Cdes, friends and fellow countrymen. Greetings. A note to open us up a little:

Progressive minds have received with skepticism the move and motive behind SA visa scrapping for Zimbabweans. We recall that the issue of visas into SA has been something Zim and the rest of SADC have been fighting to get rid of for a very long time ago. SA has been evasive on this issue yet pushing for an open SADC in the background. Just how open a SADC Pretoria wants we seem to start seeing. It is an open SADC that is in service to SA interests first and last. When it comes to servicing SA interests, S. Africans will sleep with anyone including neo-imperialists like China while lynching the DALAI LAMA. Did they not openly tell the world that the spiritual leader’s coming threatens the interests of S.Africa.

In everything they do, it is all business with S.Africa. A trip along memory lane. RENAMO. We, Zimbabweans went into Mozambique to assist a fellow pan-African brother against a banditry explosion supported by a SA’s apartheid govt, again, driven by nothing but S.A’s commercial interests. But as soon as the war was over, SA crosses floor to partner the Mozambiquean revolutionary govt in the Cabora Bassa Hydro electricity project. Years later, they are selling us electricity generated in the same Mozambique.

The same happened in CONGO. SA folded hands while we fought a war to safeguard the sovereignty of another pan-African brother. Just like the Cabora Bassa project, Pretoria would move in after the war and the attendant threat is gone, and we all know about the deals that they clinched. I keep mentioning the word pan-African to demonstrate its commercial meaning when it comes to S.Africans. Moreso that it has been their mantra when confronted with regional challenges or scrapping visas to Zimbabweans. But as we have been noticing over the years, it is all about business with the Mzansi crew.

The visa scrapping for Zimbos is a business move by S.A and nothing more. Zimbabwe and her people according to Pretoria are now ripe a business opportunity for S.A to pluck and safegurad. For, if we agree it is in the spirit of brotherhood this has been done, then are we aslo agreeing that other Southern African countries excluded here are lesser brothers of Pretoria than Zimbabweans? Now here starts the humour and the exposure.

Why now? Is this not the same country that unleashed xenophobic terror on Zimbabweans when we needed their help most? Is it not common sense for all who are for Zimbabwe’s revival that we need our children back than have them baited away by stronger economies. There is a business catch here coated with a saleable humanitarian veneer.

I will give you the background to my argument before elaborating further so that we are in the same enlightened frame. Lest I may be labeled a spoiler by those excited by the prospects of striking gold in Egoli. Sadly, it is the same blur of this excitement that is the business hook for S.Africa. And the patronizing suggestions will be that nobody is being forced to go to SA. Why are you not saying the same with Botswana and others who for long do not require visas for Zimbabweans? We are all aware that these other countries do not have the same lure as SA and that the exodus to SA will increase due to this. And for that we leave this kind and part of the debate to high schoolers.

See, its clear SA has always wanted Zimbabwe to move from being a competitor as was during the 80s/90s and be an extension of SA; which is what the new Zimbabwe many have been fighting for will NOT allow. Aware of this they have decided to team up with local forces against a fully independent Zimbabwe in the guise of revolutionary rhetoric and comradeship.

As I write today, the sources of fear about Zim being a consumer market in service of SA industry can now be seen in the many products now populating our shops’ shelves. Those that were on Mbeki’s case claiming his impartiality as a mediator was motivated by the fact that SA has and will be the biggest beneficiary of Zim’s crisis are now being vindicated by these developments. The timing is great. After years of empty shelves in Zimbabwe, S.A moves in with their products and get the Good Samaritan tag while making sweet money in the process! Now how good can this get!?

Remember the out-going president of S.A suggested Zimbabwe consider the use of the RAND in place of its own currency? Now how entangled can a country be in the economics and politics of another if they adopt its currency? What it means is that any knock to the rand (even those remotely connected to Zim’s interest or doing) will cascade down to Zimbabwe. Say for example, Zuma gets inspired and has another go of the shower scene, and the rand takes a plunge… Zimbabwe will definitely feel the vibrations of the muchina-wami!

Zimbabwe is set to be a S-African province, only that we will not be voting or having representatives in their parliament! Yet we know that S.A will with time go through the same phase Zimbabwe just went through as the nation’s leadership starts doing the inevitable of moving from the revolutionary elites to a leadership of the future. This is a must go route for every African country as the hands of time starts revealing the obsoleteness of liberation war credentials as the only leadership credentials. When that happens to S.A (and I don’t wish them that in a bad way) my heart bleeds for Zim should it be tied to SA for it will have a sequel of the past ten years.

After having stood with their revolutionary mates against the open wishes of the Zimbabwean majority, SA effectively killed the opportunity for a wholesale revival of Zimbabwe in particular our industries. Today our industries cannot compete with SA companies whose operating environment is better than their. The cost of producing in S.Africa is worlds cheaper than producing here in Zimbabwe. At the end the whole process turns out a battle of two unequals. And there goes the last remnants of our industries! Our last few jobs and the potential jobs our industries where set to make in the future.

As the world crisis currently sweeping throughout the world demands that countries find new markets for their industries to survive. For SA, Zim is a good market and a source of cheap labour. The SA/ZIM tale is now the classic baas George farm story. In this tragedy, our children are whipped (free visa) en mass to SA for plantation wages, developing baas George Farm’s produce; then the same wages goes to baas George tuck-shop buying the same produce! Finally we can now say, Goodbye Zimbabwe (1980-2009).

Rest in Peace.

We thought flight was easy -
A simple flapping of our fragile wings
Against the waves of air whirling us to freedom;
Then, we thought we were gods and goddesses,
Hallowed creatures haloed in light,
circling the skies – our own domain of royalty
where neither graveness nor gravity could ensnare us.

Then, we thought flight was
effortless and flawless;
And we didn’t realise that wings can be crushed and broken,
That winds can be brutal,
And that the kindly skies can sear too with rage and fury.

Then, we thought we were admired and revered,
Immortal and invincible:
Creatures of majesty sent to conquer the world
With our youthfulness and beauty,
But that was before we had fallen,
Before we had felt the pain of broken flight,
Thudding to the pitiless earth with wounds gaping with our own blood and bones;
That was before we had known that the elements are not always in our favour,
And that this flight and this life are a continual fight against fierce forces
That do not care for our raw dreams and determination.

Recently Kubatana offered Brian Chikwava’s new book, Harare North, as a prize for the best bit of writing on the Diaspora. Here’s something from Martha in Bulawayo . . .

For me the Diaspora is any place outside Zimbabwe. This is in contrast with the main belief that the Diaspora is over the seas. I grew up in Tsholotsho and most men over the age of eighteen are in Egoli, as Joburg in South Africa, is commonly known. For me they are in the Diaspora. For the past thirty years or so this has been an increasing trend and it has led to an appalling lack of ambition. Boys dream of going to Egoli and girls dream of getting married to Injiva (a man working in South Africa). To me the Diaspora means a  total disregard for education, a break down of the family system (men working in South Africa only visit their families once or twice a year) and lack of achievement – although it might be argued that being able to  feed one’s family is achievement. But I believe if a person who could have been a doctor, an engineer et cetera ends up being a mere gardener in South Africa, there is a lack of achievement. The Diaspora has set an unreal sense of achievement so much that the youth, and in some cases adults, have totally lost focus. To me the Diaspora means a disturbance of a people’s value system and belief in themselves.

I have to say this. I have commented on local social and political issues from way back before the turn of the century and for me whether it has been objective or emotional, one thing has always stood out in my analysis and understanding of local politics: the sincerity of Zanu PF is always and has always been suspect.

Everything the party says – the individuals as a collective – is taken in at your own peril. Whatever people say, the analysts, the opposition, the academics, there is always a caveat.

Beware – they (Zanu PF) only put up a human face to a leviathan that only seeks the dominance of other people’s lives. And all this based on the folly of imagining their own immortality.

I wrote a long time ago about how Mugabe made snide remarks way back in the early years of independence about a white legislator who sued govenment and won the case only to have Mugabe – then the darling of the white world -  to issue an edict that the pay out would be a waste of taxpayer’s money so why pay it.

Now they (Mugabe types) are arressting or rather re-arresting all kinds of activists in direct contravention of the so-called GPA so where does that leave us? Are we there yet? Stupid question! Are we ever getting there?

With this kind of crap where everybody seems to think the leopard will change its colours one can only commiserate with the opposition – and the rest of the incorrigible optimists – where popular thought is that Mugabe and the other types are about or on the road to Damascus. It has always been a trifle that actions speak louder than words, so folks how louder can it get?

The question then is: how do Zimbabweans get themselves out of this mess as the whole world is saying we only pass this Rubicon when they see genuine changes? We have lived with this crap for long enough and we surely deserve better.

Francis Fukuyama reviews The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai and Dead Aid by Dambiso Moyo.

But the truth is that these books have more in common than their authors may admit. Both women see sub-Saharan Africa’s fundamental problem not as one of resources, human or natural, or as a matter of geography, but, rather, as one of bad government. Far too many regimes in Africa have become patronage machines in which political power is sought by “big men” for the sole purpose of acquiring resources—resources that are funneled either back to the networks of supporters who helped a particular leader come to power or else into the proverbial Swiss bank account. There is no concept of public good; politics has devolved instead into a zero-sum struggle to appropriate the state and whatever assets it can control.

The topic is rather vague.  I take it to mean, for the purposes of this discussion, not spiritual crisis or domestic crisis or epistemological crisis, but economic crisis brought about by the politics of cronyism and patronage.  Anybody with a sense of history can see that power corrupts so that today’s oppressed will become tomorrow’s oppressors.  Davids are Goliaths in waiting.  I believe it is my duty as a published writer to keep detached from this ugly cycle so that I can snipe at it.

Sniping is an appropriate figure of speech for writers because they attack from a distance, not like performance artists – actors, playwrights, poet-musicians, film-makers, who engage in hand-to-hand combat and who are, consequently, living a lot more dangerously.  It was his plays in Kikuyu, not his novels in English, that got Ngugi imprisoned.

It’s not only my genre that makes me feel a little safer in our police state.  Unless you’re a commercial farmer, being white still carries a few advantages in this country.  For example, you’re less likely to be searched at a road block.   And unlike Olympic swimmers and Wimbledon tennis players, serious white writers in Zimbabwe have, until recently, been dismissed as irrelevant.  While I used to find that hurtful, I also found it curiously comforting.  I believe my phone is tapped, and I have had some threatening calls, and my laptop was ‘disappeared’ by a senior police officer; but I have yet to see the inside of a prison, and my bones are still intact.

I said earlier that writers attack from a distance.  They work at home or at the town library.  They are seldom asked to read in public because the public find their readings boring.  They are physically detached from their books.  But I have created an even greater distance by the use of satire, a form of sniping which allows me to be disingenuous, to hide behind my irony.  However, this sometimes backfires.  For example, readers think I write sonnets and odes and sestinas because I am colonial-minded, but I write them to parody colonialism.  I reject for mine what Coetzee said about Pringle’s verse: “The familiar trot of iambic tetrameter couplets reassuringly domesticates the foreign content”

The artist is notoriously egotistical, a persistent self-promoter – crisis or no crisis.  The artist would do well to heed the almost daily heroics, in Zimbabwe, of vegetable vendors, certain bloggers, certain journalists, certain human rights activists, and those who wait outside jails.

They say art thrives in times of crisis.  Where then were the artists during Gukurahundi?  Were they still too intoxicated by the euphoria of Independence to take notice?  Where today have all the writers gone? – some into exile, some into silence, some into self-censorship, some into commercial farming!