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| Pawn in power game...Morgan Tsvangirai |
The Herald
REFLECTIONS with Tichaona Zindoga
MANY people have largely tended to view Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in less-than-complimentary light, especially as a man who relishes the prospect of leading this country some day, which might never come, anyway.
This is because, in that unlikely event, he will be trying on the shoes of President Robert Mugabe.
For all we know, these are the big shoes of an academic and statesman par excellence, a visionary and icon of African humanism.
This is not to mention his liberation war credentials on which Zimbabwe was founded and remains proud of the legacy, what with the never-ending quest for dominance that the West, architects of slavery and colonialism, continue to direct at us.
By contrast, while President Mugabe and other cadres waged war on the evil forces Tsvangirai kept in the safety of his mother’s skirts back home and later in his life distinguished himself in serving tea to the colonialists in the mines. Those are generational results and stubborn facts about a good servant of the white man.
This latter attribute earned him the sobriquet of "Tea Boy", which those with a proud history of resisting the alien enemy quite used with heartless mirth, and perhaps, given the broader scheme of things, justifiably.
It goes without saying that Tsvangirai did not deploy the time he cowed from the battlefront to earn himself some respectable education, at a time when those languishing in Ian Smith’s prisons managed to further their studies.
But then the big time came.
Tsvangirai, by whatever means, rose from the obscurity of a tea-boy at some mine or the other to become the leading trade unionist in the country. That was a meteoric rise that propped up his ambition to eventually lead the country. Ambition is made of sterner stuff, as Shakespeare would have aptly put it.
Being no more lettered than any ordinary man or woman on the street, it must be owned, Devil-due-giving, that it must have been brawn that led to Tsvangirai’s rise to the top.
Ironically, he lacked just the same when we wanted to chase away the colonialists.
But the same courage led to him being the leader of the MDC when the party was formed in one September day in 1999 after of course preparations that dated to his championing of crippling worker strikes in the previous years.
He had become a subject in Western capitals looking for an alternative to an increasingly insurmountable President Mugabe.
In him, the West saw an opportunity to defeat from within Zimbabwe’s course to total liberation and emancipation but the project has been akin to pushing a mountain.
In Tsvangirai, the whites who wanted to hold on to the land they stole from our, and his ancestors, saw a flicker of hope — which they fuelled by their ill-gotten money to try to reduce to ashes the revolutionary spirit of Zimbabwe.
In short, the whites knew Tsvangirai’s own fawning spirit and decided they had found their pawn.
A cursory look at his profile now reveals that he is not as crude as in the former days, with those who have interacted with him, like this writer albeit for a moment, having to admit that he has taken some polishing.
He even has a face of a President, at least according to some sympathetic comment on some of his campaign posters.
He is the "face of democratic struggle", and undisputed leader of the MDC, some chip in.
But then this "face of the democratic struggle in Zimbabwe" is no more than that, a mere front of American and its allies’ interests in Zimbabwe.
And he is very dispensable after his present "indispensability" as the face of the not-so-democratic struggle, ask Christopher Dell, the cowboy masquerading as a diplomat.
In the recently-leaked classified cable, America’s "Mr Fix it" who has been to trouble spots around the world to fix his country’s imperialist interests, believes that Tsvangirai is "a flawed figure, not readily open to advice, indecisive and with questionable judgment in selecting those around him".
"He is the indispensable element for opposition success, but possibly an albatross around their necks once in power…Zimbabwe needs him, but should not rely on his executive abilities…"
Does that sound familiar?
Of course, that is what has been pointed out so many times over.
Tsvangirai and his MDC, many of whom are not endowed with talent, as Dell notes (except Biti and Chamisa), will be used and thrown away.
Just like used condoms; and has someone not drawn such analogy before? Tsvangirai’s benefactors in the West would not let him overgrow his tea-boy pedigree.
They would rather he dies as such, or even serve teas to the likes of Kagoro, Magaisa and Mufuka.
One might be prompted to think that the West are snobbish, much the same as those back home.
Yet the hard facts are there.
Under the present scenario, when the country is in the hands of black people, we can’t risk going back to the days of colonialism. And he that could not fight colonialists cannot be trusted with keeping the treasure.
On the other hand, if that unfortunate day comes to pass when we surrender our sovereignty, our enemies know that we must not get it back.
Unfortunately, that task is too big for Tsvangirai.
The enemy knows it, and would rather trust brainwashed Diasporans.
Tsvangirai might be useful now, but the system that follows thereafter is complex and he will be an albatross, Dell says. One cringes at the idea of how poor Tsvangirai, will be shunted aside, with disgust.
Poor, poor Tsvangirai!
He but a pawn in the larger game!
He must take time to reflect on this.
The West, led by the US who feel better placed to achieve regime change in Zimbabwe than Britain, Australia or the EU, urges him on.
They provide him all the goodies and pampering he did not think possible in his days at Nerutanga Village in Buhera, or in the seclusion of mines in Bindura.
They give him all the courage and phoney awards one can think of.
Back in their minds, they know that one day they would demand their pound of flesh and leave Tsvangirai to rot.
In fact, they are quite disgusted because they know that with someone better than Tsvangirai, which Zimbabwe can offer, they could have landed Africa’s jewel in Zimbabwe.
Tsvangirai is a walking dead.
He is walking to a destination that, if ever he arrives at, will have the door shut right at his face.
Dell might say that Tsvangirai is a "star" quality, but he knows that this star will only lead to a Bethlehem and dim to obscurity.
Perhaps for Tsvangirai "The End is Nigh!"
tichaona.zindoga@gmail.com
SEE ALSO:
MDC-T: Conduit in US foreign policy
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