Charamba’s ethnic snobbery stinks

Charamba’s ethnic snobbery stinks

CHARAMBA

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By Joram Nyathi

ONE of the cardinal tenets of the journalism practice in addition to balance and fair reporting is the confidentiality of sources, what at law is called lawyer-client confidentiality. The nearest you get to that in everyday life is a banker-client relationship.

It was not always the same with me and one Nathaniel Manheru who writes a weekly column in the Saturday Herald. I didn’t know him until two weeks ago.

On January 27 he took me down memory lane, every time making sure I wasn’t lost in the course of the narrative, which is easy with me when articles that should reflect intellectual honesty turn out to be treatises in tribal and racial bigotry.

In the course of reminding me of who he was, he made personal inferences about me that I am going to respond to briefly below. Manheru talks of "sworn enemies", "tribes" and "races" in the ownership of national resources.

I have no enemies either in private life or on the "level of ideas". It would be hard for me to be a sworn enemy of his ideas because I don’t know what they are. But his fascination with crudity and the scatological has been a source of embarrassment for me and many other readers of his column. That is on the rare occasion when he is not engrossed with his affected writing style which draws the reader’s attention more to the author than the subject under discussion.

I have not "developed a bit of irreverence" for the revolution that brought Zimbabwe’s Independence. On the contrary, I am revolted by the inheritors of colonial political power and its institutions who today make ordinary Zimbabweans feel that Independence was not worth the sacrifice or that things were better under Ian Smith. Railing against those who have sullied the noble ideals of the Second Chimurenga is not to deprecate the revolution itself.

If Manheru believes that the heroes of Zimbabwe’s Independence war died so that we can nurture corruption, starve the poor, become a beggar state and that our sisters and daughters can survive on selling their bodies to foreigners, there is every reason for us to differ.

If he believes the Independence war was fought so that millions of Zimbabweans could escape poverty and political repression in their country of birth only by seeking refuge in the arms of our former colonisers, we have valid reasons to differ.

If he believes a "writhing economy" is what land reform and black empowerment stand for, he deserves my pity. No sane person today would call Zimbabwe a "jewel of Africa".

The crystallisation of "who he is" was our chance meeting at a Barclays Bank ATM along Nelson Mandela three years ago. The charitable reader will not miss the malice when Manheru claims I was "fetching wads of good money, me (Manheru) a pittance for which my profession is notoriously renowned".

I don’t know what his profession is, but object to the insinuation that he is in it out of patriotism while the rest of us do what we do for the love of money. I must nevertheless commend him for his consummate mastery of Warren Buffet’s investment acumen that with his pittance he manages to live comfortably in the leafy suburbs of Harare while I live among the poor in Kuwadzana.

"Nyathi belonged to that tribe of doubters, a tribe whose mood was beginning to shift from active cynicism and even opposition to land reforms, to a respectful courting of all those persons deemed well-placed and thus could put in a word for ‘me’ to get a piece of the land cake," declared Manheru.

This is nothing short of a scandal. He would be hard-pressed to point out one black Zimbabwean who was opposed to land reform per se instead of the shamelessly racial and political opportunism it presented.

I, like most honest Zimbabweans, want land, but not as a largesse of political patronage in which venal individuals "put in a word" for me. No George!

I don’t have to apologise for wanting land in Zimbabwe because it doesn’t belong to Zanu PF. In case Manheru still doubts where I stand, I owe my total allegiance to the state of Zimbabwe, which means all its patriotic people, but not to the current grotesquery, the debauchery trying to pass itself off as a people’s government.

Now that I know the corporeal Manheru, I can’t believe that he is the villager who writes about the villager, the same scoundrel who was accused of punishing his wife with karate punches and kicks over a private dispute.

It was inevitable that Manheru would end his tirade with a detour into his favourite pastime — tribe. I should be happy if Manheru could explain to me why any political institution headed by a Khumalo is always tribal and one headed by a Chigwedere is invariably national.

In this obsession he has the unwavering support of one Geoff Nyarota who never tires of telling the whole world that the Shona constitute 80% of the Zimbabwean population, but does not explain why in their masterly majority they have failed to free this country from post-colonial tyranny.

Lastly, Manheru lied that Zimbabwe Independent publisher Trevor Ncube is Zimbabwean by dint of Zambian law. Zimbabwean law on its own adequately recognises his nationality, as the court found. Ignorance of such basic law for somebody in Manheru’s position is inexcusable.

Still on Ncube, Manheru should be reminded that his ethnic snobbery gets the better of national policy. Nothing could be as offensive as calling Ncube Aphiri. In its original form when we were still proud of ourselves soon after Independence, Aphiri equated to nigger, kaffir, makwerekwere, Mosken or MaNyasarandi or Madzviti or Masvina. It is a term of contempt.

But that is how Manheru views Zimbabwe’s minority ethnic groups and it is with a clear conscience that I pierce the veil of secrecy to expose him as the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information and personal spokesperson for the president of the Republic of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, George Charamba, from Buhera. At least it explains his political ambivalence given the person he serves and his main political rival. In the same vein, I reveal the name of the white farmer I wrote about as Bruce Gemmill.

Nyathi is the deputy editor of the Zimbabwe Independent newspaper. This article was originally published in the Independent
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