SAMPLE this one: "… Mugabe wants elections for his own personal interest (sic), not for the good of his party or that of the nation.

"Mugabe wants elections to resolve his differences with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in implementing the Global Political Agreement and also to ensure he becomes life president.

"His indefatigable desire to remain in power is nothing short of astounding.

"A few years ago he unsuccessfully attempted to extend his rule to 2010 without facing an election through a constitutional amendment, but the move was blocked by his party.

"Now we see that some zealots have been mobilised to push for Mugabe to be life President.

"As a nation we cannot afford to have elections merely to satisfy an individual’s personal interests.

"If Zanu-PF hopes to salvage anything out of their morbid legacy they should have the guts at the conference to stop the 86-year-old leader from pursuing his unhelpful dream.

"Mugabe should never be allowed to turn the country into a personal fiefdom."

CZI’s dollar coins

Bear with me, gentle reader. I give you another sample reading: "The outcry from public circles on the continued use of the multicurrency system has been on the issue of change (I bet no pun intended)…

"This is an issue that Government needs to address… (We must) mint our own US dollar equivalent coins backed 100 percent by US dollar reserves...

"The nation needs to be reassured that until all fundamentals are in place, the Zimbabwe dollar will not return into circulation."

In the mould of Everyman

For the benefit of those who might not be able to situate the above thoughts, the first extract is from the Editor of the Zimbabwe Independent, Constantine Chimakure, writing in his "Editor’s Memo".

The second one comes from a CZI newsletter.

Clearly, two distinct minds and matters.

I have decided to use these two extracts to illustrate a point I have kept postponing on a number of occasions, but one which I cannot defer any longer.

The point is about an imaginary black/white world we have painted and invented as our real world, thanks to those years of political polarisation.

Whether out of befuddlement or from a sheer appetite for things simple and straightforward, we have painted a world of good and bad people, of right and wrong people, of virtue and vice, both locked in an indefinite combat whose outcome somehow defines and carries our destiny.

It is a binary world as comes in medieval morality plays in the mould of Everyman.

We are at once on the terraces and in the ring; we are at once plaintiff and defendant; we are at once plaintiff-cum-defendant on the one hand, and presiding magistrate on the other.

What is worse, we know a fight must be waged to reach the outcome we desire.

But we won’t see clenched fists; we won’t see blows, let alone blood, let alone harrowing still bodies of vanquished boxer(s).

We want outcomes; we recoil from means which we postulate are the only means available to us.

It is a serious role crisis, our crisis together and I wish to wade into this one, hopefully with you, hopefully to still remain friends, or at the very least, Zimbabweans together.

That is our totem, in spite of ourselves, is it not?

A professor called Mufuka

But first things first.

Normally I do not want to debate people who react and write to vindicate personal relations or to carve personal roles.

I feel very abused when this column is used to prove or vindicate loyalties.

Or to settle indebtedness.

Someone must tell Ken Mufuka that. He is my elder and I am obliged to relate respectfully to him.

I am told he is a professor somewhere in the US.

That doubles the burden I bear towards him.

He is away from home and rebuilds "home" synthetically through occasional lightning visits, and from shards he pieces together from opinionated pieces on the Internet.

I would be very unfair to debate such a man. In any case I have little time for "a wafer" dialogue.

Two times grief for the bereaved

Ken Mufuka reacted to my piece that carried a few paragraphs on Mawere a few weeks.

It was not on Mawere, although it made passing reference to him.

And I happen to know Mawere fairly well, I am even linked to him consanguineously, although I am not too keen to explain that dimension.

This column avoids engaging people who cannot answer back, one way or the other.

I debate people with the intellect and the means for responding.

I get very worried when a whole professor bends his learned hand all to defend an erudite and eloquent "victim" that I know Mawere to be, a man who runs an Internet column.

He has a platform the same way I do; the same way professor Mufuka has one.

The issue on the table is indigenisation and the attitude of the State to the emerging African "middle" class, real or fake.

The issue is the attitude of that emerging African class and claims of a fronting role that seem to dog it.

The issue is not Manheru and theories about who he is or may be.

I am too loud to be searched for, too unequivocal to leave anything to surmise.

The issue is not about the role anyone – great or small – thinks I should play, away from the actual role I am playing, and playing well enough to catch professorial attention.

So professor, do us a little favour: address the issue on the table.

Do not acquit debts for poor Manheru does not settle bills.

If you want to be patron of anything, living or dead, here or away, by all means go for it.

But not through the disingenuousness you displayed two weeks back.

Debt to Sikhala

A huge debt to Job Sikhala.

He came to the spirited defence of Mawere.

He used the Mawere issue to raise the issue of personal liberties in post-colonial Zimbabwe.

I owe him a considered response, which shall come say day soon.

But I am sure he notices there is a formal process under way on the same matter.

Prudence bids that I hold my piece, at least for now.

Abusing your customer

It is all too easy to go down the path of gratuitous abuse of Constantine Chimakure, editor of the Zimbabwe Independent, for his views.

That is not to ignore the fact that he himself works enormously hard to court reactive abuse.

I don’t know much about his temperament in the everyday.

But the personality that leaks through his pen clearly suggests a Hotspur: impulsive, intemperate, un-reflective and even immature.

Maybe greatness came too soon, well before the heart was composed.

But he should never forget that he is an editor.

That means everyone who is part of the public, is potentially his customer, straightforwardly through sales, more complexly through editorial submissions and interaction.

If Mugabe was a Mbeki, one day Chimakure could have been landed with a piece by-lined RG Mugabe.

But Mugabe is not a Mbeki and that spares Chimakure from such a dilemma.

It does not though spare him the dilemma of a one-on-one with Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, and thus a hard-to-avoid subject for news and interviews.

And it’s not about Chimakure the person who may simply decide never to request for such an interview.

It is about Chimakure the editor of Trevor Ncube’s paper, the Zimbabwe Independent, who might, one day, be required to interview the President.

My point holds true not just for President Mugabe, but for all public figures.

Which is why a column personal to an editor should never burn bridges.

And intemperate language forecloses possibilities.

If not for the editor, certainly for his paper.

Personally I can be other things tomorrow (and am sufficiently equipped for them).

But the Independent will always need an editor, Constantine or someone else.

Dressing up your hinds

All this is an aside.

I was about to explain why it would be wrong to abuse Chimakure for the piece I have quoted above.

It would be wrong, quite wrong.

The piece dramatises the dilemma at the core of the Zimbabwe debate: the dilemma of false binaries.

I am not worried about persons nailing their loyalties on this or that cause, on this or that party, this or that organisation.

Or on no other.

I do it myself.

I am Zanu-PF to the marrow and my works and I, including this column, do not hide it.

Far too easier than hiding behind short winter grass in a vlei, is simply dressing up your hinds.

Taking a position is my right which only gets secured in a broader environment within which others are free to make choices, hold opinions and express them.

This is one huge evolution I see around me, an evolution which debaters who still wallow in the myth of an old Zanu-PF of their hate and income (for funded NGOs), never wish to see or acknowledge.

It has been very easy for Zanu-PF to outflank its opponent through stunning surprises.

As a party, it is so lucky to have opponents who are so hidebound, opponents within, opponents without alike.

Anyone here still Zanu-PF?

An anecdote.

One opposition figure told me quite recently about his recent visit to the US.

He says so mistaken are Americans on the political realities in Zimbabwe that they do not believe there are any people left in Zimbabwe who can still vote Zanu-PF.

This is why, he says, they cannot understand the MDC-T leader’s reluctance to oblige President Mugabe’s invitation to go for elections.

He tells me he told those Americans that he personally knew hundreds of Zimbabweans who will vote Mugabe well beyond his tenure.

The same figure brought to me a director of some western NGO for some meeting.

After the meeting, the director had problems in reconciling his image of Zanu-PF and what was before him.

Freezing Zanu-PF in time, or keeping it what you want it to be for your own politics and fund-raising purposes, is many activists’ delight.

Timba and one Gompertz

One has to be careful with a single anecdote.

It does not bring summer rains, does it? I give you another.

The Prime Minister was recently in France, Timba and Chamisa in tow.

One did not need special lenses to tell what the trip was all about.

But that is meat for another day.

Today I aver to Timba’s meeting with the Director for Africa in the French Foreign Ministry, one Stephane Gompertz.

The director was solicitous about elections in Zimbabwe, and the respective party prospects should these elections come to pass.

Timba played reluctant suitor and he knows why.

The French director could not understand this reluctance on the part of the minister.

Was it not a fact that MDC-T is in charge of the Finance Ministry, in which case it would convert this into an electoral edge over Zanu-PF?

Politely, the minister explained to the director that the vote came under the Justice Ministry, which falls under a Zanu-PF minister.

But the director was adamant that the Finance Minister still held sway, including saying there was no money for elections!

A whole director determining the fate of a continent, so mistaken!

Of course those not familiar with the French political tradition will be a bit surprised.

Not I!

I will recall — within strictures — a certain French President who sent a congratulatory letter to an African President of a friendly (to Zimbabwe) Francophone country for winning a pending election beforehand!

These, our teachers on democracy!

Power watcher?

There is a whole Zimbabwe out there which you and me who live, or were born here, do not know, will never inhabit.

But it shapes the Zimbabwe we live.

None of the parties in the inclusive Government is today the creature it once was, the party it was including on the day this arrangement was consummated.

Parties have undergone tremendous changes, with them personalities leading them.

Who ever thought an MDC minister would ever push for a resolution to nationalise anything, let alone mines which are owned by his party’s benefactors?

It is such an evident point that people and organisations have changed, which our media here, itself a power watcher, has been missing, hopefully not willfully.

And I said Zanu-PF, not MDC-T, has been reaping handsomely from this evolution.

Licking a saltpan

I said I do not begrudge anybody for tethering themselves to a position or a party, I said and still say.

That cannot be the problem.

The real problem is when you cannot function outside your political choice or predilections.

The real problem is when you become prisoner to your choices and loyalties, a real hostage, both functionally and conceptually.

In my full (some would say fulsome) support for Zanu-PF, I do not become blind to its blunders, its many weaknesses, a number of which this column has raised.

Just now Zanu-PF is about to drift into the blunder of mistaking its dominance of the Copac process for a notice of an inevitable electoral victory, come the next poll.

That is a fatal mistake which the party is happy to lick like a thin cow on a wet saltpan, semombe pagokoro chaipo.

Copac was about ideas and having a long tongue to project them.

It was about having right people in sufficient quantities and with sufficient throats to press home your convictions on core issues on the constitution.

MDC-T was completely unprepared for this one.

It had no mind on the matter; it had no numbers during those meetings.

It has always lacked both, which is why the 2000 draft was defeated not through MDC efforts, but through massive white farmers’ organisational investment which treated MDC as part of the raw material with which to fight Zanu-PF over the land clause.

But Copac was not about mustering voting numbers, and people in Zanu-PF – my party – should stop those gratuitous readings over Copac.

Predisposing or predetermining?

Much worse, they should not think MDC-T weaknesses will organise Zanu-PF.

MDC-T weaknesses only enable Zanu-PF to organize itself with less difficulties.

MDC-T weaknesses predispose a Zanu-PF win; they do not pre-ordain it.

I see all that from the vantage of my commitment to that party.

Indeed the same way I see that some Zanu-PF MPs feel threatened by the call for elections.

Of course I know MDC-T MPs are quaking at the thought of elections.

I like that, encourage that even.

They should quake and I do all I can to work for their defeat.

But the hard fact is that most Zanu-PF MPs are not better-placed than their MDC counterparts.

Both have nothing to tell the electorate.

Two years is no delivery time for any MP, however good, however committed.

The next poll, if held before the full term of the present Parliament, will be about political parties, not sitting MPs.

That is not to say really bad ones will not be judged; they will be, harshly too.

But the essential dynamic shaping people’s choices shall be the competing parties as sets of ideas they have propagated, or as personified by their competing leaders.

Is it not remarkable that all MPs forgot their party rivalries to oppose fresh elections in unison, and against the viewpoints of their respective leaderships (except for MDC-M)?

This is as complex as the environment now is.

Whereas yesterday the simple question was which party dislikes elections, this time around it is which MPs, across parties, like elections?

And this is the opportune moment to tackle the false binary I alluded to in the beginning.

Ballot and kings

Let me deal with Chimakure’s argument.

The logical position of a President who wants to die in office is to avoid elections like scurvy.

We do not owe the institution of the ballot to kings.

One Louis XVI and her Marie Antoinette had to be guillotined for France to have the tradition of plebiscites.

Mr Editor, you do not need five degrees to know that; you just need the flexibility to think outside a false binary, indeed to think outside the false conceptual boundaries set by your political choices and loyalty pledges.

How do you reconcile the search for life Presidency and an appetite for elections which you apparently decry?

Such an argument can only make sense when prepared for a politically inbreeding group, where questions are not asked, cheap denunciations cheered.

How does one take Mugabe to the UN Security Council, or International Criminal Court, for wanting to go for elections?

Irate against mere chiefs

Secondly, chiefs are not elected.

They cannot be faulted for reasoning within this deeply institutionalised handicap.

You are born into chieftaincy; you do not merit it except by larger rotation founded on principles of primogeniture.

And chiefs with their small numbers, cannot decide the Zimbabwe ballot.

True, they may influence their subjects, which they will still do whether or not they ask President Mugabe to be President for life.

Which they will still do especially if MDC-T ministers continue to deride or even assault them.

Why call them names, "zealots", for expressing their preferences however weirdly they do it?

Or is the editor so worked up because he thinks the chiefs have aggravated a situation already bad for a party of his choice?

Which makes his anger against chiefs a measure of his anxiety over the likely defeat of his favourite party, never a deserved chastisement for an act so untoward on the part of the chiefs?

Conundrum of logic

Thirdly, is it very prudent editorially and politically to attack a politician for wanting to go to an election, while praising the other for not wanting elections until some other time in a miasmic future?

Is it very helpful to MDC-T when a whole editor betrays that party’s discomfort and un-readiness for the poll?

Surely you cannot argue that an election now is sure to make Mugabe life President without admitting that MDC-T is set to lose that same poll?

Why cannot such a poll hasten MDC-T’s ascendancy to power, which means abridging Mugabe’s current presidency, dashing his dream for life presidency?

And when presidency is made lifelong by elections, who has a problem with that?

Alternatively, if presidency is not made lifelong by the absence of elections, who is made happy by that?

Democrats or non-democrats?

Anyway, the deferment of the poll, which is what the editor proposes for us, will leave Robert Mugabe the President of this country, albeit under conditions of inclusivity.

And life-long means what?

Being born a president or dying in office? Do we examine terms we use?

Surely dying in office, a prospect faced by any mortal being who becomes a president, surely cannot be such a feat?

What is the editor arguing for: the rights and interests of "the nation", or his fears that MDC-T might not win?

Saving MDC, serving "the nation"?

And the poor editor for the first time writes in defence of Zanu-PF MPs.

He cannot help it, can he?

By his own admission, only Zanu-PF MPs can stop Mugabe and an early election, again another ungainly admission of MDC-T’s present weakness.

Why is he looking up to the Zanu-PF Annual People’s Conference, not MDC-T, to stop the President and an election?

Why has he discounted the people he has always told us hate Zanu-PF?

Whose term is being prolonged by a deferment of elections?

Whose weaknesses are being protected by the same deferment?

How is saving MDC-T the same as serving "the nation"?

Just a bit of self-interrogation would have cleared all this.

Except "the spirit of the age" does not allow that. What kind of a readership allows such sloppy reasoning to pass?

What kind of a readership does not punish a whole editor for such violent and opinionated illogical reasoning?

Just small change or big problem?

It can only be a captive readership, which is where my main point comes in.

But I will defer it to deal with the second issue from the CZI.

The CZI wants to be "reassured" that the Zimbabwe dollar will not return.

It says the real problem with the multicurrency situation is not the use of many currencies.

Rather, it is about "change".

Not in the sense that MDC uses the word, but in the innocent sense of getting back your entitlement after seeking to settle your bill with a denominator bigger than the asking price.

From the CZI angle, deal with the small problem of change; do not throw away the baby together with the bathwater.

Perfect reasoning, if you ask me.

They propose minting coins – our coins - pegged to their US equivalent by way of value, and backed "100 percent" by US dollar reserves.

Those locally minted but US-valued coins will thus become the change you and me will get, in place of the current practice of glutinous sweets we get so our canines deepen, together with our poverty!

That is CZI reasoning, by extrapolation, the reasoning of business.

It is bad, very bad to throw out multicurrency because of some little change.

A heavy hammer on a gnat, if you ask me.

The same way it is also wrong to outlaw the Zimbabwe dollar simply because of a certain type of little politics driven by the elites, at the expense of the vast majority.

CZI is now grappling with the issue of small change because those offending consumers by filching from them are its members, directly and indirectly, who thus stand to be affected by whatever measures Minister Biti will propose in his budget.

This was not an issue for CZI for as long as money for most basic transactions affected 60 percent of our populace living in rural areas.

When you pit CZI members against an embittered and robbed urban customer, reinforced by the millions who daily survive outside the multicurrency cash economy it is defending, which is the hammer, which is the gnat?

Minister Biti was politely told by Americans that he was free to buy coins from the US.

He did not.

Zimbabwe could not afford the shipload which would have cost (in US dollars) far more than the coins were worth.

Besides, manufacturers and retailers here have been refusing to take coins from banks, thanks to the firming rand.

Snake or big snake?

How on this good earth do we back up those locally minted coins 100 percent in US dollars that are so short, US dollars we cannot have?

And when we have US dollars, why not back a national currency?

And when we can mint coins, why not mint them in overwhelming numbers to ensure they dominate the market and eventually replace the US dollar itself?

Do we fear a snake or only big snakes?

When will this day be?

A much larger point begs.

The US dollar is on a tailspin far worse than that suffered by the Zimbabwe dollar.

Let me explain.

Until now, the US dollar has been storing value for the world.

Quad-trillions are burning everyday by way of lost value world-wide, as the dollar continues to die slowly but inexorably.

We saw that in the meltdown under two years ago, to great grief.

Secondly, the US is not under US-DERA, the United States Democracy and Economic Recovery Act.

Yet it has been sliding down the precipice, and with it dragging down the welfare of the world, including our own little one here.

Why would CZI worry about "small change" at the expense of the big change it is losing through that sliding currency which it wants us to admire and imitate to the dime?

Do we get reassurance from the CZI that a sliding US dollar will not be inflicted on us, if it wants the same assurance in respect of the Zimbabwe dollar for exactly the same reasons?

When will the slide stop?

And when will CZI know the yuan? And make an argument around it?

Half-bull, half-man

Again, you see the same problem I raised above.

We have an iron template within which we must function mentally.

Zimbabwe dollar was the bane of our economy, the template says.

It was not sanctions; it was not our politics; it was not white reaction to the land reforms; it is not the stupendous exposure of our economy through unsustainable foreign ownership levels.

No, it is the Zimbabwe dollar which we now dread worse than we dread a return to Rhodesia.

After all, to support the Zimbabwe dollar is to sound Zanu-PF, and to push for multicurrency is to sound MDC-T!

But hang on: the multicurrency was introduced by Zanu-PF.

Hang on: the multicurrency environment is not providing change.

So what do you do?

You elect the unsettling comfort of a Minotaur: half-bull, half-man.

The fear of belonging to this or that camp fathers grotesque ideas.

So we must remain multicurrency, but underpinned by Gono’s minting machine for "small change".

We must recognise the need for local currency but still deny it small, small by limiting it to "change".

We are an entrapped people, we Zimbabweans.

No longer cunning?

But the Zimbabwean reality does not obey any lines, let alone symmetrical ones.

It is a lot more complex, interlocking in fact.

Last week BBC ran a story from a British-led research which is showing land reform, for all its claimed weaknesses, in fact brought with it welfare gains to many people.

That study has not played here, partly because the public media has been sleeping, and partly because this is not the kind of story the private, pro-white press would want to carry.

Similarly, the Independent carried an interview with Mark Cunning, sorry Canning, the British Ambassador here whose last mission before here was in Burma.

The interviewing slant is clear and the copy the weekly hoped for did not materialise, thanks to the ambassador who seems to have another view of the country its owners so relish to condemn.

And I happen to know that he spoke elsewhere on Zimbabwe and surprised his audiences by this positive, non-confrontational outlook.

More complex too are problems facing us, so complex that solutions are going beyond the Manichean Zanu-PF-MDC dialectic.

And the inclusive Government has done much to legitimize cross-over solutions.

Mugabe and Tsvangirai may not talk today and it is big news to small papers.

Eventually they find each other again, and the same big story becomes small news to enormous papers, enormous in their estimate.

It is a very challenging era but I get worried when politicians show greater flexibility to operate outside their respective political kraals when we, who claim to run marketplaces of ideas show that we are helplessly hidebound, caught up in the thought-warp of a bygone, polarised era.

Can we, are we, able to locally mint some small change for our customers, please, small change backed by us, not US?

Icho!

Nathaniel Manheru is a columnist for the Saturday Herald