The Sunday Mail
GERMANY has contributed so much to the world — be it good or bad.
It could be swanky cars such as the Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, Volkswagen and Maybach.
It could be popular sports brands such as Adidas and Puma.
There is just no limit to what their industrial machinery has materially gifted to the world.
Elton Mangoma
They have also produced heroes and villains, as well as brutes and thinkers, in equal measure.
Perhaps foremost among its sons famously known for both infamy and notoriety was Adolf Hitler, whose macabre industrial-scale slaughter of over six million Jews in extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Chelmno still remains a stain on the conscience of the world.
Although Jews had traditionally been persecuted for their religion for centuries, even during the Middle Ages, it is the sheer scale and depravity of Hitler’s pogrom that makes it as remarkable as it is revolting.
Such gratuitous abuse and existential threat are partly the reason that led to the exodus of Jews from Europe to Palestine, where David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the creation of Israel on May 14, 1948. Ironically, Israel, which has been progressively eating away land belonging to Palestinian Arabs over the past eight decades by encroaching onto their territory, now stands accused of persecuting Palestinians, just in the same way its people were persecuted in Europe.
How tragic!
So, it is fair to say the eternal conflagration in the Middle East, as manifested by the recent flare-up in hostilities between Palestine and Israel, is, to an extent, the indirect consequence of Hitler’s actions in the mid-20th century.
But, just as Germany has given the world brutes known for their brawn, it has also given us thinkers popular for their brain.
The perspicacious works of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Engels, Karl Max and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the field of epistemology and ethics continue to shape and influence the contemporary world.
Bishop Lazi was particularly fascinated by the insights of Hegel on Christianity and history, which he often overquotes and clichés, among them Hegel’s observation that “the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”.
History, he also posited, was an enactment of God’s purpose, which was the gradual realisation of human freedom.
Hegel, however, argued that for the realisation of this freedom, there was need to transition from a natural life of savagery to a state of law and order.
But he controversially opined that force and violence were needed to make people law-abiding until they had sufficiently advanced far enough mentally to accept the rationality of an ordered life. Kikikiki.
Similarly, Karl Marx seemed to agree with Hegel on how history tends to re-enact itself in circumstances that are almost tragic.
In his essay titled “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), he indicated: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
History is repeating itself
Bishop Lazi believes it is indeed a truism that history repeats itself.
After the sobering defeat of Nelson Chamisa and CCC in the August 23-24 plebiscite, the party is now in a state of flux, which has been exacerbated by the kerfuffle and imbroglio ignited by the recent recalls of 15 CCC MPs, nine senators and 17 councillors by Sengezo Tshabangu, who calls himself the interim secretary-general of the party.
You have to feel for ordinary members of CCC, most of whom do not have an idea of how their party is structured and run.
They currently do not know whether they are coming or going.
This is hardly surprising, particularly after Chamisa recently publicly indicated that they operated as a “wapusa wapusa” movement, a cult that gets its amorous gratification by operating in the dark.
For those who might be struggling to understand what is happening in the CCC, the Bishop will assist.
Matthew 7:24-27 cautions: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
CCC is a house built on sand — nay, it is a house built on quicksand.
It carries the Original Sin of an accursed movement whose founding as the MDC — at the behest of white former commercial farmers and the West — was predicated on removing a liberation movement, ZANU PF, that had dared to repossess the sacred ancestral lands of its people.
But Bishop Lazarus digresses.
Forget the fib about ZANU PF being remotely responsible for what is happening in the opposition.
What we are seeing in the CCC is a re-enactment of the rebellion that MDC founder Morgan Tsvangirai faced in 2014 after thrice failing to wrest power from Cde Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF, particularly after losing the 2013 election.
The same cast that was at odds with Tsvangirai — principally Tendai Biti, Tshabangu, with added moral support from senior cadres such as Welshman Ncube — are the same that are presently rebelling against Chamisa for being both dictatorial and a hopeless serial loser.
In 2014, the under-siege Tsvangirai had to wield the axe on Tshabangu, who was the MDC’s Matabeleland North provincial organising secretary, and replace him with Thembinkosi Sibindi for being part of a cabal that wanted to depose him.
However, initially, it proved difficult to get rid of him, as Biti, who was the secretary-general then, ruled that the move was null and void.
But Tsvangirai was not as lily-livered and jelly-kneed as Chamisa.
He ruthlessly blew the schemers out of the water. In fact, matters came to a head on February 15, 2014, when the MDC youthies and goons were unleashed on Elton Mangoma and then-youth assembly secretary-general Promise Mkwananzi.
Some targeted comrades like the combative Solomon Madzore had to barricade themselves inside Harvest House, while Biti made a run for it. Kikiki.
Then, as now, the MDC blamed the violence on ZANU PF, while the rebels were also accused of working with the ruling party.
Well, wise African elders once told us that when a hyena wants to eat its children, it first accuses them of smelling like goats.
This chapter marked yet another split of the MDC, after Welshman Ncube had earlier walked away from Tsvangirai’s party to form his own in 2005.
Just to give you a bit of perspective, the dissenters had in their ranks people like Biti, Mangoma, Jacob Mafume, Promise Mkwananzi and Samuel Sipepa Nkomo.
There was no way this cabal was going to pretend to reconcile themselves with Chamisa’s farcical candidate-selection process, which was mischievously designed to both purge potential threats and deploy handpicked candidates under the guise of a “citizens’ consensus”.
Tshabangu’s scathing October 4 letter was quite revealing: “Ostallos and his self-appointed group of friends put aside the list of democratically party candidates, as announced by Citizens Candidates Independent Selection Panel, the body responsible for independent candidate selection, on the 18th June 2023.
“They replaced these popular and legitimate candidates with their girlfriends, family members and virtually anybody who bid the highest price to this closely knit group of corrupt and now filth rich (sic) individuals . . .”
Chamisa blinks
Chamisa is now more than certain that a rebellion is brewing in the CCC.
On October 10, he tweeted: “A leopard never changes its spots.”
In the lead-up to his presser on Wednesday, he was reportedly seething, hissing, huffing and puffing behind the scenes, and it was widely thought he would finally put leaders of the rebellion to the sword.
He, however, did not have the cojones to look the beast in the eye.
But regardless, Chamisa is doomed if he acts and doomed if he does not.
The longer he continues to paper over the cracks by pretending that the crisis in CCC is of ZANU PF’s making and ignore the burning grievances of his fellow comrades, the more it will continue to fester.
Those who study semantics will tell you that the chasm between Biti and Ncube (the former CCC vice presidents — not sure of their rank now), on the one hand, and Chamisa and his kitchen cabinet on the other is frighteningly wide.
Last week, Biti described what is presently happening in CCC as a “mess”, while Ncube said he did not want to be drawn into “kindergarten politics” and “play with mud”. Kikikiki.
University of Zimbabwe lecturer Eldred Masunungure also described Chamisa’s decision to disengage from Parliament as a “gurwe style” of leadership that was akin to cutting the nose to spite the face.
The Bishop died. Kikikikiki.
Either way, the recent developments will have far-reaching existential implications for the opposition, especially for Chamisa’s continued grip on Bulawayo — a traditional citadel of the opposition.
Without support from Ncube and his supporters, his hold is likely to slacken, making him vulnerable to ZANU PF, which is going ever stronger. But Bishop Lazi would not care less.
The challenge he has with Chamisa and CCC is the tendency to besmirch and soil the reputation of State institutions such as Parliament by disingenuously claiming they have a hand in the implosion of the opposition when the internecine strife within the party is clear for all to see.
For someone who calls himself a man of the cloth and ostensibly pivots his movement on Christian values, his continued mendacity stinks to high heaven.
CCC’s internal fights should not be allowed to stain and contaminate our national institutions and processes.
In the circumstances, Bishop Lazi is inclined to agree with Hegel’s view that they need to be forced to be law-abiding until they become sufficiently advanced far enough mentally to accept the rationality of an ordered life.
Bishop out!
