Mugabe should not give Tsvangirai a passport

TANONOKA JOSEPH WHANDE

Rhetoric entices me. I love rhetoric because rhetoric graphically emphasizes the message.
Rhetoric will always sift out anyone who uses it to spread the wrong message.

Phandu Skelemani, Botswana’s now liberated Foreign Affairs Minister, has rhetoric, beautiful rhetoric.
Skelemani is enjoying himself because, on Zimbabwe, he appears to be talking about something he really believes in and I now wonder about his agony under Festus Mogae.

Rhetoric is enticing and.
Raila Odinga has rhetoric, appropriate rhetoric, just like Skelemani’s. In terms of rhetoric that we get from both, you’d think they were twins, rhetorically speaking, of course.
But both Botswana and Kenya have moved away from their useless and notorious organizations, the African Union and the Southern African Development Community.

I do not like the agreement that Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai went into with Robert Mugabe and I have said it before.
I do not like the agreement that Odinga went into with Mwai Kibaki either.
Odinga did it because there was a crisis in Kenya.
Odinga did not go around playing golf or water polo in some country while his people died at the hands of his political adversary.
Odinga recognized that, even having received the fruits of his quest, there was an unnatural stalemate.
He clipped his own wings to save his people and his nation.
Odinga remained in Kenya with his supporters when the mayhem played itself around them and he, in his person, participated in attempts to find an answer, surrounded by grieving families and supporters.
He was there with the people.
Odinga sacrificed part of the mandate his own people gave him just so he could save his country and his fellow citizens.

To that extent, therefore, Mr Tsvangirai must, of necessity, go home. He is the leader for whom people are being killed. He is the leader people believe in.
He is the one person on whose person Zimbabweans pin their hopes. Those nations outside our Zimbabwean borders who want to help will not do so unless Tsvangirai says so.

Surely, Mr Tsvangirai, who has suffered much more for Zimbabwe than Robert Mugabe did, does not think that it is a given that people should die for him?
MDC advisors better come up with a better strategy than sitting there and hope that the ‘international community’ will do something.
Already, the MDC is showing bad signs of uncaring and does not seem able to utilize the help and hospitality from countries such as Botswana.
The MDC is not crying out for help for the afflicted in Zimbabwe, yet it should be; instead, it is busy covering the tracks of its leader as he criss-crosses the globe.

People are dying in Zimbabwe because they support Tsvangirai.
There is trouble in Zimbabwe and the people need leadership.
Tsvangirai should not make it look as if his own life is more important than those hundreds and hundreds of starving people who refuse to renounce their allegiance to his party.
There is something called ‘leading by example’.

Mr Tsvangirai must be careful not to polorise his own supporters. And he is doing just that, in and outside Zimbabwe.
This, I must say, is not rhetoric. The MDC leadership has to do better with people in the so-called Diaspora. The MDC must desist from creating an elitist organization.
Security? Yes, definitely!
But is it okay for supporters to die for the MDC leadership while the MDC leadership is safe and enjoying itself while their own supporters are dying from Mugabe’s brutality and from Mugabe-induced cholera and other ills?
Meanwhile, the leader and his family are not even in Zimbabwe, meaning that other people’s children are being sacrificed. Really?

Tsvangirai needs better advisors than he has now. If he is not clever enough to realize that, then MDC supporters have a problem.
There are Zimbabweans who accuse some MDC people of running a fuel supply business to their seniors in Zimbabwe.
It’s on the streets and it is embarrassing.
Tsvangirai’s sacrifices are slowly being eroded by bad judgments and bad company.
We heard about Thokozani Khupe chairing a very important meeting and wondered if it was okay for her to be arrested or killed by ZANU-PF thugs; we heard about Khupe breaking down at a clinic in front of ill people who had no medication while her boss was elsewhere outside Zimbabwe.
The number of the dying is going up while Tsvangirai is away.

Mr Tsvangirai would be justified to seek asylum elsewhere if he wishes and he should, instead of playing hide and seek with the very same people who are dying for him.
Decidedly, Mr Tsvangirai has suffered and has come a long way. He must, however, be home with the very people who, on a daily basis, are being killed because they believe his ideals.

As for Odinga, his rhetoric, of late, has suddenly taken the once beloved tone that Mugabe and ZANU-PF espoused in their earlier hard-line-posture in defense of an African Renaissance, not the hogwash renaissance that the disgraced Thabo Mbeki feebly announced to the world on his assumption to the South African Presidency.
Odinga’s utterings, no longer tinged with diplomacy, echo the once misinterpreted outbursts from Robert Mugabe.
Only now do we know that Mugabe was playing to the gallery but African Americans and a host of African presidents and their citizens fell for it and, surprisingly, continue to do so.

Yet, these are the very same people who should be shattering the fake façade of retrogressive camaraderie practiced by aging and unelected African leaders.
Where are the Africans and where are the African Americans?
If Dachau and Auschwitz get more coverage, attention and sympathy than today’s recurring deaths at the hands of Mugabe, then we the world has a problem.
Where are the Africans and where are the African Americans, themselves experienced sufferers at the hands of successive governments that oppressed them?

As African Americans rise in stature, their concern for others lowers.
As Africans in Africa’s fortunes improve, their time for the less fortunate on the continent diminishes.
But I take heart in the fact that Zimbabweans don’t necessarily need them.
Understandably, the enthusiasm with which Africans and African Americans supported Mugabe has been doused by the emerging of unexpected evil in governance from the one-time idol. It is the absence of that same commitment to demand justice for people and it is the absence of the fire to demand human rights that makes me feel betrayed by both Africa and our cousins in America.

The heart of the matter is that we all belong together. We have come a long way and our common bond is the simple existence of political and social malcontents in our midst. We have to watch them.
The one thing that links us together is the abuse we have suffered at the hands of our so-called liberators. We have to watch them.
Elliot Manyika is gone now at the hands of his own masters, just like Border Gezi.
I cannot say ‘rest in peace, Elliot Manyika’ because Manyika’s victims are not yet settled in their graves. And Manyika’s survivors no longer trust authority.
His interview with his Maker is not going to be easy, rightly so.
I am Tanonoka Joseph Whande and the best I can say on behalf of my fellow Zimbabweans is…nothing.
That, my fellow Zimbabweans, is the way it is today, Thursday, December 11, 2008.