I don’t know whether to be angry or what. This seeming ambivalence, mixed emotions or whatever, is based on that this is the beginning of a New Year when the general expectation is to start on a fairly positive life experience outlook, what with that very mortal obsession of making “New Year’s resolutions.”

So it was that the South African government decided to have Zimbabweans regularise their stay in what is considered the biggest economy continent. Come on, you cannot fault these poor Zimbabweans who have been forced to make choices they would otherwise not have made all things being fair. I believe I am one of many, many Zimbabweans who stayed on despite all the crap, and this based on personal reasons. However, all my siblings left and the oldest – “a very sweet girl”- left with her family to “settle” in SA. Well, are they settled? You bet not!

Thus it was that she sent back her 15 year-old to “organise” a passport on 12 December 2010. Naturally she sought an emergency passport as she has to return to school, and believe me she has aced all the “tests” the South Africans can offer at her level. So I’m elated that she’s got a future she can never get in Zim. Having paid USD250 for an “emergency passport” which we had been told would be issued after two days; she is still wallowing here – today on the 6th of January! She might as well have applied for the snail-pace passport that we are told takes forever to be issued and saved the USD250 for lunch on her way back to SA! And she is supposed to be in class on the 11th of January 2011.

Ever wondered why so many people have so much bitterness about the so-called founding fathers [and I'm not talking about the Ndebele!]; how they have messed up the lives of innocent millions; how they still claim relevance with clowns like that Matebele Prof exhibiting traits that border on the fatalistic cocking a snook at the intelligence of the very people they claim to represent? Religious fundamentalist would no doubt say these folks are cursed, yet this is African politics where dead consciences abound.

And then we read about the KGVI fire and the statement from the MDC-T Home Affairs clown-princess that there was nothing suspicious about the pyromaniac work, as if we had suspected a link with the rush for passports by Zimbabweans domiciled in South Africa!

We sure have a long way to go.

Like Chief Nanga in Chinua Achebe’s ‘A Man of the People’, today’s politicians in Zimbabwe ‘preach one thing and practice another’, writes Levi Kabwato.

In an effort to raise awareness for International Human Rights Day (10 December), Elvis Blue, South African Idols 2010 winner joined other celebrities worldwide to support the Barefoot Against Poverty Campaign. Despite his heavy schedule, he leapt at the idea of trading places with someone less fortunate than himself and agreed to experience life as a beggar. In a Press Release issued by Civicus (7 December), Blue understandably described his experience as “the hardest thing” he’d ever done. However, he also found walking in a less fortunate person’s shoes humbling and he believed that he had been made a better person for it.

Today (9/12) is International Anti-Corruption Day and I thought I could mark the day by adopting a concept similar to the Barefoot Campaign. Unlike Blue, I do not delight in the thought of subjecting myself to hardship and so I decided that I’d spend an imaginary day in the fantastic life of a GNU. HON. MP. CDE. & EOS. (Ever Obedient Son).

Not that their jobs are easy. Keeping this country moving forward and away from the detractors’ clutches demands an early start. To ensure that my strength is kept up throughout the day, at 10am I have a large breakfast (which includes a years’ supply of bacon, kindly donated by a friend). My physician (who is so kind as not to charge me for consultations) says is the most important meal of the day. In fact, a look at my form reveals that I consider all my meals important and so they are all justifiably of generous proportions.

I arrive at the office to find a pile of messages and mile-long list of things to do. With over 20 years in office I’ve acquired superior prioritisation skills and immediately get on the phone to touch base with my “father”. As his humble and obedient servant, I owe everything I am to him and I often like to share my good fortunes with him as a token of my gratitude.

The next few hours are spent meeting with or calling my accountant, my bankers, several of my farm managers, numerous business associates to convince them to make some mutually beneficial investments, some friends to thank them for their kind gifts and my realtors who manage all my houses, both big and small.

It’s almost 3pm and I prepare to leave the office to catch a chartered flight (a complimentary gift from a friend) to some remote place where I was scheduled to address some villagers at midday. On my way out, I promptly sign a scathing letter to stingy Kimberly, admonishing her for her cumbersomely correct process. Unlike my friends, she is definitely neither kind nor generous.

It is too late to return to the capital and so I check into a luxury hotel room that has efficient room service and a well-stocked mini-bar (for which I’m not being charged thanks to a good friend). I reflect on the day and am quite satisfied. I’ve accomplished a lot, managing to visit all my enterprises in the area. They are all flourishing due to the overwhelming support from my numerous friends. I was also able to make new friends who are eager to make a contribution to the cause. My address to the villagers went on well and they know what they must do to receive reward. As I fall asleep, I am quite convinced that indeed, I am a heavyweight in this game.

The Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU) and Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) have released a report entitled “No Hiding Place: Politically Motivated Rape against Women in Zimbabwe.”  This report is accompanied by a DVD “What about us?” Both the report and the DVD focus on the experiences of women members of a voluntary network set up to provide support for female victims of politically motivated rape.

Read the report here

Even when the GNU was inked in 2008, progressive, cerebral and visceral analysts – and even pseudo-intellectuals – greeted the marriage of inconvenience with the same cynicism that Zanu PF game planners are considering the outcome of what many see as this rushed election.

Reasonable men and women wondered how Zanu PF- a nationalist and rightwing party – could capitulate to any demands placed on the table by the MDC, and this based on previous pronouncements that they did not see any reason why in their opinion people with no liberation war credentials could be allowed to rule the country. And now we have Khaya Moyo and Chihuri speaking the language of Chinotimba we pretend to be surprised, only because another election is looming despite popular opinion that this will be the death of us as the conditions for a credible elections are palpably absent.

In this newest discourse on the future of the country, the issue then becomes what has to be done to have a consensus that the country can go head and have elections, not to mention the referendum. Based on what we already know about the Zanu PF collective and the congenital and abysmal attitude to democracy and the people’s right too choose a government of their own, it would be safe to say that what has been missing in this crisis is outside leverage to make Mugabe bend.  Yet we also already know Mugabe’s attitude toward outsiders “interfering”  in the internal affairs of “his” country.

What choices then do Zimbabweans have on the face of these apparently intractable contradictions as defined for the whole nation by Mugabe and Zanu PF? You get Jonathan Moyo saying the MDC will never win an election, and you have to ask what informs such careless statements: who is voting, the people of Zimbabwe or Zanu PF? Obviously Zanu PF will never vote for the MDC, and in an election where only Zanu PF elements vote, you can guarantee an MDT thrashing – much like the June presidential run-off farce – but for God’s sake it does not work that way and you somewhat understand why Zanu PF would insist on having these elections, because they figure there wont be any MDC supporters to vote thanks to the patriotic efforts of Jabulani Sibanda and Chinotimba!

But then it has to be asked for how long Mugabe and Zanu PF are going to ride roughshod over the wishes not only of Zimbabweans but standards set by the international community which has – albeit feebly – tried to steer this country to placid waters? Imagine the progeny of Zanu PF hawks embracing the same militancy half a century after Zimbabwe’s independence and telling us that no one without liberation war credentials is fit to rule! You then understand the belligerency Africa has seen in its many troubled spots where obdurate nationalists and despots are responded to by matching militancy from frustrated opponents who decided the ballot was just but a fart in the wind as far as the nationalist despots were concerned.

Another thing that has brought the rather unnecessary stretching of this crisis, some contend, is the mediation by SADC and how useless the whole exercise has been since the Mbeki years. International relations and diplomacy efforts only work when local parties involved in negotiations see themselves as equals, after all this is what has brought to an end some of the continent’s most atrocious human crises. Zimbabwe however offers an example that negotiations can drag for centuries as long as one party to the negotiations obsesses about entitlement to political power despite the good intentions of mediators to make repair the limping country.

Meanwhile, with this insistence on elections by Zanu PF, we do not have to brace ourselves that the victory Zanu PF is already claiming will be disputed: we already know that the mediators will persuade the MDC to accept a Zanu PF victory while those who voted for change and the international community who question the outcome will be told once again to go to hell. And where does that leave the ordinary man, woman and child? Well, just blame the MDC for not being tough enough on Mugabe and Zanu PF, yet you still have to empathise with those so-called MDC hardliners who were – and still are – against this marriage that has inconvenienced us all when we could be using our brains to understand better things other than how Zanu PF the party Simon Khaya Moyo so much extols lost the bush war plot, how this neo-patrimonialism crap came to make supposedly good man bad.

I saw and wept the other day at the response to Gabon’s run-off election where results were torn in front of television cameras by an official from the party that was sensing sure defeat, and you understand Zanu PF’s thesis that they will never accept an electoral outcome that does not favour them as a culture from the Dark Ages where the rule and the will of the people has no place in their definition of self-rule and self-determination. The question obviously becomes, why hold elections if you are not going to accept the results? Chinotimba answered that already in a Newsday interview:

That’s how we do things in Zanu PF!