By Julius Sai Mutinhima Dewa
What’s lacking in Zimbabwe is honest leadership and honest followership. We have corruption right on the President’s doorstep with his children accused and no effort whatsoever to rebut that. Throwing yourself at the mercy of prayer as if you are the victim is completely out of place.
LEADERSHIP HASN’T ARRIVED INTO THE NEW DISPENSATION
The President is clearly taking people fore-granted and has totally forgotten his promise to the masses who supported his ascendancy in November 2017. He promised he would depart from the Past and hence the words “New Dispensation”.
A New Dispensation that fails to understand what it is renewing is a dishonest exploration into nowhere. So in that regard the Zimbabwe ship has no honest Captain and sailors.
The President and his team are failing and they have no decorum to acknowledge that. How do they face their God in prayer if they cannot start by confessions? Are they going there clean and with clear consciences in the middle of all that’s happening in our country? What has the Government of President Mnangagwa not done to make our country the ever-sombre resident of mother-Earth? But to make matters even worse we have followers who also don’t understand why they came out in November 2017 to force President Mugabe out after 37years of stagnation, oppression and all the other ills he allowed into our country. We have followers who cannot hold their leader to account and they too haven’t renewed themselves into a new dispensation of followers and have allowed corruption and oppression to take root and with it the stagnation, sinking even, we see in our country. As long as we don’t know what had to be renewed we are doomed as a country.
EXPECTATION VS DELIVERY DEFICIT
Once again, just like in the era of President Mugabe there is failure to align expectations with the reality on the ground. In the New Dispensation we expected leadership that was service-oriented, leadership that would be accountable and transparent and that would actively seek the upliftment of our people and not a close circle of relatives and friends. We also expected a bold followership which was ready to force their leader into being accountable and shape him in the image of the unfulfilled aspirations of the past and the rectified mistakes of our history, not into an infallible leader but into a listening, delivering, pragmatic, tolerant, accountable and every person’s leader we could all be proud of.
That our president still calls his opponents mhandu(enemies) in this day and age, and has zero tolerance to transparency and actively seeks the punishment and silencing of whistleblowers and still holds on to the archaic views that President Mugabe held is a reflection of his zeal for the suppression of democracy.
When our President wished sanctions away by the ridiculous chants:
“Hatizvidi.
hatizvidi, Ngazviende, ngazviende” he showed himself as a person not only out of his depth in the post but completely out of touch with reality. Instead of doing that our President had to build the confidence of his own nation in him by rallying them behind him and gain credence as a person who was really bent on making people’s lives better. Pardoning corruption, appointing the Foreign Minister’s wife as the head of ZACC regardless of how good she is are all seen as jokes in bad taste. Listening to divisive characters such as Patrick Chinamasa is as equally bad for the country as appointing Energy Mutodi, with all the land scams he was synonymous with, to the post of deputy spokesperson. Prayer before an honest introspection of all this is a distasteful joke.
PREOCCUPATION WITH DESTROYING THE ALTERNATIVE VOICE
Once again we are seeing a President who is pre-occupied with silencing opposition.
When you still identify with the same principles as what you term the old dispensation, and when you share the same “enemies” with what you renewed it has to dawn on you that yours is not a “New Dispensation” it is just an extension of the past. I won’t be surprised that President Mnangagwa even on this day of “National Prayer” his main prayer was for the demise of the country’s opposition and for ZANU PF to be the only remaining party.
Our President still majors in trivialities in the same way his predecessor did. Theirs is not the success of Zimbabwe but primarily that of his family and inner circle with ZANU PF picking up the residue and remnants.
If the effort put in making ZANU PF formidable and sustainable was transferred to making Zimbabwe prosperous then we would have a country second to none in the whole world.
ZANU PF destroys it’s enemies with an efficiency I personally envy and I always wish if that was the same efficiency invested by our government in destroying Zimbabwe main enemies; poverty, famine, stagnation, diseases etc. But no, all of those can wait as long as power vests in a leader ZANU PF chooses. This is the mantra that makes the President choose his Foreign Minister’s wife to chair ZACC even though she is compromised from day one. Her excellence or lack of it do not count as that is clearly shrouded by the position her husband holds right at the top of government.
NO HISTORY OF SUCCEEDING ON ITS OWN
Zimbabwe seems to be the only country whose governing party is afraid of a vibrant opposition which has the capacity to unseat it.
A governing party that knows what it is doing cannot be afraid of a vibrant opposition as it will have ample evidence under it’s cuff to show off with as a successful incumbent. But the truth with ZANU PF is it is not able to run a country on it’s own. Between 1980-1987 when the country was relatively successful the country was a coalition government of ZANU, PF ZAPU and CAZ(Republican Party) together with John Landau and Chris Andersen’s parties. Between 1987 and 1998 it was ZANU PF when the former PF-ZAPU ministers in cabinet were still beholden to the people of Zimbabwe and had not yet assumed a true ZANU PF character.
When they did assume a true ZANU PF character and the cabinet became a truly one party cabinet the country fell apart until another coalition the GNU with MDC-T and MDC managed to get the economy to recover. But again with the assumption of a truly one party cabinet from 2013, ZANU PF is openly, embarrassingly and shamelessly failing the country once again. Myopia-led political parties such as ZANU PF need others and a vibrant opposition should always be encouraged not destroyed.
I PRAY FOR ZIMBABWE
With this confronting us and our country really on the backfoot, I do pray for a nation needing deliverance. Our country is being failed by it’s leadership and also its followership.
The leadership is demonstrably out of depth if there is leadership to still talk about but we also have compatriots who are failing to hold the leadership, pretentious as it is, to account.
We have failed to renew ourselves and have forgotten how we allowed 37years of our oppression to take root.
We have to be bold enough and ask God to hold our leaders to account and demand from them true leadership and success for our country.
Be the Judge!
