Editor Garande Still Missing the Point

by Tsanga Tutankhamen Shanga; 25th December 2007

As promised in a private correspondence, Itayi Garande responded to my article, An Incoherent Call for MDC Regime Change, written in response to what appears to be a disturbingly visceral attack on Morgan Tsvangirai and his party, the MDC. His response comprised an apparently hastily assembled patchwork of facts, none of which addresses the salient points of my article. Evidently, the man did not get the gist of my initial response. I will briefly reiterate the points.

In an opinion editorial published on the New Zimbabwe website, Editor Garande of the Zimbabwe Guardian suggested it may be time to put Morgan Tsvangirai to the sword. The case for changing the leadership of the MDC was amorphously stated. An entirely irrelevant analogy was invoked to buttress the editor’s flimsy premise. The weakness of his incredibly pathetic argument for regime change was not only self-evident in the paucity of the supporting facts but also his apparent ignorance of current world events, particularly Iraq. Per Mr Garande’s op-ed, he wants the MDC politically decapitated by unceremoniously throwing out Tsvangirai out of the house through the window. It is within Garande’s rights to freely state his opinion. However, as a shaper of public opinion, he is obliged to tells us of the ramifications of that decapitation especially in the conspicuous absence of immediate successors to Tsvangirai and Chamisa.

I never did, nor do I expect the editor of the Zimbabwe Guardian to have the power of prophecy; but that is not ample reason to let him go scot-free with proposing half-baked measures. The very least he could have done was lay out the possible fallout, suggest plausible candidates and their known political planks/manifestos. It was his inability to logically articulate his case that condemned him into the lightweight editorial league. My pointed response to his meme notwithstanding, the perceived insults were inherent in his own poorly stated case not my honest assessment of its editorial poverty. Perhaps Mr Editor might be better served were he to remember that the destruction of a poorly run newspaper is in its editorial indigence.

I am charged with passionately defending Tsvangirai. The editor missed the point. What he deems a spirited defence of Tsvangirai stems not from political allegiance to the man or his party. It was only instructive to offer a countervailing argument to Mr Garande’s call for the sacrificial slaughter of said Tsvangirai. I felt he, Garande, was verbally mugging the MDC and subsequent to my reading his op-ed there was a moral imperative to defend the defenceless. Mr Garande says I am a fervent supporter of Mr Tsvangirai. Far from it, Mr Editor, you may have mistaken my defence of the defenceless for fervent support of Mr Tsvangirai. I am not personally acquainted with either Tsvangirai or Chamisa. If defending the weak and the meek against bullies is a crime then I plead guilty as charged.

The editor’s rather overly vituperative editorials goaded me into responding. Measure for measure, I reciprocated by prodding Mr Garande into telling us more. The gauntlet was thrown at his feet. To his credit, in a private correspondence, he graciously asked for permission to share my opinions with his readership and also offer a rebuttal. I was pleasantly startled by his educational background when I realized I had locked horns with a bull. The man has the capability to pack a powerful verbal punch – chibhakera chematsenga nzungu. That surprise devolved into disappointment. The quality of his works does not do him justice.

In his response, Garande says, and I quote him verbatim; “I also believe that criticizing Tsvangirai is not an endorsement of President Mugabe. The MDC has made people believe that this is so. Tsvangirai's weaknesses should be scrutinised by the media regardless, without fear of editors being labelled ZANU (PF) apologists or members of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). This is a man who is fighting to be our president. He has to be scrutinized. Remember, he claims that he stands for democratic principles and freedom of the press. One of the reasons why the electorate often gets caught off-guard by dictators is because there is not enough scrutiny on them before they assume power, or major personality flaws are often ignored.“

Mr Editor should realize that when one pens a one-sided tome, for public consumption, in which a few men in a crowd of many are incessantly eviscerated, surely, it should not come as a surprise if people begin to draw conclusions to the effect that one is a virulently partisan mouth piece of those who would directly benefit from the fulfilment of one's publicly stated desires, viz.; defenestration of the MDC leadership. No one is questioning Itayi’s right to free speech. It is his sense of balance, or apparent lack thereof, that is the source of the discomfiture of his readership. Mr Garande needs to toughen up. He opted to bare his wares in public and when an inevitable critique is tossed at him, he wails in protest; as the Shona adage goes, wakanga nyimo wavangarara – you cannot choose to roast Bambara groundnuts, Vignea subterranea, with bare hands and complain after your hands get singed. He complains at the apparent besmirchment of his journalist reputation by people who call him a ZANU (PF) operative but, if I may ask, what do they say about that which looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck?

Tsvangirai is not the only presidential aspirant and yet he has never been given any respite by Editor Garande. There is Arthur Mutambara, whose political credibility has deteriorated to vanishing point, but you incredibly spare him that vaunted scrutiny you are wailing about. In his rebuttal to my op-ed, his relentless attack on Tsvangirai continues unabated. He talks about a Tsvangirai MDC. I did not know there was another MDC.

Tsvangirai is accused of trying to curry favours with white farmers. In which he seems to imply a quid pro quo, Garande points an accusatory finger at Tsvangirai for soliciting financial support from white farmers. Garande tells us; “Looking to raise US$2.7 million for his party, Tsvangirai set a bad precedent that would spell disaster for the MDC party. He asked the country’s 4 000 commercial farmers (whom he called ‘his cousins’ in a speech in June 2000 at Rufaro Stadium) to contribute $1 400 each …“ Garande plays crass race politics here. By what authority is Garande denying these farmers their citizenship? The commercial farmers were and are Zimbabwean economic patriots, as opposed to the ZANU (PF) economic pests and parasites running Zimbabwean into abject international disgrace. Better to have a white-skinned Zimbabwean who expresses his loves for that country not through cheap and plentiful words but precious deeds than a black demagogue who publicly professes to love the country and yet plunder it into a pitiful crippled beggar. Moreover, soliciting financial help from one’s compatriots is not illegal, is it?

Garande further accuses Tsvangirai of asking for money from the Americans and the Britishers. It takes some chutzpah – the allegory of the boy who murders his parents only to ask for mercy since he is now an orphan – if Garande is earning his daily sustenance plying his trade in the USA or UK and, yet, have the brass nerve to accuse Tsvangirai of attempting to do the very same. Interestingly, Editor Garande does not tell us who underwrites the political activities of the pseudo-MDC of Mutambara. I am for Garande’s sunshine policy. Let us expose everything to the sun for sunshine is the best disinfectant. Are any of our parties being funded by the same folks who, in 2004, made a specious claim that Zimbabwe was a hub for al Qaeda thus warranting a carpet bombing reminiscent of Iraq and Afghanistan by George Bush?

Here is a gem that seems to be the modus operandi of Garande; “I am rather surprised that a person from opposition would even consider boycotting elections; and thereby disenfranchise those who would vote them to power.” This kind of argument is quite baffling. Wading into a jury-rigged election in which the outcome is predetermined is not only a waste of time and money but a worthless exercise in futility. Participation in such an election will only lend a patina of respectability to the dictator. A clever dictator prefers a sham election to no elections at all. Check the track record of Kenneth Kaunda, Joseph Mobutu, Hosni Mubarak or the ill-fated Saddam Hussein. Garande is barking at the moon when he calls Tsvangirai a spineless coward in everything but name. One of the contentions in my response to his New Zimbabwe op-ed was simple; Tsvangirai has intrepidly saved democracy in Zimbabwe where seasoned and grizzled veterans failed. He has a parliamentary foothold to prove it. The calibre of Tsvangirai’s custodianship of the opposition is no longer a point of disputation except, as is apparent, in the head of the editor of the Zimbabwe Guardian.

Garande launches another verbal assegai at Tsvangirai, writing; “The squabble with Welshman Ncube split the party. His weak leadership, which spelled disaster for possible unity with Mutambara’s MDC, caused problems just when the MDC was about to consolidate. From the moment Tsvangirai refused to share the stage with Mutambara in the U.K. and elsewhere earlier this year, preferring to do so with the weaker Madhuku; it was clear to even the most thick-headed Zimbabwean that the MDC was writing off all its chances of uniting.” Perhaps it has not clicked in the head of the editor that demographically outnumbered politicians in search of power often look for a useful fool to use as a tool to attain power.

It has been intimated that Mutambara is Welshmen Ncube’s tool to fool Zimbabweans. What the conniving Richard Cheney is to George Walker Bush, Welshman might be to Arthur. Thus, it would be an exhibition of a lack of prudence for Tsvangirai to retrieve from the bottom of a latrine pit that which belongs to the latrine and expect to come out smelling like roses. There is nothing to be gained from giving Mutambara the limelight he so craves – little wonder one of the popular jokes doing the rounds has Mutambara running to the police to solicitously ask for a beating so he could get some iota of credibility – hanzi Mutambara akaita murambamhuru kumhanya kumapurisa akanovati ndiroveiwo. For his notoriously disruptive behaviour, the MDC should accept Mutambara into the fold if only he were to grovel on broken glass on his knees and elbows with his tongue coming out and his tail firmly tucked between his hind legs. Only after he has done that and, furthermore, shown contrition by covering himself in ashes and worn nothing but sack cloth for a year while wandering the breath and width of the country should he share a platform with Tsvangirai, and only as a peripheral cheerleader bereft of any meaningful power.

Garande lists a tiresome litany of transgressions by Tsvangirai and company but avoids addressing the core issue of my op-ed. Not only does he trip himself with his statements but he also reinforces my contention that his knowledge of history, for an editor, is apparently incredibly remarkably substandard. As an example, Garande tells us;“Every research agency showed that Zimbabwe was going to its knees because of the sanctions (declared / undeclared).” However, in the same breath he also describes Zimbabwe “[a]s one of Africa’s finest countries.” If studies by every research agency show Zimbabwe’s pitiful state, I would have thought his former-quoted statement should have been in the past tense or, if one is an optimist, future tense but definitely not present tense. On Mugabe's ascendancy to the ZANU (PF) leadership, the editor contends; “ZANU (PF) argues that in Mugabe, against all popular belief, at least they have found a charismatic, reliable, visionary leader. Can the MDC say the same thing?” The editor should not hang his word on some people's professed belief alone but knowledge. Those who know Zimbabwean history are well aware of the fact that leadership within ZANU/ZANU (PF) has changed hands not amicably but through intra-party coups such as the ouster of Ndabaningi Sithole, the first leader of ZANU, insurrections like the Nhari Rebellion, the assassination of Herbert Chitepo that facilitated Mugabe’s ascendancy to power, the death and recent post-mortem rebuff of Josiah Tongogara to name but few glaring examples. Simply put, in ZANU (PF), power is wrested by force not handed over in a peaceful manner. As the Nhari Rebellion teaches us, from which Mnangagwa did not seem to have learnt anything, failed attempts to seize is met with fierce and oft-times brutal suppression. Nothing of this fratricidal carnage has happened in the MDC. In ZANU (PF) power is seized by force and maintained by fear, fear that even haunts its own leaders like a Damocles’ sword. Contrary to Garande's assertion, getting and maintaining power in ZANU (PF) has little to do with charisma but a lack of compunction such as the world witnessed during the Night of Long Knives.

If anything the editor sounds like a hybrid of Marcus Brutus and Cassius in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Like Cassius, the laundry list of impertinent transgressions would otherwise be convincing were they unique to Tsvangirai. Listing someone’s flaws is a fairly simple and mundane task that does not require too much mental exertion and, additionally, anyone can list flaws of any leader without much ado. He knows it is grossly inadequate hence his attempted concealment by playing the Marcus Brutus card – think him (Tsvangirai) as a serpent’s egg which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous and, [so] kill (defenestrate) him in the shell.

Garande, sahwira wangu - my friend with whom one can collegially exchange crude banter – panezvawataura hapana chitsva chandawona, did not say anything that is new to me. He missed the point of my article. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Tsvangirai is not a perfect candidate but, since we do not live in an ideal world, he is the best of the worst of the lot we have. I asked neither for a pointless list of facts nor a torrent of anti-MDC invective. I am still pleading and cajoling with Mr Editor to pick up my gauntlet and tell us who his preferred candidates for the Zimbabwean presidency so that we can openly and candidly discuss their merits and demerits.

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