The Herald
At one point or the other the world has been treated to a nudist show by some overzealous activists who want to draw attention to their cause which might well range from the noble to outrageous and sometimes outright disgust.
Animal rights activists have often found this device handy, and there you have men and women in a little more than their birth suits fighting for the dear cause of animals they feel are being ill-treated.
In 2003, American country music group, the Dixie Chicks posed nude on the cover of a top magazine in defiance of a section of American public who had been miffed by their anti-Iraq war sentiments.
One of the group members had openly expressed that she was "ashamed" that war mongering President George W Bush came from her home state of Texas.
It will be recalled that Bush had defied millions of dissenting voices at home and abroad as well as the UN Security Council to invade the oil-rich Gulf country, rather blasphemously claiming that "God" had instructed him and his chief lapdog ally called Tony Blair, to topple Saddam Hussein.
Essentially, the underlying principle of all the nudist protests, seem to lie in the perceived irresistibility of a naked body, and by extension, sex, and the symbolic sense of being exposed.
Stripping Nelson Chamisa
Following the gazetting by Government of ministerial administrative powers on Thursday last week, there has been a marked and oft unsavoury use of the nudist device, especially in relation to the Minister of ICT Development Nelson Chamisa whom all week we have been told has been "stripped", "undressed" and "dressed down" by President Mugabe.
Chamisa, like Priscilla Misihairabwi Mushonga, Heneri Dzinotyiwei, and Joel Gabbuza will not have any acts to administer.
It has been Chamisa who has been prominently singled out as having been "stripped of power", as he had openly expressed the wish to take control of telecommunications industry.
Nicholas Goche's Transport, Communication and Infrastructure Ministry will adminnister the posts and telecomms act.
Rabid critic of President Mugabe, John Makumbe, summed the verbal nudist charade by saying, "The MDC has been left naked...it's like MDC are a shadow cabinet."
Chamisa was even more dramatic, saying he had been dismembered of his manhood.
Saying there had been "a gazetting of robbery", he complained that it did not "make any sense" for him to be ICT Minister without the ICT's.
"It is not possible to be a man without the features of a man," he fumed to a local weekly.
Biti says MDC-T is going to fight the "unilateral" administrative assignments tipping his boss Prime Minister Tsvangirai to "deal with the issue" because "party President Tsvangirai appointed our ministers not President Mugabe."
Loose cannon stripped
The furore over Chamisa's "stripping" is understandable, and Makumbe is not way off the mark when he says that it is the MDC-T party that has been stripped naked.
Apart from being a close ally of Tsvangirai, youthful Chamisa is the loose cannon of the party.
His loudmouth opposition to Zanu-PF, with which he has a penchant for finding endless deadlocks and conflicts, deriving -- and not very different from -- student politics where he cut his teeth, is considered crucial.
That he wanted to assign to himself Cabinet functions through the ill-fated ICT Bill last year, in the process stepping into the mandate of the Information and Telecomms ministries as he wanted to shore power on himself is known.
It will be recalled that at one point Chamisa succinctly said he had taken his party's propaganda war to the internet, which he thought he would control, by saying that papers were free to "licence themselves on the internet" to escape the law governing media in the country.
"Without control" of the internet and ZBC which he wanted to wrestle from Shamu the other time, Chamisa has been exposed and for all sensational use of the Queen's language, which sometimes borders on something between baloney and insanity, he is nothing more than an empty cannon.
Playing by the book
For all the sensational talk about Chamisa being "usurped of his powers" we have acutely noted the absence of evidence to the effect that he indeed had powers that had to be stripped in the first place.
One can only be sure that he would be willing to flaunt the letter from Cabinet that assigned him particular duties, which the latest move by Government would have undermined.
For all that is known, and we stand to be corrected, the powers that Chamisa has allegedly been stripped of have but only long been on his wish list and nothing more.
We hope by now he has since made the requisite introspection befitting any serious member of Government as opposed to a student politician.
In the same vein, one cannot help how Biti, for his standing as a lawyer, could be drawn to making a partisan statement that his party was going to fight President Mugabe's "unilateralism" and that Tsvangirai would "deal with the issue", whatever that implied.
Maybe he should, along with anyone interested in procedure, revisit the Cabinet Handbook, which came into force in November 2008.
The handbook, Cabinet's own bible, says on the Assignment of the Administration of Acts of Parliament: "At the direction of His Excellency, the President, the Cabinet Office will reassign the administration of Acts of Parliament to ministers as and when it becomes due."
Any complaints in this regard should be addressed to the Cabinet Office.
How Biti or Chamisa could be lost to this clear-cut procedure is baffling and perhaps an indictment on either the sincerity or the calibre of the two ministers and their followers.
In a word, there is nothing "unilateral", in the evil sense of the word, about the reassignment procedure in the context of GPA.
The Cabinet Handbook recognises the GPA and Prime Minister Morgan Richard Tsvangirai, only reassignment of administrative powers is beyond his scope, neither can he unilaterally reverse them.
That is all about playing by the book.
Rules of engagement
We strongly note and commend America for coming clean on Mr Tsvangirai's statement that Zimbabwe would need an international peace-keeping force in coming elections.
The Prime Minister was wrong in suggesting the deployment of a peacekeeping force, a US diplomat told us, leaving room for a terminological slip up for Mr Tsvangirai.
Sadc would not agree, as there are rules of engagement, whose complexity Mr Tsvangirai had not considered, and it would be impractical for peacekeepers to be involved in an election.
Anyway, Sadc would not want such precedent.
Coming from the US, which Mr Tsvangirai must have wished to sell the idea to, it is warming that the US which has in the past bought every cock and bull story from the MDC, could have such a voice of reason.
Tsvangirai's Damascus moment
On the other hand, it would seem Mr Tsvangirai himself has finally listened to the voice of reason.
On Thursday, he came out in support of the country's indigenisation laws at a business symposium.
He assured investors that there was "no intention on the part of Government to undermine investment but to promote broad-based indigenisation and empowermment" and that the policy was in the best interests of Zimbabweans.
He said Government was negotiating and discussing ways the law could enhance local participation.
The apparent turnaround from Mr Tsvangirai, who had been hell bent on the law after the gazetting of the regulations, is pretty welcome and here is hoping that the PM will show real commitment towards the empowerment of the Zimbabwean populace.
And just as one would expect him to make a follow-up on his sanctions-must-go statement a couple of weeks ago, it will be interesting to see how the PM and his charges act after the statement.
It is an opportunity for becoming popular for a popular cause and it is would seem he has belatedly given himself a present for his 58th birthday.
West's African heroes are cretins
As the dust of South African President Zuma's UK visit settles, there could be not so many more illuminate analyses of the controversial tour than that which given by a perceptive local columnist this week.
Concluding that the underwarm reception by the British public and Press was not because of polygamy, which the gay-loving European country hates with a passion, the columnist gave a very useful insight.
He recalled that in 1998, the beloved Nelson Mandela, two years into his divorce with long-time wife Winnie, had brought his girlfriend Graca Machel, former wife of the assasinated Mozambican nationalist Samora, to Buckingham Palace.
He said Zuma, Mandela and Prince Charles all had a weakness for women, and there was no justifiable reason of deifying or loathing any over the other.
The nub of the Zuma case was that like former President Thabo Mbeki, he had been faithful to a 2002 protocol compelling Sadc and AU countries to "stick together in the face of imperialist onslaught or they would be picked apart one by one".
There can never be a keener observation.
And as far as the beloved Mandela is concerned, just ask Winnie and she will tell you the man who walked out of the whiteman's prison twenty years ago, is not what she, South Africa, and Africa in general expected.
As for another Western darling, Desmond Tutu, well, he is just a cretin who has won fame for a charade called Truth and Reconcilliation Commission.
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