WHEN Professor Jonathan Moyo parted ways with Zanu PF in 2005, President Robert Mugabe remarked that the professor was clever but not wise.

In making appointments to Zanu PF’s politburo, Mugabe and his fellow Presidium members demonstrated that they are neither clever nor wise.

It is difficult to see how Zanu PF thinks it can win elections given that most of the politburo appointments are tired and uninspiring.

It is not in the interest of Zimbabweans to have a dysfunctional Zanu PF. This is not least because a dysfunctional Zanu PF has an unmatched propensity for violence. How can this uninspiring, tired politburo be expected to win elections other than through violence?

The Presidium has done itself and the country a disservice by treating a matter of national concern in a factionalist, flippant and retrogressive way that can only plunge the country into violence come the next elections.

How can people who believe diesel comes from a rock be entrusted with modernising the party?

What new communications impetus can be given to the party by both Rugare Gumbo and the utterly clueless Cain Mathema?

What for instance is the added value of Stan Mudenge and Abigail Damasane to the politburo?

Why trouble old-man Nathan Shamuyarira by dragging him into this politburo?

Ultimately the question is: How does a liberation party define itself in a changing world when new forces are asserting themselves and the party wants to cling on to a decaying order?

It is a cause for concern that three decades after independence we have a party in our country that seems to operate under the misguided notion that only those who participated in the liberation struggle should hold senior positions, never mind their limited capacities in those positions. Modern Zimbabwean political discourse is replete with grand nationalism narratives. At the heart of these narratives are serious questions about identity, history and the notion of a nation.

What does it mean to be a Zimbabwean, and who is responsible for these definitions? Liberation history in this day and age should no longer be used to demonise and exclude others.

Whatever spin is put on Zimbabwe politics, there is no escaping that Zanu PF is in trouble. Those who do not believe this will do well to revisit the results of the March 2008 elections. Before that election, the combined MDC had 41 seats in a 150 parliament. After the elections, they had a combined 109 in a 210 chamber.

That March election wiped out Zanu PF’s two thirds majority and what is more, the MDC made serious inroads in areas that were traditionally thought to be Zanu PF’s. More worrying for Zanu PF was that their presidential candidate Robert Mugabe actually received fewer votes than the party. These are the signs of the times, and if Zanu PF intends to win the elections without using violence, then they would do well to read the signs. The signs at the present moment are that most of the people in the current politburo have gone past their best-before date.

The time has also come for President Mugabe, one of the founding fathers of Zimbabwe, to call it a day. He owes this not just to himself but to Zanu PF. He is currently gripping Zanu PF in a mortal embrace that threatens to have dastard consequences for his party and poses a threat to national security. This is more so against the back ground of Zanu PF’s factional politics and a hushed succession debate.

As a political ship, Zanu PF is sinking and is desperately in need of a captain who can think beyond violence and understands how to transform this liberation party into a vibrant modern party that can give a better life to all Zimbabweans. And here we are not talking about looting national resources and political patronage.

There are a lot of good people in Zanu PF who out of respect to President Mugabe, and the presidium, dare not challenge its decisions. Some have said in private discussions that they are doing something about trying to transform their party from within. The problem with this is that it is very much like winking at a beautiful girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.

There is no knowing what President Mugabe or what the other members of the Presidium think. Georg Buchner says: “Every man is an abyss, you get dizzy looking into it.”

Here the point is that when we think about other people’s differences to ourselves, we get dizzy. Our history is not necessarily one of collective experience. Each one of us is isolated. Trying to account for a person in terms of class, race, or even nationality is bound to be a terrible over simplification. Yet sometimes we do think like that because of the history of colonialism, oppression and violence that has visited us and our loved ones.

Theological people talk of free will, but in essence, there is very little freedom for anybody. Not even for our leaders, however democratically elected. They are tied by their fears, fears of uprisings; fears of losing elections; and fears of being persecuted.

The fact of the matter, however, is that if the oppressed deal only with their oppression, then they are denying themselves and others any freedom outside the chains that bind them.

Zanu PF cannot forever be ensconced in the war mode. Much more critically, President Mugabe is 86 years old. Whatever shouts of bravado, his biological clock is ticking -- he is after all human like everyone else. The old man needs a rest and the time has come to pass on the baton. Zanu PF as a party is tired and needs renewal. That renewal will not come with the kind of politburo announced by the Presidium.

Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote a poem called Ozymandias that Zanu PF will do well to note. It goes:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This was a great statue but now remains bits and pieces. This is about history and power. It is what is called mutability -- the only thing that remains the same is change. The poem lifts the veil about leaders in power. We realise the full significance of words on the pedestal. It is the voice of a man who thinks he is in control, but when we look at the stature in bits and pieces, we realise the folly of such words. Nothing remains of the stature besides the bits and pieces. There is absence of any kind of life even as the stature proclaims: Look on my works yu mighty and despair.