The Sunday Mail
Writing Back
Ranga Mataire
There shouldn’t be any qualms with a political figure adhering to his/her religious beliefs. However, it becomes a real problem and a danger to society when such a political figure assumes that his/her personal beliefs are superior to the foundational ethos of a nation.
Nelson Chamisa, leader of the MDC Alliance, has been doing so with an astounding sense naivety.
Let’s start where we are supposed to start.
‘Writing Back’ is never about opening our armpits to strangers. In fact, it is about affirming our humanity and debunking the long held prejudices of the “Empire” about us.
Even when fellow countrymen, in moments of drunken stupor, attempt to expose their backsides to strangers, elderly women and men always rush to cover such iniquities from the eyes of strangers.
Sadly, as an oddity of nature, there are times when even the elders can’t predict certain sudden spiritual afflictions bordering on some kind of madness.
These kind of afflictions normally call for real exorcism ceremonies where a traditional brew is prepared by those that are past menopause.
And before such ceremonies are held, the afflicted individuals are kept in check and completely quarantined from partaking in issues of the Dare, lest they poison the esteemed discourses that normally define and shape the clan’s trajectory.
Who then has the responsibility to quarantine a political figure who is in the habit of exposing his bare backside to strangers in the vain hope of endearing with them by profaning the very things that define his own clan, his own family and his own nation?
Who is going to call for a cleansing ceremony of a political figure who has taken it as a pastime to defame the very essence of what it means to be Zimbabwean?
After all the misogyny and intolerance of the 2018 campaign, Chamisa has brought a new outrage to our national discourse; religious fundamentalism.
“Our problems”, he tweeted, “emanate partly from the Zimbabwe Bird”, which he calls “a religious idol.”
This is not new. Even those close to him have warned us.
In 2013, Phillan Zamchiya’s paper entitled “The MDC-T’s (Un) Seeing Eye in Zimbabwe’s 2013 Harmonised Elections: A Technical Knockout”, revealed how Chamisa convinced Morgan Tsvangirai to discard all technical advice on the campaign and go by his spiritual dreams.
“God showed me in my dreams that Morgan Tsvangirai is going to win with a close margin, between 53 and 56%,” Chamisa told a campaign meeting.
In 2018, another scholar, Simukai Tinhu, wrote: “Chamisa would have been a complete politician and realist that the MDC needs at the helm of the party had it not for his occasional idealism shaped by his addiction to strident neo-liberal views and his disturbingly constant reference to the Bible at political rallies. His religious views shaped immutably and meticulously by his born again Christianism will compromise a tragic view of politics, something required to succeed in Zimbabwe’s brute political scene. But these are the things that can be worked on as he matures further.”
It seems nobody has been able to “work on” Chamisa’s fanaticism at all.
Tafadzwa Masango, writing in the Patriot newspaper of April 26 — May 2 2019, calls Chamisa “a classic case of an individual who denies his own history and identity in an attempt to please outsiders who he believes are superior to him.”
Masango was however a bit charitable. There was no need in highlighting and illustrating national symbols present in the very country that Chamisa views as the paragon of good governance and democracy. The very country which he said was on standby to donate huge sums of money once he assumes power. Let him look closely at the United States dollar note. While his mind might be muddled and is given to histrionics antics, we are certain that there are things his eyes won’t miss on that US dollar note.
Maybe the realisation that his chances of ever governing this country are becoming dim is scaring him out of his wits. Roy Porter in “A Social History of Madness” aptly captures this character’s dilemma when he says: “Because it imagines power, madness is both impotence and omnipotence. It requires power to control.” Unfortunately, Chamisa lacks that power and its driving him nuts.
The media must start calling a spade a spade. No one automatically deserves deference simply because he has some people who blindly decide not to see his glaring anti-Zimbabwe antics.
Not a day passes without a newspaper or social media speaking of President Mnangagwa and Chamisa as if they are equals. This could be the time for the media to burn these false equivalences forever. Pretending that both sides are equal when they are clearly not is not objective journalism. It is telling fairy tales, and like most fairy tales, a dishonest one.
We need to re-calibrate the default assumptions of Zimbabwe’s political discourse that give credence to hallucinations of victory and remind each other that the nation is bigger than a delusional political character who thinks that since his election ran on “God is in It” he can’t fathom the same God relegating him to a sour loser.
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