By Ndaba Nduku and Chofamba Sithole| Like every Zimbabwean, Nelson Chamisa has a right to attend a state funeral, and to be respected as an Opposition leader.
Respect is token and not demanded. On the other hand, being the party in govt doesn’t give you ownership of the dead, or state functions.
In sane societies, all political party leaders are accorded respect as national leaders. Zanu and it’s apologists don’t see that as norm because what drives them is not political power or governance only, but emotional and personal hatred of anyone whose opinion differs from theirs.
A sense of entitlement is what made Zanu hate men of honour like Dunison Dabengwa. It is what makes them see opposition leaders as enemies instead of political rivals.
This is why l say ‘thumbs up’ to individuals and families, the Dabengwa family, for not allowing Zanu to treat everyone at DD’s funeral like it did Zapu in the 80s. Why would the same Zanu want to perpetuate hatred that it sowed in the nation in the 80s through its initial incarceration of DD and his contemporaries?
It’s time our society tamed Zanu by refusing to allow it to behave like it owns us. State functions are not Zanu functions. Destroying the country is more than enough for Zanu to be ashamed of its conduct. Moral values and Ubuntu should not be at the mercy of Zanu bastardisation.
Observers like us are able to see through Zanu bastardisation of cultural values and national politics.
Nelson Chamisa had to be pulled from the crowd by the Dabengwa family to deliver a speech as leader of the opposition, because Zanu-PF/government people who controlled logistics at this State funeral behaved, yet again, as the uncivilized delinquents that they’re, reducing the civility that should come with State ceremonies to their stunted conception of the affairs of State!
I don’t expect any one to defend this nonsensical and reprobate behaviour – even if you’re Zanu-PF, you must accept that the Zimbabwean State should exist as a separate rational-legal entity with its established systems and conventions that must kick in automatically regardless of the identity and character of the party that happens to hold power at any one time.
It is infantile and depressingly uncivilized for a political party to reduce the State to an emotional creature that responds to the political predilections and temperaments of the individuals who occupy public office at any one time.
It’s even more tragic when you consider that Zanu-PF has been the ruling party for 40 long years but manifests embarrassing evidence of its interrupted evolution.
They’re like an adolescent boy whose cognitive development freezes at that age whilst his body goes through full development into adulthood, so that he spots grey hair in old age and bears all the signs of maturity and yet remains, in his mind, a pre-teen! And now imagine such a mindset in control of your national affairs!
That’s the legacy of Robert Mugabe, that vile megalomaniac whose single-minded determination to hold power till his dying breath poisoned our emergent State at independence and made sure it never developed a post-independence democratic culture that is capable of facilitating national life.
And now his erstwhile lieutenants are continuing with the same uncivilized approach to state affairs. However much Zanu-PF supporters may defend this sort of behaviour, there is nonetheless no defence to the corrosive practice of privileging your partisan animosity for a rival political leader to the point of corrupting what should be impersonal, dispassionate, straightforward processes of State in discharging its ceremonial obligations: the official opposition sits as part of the government, broadly, in the legislature!
Just next door in South Africa, they do so much better. And what riles me the most are hypocritical Zanu-PF supporters who live in countries where the civility that we yearn to see in our own country exists as a matter of course, and yet they have the nerve to defend partisan nonsense in their own country simply because they hate the opposition and its leaders! That’s what’s called cutting your nose to spite your face!”