In That Case, Keep Barking Comrade Pongo

by Tsanga Tutankhamen Shanga: 19th January 2010

Responding to my opinion-editorial published by Nehanda Radio, Pongo did not seem to understand the crux of my rebuttal to his stream of ZANU-PF propaganda. Pongo’s WMDs will not exculpate Mugabe and ZANU-PF. Comrade Pongo can say falsehoods all he wants but his words will not change the immutable facts on the ground, namely, Zimbabwe’s sorrowful state is a culmination of Mugabe’s incompetence, mean-spiritedness and shamelessly exploitative character coupled with his association with and baffling promotion of a troop of hapless cheerleaders, shameless bottom feeders, criminally corrupt sycophants and hordes of brainless thugs specifically trained to constantly bay for the blood of their compatriots.

This was no mere conjuncture on my part. Others have issued even more damning statements regarding Mugabe’s rule. No less than Comrade Pongo’s newly found ideological compadre, Professor Jonathan Moyo, has said some of the most withering condemnations of Mugabe’s misrule.

In one of his op-ed published by the New Zimbabwe, the professor had the following choice words; “Mugabe has publicly demonstrated leadership incapacity.” Furthermore, in the same op-ed, Professor Moyo eviscerated Mugabe by stating that “[t]hat Mugabe must now go is thus no longer a dismissible opposition slogan but a strategic necessity that desperately needs urgent legal and constitutional action by Mugabe himself.” An observer of this hard fact, says the professor, need not “be a malcontent to see that, after 25 years of controversial rule and with the economy melting down as a direct result of that rule, Mugabe's continued stay in office has become such an excessive burden to the welfare of the state and such a fatal danger to the public interest of Zimbabweans at home and in the diaspora that each day that goes by with him in office leaves the nation's survival at great risk while seriously compromising national sovereignty.”

Having watched Mugabe at close range, Professor Moyo tells us that Mugabe is a man “without compassion” and a man who leads a government prone to “irrational acts” which speak “volumes of his cold and cruel leadership style.” On Mugabe’s incompetence, Professor Moyo says that Mugabe “still makes very interesting bombastic speeches that are applauded for their entertainment value and which are full of sound and fury but signifying precious little at the level of policy and action.” Since Pongo takes umbrage with such observations, one hopes he will have an opportunity to talk to Professor Moyo to find out if the professor still stands by his words. Don’t bet the farm of it, dear reader.

Verily I say ZANU-PF cretins have a better chance of commanding the moon to move by barking at it than they have of changing self-evident truths no matter how much they insist on barking. Comrade Pongo is painfully aware of this stark truth. Consequently, he swiftly tries to conflate what he calls the expression of black self-hatred with telling the truth about Mugabe’s thirty years of gross ill governance of Zimbabwe and the unforgivable abuse of its innocent citizens.

Comrade Pongo charges, and I quote; “Many-a-times (sic) you hear our dear brothers and sisters say black people, Africans, cannot lead they are corrupt. [T]his is an example of what oppression has done to some of our black brothers and sisters.” Whenever our dear brother Pongo hears such observations, he has to remember that, in the case of Zimbabwe, these are not idle condemnations but the simple stating of facts. People should not be disparaged for telling the unvarnished truth.

He says he is all for a free debate based on historical facts but Pongo runs away from the subject of the parlous state of Zimbabwe faster than the devil runs away from Holy Water. Trying to muddle up everything, he cacophonously charges that “[a] lot of my Zimbabwean colleagues still suffer from inferiority complex- dare I say -a result of the colonial legacy of denigration and derision passed down from their forefathers who for years thought the Whiteman had answers to everything.” This observation might be true within the circle of people Pongo fraternizes with but I am not personally familiar with this archaic mindset.

Furthermore, our dear brother accuses his Zimbabwean colleagues who “viewed [sic] the oppressors as diminutive-gods, even the chosen, the natural leaders,” “civilizers of the black African” and the only agents of meaningful progress. This is more of a confession, on Pongo’s part, than an accusation. It is Comrade Pongo himself who suffers from these maladies since he talks about them with incredible alacrity and, like birds of the same plumage, flocks with similarly afflicted Zimbabweans.

Pongo says that he is supportive of the unfolding looting disguised as land reacquisition, black empowerment and indigenization. If what is going on, at the instigation of the British-educated Didymus Mutasa, is what passes for black empowerment, indigenization and land reform, may God help us. These are meaningless buzzwords meant to arouse the anger of people who suffer from regular bouts of emotional incontinence. Genuine land reform would never have taken more than twenty years to put into effect. Land stirs up a lot of emotion so much so that it is a potent political battering ram with which to knock down opponents.

For years, Zimbabweans have witnessed the abuse of the issue of land for political mileage by ZANU-PF. No one from the current crop of ZANU-PF lot is genuinely interested in taking care of this issue to finality and satisfaction of all concerned parties. The late Canaan Banana was truly exceptional in this regard. Despite his personal failings, which all of us have, he tried his best when he established Kushinga-Phikelela National Farmer Training Centre Institutional.

A patriotic visionary, former President Banana must have realized that the indigenization of the agriculture sector of our economy would bring more prosperity if the future black farmers were properly trained for the task ahead. By now, Zimbabwe would have had very good and very prosperous black farmers trained at KushPhike. How many of the new farmers meet the minimum standards of eligibility and how many have been trained there? Since you want a meaningful and fact-based debate, Comrade Pongo, tell us.

What is going on is a witch’s brew of political vindictiveness and barefaced looting. Land reform it is not! Take the case of Mai Sally Mugabe’s orphanage. What justification is there for the looting that went on at Mbuya Nehanda Orphanage? Please, some one tell us. Where the orphans there whitemen’s children? Perhaps the birthright that Pongo so assertively barks about does not extend to Zimbabwean orphans.

What is even more shocking is that the desecration of the cause Mai Sally Mugabe championed so vigorously has been condemned neither by her husband nor anyone in ZANU-PF. Without surprise, the culprits have yet to be brought to book. What a shocking betrayal of so noble a person! Mai Sally, may her soul rest in peace, must be turning in her grave.

“I choose not to sell my birthright,” barks Pongo. “I for one am a proponent of the land reacquisition programme and I believe that our land is indeed our prosperity, it is our birthright.” Like everything else that Pongo and his ZANU-PF ilk have been saying, these are vacuous political slogans contradicted by the reality on the ground. The forced removal of black farmers, war veterans amongst them, to make way for Billy Rautenbach at Nuanetsi tells us the veracity of the above cited trope is nil. Here is a whiteman getting help from ZANU-PF, the self-proclaimed champions of black land reacquisition, put his hands on the blackman’s “birthright.” That is a weird manner to go about this so-called land reform program, unless Billy Rautenbach has morphed into a black Zimbabwean in desperate need of economic empowerment.

Beyond pouting off slogans that are as old as the hills of our beloved Zimbabwe, perhaps Comrade Pongo can enlighten us on the difference between Mr Mayer and Mr Rautenbach – or is it Comrade Rautenbach? I am not very hopeful, though. It took Pongo a visit to his maternal grandparents to disabuse himself of his hitherto ignorance on the issue of land disgruntlement. For a political ideologue, that is a very damning confession.

Those of us who want a genuine land reform program already know the historical inequalities of landownership. ZANU-PF ideologues do not have a monopoly on this knowledge. I did not have to visit my maternal grandparents to fully understand the issue of land. In my own village, I knew we needed productive land for our crops and animals. I have known this ever since I was a boy when I was old enough to tend the fields as well as herd cattle and goats. On this issue, the last thing I need is a reminder from a clueless opportunist.

Equally infuriating is the accumulation of huge tracts of land by an emergent Mugabe-aided oligarchy. It is a great injustice and barking hollow slogans will not convince the Zimbabwean people otherwise. In the 1970s, Mugabe passionately attacked this practice as a gross injustice. Thirty years later, that injustice is still plaguing us. As it is, the land reform we have is following the same dangerous and destabilizing trajectory of the endless Mexican land reforms. After more than a century since the Mexican peasants fought a revolution, the peasants are still up in arms after the betrayal by the leaders of the land revolution. It is dangerous. We do not need a Chiapas-type of crisis in Zimbabwe 100 years from now.

Pongo claims to despise the West but has a rather curious way of showing it. He hates the United Kingdom so much so that he is fretful of getting booted out of it kicking and screaming like Caesar Zvayi did when he was deported from Botswana. After vilifying Zimbabwean critics of ZANU-PF misrule by intimating they are servile Uncle Toms, it turns out that the ZANU-PF motormouth says one thing and does the exact opposite.

On his farm, if it can be called a farm at all, Spanish taxpayers seemingly support animal husbandry activities. The last time I checked, Spain was a whiteman’s country. Moreover, Spain has a very sordid colonial past. It was the Spaniard conquistadores that destroyed the great Mesoamerican civilizations. Accordingly, I find it strange that Pongo finds nothing wrong getting money from a nation that has a genocidal past.

Instead of getting his education in the land of his birthright, he has been busy trying to acquire knowledge in the west. What is even funnier is that the race-baiting Pongo transferred from the University of Wolverhampton to Westminster University. For a self-proclaimed proud anti-imperialist, Pongo was not satisfied getting a degree at a provincial university, oh no! That would not do. He decided to show everyone how much he despises whites by going to drink from a fountain of knowledge located right at the locus of the same evil forces of white supremacy he claims to hate. Pongo could have acquired his degrees at the University of Zimbabwe had he been smart enough to qualify for that great institution. Based on the quality of his public writings, Pongo would never have made it to and through UZ. I ought to know, I am a product of that university.

Comrade Pongo attacks what he calls “hand-me-downs from pikinini bhasi mwana wemurungu ayishandirwa nevabereki.” Gone unsaid here is that under ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe has increasingly sustained itself on hand-me-downs from the imperial West. When the IMF, based in Washington DC and, therefore, part of the pikinini bhasi setup, released some money meant for boosting the crippled economy, the kleptocrats in ZANU-PF could not wait to put their dirty hands on the hand-me-down moolah.

Much to their dismay, Tendai Biti told them to keep their sticky fingers off the money. How the thieves howled in protest, true to their form when the money was kept away from them. Like a helpless and hopeless drug addict, ZANU-PF has developed an incurable clinical dependence on the hand-me-downs thrown at it by the pikinini bhasi in London, Madrid and Washington DC.

The poor quality of some of the hand-me-downs that ZANU-PF has gladly gobbled up is truly comical. When China donated some rickety hand-me-down plane, I laughed when the donation was touted as a huge message of intent. The Chinese had just bought a fleet of planes from Boeing and could gladly sell their homemade flying coffins to the gullible ZANU-PF desperadoes. If the planes were that good, the Chinese would have retained them. I laughed when a free plane, mbasera, was added to the two that had been purchased.

In Harare, I have seen vegetable sellers give loyal customers free tomatoes or fruits. Usually these are about to be thrown away because they would not be good for too long. I laughed again and again when one of the rickety planes caught fire and the other failed to take off after presumably running into wild hogs.

Not only have we had to depend on hand-me-downs but we have also been reduced to pitifully beg for more food like a famished Oliver Twist. The biggest benefactor is the United States of America, which has donated an inordinate amount of food aid compared to our-so-called ideological brothers in Beijing.

Pongo is of the opinion I am mounting a jihad against him. He is mistaken. I do not see it that way. As an ordinary Zimbabwean, I am sick and tired of ZANU-PF operatives saying the same old tired platitudes much to the detriment of the wellbeing of our country. Perhaps Pongo was not expecting others to talk back. What he wants is a monologue not a debate. As my compatriot, I will publicly declare that I fully support his right to freely express his opinion. Nonetheless, he should not expect Zimbabweans who hold counterviews to say or do nothing.

ZANU-PF has pushed around the Zimbabwean people for too long. It is inevitable that they are tired of it so much so that the people are ready, willing and able to effectively push back. It is the natural order of things. The cartel knows what is coming and has nobody to blame but its members.

The unveiling of Brilliant Billy Pongo as a ZANU-PF propagandist in the United Kingdom and the re-emergence of Jonathan Moyo tell us that ZANU-PF is now a completely ideologically bankrupt party. If Professor Moyo is a brainy political chameleon then Comrade Pongo, who might fancy himself a political chameleon, is a delusional political gecko – chiguyakuya – that stupidly believes that it can change its colours for concealment.

However, both men have value beyond that which their masters pay them for. The words that have been penned by the brainy political chameleon and the feckless political gecko have a lot of probative value for agents of political, economical and cultural renaissance of Zimbabwe. They reveal a political entity that is ideologically unhinged.

Pongo’s desperate barking gives us a flavour of what is going on in the tribally fractured ZANU-PF cartel. In that case, keep barking Comrade Pongo.

Pongo Barking at the Moon

by Tsanga Tutankhamen Shanga: 9th January 2010

Brilliant Pongo, whose attempt to become an internet disc jockey may have flopped disastrously, seems to have found a new hobby, defending Mugabe’s custodianship of Zimbabwe that has, after thirty years of wielding power, flopped disastrously. One hopes that the dull attempts to imitate the buck-toothed Joseph Chinotimba by Comrade Pongo, oxymoronically named Brilliant, meet the same fate as his bilge-water-type Growth Point Starter Pack tenure. To accelerate the inevitable emollition of Comrade Pongo’s apparently self-serving indefensible defence of Mugabe’s tyranny, it is instructive to put Brilliant’s spurious charges under the microscope every time he musters the brass nerve to wittingly spread risible falsehoods.

In his latest instalment of words of mass deception (WMDs), the dreadlocked and red-eyed Comrade Pongo irritatingly barks at the imposition of targeted sanctions against members of the ZANU-PF criminal syndicate. “Some people will be quick to apportion blame on President Mugabe and ZANU PF, but is it all down to one man (sic)?” asks Comrade Pongo. The answer to that one is simple; it took one patently incompetent, mean-spirited and shamelessly exploitative man working in connivance with a troop of hapless cheerleaders, shameless bottom feeders, criminally corrupt sycophants and hoards of brainless thugs specifically trained to constantly bay for the blood of their compatriots. That, Comrade Pongo, is what brought ruin to Zimbabwe.

In 1980, Mugabe inherited a nation that was ready to take off after the end of a debilitating war. Keen-eyed African leaders realized how fortunate it was for Mugabe. “You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way,” Mwalimu Nyerere advised Mugabe. Tone deaf as he is, Mugabe did not listen. He had a more hard-pressing issue to attend to; consolidating all the power into his hands not for any noble goal but just for the sake of it. After a few cosmetic changes like the effortless task of changing nameplates on roads and renaming mountains and rivers, he got the ball rolling on his brutal and wicked quest for absolute power.

Mugabe is monomaniacal when he makes up his mind. Once he has a target, he will go for it full tilt, everything else be damned. So, without surprise, he set out to brutally decimate PF-ZAPU and members of its armed wing, the gallant ZIPRA forces. Looking back, PF-ZAPU offered an ideological alternative to what would turn out to be Mugabe’s misguided and ill-conceived brand of Marxism-Leninism. ZIPRA cadres, whose patriotism to the Zimbabwean cause was and has never been in question, posed a huge military buffer to his ambition for imperial-style power.

In short order, Joshua Nkomo had to be caricatured as a tribal overlord, liberation war heroes Dumiso Dabengwa and Lookout Masuku had to be broken down. To rally the nation, we were told that Nkomo, Dabengwa and Masuku had cached arms to seize the country. Subliminally, the Shonas were fooled into thinking that the loathed Madzviti raids were in the offing. It is an old trick that works all the time; demonize your enemy and then pounce. It is even better if you can goad a few miscreants in the other camp to behave stupidly. It might have been the same approach the ZANU-PF used, goading a few hot-headed ZIPRA ex-combatants to provide a casus belli. That is what happened and so was the beginning of the crime we all know as the Gukurahundi Genocide.

Gukurahundi was a continuation of the power play that started long before Zimbabwe became independent or, as it turned out, Mugabe’s personal fiefdom. Within the ZANU-PF structure, potential opponents of Mugabe’s seizure of absolute power were weeded out. Josiah Tongogara posed the biggest threat to Mugabe’s quest for power. If Oppah Muchinguri’s recent utterances are credible, Tongogara was assassinated. Cui bono? Who had the most to gain from the murder of Josiah Tongogara? The same cast of characters that has become wildly wealthy by looting the country’s resources. As Mugabe was busy vasectomizing all opposition, the country fell apart because of sheer negligence. This was long before the imposition of sanctions.

Others have catalogued the unimaginable corruption that Mugabe’s syndicate started as soon as PF-ZAPU had been thrashed into submission. Thanks to Geoff Nyarota and his journalists at the Bulawayo-based The Chronicle Newspaper, the thieves masquerading as our liberators were caught engaging in common theft called the Willogate Scandal. Robert Mugabe was in it up to his neck. It was Maurice Nyagumbo who implicated Mugabe as a participant in the illegal Willogate shenanigans. Some have said the lovable Mrs Sally Mugabe, the only sensible Mugabe the country has ever known, was also getting Toyota Cressida cars to ship to Ghana. That charge is silly at best and libellous at worst. Mai Mugabe was too busy taking care of her orphanages to engage in the stealing and shipping of cars. It was the bigamist Mugabe himself who needed the ill-gotten money to support his clandestine mistress.

After the dog-and-pony show, the Sandura Commission, meant to hoodwink the nation into believing Mugabe was against corruption, the looting picked pace. Mugabe also used the opportunity to consolidate his grip on ZANU-PF. Dead men tell no tales so poor Maurice Nyagumbo conveniently committed suicide, as we were told. Enos Nkala was booted out. Edgar Tekere would soon be shown the door for his pestilent noises about ZANU-PF corruption. By then Tongogara had been long gone from the scene and Ndabaningi Sithole had been reduced to a cartoon character. Thus, of the original ZANU founders, nobody was left to remind Mugabe of the original ethos of the party. Nobody except the self-deluding Edison Zvobgo who foolishly thought he would one day take over from Mugabe – are you paying attention Comrade Mnangagwa? Comrade Pongo, this was well before the imposition of sanctions.

ZANU-PF was quickly transformed to suit Mugabe’s incomprehensible thirst for power. Cheerleaders soon replaced Nkala, Tekere, Nyagumbo and Tongogara. Like hungry vultures that have spotted a carcass, shameless opportunists descended onto the scene. The boisterous and show-boating Philip Chiyangwa is a prime example of the vultures that have ruined Zimbabwe. Sanctions, Comrade Dreadlocked Dread, have actually seen the members of the ZANU-PF crime syndicate brazenly steal and embezzle their way into fabulous wealth. The shortage of basic commodities like fuel and fertilizer only made the cartel richer at a quicker pace.

I have previously noted that sanctions have proven to be very devastating primarily because Mugabe has never cared and will never ever care for the wellbeing of the Zimbabwean people. He could have learnt from Ian Smith, P. W. Botha or Fidel Castro. Despite an energy-sapping war, Smith found a way around the sanctions imposed after the UDI. The Afrikaner Regime took advantage of the natural riches of South Africa to fend off sanctions. One impressive example is the coal-to-oil industry that resulted in the birth of the industrial city of Sasolburg. Sasol, a company born out of Botha’s sanction-busting agenda, is now a multinational company listed on the world’s biggest stock markets. Castro’s Cuba has been under sanctions for almost half a century and yet Cuba has one of the world’s best healthcare systems. While Mugabe runs to China for treatment, a testament to how far he has destroyed the country’s healthcare system, Fidel Castro is taken care of within Cuba. Incompetent Mugabe, unlike the troika of Smith, Botha and Castro, failed because he does not care.

Pongo laments the detrimental flight of talented Zimbabweans from their own motherland. Brilliant, point that finger of yours at the image of the man on your freaking T-shirt, one Robert Gabriel Mugabe! It is Mugabe that caused the largest involuntary mass dislocation of Africa’s children since the heinous crime of the Slave Trade. Mugabe is complicit in the re-enslavement of Africa’s Zimbabwean children by the very same imperial forces that he pretends to hate so much.

One has to wonder if Mugabe’s anger and irritation at the travel restrictions have more to do with his longing to kiss imperial rings in the courts of Europe again. He has been free to travel everywhere else. One would think he would be contended going to places like Beijing and Lilongwe. Mugabe is not happy with that. For a strange reason, he wants to visit Brussels and London.

The inevitable imposition of sanctions was prompted by the nationwide roguery of the ZANU-PF crime syndicate. That Mugabe has vainly tried to exploit the targeted sanctions only serves to reinforce the image of the man’s penchant for not being truthful with the Zimbabwean people.

Mugabe is a failed leader. Sanctions have nothing to do with it. So, give it a rest, Comrade Pongo. Stop barking at the moon.