Speaking with a Forked Tongue: Mugabe’s Old Habit

by TTS; 24th August 2008

"We do not rig elections. We have that sense of honesty. I cannot sleep with my conscience if I have cheated in elections," so claimed Robert Gabriel Mugabe as he voted at Mhizha Primary School, Highfield. Watching the whole charade on Al Jazeera, I laughed at the preposterous declaration. “Here we go again,” I said to myself. The cadger’s countenance had the seriousness of a man who had toyed with idea of becoming a Roman Catholic priest. Mugabe might have believed his words at that time but I did not believe one word of it. If a leopard had promised to look after the orphaned baby goat after it had eaten the kid’s mother, it would have sounded more sincere than Mugabe’s declaration.

"We sit here in order for us to chart a new way, a new way of political interaction,'' he said after some election chicanery pulled off by his minions at the Zimbabwe Election Commission. "We are committed to ensuring that the process of negotiation becomes successful. We want a better Zimbabwe. If we put our heads together I am sure we can find a solution,'' he said. “We shall be doing this as Zimbabweans,” said Mugabe. All this is at variance with the behaviour of his subordinates. To scuttle the talks, Charamba reportedly leaked information to the press to the point of putting sieves to shame. Charamba is Mugabe’s mouthpiece. Without the consent of his superior, it is very doubtful that he would have mounted a fanatical jihad to kill the talks meant to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis ZANU-PF created.

The inability or lack of will to rein in the crazed goon Joseph Chinotimba gives credence to fact that ZANU-PF and Mugabe were never interested in finding a lasting solution for the good of the blighted nation. Chinotimba is a mere mortal and putting him in his place, so to speak, is a mundane task. Only a few years ago, an aggrieved simple Zimbabwean cut Joseph Chinotimba’s tail to size. On some occasions, ZANU-PF has taken the murderous zealot Chinotimba out of his tattered and torn cloths and dressed the buffoon in a suit fully aware that not even God the Almighty can take the murderous zealotry out of Chinotimba, suit or rags. When in need to brutally enforce their will on the people, Chinotimba is at ZANU-PF’s calling. Without Mugabe’s foreknowledge and acquiescence, there is no way the Glen Norah idiot – rombe – would go on one rampage after another without anyone in ZANU-PF raising a finger in objection. As the sagacious Geoff Nyarota demanded, Mugabe could have easily put a stop to this madness. By his silence, Mugabe was complicit in the violation of the spirit of the Memorandum of Understanding.

The persistence of violence against the populace has exposed Mugabe’s old habit of saying things he does not believe. Some will argue that the violence has been reduced but this point is moot. During the dialogue, it was the complete cessation of violence that mattered.

Mugabe’s purportedly impending blindness was another act of deception. Here is how Lindie Whiz put it; “Ndlovu told state media editors at a briefing last week that Mugabe had complained that he really wanted to read papers about what was happening in the country, but could not because the print was “the size of ants”, and asked the minister to tell editors of the state newspapers to increase the font size.” Everyone knows Mugabe’s health is a closely guarded secret. When pictures of Mugabe’s swollen ankles were littered all over the internet, Mugabe’s handlers quickly responded by showing a video clip of the man hoofing a football. Divulging anything about the man’s health is tantamount to sedition. Sikhanyiso’s laughable little tall tale about words looking like ants, yibunyonyo, was nothing but a ruse to garner public sympathy for his deeply unpopular boss. Why did Sikhanyiso not summon George Charamba to read loudly to his boss, or is the boss going deaf, too? Better yet, why did they not buy Mugabe reading glasses with thicker lenses?

There is possibly another prime motive for “leaking” the ridiculously silly little bunyonyo story. We are told that the president of the country has to read a newspaper, and not even a good one, to know what is going on in the country. This is a tasteless joke, really. Who is fooling who here? Mugabe presides over one of the most comparatively bloated governments in the world and yet people are asked to believe that none of his plethora of ministers is capable of briefing him on the state of affairs! This paints a picture of a man who is not in charge of his government, a president who is at the mercy of insubordinate minions. May be his ministers are too busy selling petrol and diesel on the black market. It is a false impression. Mugabe has a tight rein over his government such that the idea of his ministers leaving him on his own to forage for facts is utterly unbelievable. It was a simple case of Sikhanyiso Ndlovu taking the cue from his lord and, thus, speaking with a forked tongue.

It is a trend that was followed by ZANU-PF shills at talkzimbabwe.com. Whereas the MOU stated that the demonization and counter demonization had to stop while negotiations were in progress, the ZANU-PF Herald-upon-Thames, published a slanderous article accusing Morgan Tsvangirai of lying. It takes brass nerves for people in ZANU-PF to call other people liars. The ZANU-PF Herald-upon-Thames has dragooned a well-meaning but nevertheless misguided and grossly misinformed African American afrocentrist, Lloyd Whitefield Butler to attack Morgan Tsvangirai. Tsvangirai is a reincarnation of Jonas Savimbi, charges Butler, who has to be stopped. “Blow your horn, Gabriel, blow your horn,” Butler waxes lyrically about Mugabe. It was all part of a subtle concerted effort to degrade the talks while giving the public the appearance of sincerity.

Tsvangirai and his team of negotiators should have known they would be asked to surrender the electoral mandate they received following the March elections in lieu of an agreement that would lead to a genuine government of national unity.

All the noise ZANU-PF made about acting in good faith was just that, vacuous noise. ZANU-PF and its leader have very little regard for truth. They think of it as a weakness of character. For Mugabe in particular, a self-declared observant Roman Catholic, contempt for truth seems a habit that he has had for a long time. It is apparent the man lacks sincerity, a habit that has not diminished with his age. Nothing good was going to come out the dialogue. Yes, Comrade Guseni Mutambara, despite your insipid denials, it was a bilateral indaba, not trilateral, since you supinely talked and acted like a ZANU-PF lackey not a leader of an independent political entity.

Looking back, it is very difficulty to find many instances in which Mugabe and his surrogates have been held back by the sanctity of truth. The political trail that the man has blazed is littered with statements rendered null and avoid by diametrically opposite acts of his subordinates.

Just listen to the video tape on Nyarota’s site. Asked to comment on his inflammatory rhetoric that urged soldiers to be brutal, Mugabe answered with his forked tongue. Said Comrade Mugabe in the video, and I quote: “It is only a dramatic way of saying we are waging a struggle to overthrow the settler system. It does not literally mean that we go all out to destroy the whites.” Bearing in mind that most of the fighters exhorted to conduct the war were barely literate, it is very doubtful they would have been able to distinguish between a metaphorical statement from a direct command to act as instructed. Failure to act as instructed would surely have resulted in a court martial followed by incarceration or death by execution. In ZANU-PF, the main actors of rebellions were either executed or jailed. Anyone suspected of dissent, real or imaginary, against the central command was ostracized. Dzinashe Machingura was sent to jail by Mugabe, as was the latter-day-Mugabe-loyalist, the execrable Augustine Chihuri.

While leading ZANU-PF’s war effort, and dressed in a safari suit, he said, and I quote: “It is absolutely wrong to allow a set of individuals to acquire the ownership and possession of resources which are God-given. They are not man-made; the land, the water the forests, the animals, the fish in the rivers and the minerals. These are given us by nature and it is wrong, in principle, for anyone man to claim ownership of such resources which should belong to the people as a whole.” Under his leadership, this is exactly what his cabinet ministers and lower-ranking members of his gang have done, unless the principle is malleable. One does not have to look far to see who the biggest beneficiaries of his largesse are. Some of them are so ostentatiously arrogant they flaunt their gains in public. This unabashed arrogance has not been punished. Beneficiaries of the ZANU-PF’s stripping of national assets have often found themselves dispossesed of their ill-procured wealth once they were out of favour, the voluble Mutumwa Mawere being a prototype.

One does not run around frenetically looking for medicine for a disease that does not exist. Long before the Willowgate Scandal, Mugabe knew he was leading a gang of plunderers and filchers. If we want to be overly charitable, we might say he tried to curb the avarice of his followers by drafting the Leadership Code. In retrospect, the code was a tacit acknowledgement of the failure of the socialist ideals he and his crew espoused while wearing safari suits. As soon as they were in power and dressed in London-tailored suits, they could not run away fast enough from the foolish notions of Karl Marx and Vladimir I. Lenin they espoused while in Maputo. The fact that he continuously recycled the same cast of characters that had been caught red-handed and disgraced to no end, Frederick Shava is an example, is in itself indicative of the insincerity of the Leadership Code. People cannot be blamed for looking back and concluding that it was meant to deceive the nation.

One combining of forces with Father Zimbabwe, Mugabe said; “We are thinking in terms of one army. The Patriotic Front is going to emerge with one army. There will therefore not be any sector for ZAPU or a sector for ZANU. We are one and that we shall remain. The principle [to merge ZIPRA and ZANLA] is there and it is our hope that very soon our two armies will constitute one force as indeed our two command constituted one joint operations command.” Mugabe talked of “hope” but the prospect for such a force was quite hopeless. Prior to this statement, Dzinashe Machingura’s combined forces of ZIPRA and ZANLA, the Zimbabwe People Army, had been brutally dismantled at the behest of the ZANU-PF civilian leadership. There was no chance that ZIPA would be revived, at least not with the two forces as co-equal.

We now know he was speaking with a forked tongue when he said; “We have the Patriotic Front and our hope is that we shall fight as one. We would like to constitute one front with just one leader campaigning as president of the front.” It turned out not to be true. PF-ZAPU and ZANU-PF contested the 1980 elections separately. For all his effort, Joshua Nkomo was vindictively reduced to a peripheral figure when history dictated that he be shown the respect and national recognition he had earnestly worked for.

Mugabe crudely treated Joshua Nkomo the nation should have realized the danger portended by the vindictive nature of the Mugabe regime. To our parents, Joshua Nkomo was Father Zimbabwe but to those of us of later generations, he was the lovable Grandfather of the Nation. One is not going to lie about and demonize a beloved grandfather, forcing him to flee his homeland in a dress, and not incur the wrath of his grandchildren. If he could not respect a man older than him, Mugabe was bound not to respect lesser mortals.

After negotiating and signing the unity agreement with ZAPU, one would have thought that the new party would be called the Patriotic Front as Mugabe himself had intimated in 1979. Lo and behold, it was named ZANU-PF! The ZAPU insignia of a war hero compassionately coddling a baby was erased and replaced by the crowing rooster. This did not appear like a case of unity agreement but the signing of surrender articles by ZAPU. In shocking apparent triumphalism, a skyscraper under construction in Harare that was to be named Piccadilly Centre was renamed Karigamombe Centre. It may have been a case of happenstance but, knowing ZANU-PF as we do, that is very doubtful. A transliteration of the Shona word karigamombe is he-who-that-brought-down-the-bull (nkomo, in Ndebele). That kind of juvenile crowing and gloating put paid to the notion that ZANU-PF had engaged in the unity negotiations in good faith.

In 1980, our war-weary parents and grandparents could be forgiven for believing, prima facie, when Mugabe declared; “We haven’t been fighting for individual benefits. We have been fighting to get power into the hands of the people. In other words we have been fighting a people’s struggle. [S]o it is the interest of the people, really, that is the decisive factor. That is the paramount issue.” We now know better. He probably never meant it! These are the words of a man who now swears by his deceased mother’s name, may her soul rest in peace, that the same people’s struggle to take the country in a different direction will not be fulfilled and, if the same people insist on the struggle for change, they shall be branded puppets of the west and be beaten and murdered in cold blood.

Our parents and grandparents gave Mugabe the benefit of the doubt thereby entrusting the custodianship of the nation into his hands. As the nation looks back, evidence on the ground says it was a terrible mistake. We should not find fault with them. However, given our knowledge of the history of the man, unlike our forbearers, we have a moral obligation and patriotic duty not to be deceived again by the man who seems to have the habit of speaking with a forked tongue. Surely, if not to ourselves, we certainly owe it to posterity.

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