Do They Think We’re Stupid?
In principle, I don’t have a problem with the idea of an anti-sanctions rally. Anyone who still clings to the myth of them being targeted or a grand illusion orchestrated by our Dear Leader, needs to face reality: sanctions are real, they are not targeted, and they are wrong.
As with most things, ZANU PF took the recent anti-sanctions rally much too far. Now what would have been a rallying point for all Zimbabweans, has been reduced to little more than an exercise in futility and the beginning of ZANU PFs campaign for debatable elections. By no stretch of the imagination can anyone claim that it was a legitimate expression of the peoples’ wishes. For one thing, the people were told to go. A friend called me in distress, after the technicians at a printing concern near downtown Harare were ordered (after an ID check) to attend the rally, and his indigenously owned and operated business lost time, money and customers.
Happily, there are reports the police walked out of the rally during the President’s speech, leaving members of the public with better things to do to do the same.
Forced attendance is nothing compared to the relentless assault on the intelligence of ordinary Zimbabweans. The injury is made worse when you recall that it is the same regime that in the early 80′s instituted a policy of education for all, punctuating the savanna with numerous schools and teachers’ colleges. Or that during Gore reNzara, the same regime bragged to anyone who would listen that even ana ambuya vekumusha understood economic concepts like the drivers of hyperinflation. Yet yesterday they saw fit to treat the assembled masses like drooling five year olds. Zimbabwe supposedly has some of the most educated members of government in the world, and these same people chose to publicly offer moronic platitudes like comparing Our Dear Leader to Cremora – a bland white powder, or saying
“There is no president the world over who has degrees like President Mugabe. He is brainy and that’s why he is feared.”
I quite doubt that anyone could be in fear of an 87 year old man who didn’t command a vast army, no matter how ‘brainy’ he was.
Do they think we’re stupid? Yes.
While Our Dear Leader and his cohorts make an embarrassing spectacle of lamenting sanctions, they forget and distract us from realising that we are slowly becoming South Africa and China’s client state. Zimbabwe manufactures very little. Redistributing what pittance is left of foreign owned companies would not change that. It will not change China’s increasing ownership of the ‘people’s resources’ neither will it stop the influx of South African goods onto supermarket shelves.