Tuku has just soiled himself

Tuku has just soiled himself

MTUKUDZI

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By Oscar Nkala

GROWING up as the son of a noble peasant farmer in Jahunda taught me enough about tradition to know that individuals remain respectable ladies and gentleman until they act in a disreputable manner, which is essentially the undoing of reputations.

People do this for various reasons, Joseph Chinotimba didn’t mind being notorious as long as it got him many farms, wives, Cherokees, a fully paid “working leave” from Harare City Council and a chance to tell the country that he fought and died for Zimbabwe during the second Chimurenga revolution.

Plenty of learned others please the Old Man of Zimbabwe State House just to keep their pot-bellies growing, but sideways because the front is already too stuffed. Some thieves in cabinet are there just to enjoy diplomatic immunity from arrest, for who doesn't have a cupboard full of skeletons in ZANU PF?

But I honestly cannot see where this Oliver Mtukudzi fellow thinks he can fit in the already bloated cabinet in Harare. Poor sods like me have only realized how mighty musicians can stoop so low as to fib in song, that some people can indeed change colours and screw their eyes to odd angles much faster and better than the average Sub-Saharan fly-eating chameleon.

Over the past few days I have been having long trial session with the latest entry into the Zimbabwe Faded Musicians Association (ZFMA).

Excerpts:
1. Are you the same Oliver Mtukudzi who, not so many years ago, was bold enough to tell the Old Man of State House that he was too old (‘usegugile/asakara’) to be a resident of that fort?
2. Is it you, dear Tuku, whom I am told now sleeps with, and sings ZANU PF?
And are you truly so carried away that you find it proper to use your golden voice and the very songs that earned you respect and reputation worldwide to promote a campaign of hunger, rape, tyranny, demo-crush and murder?

(No answers as yet, because the accused insists on his right not to speak in the absence of his lawyer and he has been sent for. The lawyer says he would have been here on Monday had it not been for the fuel crisis entering its third week in Bulawayo.)

While every one is wailing for freedom, wishing the monster to go away, Oliver seems to have used his wisdom and reputation to wail for the monster to stay. Poor Oliver, can’t he see there are already too many pitiful praise singers in ZANU PF: Elliot Manyika, Andy Brown, Jonathan Moyo, Tambaoga and this easily forgettable, religious silly fool who sang something like ‘Mwari Komborera President Mugabe?’

It is sad, but Tuku cannot avoid facing the fact that through his belated entry into the derailed Gravy Train, he has abused the respect and trust of the people. He has robbed himself of his prestigious, well deserved position in the country’s music industry. He has unwillingly turned his back on the people just to appease hazardously narrow, old-man, “mwana-wa-Ningi” agendas that will not live beyond the election.

I thought Oliver was a man of great integrity and good social standing. Not that I expected him to sing praise songs for Morgan Tsvangirai or Paul Siwela, Wilson Kumbula, Shakespeare Maya or my paltry self. I thought he was man enough to know right from wrong, and to know that associating with despised crowds has become a quick, violent way of ending one’s musical career in Zimbabwe.
We have been watching the rise of Tuku and celebrated his position among Zimbabwe’s ambassadors of music.

But now I believe the words of Matshake, my long gone grandfather who told me this:

“The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more he exposes his bottom.”
He could have been more relevant to Zimbabwean musicians had he been specific enough to say “the wrong tree.”

The same applies for musicians who sing for Bob and the Murderous Wailers.

But for our icon to sing in support of ZANU PF tyranny, with or without relatives in that tyrannical party, lends credence to Grapevine tales suggesting that Tuku suddenly has a brilliant but grotesquely misplaced ambition to take up the post of Minister of Music, Sport, Culture and Patriotism in the post-election cabinet. It appears he has suddenly realized that he is perhaps the only one with such high-up relatives in ZANU PF who hasn’t been rewarded with a high ranking public service post or at least the governorship of Dande. And duly decided to have a go at it, using what he knows best.

We sympathize with him in that he cannot avoid having relatives in ZANU PF. It’s common all over Zimbabwe; even my own brother is a horrid ZANU PF councilor, actively engaged in enforcing the food-votes campaign all over Matabeleland South.

So just like me, Tuku does not need to be sorry to have relatives in ZANU PF just as ex-Rhodesian mounted policeman Philip Chiyangwa felt so much at home in ZANU PF until they decided he was onto his old tricks, betraying the revolution and its secrets to white apartheid spy-masters in Pretoria, Langley, Tel Aviv and London.

We all have nasty relatives in the nasty ZANU PF. But is Tuku, with all honesty, trying to tell us that he has never known, since 1980 and until 2004, that Joyce Teurai Ropa Mujuru, whose only qualification to cabinet was a stray bullet she claimed to have fired which accidentally brought down a Rhodesian Air-force copter, is his relative?

Having relatives in ZANU PF does not compel any musician, including Tuku, to perform at unpopular parties meant to endorse the oppression of human rights, celebrating an internal party coup as a triumph for gender balance and empowerment. Seeing as Joyce is his relative, Tuku probably knows more than we all do that Joyce’s appointment was never a triumph for gender balance in the dirty, stinking and snarling-skeleton stuffed corridors of ZANU PF hegemony. With or without musicians who think they can abuse their popularity to prop up Zezuru tyranny and hegemony in Zimbabwe, the people still view the appointment of the unintelligent Joyce as one maneuver in the vicious succession coup. For that is all it was, the confirmation that all that is not Zezuru is not presidium material.
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