Professors are a dangerous species
SO Professor Lovemore Madhuku is now fully into politics.
While many and the man himself would like us to believe that his entry into the political arena has been necessitated by the ‘loss of focus’ by his brethren whom he now realises are lost some of us know better.
His is no entry to serve or rescue but a culmination of a well-calculated act that has been years in the making.
The learned professor is no stranger, we have seen him ‘rise’, we have seen him orchestrating, manoeuvering and scheming specifically for this moment.
Of course it is his constitutional right to start his own political party that is what some of us died for.
Well the formation of a political party is nothing out of the extraordinary in our democracy; it might have been under the repressive Ian Smith Regime that banned African political parties but today it is not.
We have seen the Ndongas, the MDCs of different names and some of these have or are led by professors.
And after seeing them, the parties led by professors that is, and because I am one I have come to the conclusion that maybe professors are not the best people to lead political parties.
We might be brilliant academics that can write and analyse constitutions inside-out, we might invent robots and we might be scribes but be very careful of us.
I say so freely because I am also a professor and a fellow professor has decided to launch a political party.
But while it is our constitutional right to set up our own organisations and do what we want, the political arena has been about more than personal wishes and wants.
Pertinent questions must first be asked and answered by all those that claim to or want to serve the people.
For instance, how close are we to our heritage, how close are we to our past, how close are we to the struggle that is the bedrock of our present and importantly how close are we to the people.
How many of us can embrace the men in straw hats as we don our professorial gowns?
How many of us with our fluency and elegance are ready to stick it out with the farmer, the downtrodden, the peasants and their halting English?
I fear many of us are just preachers, experts at theorising, we pontificate and formulate complex theories but fall short on action.
Can we present the people home and away for that is what matters the most.
A professor worth his salt must be able to sell the Zimbabwean agenda in the United Nations General Assembly without fear, cowering, worrying about nothing else but the land of Nehanda and Lobengula.
Our leaders must be men and women who are ready to ply the capitals of the world unashamedly singing the song of the Land Reform Programme and they must be ready to defend it, tooth and nail.
They should sing without faltering the song of indigenisation and empowering the people that is the simple politics that we should stand for.
Thus as we welcome new professors into the political arena we must always bear in mind the agendas that they carry.