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in threatening the facilitator’s legitimacy, she committed a travesty in need of atonement.
We could only watch and wonder as to what had become of leadership and African solidarity as Lindiwe went about her destructive engagement at times with language that would make a truck driver green with envy.
Through it all, she provided good copy to sections of the local, South African and Western media sworn to reporting the Zimbabwe, not the Zimbabwean story.
Our colleagues in the private media here, who should know better, should also hang their heads in shame for clothing Lindiwe in giant Sadc robes when she was nothing more than a dwarfish thief arrogating to herself a role that was never hers.
These sections of the media feasted on her sound bites against wise counsel, to the extent of carving headlines about sunrise on clear Savannah days.
But at the end of it all, Lindiwe was just that, a South African, we are Zimbabweans, whose first duty is to defend the flag.
Where we have issues with our country or its leadership, journalism with responsibility has it that the best form of protest is to wash the flag, not to burn it.
We hope going forward we now all know who speaks for Sadc, and who the facilitator is.
Cde Zuma should be commended for finally standing up to be counted.
In swiftly censuring Lindiwe after President Mugabe urged him to silence her persistent negative voice, the South African president showed leadership.
Lindiwe was more trouble than she was worth as her pedestrian approach to international diplomacy tainted Cde Zuma’s credibility as facilitator.
The decision may not have been an easy one for Cde Zuma given how long the utterances had gone on unchecked, but at the end of the day when one acts on principle, it is always easy to live with.
The ball is now in Lindiwe’s court, who — if she has any modicum of decency — should do the honourable thing of apologising first to President Mugabe whom she needlessly ridiculed over the years, secondly the people of Zimbabwe whose country she soiled with her predilection for the scandalous and lastly her boss whose trust she betrayed by wearing his boots without permission.
After this, she should then resign her commission.
No diplomat worth her salt would approach international diplomacy with the sophistication of a gangster the way Lindiwe did, and no self-respecting advisor would mistake her advisory role for a principal one.
Lindiwe’s duties as international relations advisor bid her to dispense constructive advise to the South African presidency, but the charge sheet made by the Presidency on Sunday, which dovetailed with what we have always said, proves that rather than working to foster good relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa, Lindiwe Zulu fomented discord and suspicion.
As such if she doesn’t have the decency to resign, the onus is on Cde Zuma to show her the door because no self-respecting country would trust South African diplomacy with such a loose tongue as part of its foreign policy face.
This woman did irreparable damage to our cause over the years at a time we were working to harmonise our domestic and international relations.
She painted a completely wrong picture of our country and its leadership, in the process influencing opinion against us.
Sadc was not spared either as it was portrayed as a thoughtless bloc that conducts its affairs in newspapers and social networks.
We wait, though we don’t hold our breath, for Ms Zulu’s apology.
Online Reporter
dyton mupawaenda