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Anti-social state destroys human relationships

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THE PATRIOT issue of November 20 – 26 2015 carried two related articles whose meanings need to be linked.
The instalment for this column mentioned the need to strengthen the practice of community-based intelligence jointly developed by liberation war fighters and community-based war collaborators against the settler state of Rhodesia which enjoyed South African and Western support through the supply of mercenaries, propaganda support, intelligence gathering and weapons.
In the same issue of The Patriot the feature titled, ‘No to cellphones, condoms in schools: Parents’ by Patience Rusare revealed the remnants of that practice of community-based intelligence which continue to be critical, especially of foreign-sponsored cultural adjustment programmes logically following in the path prepared through the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) of the 1990s.
The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Education, Sports and Culture did well to go out to rural communities to find out what the people thought of the creeping anti-social changes which are being pushed upon the people through Constitutional Court (ConCourt) judgments, through foreign-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs), through so-called education reforms, through the unplanned introduction of new technologies into schools and through anti-social economic reforms.
Community opposition to the growth of the anti-social state and its war on human relationships which the Portfolio Committee on Education ran into should not surprise anyone.
Any honest examination of contributions to the 1999 Constitutional Commission outreach as well as to the 2009 – 2010 outreach of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Constitution would reveal the same opposition which the ConCourt and those who wrote the current Constitution ignored.
But what are the surface signs of the growth of this anti-social state and its war on human relationships?
These signs can be gathered from looking at some currently prevailing contradictions as follows:
The state which is being told to allow and provide condoms for schoolchildren is also being told to cut school lunches, cut or stop Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) payments and cut student teachers’ allowances by half.
In fact the same week as the issue of The Patriot reporting on the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee, there was an activist on radio claiming that schoolchildren in Masvingo were so desperately in need of condoms that they were using discarded freezit packets!
This story of desperation was created by NGOs to pressure the state into issuing condoms to schoolchildren in the name of youth empowerment and young people’s rights.
The same state being told to ban under-age marriages and perhaps raise the age of marital consent to 18 is also being used to liberalise prostitution and treat prostitutes as sex workers even though it is common knowledge that a third or so of them are in fact under-age girls and children.
What this paradox on the age of sexual consent means is the removal of sex from relationships and the abolition of sex as a relationship in preference for sex as a service or commodity which can be purchased.
The under-age girl who sells her body in prostitution is liberated.
The one relating to a man in marriage is a slave.
That is the logic of the anti-social state.On the human rights front the same paradox prevails at two levels: The right to determine what is good for the human being is being moved away from families, away from communities, away from schools, away from churches, synagogues and mosques, so that the state becomes or pretends to be everyone’s grandmother, with the policeman, the social worker and the state health practitioner now the enforcer of human entitlements on behalf of the state.
Eurocentric gender theory assumes that (in order) to liberate women from male oppression it is necessary to abolish all relationships based on cultural practices which distinguish women from men.
In this way, the abolition of male/female difference becomes synonymous with freedom for women.
Yet unisexism is not liberation.
The first problem that arises is that the conflict which arises from trying to abolish those differences actually creates new differences, new misunderstandings and new obstacles between men and women, resulting in escalating violence between them.
Forcing college boys and girls to live in the same dormitories and to share rooms results in one sex despising if not hating the other.
According to Professor Ken Mufuka:
“The practice of non-gender dormitories has been the norm (in the US) for the last 30 years.
“Christian colleges are now restoring same sex dormitories because female students have complained bitterly that (college) boys are ‘gross and dirty’.
“Male barbarism (stimulated by proximity to large numbers of barely dressed women) is simply intolerable.
“(The boys) seem to (be encouraged) to want to jump into bed with female room-mates without prior consultation.”
Whole governments, whole societies are being subjected to neo-liberal anti-social theory.
According to Mufuka again:
“Sex is defined as part of male dominance-female submission.
“This is not found in nature, but is a social construct.
“Once the male-female dominance and submission is abolished then humans will be free to express their true sexual orientation in a variety of ways, some straight, some gay, others lesbian (and bisexual).”
This is where the anti-social nature of the neo-liberal state comes from.
It assumes that all existing relations between male and female are social constructions contrary to nature.
So it tries to dismantle those social relations and to turn human beings into freely floating atoms who must discover their true nature away from established social relations, but in order to establish yet new and free relations.
Part of the absurdity of this whole campaign is that the state whose institutions are set to abolish all social constructs to do with men and women is itself a social construct.
There is no such thing as a pure state derived from nature.
The other absurdity arises from copying methods and strategies of gender liberation struggle from the struggles of nationalist and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
Where the British can be assumed to be separate and independent of the Kikuyus of Kenya, where the Rhodesians can be assumed to be a separate and independent group from Madzimbahwe, this is not to be the same with husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends.
The mutual differences between men and women are the basis for their mutual independence and the basis for mutual attraction and love.
So adoption of modes of struggle borrowed from national independence movements can only lead to deadly and escalating conflict to no end.
The other part of the absurdity arises from involvement of neo-liberal capitalism in the growth and promotion of this anti-social state.
When the ConCourt seeks to abolish child marriages while liberalising prostitution and turning a blind eye to child prostitution, it is expressing the neo-liberal capitalist view that sex as a commodity for sale, sex as a paid-for-service, is liberating because it avoids or abolishes the need for relationships.
Who needs binding relationships when one can convert all relationships into saleable services?
The child prostitute is free to choose a life of debauchery because there are no binding relationships.
But the under-age bride is a slave because she must follow the rules of established relationships.
The absurdities of the growing anti-social state are endless.
That state is being pushed to become Tete and Mbuya by providing free sex education and free condoms.
But the same forces telling it to do so are also saying water should be pre-paid just like cellphone airtime.
Energy is already pre-paid.
So the people, using their community-based intelligence, are wondering what sort of moral universe would make the state sell prepaid electricity and water while offering sex education and condoms for free?
What is being promoted is an anti-social world where there will be no family, no mothers, no grandmother and no pungwes.
There shall be only free-floating, free-choosing individuals without lasting relationships.

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