To hell with SADC and the African Union!!

by Tanonoka Joseph Whande

In every generation, there comes a time when a nation just has to stop and reflect; a time when people of conscience choose to suffer injustice rather than to contribute to it. There always comes a time when nationals pause to confront themselves and decide whether to continue on the path they are traveling or change course.

In every generation, there comes a time when a people must chivalrously harden their consciences and accept that pain, discomfort and hardship are unavoidable components of the process of banishing pain, discomfort and hardship from the midst of their very own existence.

Although, during the last century, Zimbabweans have always been oppressed and ill treated by successive governments, especially the current and only black government we have ever known, Zimbabweans are, by nature, peace loving people who have sacrificed so much.

Our current government has already proved to be more brutal than any other before it.

And yet in every generation, there comes a time when citizens, as individual members of a nation, must stop and enter into deep introspection. Another fake election looms and we are, once again, being asked to legitimize electoral fraud by participating in the farce.

It is time for Zimbabweans to decide.

The so-called smart sanctions are an insult. Mugabe and his goons deserve full-blown sanctions and effective isolation. Targeted ZANU-PF culprits always scavenge for diplomatic loopholes and travel at will.

I wish there were a way of keeping all Zimbabwean aircraft confined to Zimbabwean air space if not completely grounded. Why should those who got Zimbabwe into the mess it is in be allowed to go up for air and take expensive tea-breaks by globe-trotting while the innocent, deprived, chain-ganged sufferers suffocate as they desperately try to hold the crumbling nation together?

Several times over the years, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) threatened to blockade our borders. I think they really should seriously consider this action. Painful? You bet! But to save a drowning person, is it not necessary to jump into the same waters as the drowning victim?

To hell with smart sanctions; blockade the damn borders and get it over with! What could possibly cause us more pain, discomfort and hardship than what we are already being subjected to by this government?

Because of their failures, Mugabe and his ZANU-PF cronies have turned their anxieties into paranoia. They are highly suspicious of innocent citizens and see crowds of enemies behind every telephone pole.

2007 is coming to an end and Zimbabweans are still captives in their own country. We are still not a free people. We literally live from handout to mouth. We cry for jobs. Good education. For freedom. We cry for food in a country that used to feed Africa.

Not only did Mugabe and his party betray us, even individual members of the opposition now appear to worry more about their own survival than be concerned about the people.

We were betrayed and it is time for Zimbabweans to make a decision. Zimbabweans are always asked to collectively weigh the disadvantages of life against the advantages of death.

How unfortunate!

We watch as our government does pretty much as they please at the expense of the people. Public funds are being abused and stolen. Mugabe and his cabinet ministers are looting land and corporations, just in case something untoward happens at the polls. Our freedoms are now toilet paper thin yet Mugabe keeps gnawing at the little coating that remains.

Pleading sense from these people is like trying to read a newspaper in high wind.
God made us custodians of our individual lives and it is our responsibility to protect ourselves as God’s proxies. So who are we to keep quiet and remain uninvolved when such physical, spiritual and mental inconsistencies and atrocities are rained on the innocents of Zimbabwe?

The time to harden our resolve has come. We are unwell, hungry, jobless and abused on a daily basis. But the president pops up on TV and, instead of wiping the gloom and the tears off our faces, he tells the world, and even us sufferers, that we are all happy and all is well. Of course, denial is a classic symptom of unhealthy rage.
Look at the violence we instigate and perpetrate against ourselves on behalf of Mugabe who has clearly harnessed criminal elements and called them ‘war veterans’!

No war veteran who valued life enough to fight in the war of liberation and experienced the unfairness of life would ever want to see Zimbabwe at war again. Belligerence is now masking our despair and hopelessness.

The leadership in Zimbabwe is teaching our children and us to hate people we don’t even know. Mugabe blames his failures on people who have never addressed a meeting in the country. He has turned state funerals into verbal war zones where he hurls insults at people at home and abroad.

Independent thinking is under assault; and when one dares to express themselves freely, they are declared an enemy of the state, a marionette stimulated by some imagined puppet-master in some foreign land. Journalists and academics are being targeted.

I blame Robert Mugabe not Gordon Brown. I blame our kin, Thabo Mbeki, not George W. Bush.

We are forced to put our faith in Africa’s leaders who think nothing of human rights and collectively plunder their nations, killing and imprisoning journalists, intellectuals and those who do not support them.

SADC and the African Union have led Zimbabweans into the slaughterhouse. In spite of a string of previous failures in such matters, SADC, that group of short-sighted leaders, recently asked Thabo Mbeki to mediate in the Zimbabwean issue again. This after being fired by political opponents in the Ivory Coast for taking sides during mediation.

And just this past Tuesday, Mbeki was at it again.

Burundi’s last active rebel group boycotted a meeting to put the derailed peace process back on track because, the rebel group said, “the South African mediator is biased” and by so doing “had disqualified himself as a mediator.”

During South Africa’s mediation talks, the government of Burundi continues to physically attack supporters of the group with which it is engaged in peace talks. Over the past weekend, Nelson Chamisa, spokesperson of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change charged that their supporters were being attacked and some killed by Mugabe’s agents while South Africa is leading talks between the two.

This is the man SADC picks to help the Zimbabwean people get out of the clutches of a murderous dictator?

We cannot have another year like this.

No, Sir!

Zimbabweans themselves must now do something lest even the gods abandon us as hopeless cases that are not even interested in their own survival, welfare and emancipation.

Yes, stiffer sanctions and border closures would hurt the common folks more but otherwise is it preferable for us to maintain these existing conditions of hopelessness and despondency ad infinitum?

Of course, there will be pain but labour pangs have never discouraged pregnancies.

The pain will pass.

It is time to stop this travesty. We should no longer accommodate leaders who condescendingly punch us in the nose then put us on trial for nosebleeds. Never before have we changed our values to accommodate our abusers. It’s not going to start now.

We are a people with pride; we stand on solid history. It is only with the courage of conviction, passion and a strong sense of self that we can stop the misery being inflicted on the nation and on us. We whine and we talk too much but do too little. Haven’t we learned enough?

Close the damn borders, COSATU, and the world must tighten the sanctions!
Having been betrayed by our own leaders, by the opposition, by Mbeki, SADC and the African Union, the people of Zimbabwe have the right to defend themselves.
Frighteningly, however, self-defense also involves attacking.

Like they did in Rwanda, African leaders underestimate the looming conflagration in Zimbabwe.

It is within this scenario that I think we, Zimbabweans, at home and abroad, must do a little more for our own emancipation.

To hell with SADC and the African Union!

*Tanonoka Joseph Whande is a Botswana-based Zimbabwean journalist.