BABA JUKWA: Obituary for my party

BABA JUKWA: Obituary for my party

Zimbabwe, when I look back along the path we walked from Independence Day 1980 to today, I can’t hold back the flowing tears. It is hard to write an obituary for a party that I have been part of for my entire life - and now I am helping to dismantle. It is like a jersey infested with lice. The only solution is to burn it. Haudzipedzi kutswanya inda dzacho! Who would have thought at 1980 that Zimbabwe would be like this?

Two things describe why my party is in this situation: Chi-shefu, which is the appetite to want to be hero worshiped and averse to criticism; and Cronyism, which is rewarding those who turn a blind eye to evil but are quick to hero worship the leader. The effect of these was felt throughout the country and I will observe it in stages, tears running down my cheeks.

Agriculture

Our economy was mainly Agro-based and so I don’t dispute that we needed to address the land issue. Although it pains me to say so, Ian Smith’s agricultural policy was one of the best, love him or hate him. The guy had devised methods to prevent soil erosion in the whole country by putting in laws that prohibit random agricultural activities at water channels or near rivers.

He also introduced a mandatory contour digging programme throughout the country. Our people hated this and the song “Nhamo Yemakandiwa” came out of this hatred. But little did our people know that it was for their benefit and during the war, we were stupid enough to gain cheap political millage at pungwes ordering people to destroy those makandiwa. Now rivers are all sand, most areas in the former TTLs are just gullies and with dry rivers comes drought. Smith also made sure that cattle would dip every week and he collected cattle taxes, something which our people also did not like. Selling one’s agricultural produce or cattle was done in open markets or auctions and people got value for money for their hard work.

Nobody listened

The first land reform programme yielded very little for the country. Some money was thrown here and there with Britain saying they paid £64 million so that we could buy land and redistribute it to poor black people. But all the prime land went to us the chefs. I got mine for free but I warned people in my party that this system does not work. One day it will explode but no one listened to me. We needed to identify real farmers so that we don’t disturb agriculture. But no one listened. So all of us in the first Cabinet, Politburo and Central Committee got free farms. A few from the former ZAPU also got their free bits. The useless land was then given to the few junior party members who wanted to use it. But still the objective was the same, to reward people in my party for loyalty to the Chef, my party leader and the military system that he was creating for his own personal security while some of us were made to make do with very little security unless we were ministers. 

Industry & Commerce

Love him or hate him, Smith had managed to build a solid economy under sanctions and had also managed to find ways of beating the sanctions. We hit him hard when we bombed the BP Shell tanks in Salisbury which later forced him to negotiate with us at Lancaster House, but his economy was good. The Rhodesian Dollar we inherited was strong. We called it the Zimbabwe dollar. The exchange rate in 1980 was one dollar to one pound. Don’t listen to my party cry crocodile tears about sanctions. The only thing we achieved was to find a scapegoat in the form of sanctions but my party destroyed a thriving industry that we inherited from Smith. High inflation started company closures, unemployment, social chaos and of course you all know that we helped form MDC through our mismanagement of the economy. 

Politics

Since the time of the liberation struggle, our people have not rested. They were beaten, killed during the war by our troops for sometimes flimsy excuses of being witches or traitors. Some overzealous mjibhas were complicit in the torture of our people. And we did not stop this until now. We only extended the methods of torture and murder and included rape of women as punishment to anyone who does not like our party.

 

So the people of Matebeleland think that they are the first to be victims of torture and murder by my party. No, it started way before 1980. During the war, rape was structured because our troops could sleep with any girl they liked in the villages, VanaChimbwido. We the chefs were also helping ourselves with girls at refugee camps in Maputo and elsewhere. I don’t want to open old wounds Vana Ve Zimbabwe, but this is fact. Any parent who refused to hand over their daughters to Pungwes would meet death. And attending pungwes was compulsory and I guess you still see this disease by my party up to now. The mixture of socialism, which we knew little about but just adopted to please the Chinese and North Koreans, and capitalism, which we admired, contributed to the destruction of the economy. It was like mixing a donkey and a lion. It failed. So Gukurahundi and all the evil things that happened in our country have their roots in our activities before independence and also the one party state idea which aimed at making our leader Mugabe a God, like what we were witnessing in North Korea being done to the late Kim Ill Sung.

Up to now, Mugabe still dreams of that, that’s why anyone who has cheated him by praising him has been rewarded heavily. Ask “Obedient son” Obert Mpofu how all of a sudden he found himself surrounded with diamond money. We will discuss our vision for a new Zimbabwe together next week, but for now Zimbabwe go en masse to vote the people in and my party out. Victory is certain and we will defend our victory with our blood.

 - Asijiki, Ndatenda, Baba Jukwa