Caesar Zvayi and The Long Arm of Justice

by TTS 8th August 2008

Once in my village, so goes one of the stories I heard growing up, a notorious villager tried to poison a very respectable visitor by stealthily dropping a grain of dried crocodile bile into the communal mug of beer during a celebratory beer-drinking gathering. Fortunately, a vigilant villager at the gathering saw the act and quickly snatched the mug before the visitor had taken a swig at the lethally spiked brew. The would-be killer was hogtied. Under vehement and non-contrite protest, the poisoned beer was forced into his gut. “Varume, mandiwuraya – gentlemen, you have killed me,” he repeatedly wailed pitifully at his impending death. Mr Zvayi’s response to deportation reminded me of this story. Just as the village had little sympathy for the notorious man who had spiked the mug of beer with poison, I do not have a scintilla of sympathy for Mr Zvayi. Many would gladly accept the charge of schadenfreude when it comes to the pain of Zvayi and his ilk. Caesar Zvayi’s misery is quite delightful.

Caesar has been given unto him that which belongs to Caesar. Caesar wept. He should have known that hitching his wagon to the dying horse that is ZANU-PF he had condemned his own fate to eternal ignominy. He sought the company and patronage of a monster. Caesar not only lavished praise on the monster but egged it on as it went on a destructive and murderous rampage. As an insider, there is no doubt that the he realized the monster's teeth had all been pulled out. To use a metaphor, that monster can bite with nothing but bare gums or friable Chinese-made dentures. To add to its woes, it is now a cornered and starving beast. It is often said that a cornered beast is dangerous but we all know that ZANU-PF is now a beast crippled by hunger. It is going to die a natural death. There is nothing Emerson Mnangagwa, Constantine Chiwenga and Gideon Gono can do about it! Zvayi fled because he knew the end had come and, like the rat that he is, he futilely attempted to jump ship. It is a sinking ship, hence his teary-eyed protest against deportation.

For an educated man, Caesar Zvayi at times behaved like a blasted fool. He might have deluded himself into believing that his association with ZANU-PF had conferred omnipotence upon him so as to enable him to insult people with impunity. As long as ZANU-PF had enough power to cower people into subservience, and he was shielded within its fortress, Caesar could and did throw injurious words with nary a worry anything retributive would touch him. Significantly, Caesar should have known that heaping insults on an African American by invoking plantation paradigms is worse than dousing a raging fire with petrol: It is dangerous. It was bound to backfire. He provoked James McGee who obliged by going out into rural Zimbabwe to catalogue evidence of crimes against humanity perpetrated by ZANU-PF and given incendiary editorial support by Caesar Zvayi. A black man from the USA who fought in the sweltering jungles and paddy fields of Vietnam is not going to get intimidated by the likes of the glowering Constantine Chiwenga. It should not surprise anyone if it comes to light that McGee took Zvayi’s insults personally. By insulting that brother, Caesar made a monumental blunder. The price for that folly is going to be heavy. Caesar Zvayi knows he is headed for the dock to answer for his crimes. It is no mere coincidence that he was added on the personae non grata list. Zvayi has nobody to blame but himself; he went looking for trouble and trouble found him – akarumwa nochokuchera.

Once he had fled the poverty generated by his masters, an astute person would have tried to ideologically distance himself from a discredited institution like ZANU-PF. It would not have been the first time for Caesar to do a volte-face anyway. The man is an enigma. I am not going to accuse Zvayi of rank stupidity: A man who can seamlessly transition from a high-school geography teacher to editor of a national paper and finally, secure a lectureship in journalism at a reputable university despite having graduated with an unglamourous BSc General degree in biology and geography, must have some innate intelligence which occasionally erupts to the surface from beneath a cesspool of deadly ignorance and arrogance. Once in Botswana, Caesar belligerently continued to behave as if he was still in Zimbabwe. He would not renounce his professionally suicidal and inexplicable passionate attachment to the Mugabe regime. If anything, he was unapologetic under circumstances that would have forced saner people to tuck their tails between their hind legs and slink away in shame. The man lacks humility; at least he gave that impression prior to his deportation. When harsh reality hit home, his sobbing did not comport with the now-all-too-familiar bravado. His supporters are accusing Botswana of stifling his freedom of thought and free speech but forget that in Zimbabwe, Zvayi’s ZANU-PF benefactors have never granted Zimbabweans the very same. It is a curious pattern of behaviour unique to ZANU-PF.

Interestingly, he decided to seek a better life in Botswana, the very same country whose leader has been dismissed by ZANU-PF as a hapless puppet of western powers. One would have thought that Zvayi would by now be conversant in Mandarin and ready to work in China. Lest we forget, it has been ZANU-PF’s policy to publicly court the Chinese and the Malaysian while scorning the west. Judging from the behaviour of ZANU-PF, that policy has been an abject failure. It was never a prudent policy. It had the prudence of a woman dispensing sexual favours to a man addicted to prostitution with the hope of securing an everlasting marriage free of infidelity.

Anyone who has worked with the Chinese will tell you that they are ultrapatriotic to the point of being paranoid. To a Chinese, only China matters. Friendship is conditional, specifically for the non-reciprocated benefit of the Chinese. Anybody, be it friend or compatriot, who causes them grief or besmirches their national honour is dispensable. There is no way the Chinese are going to jeopardize their economic ties with America, the biggest consumer market for Chinese goods, for the sake of a discredited Third World tin-pot dictatorship. Zvayi knows it, as does anyone in ZANU-PF with enough grey matter between the ears, hence the angry response on the imposition of sanctions by the west. If a married man has spent years publicly deriding his wife as ugly and worthless while courting another woman he found at a shebeen but lashes out in anger as soon as the scorned wife files divorce papers, can we not say that the man has known all along that his wife was and will always be better than his shebeen mistress?

Like the shebeen patron, Caesar Zvayi’s response to deportation gives us a very telling glimpse of the dire situation within the ranks of ZANU-PF’s so-called hardliners’ camp. There must be complete desperation. It was that desperation that drove them to commit crimes against humanity. They probably hoped it would buy them enough room to do as they please. The junta wanted to corner everyone but only succeeded in cornering themselves. Caesar tried to flee from that hellish corner. Like his contemporaries, he failed.

As the ancient wisdom goes; "It is the law, for like begets like; and you do not gather olives from thistles, neither apples from bramble bushes, neither do you find love in hate." The junta will not easily find love from the tormented Zimbabwean people and their friends for the junta harboured nothing but homicidal hatred and utter contempt for the people. They will reap what they sowed. Any amnesty granted to the implicated parties as a result of the on-going indaba will only offer temporary respite. Genuine and everlasting amnesty will only come from the hearts of the Zimbabwean people. As long as the scars of the wounds inflicted by the brutal militias and rogue elements of the Zimbabwe Defence Force are there, as long as the psychological trauma suffered by the Zimbabwean children persist and as long as those murdered by ZANU-PF cannot be resurrected, the right of the Zimbabwean people to seek justice shall justifiably be there. It is an inalienable right that no one can abridge; not Mbeki not Tsvangirai and most certainly not Mnangagwa, Chiwenga, Mutambara and Mugabe. It will not be possible to flee from the long reach of the arm of justice. Zvayi is certainly finding that out.