COMMENT: The caravan must move on

31 Jul, 2016 - 00:07 0 Views
COMMENT: The caravan must move on

The Sunday Mail

Hardline views usually make for wonderful headlines and horrible outcomes. The wonderful headlines egg the hardliners further down the slippery slope to an extremism that often expresses itself in social angst and upheaval.

And that in turn makes for more wonderful headlines and the race to the bottom continues as the extremists feed off the media and in turn feed them back while the rest of humanity gnashes its teeth.

In Syria, instead of the interested parties edging towards a solution after years of war have failed to deliver anything but death to ordinary people, we have rhetoric being upped and sabre rattling increasing.

In South Sudan, the world’s newest nation state – and which should have learnt from other countries’ failures – we see a descent into a vortex of violence that the ordinary people of that land thought ended with their recognition of independence.

In the United States, institutionalised murder of non-white people is on the rise, and the response has been to go vigilante and gun down police officers indiscriminately.

We won’t even get into France, which is not the future of extremist violence, but is indisputably already its new home.

Through it all, the hardliners push the boundaries, they cross the line, they lower the bar. And people suffer, they bleed, they die.

The media express their horror at it through loud headlines that actually serve to tell us that they are secretly pleased that they will sell more copies and get better television ratings; a macabre fascination with disaster that has become the hallmark of the Social Media/Selfie Age.

Rarely do we get genuine, heartfelt calls for restraint. Temperance doesn’t advance political agendas, restraint doesn’t sell newspaper copies. And yet through the cacophony of extremist exhortation and declaration, there is a strong case for moderation. That voice of reason so often drowned out by those who would rather beat the drums of war – as if they themselves and not poor, ordinary folk will do the actual dying in the battlefields – sometimes rises above the baying of those consumed by bloodlust.

Just as it did last week as President Mugabe addressed war veterans at Zanu-PF’s headquarters in Harare.

The backdrop to that address, broadly speaking, was a fallout between some war veterans and the leadership of Zanu-PF.

We all know that story: some people see the actions of a few, rogue war veterans as an opportunity to divide Zanu-PF; others see it as their chance to push out President Mugabe; others yet see it is an invitation to get rid of Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

The hounds smelt blood and thought they would go for the jugular. Some sections of the media screamed about the collapse of Zanu-PF. Some shrieked that the centre – in reference to President Mugabe – was no longer holding. Some politicians, without themselves even discounting the possibility that they were speaking under the influence of certain herbs that are illegal in this country and in much of the world, said it was all VP Mnangagwa’s fault and he should be kicked out.

In all cases, not a shred of tangible evidence was provided to back up the claims. In all the cases, no logical or articulate postulation was put forward to justify the conclusions.

And in all the cases, both the media and the hardliners sought to sow the seeds of division whose fruit is chaos. President Mugabe’s measured call to speak the language of unity was thus timely.

Like he did in February when another official – a lady who has confessed to have an education not exceeding a point even sufficient to write and fail Ordinary Level – chose a public occasion to attack VP Mnangagwa, President Mugabe showed once again why opinion polls consistently say he is the politician ordinary Zimbabweans trust the most.

This is not the time to be engaging in wild fights that do nothing to further the development agenda that the Zanu-PF Government promised as it coasted to electoral victory three years ago.

This is not the time to be jostling for positions even as Zim-Asset cries out for full implementation.

Yes, there are many public officials who are quietly going about their work in fulfillment of the electoral promises.

But some seem intent on preaching from the pulpit of dangerous extremism. Such voices must be brought to heel, and some of them must be ignored outright as we focus on the important things.

There is an old Arabic proverb that tells us, “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.” President Mugabe’s message to the extremists last week was that we should let the caravan move on.

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