By Tafadzwa Masango
LET us go back to ZINASU for a moment.
The operational strategy of ZINASU in the initial stages was to oppose most Government programmes, including the hosting of the Solar Summit which the late John Makumbe, addressing the 1996 ZINASU Congress, described as a waste of funds and encouraged students to revolt against.
The second strategy was to engage in disruptive and violent demonstrations which, in 1998, resulted in the injuring of two police officers and damage to vehicles and buildings, both state and private-owned.
ZINASU also conducted a spirited campaign against the introduction of the National Youth Service (NYS), while its programmes and activities were highly publicised by Studio 7 and Radio Dialogue led by Father Nigel Johnson.
Father Johnson, who was a Catholic Chaplain at the UZ in 1992, produced a paper titled, The Future of Student Demonstrations, a subject clearly outside his religious terms of reference.
When the MDC was formally launched in 1999, ZINASU was a major component of the regime change party.
In 1992, ZINASU had entered into a strategic alliance with ZCTU which compelled the former to organise college and university students countrywide to participate in any demonstrations organised by the latter.
When ZCTU transformed into the MDC, it was not surprising that ZINASU was a key player.
In 2002, under the leadership of Itai Zimunya and Philip Pasirayi, ZINASU mobilised the support of the Norwegian Students Union, the European Students Board, the Southern African Students Union and, together with local CSOs such as ZCTU, ZESN and Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, staged student demonstrations which led to the death of a Bachelor of Science student, Batanai Hadzidzi.
The involvement of European and foreign student organisations in local demonstrations clearly suggests a foreign ‘holding hand’.
Perhaps the biggest prize arising from ‘Project ZINASU’ for the US is the fact that through it, a whole generation of students whom the ZANU PF Government invested a significant chunk of the country’s resources was literally stolen from under its feet, misdirected and turned into a weapon of regime change. Instead of that generation of students being a bulwark of the country’s defence, through progressive, critical and positive thinking, a large number of them have become a threat to the country by holding positions in institutions created and funded by foreign powers who wish to reverse the gains of the revolution.
These are the men and women we see speaking ill of and making misinformed testimonies about Zimbabwe in foreign lands.
These are the people we see agitating for the continued imposition of sanctions on the people of Zimbabwe.
These are the people who are paid to denounce a democratically elected Government in pursuit of regime change.
The unpardonable sin of betraying one’s country, which countries such as the US are passionate about, suddenly becomes non-existent when it comes to using these miserable folk to betray their motherland.
It is a shame that many of today’s young people are told ‘glorious’ stories about the good old days by the ZINASU old guard, but never do they mention how complicit they have been over the years in taking away the very experiences of well-funded and capacitated institutions of higher learning they attended.
Today, students want grants, but no one ever talks about how the who-is-who in the opposition were beneficiaries of these grants, which many never paid back, or how these so called ‘democratic’ leaders were champions in destroying the very infrastructure at higher learning institutions that should have benefitted others.
Instead they glorify this destruction of property; making heroes out of those who carried out acts of vandalism, forgetting that coming generations of Zimbabwean students would pay the cost of such distruction.
Today, they are calling themselves political leaders, defenders of human rights, political activists, but in all honesty, they are a bunch of misguided people who want to continue to live out their college excursions on a nationwide scale.
They talk of giving signals for people to go onto the streets. They talk of overthrowing the Government before the next election cycle in 2023.
All this rhetoric is nothing more than a repetition of their college years in the 1990s and 2000s.
While their colleagues became bankers, doctors and philanthropists, they remained caught up in a time warp, still longing for the high that comes with going against those in authority.
The use of the Vanguard as a disciplinary mechanism and to silence dissent against the reconstituted ZINASU at Harvest House is in itself a manifestation of the lack of democracy in the opposition.
The use of violence internally should raise a red flag to those who support this nonsense that ‘Kumagumo kune nyaya’.
When the US was creating the monster that became Osama bin Laden to fight the then Soviet Union, they did not think that their project would eventually turn on them as he did.
Such is the challenge when dealing with volatile persons; they will sooner or later unshackle themselves from their master’s control and wreak havoc — they morph into Frankenstein monsters.
Yes, ZINASU has been a major training forum for opposition and resistance politics which has eventually grown into a pillar of the regime change agenda.
Pick a stone and throw it into the opposition camp; there is a 90 percent chance it will hit a senior member nurtured and schooled in the politics of resistance under the umbrella of ZINASU.
It is important to observe that the foreign programme for destabilising Zimbabwe did not begin after the introduction of the Land Reform Programme.
The US, by its own admission, formed ZINASU in 1986, only six years after Zimbabwe attained independence.
This shows that ZINASU has been a long-term project; one of the long tried and tested devices of effecting regime change in countries the US needs unfettered access.
The rise of these so-called student leaders is not by chance, or through natural selection, but a managed process.