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An open letter to Robert Mugabe
By
Courage
Shumba
Dear Mr Mugabe,
I am writing to you because of your continued, though illegitimate, occupation of the presidency of the governance of Zimbabwe.
I am writing to you to put to your attention my continued frustration and disgust at the quality of your leadership and to make you aware of the hardship your objectionable and continued stay in authority is visiting the people of Zimbabwe. I am not alone, as it is known to you that this is one among the thousands of petitions you will receive, to encourage you to take stock of your actions, and whilst you continue to function as head of state, exercise some sanity and humanity where your decisions affect the social being of an entire country.
Your government has continued to rule our country in a manner reminiscent of apartheid. Your government rules our country as if it were an occupying foreign authority. Today we are writing, to you of all people, Mr Mugabe, to register our displeasure with a system, your system, we ushered into power to protect ourselves from the madness of colonial racism, yet today you stand high being the unquestionable personification of colonial disenfranchisement and violence against our own people.
The laws of Zimbabwe today, are the same laws of Rhodesia yesterday, today re-sharpened, not to protect the pride of our sovereignty but to protect your few loyal privileged former guerrilla guru’s whilst the rest are condemned to appalling poverty. I seriously believe that your government lacks the vision to see the people of Zimbabwe prosper. It lacks the wisdom to accept that democracy and good governance as the only sustainable culture on which progressive partnerships between those who govern and those who are governed are forged successfully.
Your government, and the Zanu Pf party continue to squander every opportunity available to return to the path of the spirit of the liberation agenda for which thousands paid the ultimate price and thousands more remain traumatised by the loss of loved ones, and apparently, for no gain and whose families are worse now than they were then under colonial rule.
Today, Zimbabwe, like was Rhodesia remains a police state. Today, Zimbabwe by both African and western governance standards is not only a notorious tyranny but a pariah and failed nation with whom no one has the confidence to invest, to loan to or trade with because of your retrogressive and backwardness in failing to see the direction in which the world is poised to drive. People may live with the fact that to this struggle, many lost sons and daughters, but that is a pain less to live with than the realisation that you, in person, has lacked and continues to lack the willingness to make their losses count.
Your stubborn attitude towards multi party politics and your failed one party state philosophy speak of a leader who has had no tolerance for alternative views. There is no wondering then why they is a deliberate onslaught on those that seek to question your policies and your commitment to a free Zimbabwe. The reality is that you do not have neither the answers nor the vision for our country and perhaps never had any beyond what were your ambitions to be the most powerful man in our country, Zimbabwe. Such an ambition, if propelled, as it is in your case, in the total absence of faith in your own people or interest in their issues, has the repercussions we are witnesses to in the case of Zimbabwe today.
You have deliberately militarised the running of departments that require expertise. For example, how is it justified, that the management of the Grain Marketing Board is controlled under the ministry of security and defence, and appointees are former military personnel. What experience do they have in food management and production? Why do we not have the right people in the right places all the time? The truth is you have a culture of rewarding cheap loyalty with lavish packages and ministerial positions .You are, in short, indifferent about the people of Zimbabwe. Nothing much is expected from a government or party when all its decisions are born out of a ridiculous and insatiable obsession for supremacy. Yours is that biblical tree that could not bear fruit and needs to be cut down so we may use its logs.
Your vitriolic attacks on the Movement for Democratic Change, the National Constitutional Assembly, and most of Zimbabwe’s forward facing attempts to garner support and dispose of an incompetent and self-centred ‘mafia ‘movement have no audience within our tribe. Your words are meant to buy time, to delude, misinform, divert focus from the real issues. Yours are hollow and opportunistic excuses which fail to answer why between 1983 and 1987 you murdered 20 000 civilians in the Midlands-Matabeleland region, nor can they answer the scandals namely 1) Watergate (2) War Veterans Compensation (3) Noczim Scandal (4) VIP Housing Scheme scandal (5) Harare International Airport tender award scandal, (6) D.R.C diamonds scandal
(7) Multiple farm ownership scandal (8)Zifa Scandal among many corrupt activities in which no one was ever prosecuted and every investigation that followed was never publicised. In all these scandals, all of them involving senior Zanu PF figures you have never been able to let the people where you stand. Our conclusion, quite rightly, is that you stand tall in the midst of these criminals.
Corruption has become an industry on its own under your leadership. You have trained brigades to murder and harass civilians and boosted publicly of being a violent intolerant President. You have threatened leaders of the opposition with death, and you have even hired liars, Ari-Ben Menashe and paid them, using our money, to fabricate falsehoods, all because of your desire to remain in power whatever the political, social or economic cost suffered by Zimbabwe’s as a result of its battered image for so long its politics is associated with you, personally, Mr Mugabe. Your continued stay in office contaminates and forestalls the possibility of a quick return of Zimbabwe to normal life. You are a liability to our nation and we ask you to go.
Had you been a company run for profit, you would have been liquidated within months of operation for you are a loss-making asset.
We do not need lessons from you on patriotism .No! . We also tell you that we are not under the influences of anybody else British, American or Jordanian in asking you to go. We are our own messengers, this is our own message and we rally behind it because it is the only message that suits the moment .You are unacceptable. In our endeavour to flourish you and your sycophants are our first obstacles. They may be other impediments and hindrances in the way but we have to deal with the crooks and criminals among us before we journey on in search of greater peace, fairness and freedoms from the wider if not diverse world abroad. People like you kill such momentum with your shameless opportunism and selfishness.
We rally today behind the Movement for Democratic Change; because we founded it, and we own it .It is the only political movement in Zimbabwe, today, owned by the aspirations of the common people. It is the only movement in which Zimbabwe has a clear hope. The movement will, and has to continue to engage with the rest of the world so that assets of dictators are frozen and their movement is contained. There will be no hope of peace in the mind of the oppressor until there is peace and hope in the mind of the oppressed. It is the mandate of every oppressed to search and destroy the sources of oppression that holds him captive, and it is our intention to do just that.
Your resort to force and violence is a manifestation of poor planning, shortsighted policy programming and general unsuitability of yourself for the position of State President. Your judgments, usually paranoiac and emotional are a danger to the stability of our country and region. Take for example, how by haphazardly interrupting commercial agriculture you destroyed the food supply lifeline of the domestic people and negated our country’s strategic position as the food basket of Southern Africa. Don’t stop there! You dealt a blow to the foreign currency supply lifeline of Zimbabwe. Now look where you are! You can’t pay for electricity! You can’t get enough oil and it costs us business, and we lose business, and when business is lost you have no employment .Its that simple!
I have never argued against the redistribution of land equitably. I have never celebrated seeing Africans in their own countries systematically denied access to opportunity. I am a believer in the African continent and her people. I always thought we had the wisdom and judgment, to choose the best ways and moments to act. Your government proved me wrong. There was no plan forward or retreat. There was no money or the promise of it. There were no true partners just sympathisers.
There was no unity even among ourselves. Your loyalists, before we knew had 3 or 4 farms in their names, and another 2 or three in the names of cousins and those cousins had their own farms in their own names. What a circus! You failed to organise orderly parceling out of farms in a situation that needed just the consensus of the liberation spirit but one warned of the economic imperatives of our country. You failed !
We ask you to go! We ask you stop brutalising our people! We demand an end to your apartheid rule in a country that is supposed to be free.
In the name of my people,
Courage Shumba
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