LAST Saturday was an essential day in the country’s politics as it gave Zimbabweans an opportunity to make serious choices on the leaders they want when the high-riding President Robert Mugabe and the fast-waning Morgan Tsvangirai addressed their supporters at the ZANU PF Headquarters and Zimbabwe Grounds respectively.
While President Mugabe was imparting life development skills and laying the foundation for the future for youths, Tsvangirai was busy spewing trash to the effect he wants his party to revive its ‘strategy’ of confronting the Government.
“We want you to be good leaders, honest leaders. Idya cheziya. Don’t take advantage of the people. Don’t use the names of the leaders to cheat the people and rob them of their property,” said President Mugabe during his address to members of the ZANU PF Youth League.
“We give land not for prestigious purposes, but for economic purposes.
“You should get a national consciousness, an awareness of the evils of imperialism, distinction between right and wrong, you stand by what is right.”
Tsvangirai on the other hand sought to score cheap political points by galvanising the people to turn to violence as part of the opposition’s fresh strategy to ‘deal’ with ZANU PF.
“We in the MDC committed ourselves in 1999 to changing our government democratically, within the law and without violence,” Tsvangirai told his followers during his so-called ‘state of the nation address’.
“We have stuck to those principles and we have neither beaten one policeman nor broken a single window in the past 16 years while we ourselves have been beaten, abducted and killed.
“I am not sure whether we can maintain that stance into the future.”
A diagnosis of this nature would have been alien to our politics if we had been bound by one ideology interwoven around the virtues of patriotism and ideals of the liberation struggle.
However, such is the nature of Zimbabwean politics that day in, day out we have to entangle ourselves with burden of preaching what and who Zimbabwe is.
We have to toil to free the likes of Tsvangirai from the demons of neo-colonialism and its load.
We have to free their minds from the tragedy wrought on them by swords of chalk and dust boards whites replaced with guns and bullets to arrest their minds.
Within the opposition in Zimbabwe, there is an irrational fixation with redefining the people’s story, our story, and their story.
Not only do they seek to redefine this story; the story of the country’s struggle for freedom, the story of Zimbabwe’s quest for economic redemption, there are actually manoeuvers to rubbish and change it even.
But this is a story and a history that can never be taken away from us.
It is a story that will never escape our memories, we who have been bound by a national consciousness; we who have been alive to the evils of imperialism; we who conscious to the distinction between right and wrong.
Tsvangirai’s game plan is very clear to all who have been associated with his activities in Zimbabwean politics.
His book has run out of new plans, new ideas to unshackle the Robert Mugabe influence on not only Zimbabwean, but African politics.
There is a less persuasive way of getting into Tsvangirai’s head, his plans and how they intend to be executed.
What Tsvangirai is planning, which plan he unwittingly gave away through his nefarious lie that he was about to join hands with ousted former Vice-President Dr Joice Mujuru to form an anti-Mugabe onslaught, is to create the image of a resurgent opposition facing an ‘unstable’ ZANU PF.
There are fresh moves to take aim at President Mugabe and present him as a ‘failed’ leader and there is a new plan to poke fun at his age, to rush him to tackle the ‘succession issue’.
Morgan and your people, we know this and we know what it is intended to achieve.
We know that the Sahara TV ‘debacle’ was a test-run to drive the Zimbabwe agenda towards nonsensical discussions centred on President Mugabe’s age.
We know who was behind that ‘plan’.
Zimbabweans were in their sober senses when they overwhelmingly voted for him in the July 31 2013 harmonised elections.
They endorsed what he stands for, his vision as seen by his stellar delivery on Saturday and his value to the people of Zimbabwe.
None will stop his principles and his vision through childish dreams disguised as ‘strategies’ to deal with Robert Mugabe.
No one, but us Zimbabweans will define and shape our politics.
Zimbabwean politics will never be defined by what Morgan Tsvangirai wants or dreams of, but by what the people want which is this endorsement of Robert Mugabe as their leader.
Let those with ears listen.