As Zimbabweans, we eat politics!

Pericles is said to have been born in 495 BC into the wealthy family of the Alcmaeonids and became a statesman of great renown.

Some authorities say he was dubbed “the first citizen of Athens” — that legendary, ancient city.
He died in 429 BC. Plato was born the year that Pericles died, 429 BC, and lived till 347 BC.

One source says he is “by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy.”

It also says Plato was an “Athenian citizen of high status” and few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.

The two men had some pretty catchy and thought-provoking political philosophies attributed to them.
One of Plato’s famous quotes is: “The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”

Pericles is quoted as saying, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”

For all the fever that usually visit Zimbabwe’s body politic, there are a great many people who would be heard saying, “We don’t eat politics”.

All they want, they say, is food on the table.
Politics will not bring us food, they say.
Oh, really? The fact of the matter is that Zimbabweans, like any other peoples elsewhere, do eat politics!

It is politics that shapes the environment in which something can be or cannot be eaten. Events in the last 12 or so years have demonstrated, more than ever, that it is politics that establishes whether there can be any eating at all or not and what can be eaten or not.

Barring the now all too frequent droughts — no politician is able to make or unmake the same — all other things have pointed to the centrality of politics as definitive of what can or cannot be eaten.

Talk of the historic land reform programme in 2000 — so designed to make the majority of the people eat of the fat of their land. The land of their ancestors.

And talk of the backlash that visited a Zimbabwe that decided the exclusion of the majority of 12 million people by a minority 6 000 was over.

Sanctions that visited Zimbabwe from the very people who had been asked to share a resource they had enjoyed in exclusivity for 110 years. Which exclusivity had been consolidated by the power of the gun and the power of the laws.

Zimbabwe got the generous gift of sanctions that the hunger so begotten would gnaw and gnaw at the hapless stomach until the same stomach would inform the head and heart that something needed to be done politically.

Namely, to scream and act, “Mugabe must go!”
The empty shop shelves even of big, multinational supermarket chains that could afford to import and sell, even at inflated prices. The shortage of even beer to drown our sorrows long winding queues that sapped scant energies the new staple of man’uchu, and so forth, were not uninformed by the politics of the day.

Here is when politics defined what could be had, or otherwise which was largely the case, on the tables.

And did MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai not helpfully tell us that things would be worse and those that thought were lacking of food and basics would lack even more? So, things turned nasty, nastier.
Not so much for our politicians who have the means to be cushioned from our ordinary hungers and wants.

Tsvangirai himself has been across the world and across legendary seas, barely touched by want.
It is the ordinary man and woman; boy and girl that felt the pangs of hunger, a product of politics.
Felt the anger that traditionally and proverbially accompanies hunger. Hunger which Tsvangirai so nursed to be directed to President Mugabe and his party.

Yet President Mugabe himself would never feel or suffer our ordinary hunger. It was designed for us, to be suffered by us.

It is the ordinary, gnawing hunger that rendered ground to Tsvangirai to claim that he would inject billions of dollars to poor, sanctioned folk.

Given the foregoing — the hunger and suffering of the past decade — surely one cannot be disinterested in politics or pretend politics does not have anything to do with bread and butter issues.
Unless they are veritably dumb. Politics is the bread and the butter — or lack thereof.

This brings one to Pericles. Whether one is interested in politics or not, politics will surely have an impact on their lives. Politicians will be interested in the ordinary man and woman — for better or worse.

To use or to ease our ordinary pains. It is only logical that people be interested in how they will be used by this genus of creature called politicians.

One cannot afford to be disinterested. Or to watch people that willfully visit hunger on the land ascend to high places and be feel so foolishly content about it.

The people, in their rights and in their power, represent one supreme force that is bigger and better than any depraved political soul, so debased, so sadistic.

People must rule: they accept and they reject.
And in the present political case, they cannot afford to be led by someone who foolishly soils his dishes.

Zimbabweans should clearly hold Tsvangirai and company to account. While refusing to dignify his brand of sadistic politics with votes, Zimbabweans could be interested in making a statement on their interest in a Zimbabwe that is self-determining and creates its own wealth rather than wait for foreign handouts.

Handouts that may, will, never come.
By the way, whatever happened to the US$10 billion that Tsvangirai promised to pour into the Zimbabwe and economy courtesy of his donor friends?

Now we see the apparently spendthrift Tsvangirai sulking over President Mugabe’s input scheme, which we are told has come by way of well-wishers and personal savings of the President.

That the brand Tsvangirai is neither sustainable nor desirable makes one quite interested in the forthcoming Zanu-PF 13th Annual Conference pencilled for Gweru. The party will do itself a huge favour in coming from the crucial indaba reinvigorated and ready to consolidate its liberating agenda for Zimbabwe.

If Zanu-PF wins, as it should, the next elections how is it going to not only consolidate the gains of the liberation struggle, but also protect people from the vindictiveness of its cowardly detractors who direct their anger on people by way of sanctions?

Sanctions have been a huge issue, which no amount of tears or rhetoric will conquer.
Just what new ideas will Zanu-PF bring to the table so people will be cushioned and feel safe in the liberating arms of Zanu-PF?

People will be interested how the party will solve its internal contradictions so it moves on without the same contradictions working against the party.

And let the party not think it is immune to censure or reproach. The harmonised elections of 2008 provided just a glimpse of what a hungry and desperate people can do.

While people could have been at the wits end as hunger bit, they may as well be upset with the revolutionary party on other things. For example, what is the party going to do with the corruption among its cadres, which corruption has created quite a number of “fatcats”?

Programmes such as indigenisation and economic empowerment can easily be undermined by greedy elites. The result will be the failure of the well meaning and revolutionary ideas as people do not buy into them, upset by a ravenous elite.

The untrammeled greed even provides fodder for the counter-revolutionary.
Zanu-PF must make sure that it asserts its identification with the ordinary man and woman whose benefit from revolutionary ideas should be palpable.

An indaba like December 4 to 9 can set such a tone.
The conference should also be trusted to galvanise the idea that as a party that seeks relevance in years to come, it is interested in cultivating young revolutionary blood.

Which makes the idea of the non-imposition of candidates during the forthcoming primary elections — a process that may issue new faces — very imperative. Only to date there have been pretty mixed signals on the matter.

But people will expect the party with the governing ideas to make decisive steps to renew and consolidate.