If truth be told the smart money in Zimbabwe wants a healed nation, very few people want the current level of 'scortched earth', 'last man standing', winner takes all' politics we have seen recently and over the past 28 years. Where all calculated strategy is based upon negative mudslinging or attacks that have little to do with building policies or constituencies; but everything to do with tearing political opponents (sic percieved enemies) down.
Pointing to the public failure that has befallen the institutions most intimately involved in shaping the spiritual and moral lives of Zimbabweans; that could lead to a moral resistance and uplift is mandatory. However also suggesting ways we can build objectively, is better than just breaking down fault through argument. Offering sound alternatives is also key.
(Does it mean the OPFOR dictatorship is off the hook? Of course not.)
Between ever changing roles as bystanders and apologists and the dysfunctional nature of the leadership culture, there exists a consensus of ordinary people seeking to express their own agency. It is a body of thought formed outside the current partisan political arena and it is gaining influence. For those who disagree, I ask one simple thing: quote one inspirational sentence from our modern ‘political leaders’.
For all our culturally inflicted acts and displays of social deference, all our forgiveness of any sin of political manipulation and mendacity, or turning the other cheek over any murderous transgression, what gains have we made in ten years of rancour?
In a time that cries out for brilliance of thought and a keenness of minds that are pregnant with solutions; who remembers a word uttered by any of them that was not born of expedience or combative?
For all the intellectual investment and examination that has been unloaded onto this Zimbabwe issue, who can remember an effective theory that captures the imagination or demands enthusiastic reflection? Who has foresight in this time of loss of visionary sight? That spirit others call greatness?
Within this situation, we are all the potential contributors of the better or worse that is to come.
Visionary foresight and insight is ours. The founding basis of any great leap forwards into the future of all progressive nations. Often stifled by a small-mindedness that is the path of least resistance.
Today, all to many are distracted by a quest for survival that only offers a narrowness of view. The crime is that when the best should have been found, some reduced the potency of reason;reduced it to a vehicle of limited imagination, reduced it to one question that now dominates all thought about our nation.
Where is the real power now in Zimbabwe?
Where that answer is found, is precisely my point.
At this very moment Zimbabweans are being asked to resist something that both sides of the political divide call, evil (the word has acquired an imperfect and impotent association overly used by both sides.)
What one side of 'intellectuals' have called decisively a fight against oppression, the other side calls a fight against colonial imperialism. This argument though occurs in a restricted world that has been reshaped into new-fangled immoral order that misuses and reuses for its purposes the very language that once shaped the parameters of our imperfect yet developing order.
That both political camps claim to stand for moral resistance but breed an infernal confusion in the body politic is telling; because that moral resistance is never fully articulated as productivity for the country only destruction, either as manipulation and terrible violence or economic hardship guided and instigated from outside the country. What is required was a feat of ingenious proportion, to pass the political test of ‘authenticity', the holy grail of all political ideology...to actually create the better world one claims to be fighting for.
Some place all hope in the approaching model, personified in the hopeful speeches and oft filmed bloody sacrifices, of the MDC and certain civil groups. Yes they are correct but wide of the mark to stop asking questions of our would be saviours, or giving up all powers of agency. When have political promises of economic recovery and good governance alone ever been ample enough to change actual reality? Yes the poetry of politics articulates the problem as inflation, the rise of the parallel market, the loss of democratic practices, human rights abuses.
We must not forget what sort Zimbabwe people are now living in; where many Zimbabweans via sins of omission or commission have become parties in the very culture of abuse so many want to see end. Adapting to on the nations misfortune, hoping its affects will trouble others and benefit ourselves.
We must not forget the sort of Zimbabwe we want to live in.
The exclusion of Zimbabweans from their own future, either as an expression of moral fibre, a deliberation or sentiment has reached its end.
What large ideals can be sought, where nothing but the actions of narrow minds now exist?
When will we remember the simple contribution of being able to allow opposing views, to hear as much as we want to be heard; the ability to say sorry and mean it; to know that greed is wrong as much as making others live in fear is wrong. To understand the all too human concept of do unto others as you would have then do unto you.
Zimbabwe’s new dawn will be a tabula rasa; a ‘clean slate’; we place upon it what we will. This will be based upon self-knowledge founded within a void of indifference breeding nihilism; or genuine progressiveness; but not both.
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