The Sunday Mail
Henry Louis Mencken once said, “A cynic is a person who if he sees flowers, he looks around for a coffin.”
We will return to that statement later. For now let us explore a phrase that has much more common currency among the literati.
Art for art’s sake.
This is derived from the French phrase “l’art pour l’art”, credited to 19th century critic Theophile Gautier.
The statement was a Bohemian credo used as a rallying call by all opposed to moralist and socialist realism constraints on artists.
Believers said art was self-justifying and did not need to have a “cause”.
It is also a credo that will not be unfamiliar to the African political sphere, where we experience the painful phenomenon of opposition for opposition’s sake.
In Zimbabwe, opposition for opposition’s sake is more than just a credo, it is a business that some have honed into an art form over the past 15 years.
That is why the Harare City Council, dominated by opposition MDC-T politicians, feels no sense of irony in seeking to fire 3 000 workers while in the same breath accusing the Zanu-PF Government of failing to protect employees.
They just have to oppose, they can but do nothing else!
Opposition for opposition’s sake is not limited to MDC-T and its media appendages.
It is something that many non-governmental organisations have worked hard on to the point of making it a default mental setting.
Which is why it was refreshing to read recently of a new director at the strange animal called Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, Dr Phillan Zamchiya, speaking about ending, in his own words, the “demonic regime change agenda by the West” and instead focusing on proffering solutions to the country’s challenges.
Is it a Damascene moment? Is it an evolutionary or, better still, a revolutionary transition in the thinking of this NGO which since 2001 has worked closely with other opposition elements to oppose President Mugabe for the sake of opposing President Mugabe?
From an evolutionary perspective, even as Charles Darwin set about penning “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life”, we all know that a cat can never evolve into a dog.
A snake can only evolve into a more dangerous predator.
So if this is evolution in Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, than we best better beware what could be brewing as the anti-Zimbabwe NGO lobby adopts new means of executing an agenda that has nothing to do with the interests of the majority in this country.
Or could it be a revolutionary transition by this NGO, which by the way is the mother of the anti-Zimbabwe lobby within the civic sector?
That is highly unlikely.
Despite Dr Zamchiya’s Mugabe-esque take on demonic Western-inspired regime change agendas and seeking to have better, pro-development “relational capacities” with Government and “other viable stakeholders”, there is an elephant in the room that cannot continue being ignored.
Who funds Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition? We know from leaked confidential US Embassy cables made available by Wikileaks that Usaid has poured millions of dirty dollars into organisations like the one Dr Zamchiya leads.
Can he unequivocally tell us that either they have rejected those dirty dollars, or that they have somehow reached an arrangement with the US state department to keep on getting that money but will not use it for “demonic regime change”?
We raise this issue not because we have any fear of Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition or any other Western-funded NGO for that matter.
Fifteen years of trying and failing have shown us that dirty dollars cannot overcome our revolution.
Rather, we raise these issues because Zimbabwe could be entering a new phase in the anti-empowerment drive in which outright hostility is replaced by a pretense at re-engagement.
Already we appear to be inching towards IMF capture of Government policy because of a few seemingly conciliatory words from the lender. Are the American-funded NGOs and the moneymen in Europe really holding out flowers to us, or as Henry Louis Mencken says, should we be keeping our eyes open for the attendant coffin — our own coffin?
EDITORIAL COMMENT: There is an elephant in the room
The Sunday Mail
Henry Louis Mencken once said, “A cynic is a person who if he sees flowers, he looks around for a coffin.”
We will return to that statement later. For now let us explore a phrase that has much more common currency among the literati.
Art for art’s sake.
This is derived from the French phrase “l’art pour l’art”, credited to 19th century critic Theophile Gautier.
The statement was a Bohemian credo used as a rallying call by all opposed to moralist and socialist realism constraints on artists.
Believers said art was self-justifying and did not need to have a “cause”.
It is also a credo that will not be unfamiliar to the African political sphere, where we experience the painful phenomenon of opposition for opposition’s sake.
In Zimbabwe, opposition for opposition’s sake is more than just a credo, it is a business that some have honed into an art form over the past 15 years.
That is why the Harare City Council, dominated by opposition MDC-T politicians, feels no sense of irony in seeking to fire 3 000 workers while in the same breath accusing the Zanu-PF Government of failing to protect employees.
They just have to oppose, they can but do nothing else!
Opposition for opposition’s sake is not limited to MDC-T and its media appendages.
It is something that many non-governmental organisations have worked hard on to the point of making it a default mental setting.
Which is why it was refreshing to read recently of a new director at the strange animal called Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, Dr Phillan Zamchiya, speaking about ending, in his own words, the “demonic regime change agenda by the West” and instead focusing on proffering solutions to the country’s challenges.
Is it a Damascene moment? Is it an evolutionary or, better still, a revolutionary transition in the thinking of this NGO which since 2001 has worked closely with other opposition elements to oppose President Mugabe for the sake of opposing President Mugabe?
From an evolutionary perspective, even as Charles Darwin set about penning “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life”, we all know that a cat can never evolve into a dog.
A snake can only evolve into a more dangerous predator.
So if this is evolution in Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, than we best better beware what could be brewing as the anti-Zimbabwe NGO lobby adopts new means of executing an agenda that has nothing to do with the interests of the majority in this country.
Or could it be a revolutionary transition by this NGO, which by the way is the mother of the anti-Zimbabwe lobby within the civic sector?
That is highly unlikely.
Despite Dr Zamchiya’s Mugabe-esque take on demonic Western-inspired regime change agendas and seeking to have better, pro-development “relational capacities” with Government and “other viable stakeholders”, there is an elephant in the room that cannot continue being ignored.
Who funds Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition? We know from leaked confidential US Embassy cables made available by Wikileaks that Usaid has poured millions of dirty dollars into organisations like the one Dr Zamchiya leads.
Can he unequivocally tell us that either they have rejected those dirty dollars, or that they have somehow reached an arrangement with the US state department to keep on getting that money but will not use it for “demonic regime change”?
We raise this issue not because we have any fear of Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition or any other Western-funded NGO for that matter.
Fifteen years of trying and failing have shown us that dirty dollars cannot overcome our revolution.
Rather, we raise these issues because Zimbabwe could be entering a new phase in the anti-empowerment drive in which outright hostility is replaced by a pretense at re-engagement.
Already we appear to be inching towards IMF capture of Government policy because of a few seemingly conciliatory words from the lender. Are the American-funded NGOs and the moneymen in Europe really holding out flowers to us, or as Henry Louis Mencken says, should we be keeping our eyes open for the attendant coffin — our own coffin?
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