unity government” to extend and tighten their grip on every source of wealth in the country, and as the stock of assets that they did not own shrank, so the rivalry among those aspiring to great wealth via political power became sharper.
ZANU always believed that those who were not totally subservient to them were enemies, which usually meant they could only be tools of the current number one enemy, whether that was Ian Smith or “the British” (who are actually rather difficult to define; it seemed to mean palefaces the leadership disagreed with) or the MDC or NCA, or at one time Tekere’s ZUM or Margaret Dongo’s supporters.
Loyal cadres (jargon I’m not at ease with, but we could probably all name people we know who earned that label) developed a sharp sense for detecting those who were not wholehearted members of the looting party. “Anyone who’s not with us is against us” became so ingrained in the consciousness of the party faithful that when we reached the stage where anything you wanted to grab had already been taken by another member, it became easy enough for the zealous seeker of wealth via political power to narrow his or her definition of “us” – so that the party member who grabbed the farm, firm, factory or mansion you wanted to grab could cease to be, in your eyes, a truly loyal member of the party.
If s/he did not deserve that label, then automatically in ZANU thinking, they were no longer deserving of their share of the loot. In some cases, such people were no longer considered worthy to continue living.
So Zanu (PF) as a monolithic political party is rapidly ceasing to exist. On the other hand, its members include almost everyone who has grown rich in the past 30 years. The few who prospered by their own initiative and hard work have been driven into exile or in other ways excluded from the ranks of “real citizens”. When that happens to you, you are no longer safe.
Zanu (PF) may be finished, but this class of warring looters will be with us for some time and nobody has yet offered any solution to that problem.
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