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One can look at the much admired success stories of the likes of Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Richard Branson, and even Strive Masiyiwa; or at the tragic string of suicides that followed the global economic crisis that began in mid-2008. Either way the two extremes of materialism become strikingly clear.
The acting chief financial officer of the United States’ Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation hanged himself in the wake of the economic cringe, the chief executive of Sheldon Good, another US real estate firm also shot himself in the head, and a French money manager who had invested royal funds to the tune of US$1,4 billion in the collapsed Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff slit himself to death after all that money was lost.
There is a hazardously incorrect belief that prosperity in itself quenches the yearning for happiness, and many people go to extreme efforts to amass wealth in the firm belief that material success is the source of all happiness. Even some gospel preachers are fully convinced that this myth is truth.
Such hope is hopelessly illusory, and there is this unmitigated obsession with national prosperity that leads politicians to override the tenets of justice — sometimes taking ruthless strides and inflicting so much harm and misery on peoples of weaker nations.
There is a strange melancholy that permeates Zimbabwe today — a despair that is not without cause. It all began with the painful diminishing of our former sense of national prosperity, especially after the 2000 land reclamation program, itself followed by ruinous and murderous retaliatory economic sanctions that almost brought the country to a total collapse in 2008. Some of our young people are building their lives on a false hope that the answer to our economic woes lies in the political ballot — especially one that can produce a pro-Western regime. There is a blind faith that says such an outcome will inherently come with unlimited material benefits for the nation. The illusion has many takers among our people.
We have an amazing sense of forgetfulness when it comes to the lessons that history teaches us, and this is precisely why we are so cheap as to believe that the people from whom we once liberated ourselves can today become the messiahs to bring to us a sense of freedom and liberty.
To contemporary Christians the word idolatry conjures images of primitive people bowing down foolishly before statues, just like contemporary people view images of chained semi-naked Africans crowded in overloaded boats whenever they hear the word slavery, or how they view images of ruthless gun-wielding conquest men dressed in 18th century tunics each time they hear the phrase “colonisation of Africa.”
We laugh out loud when we read about Aphrodite, the statue goddess of beauty; when we read about Ares, the statue god of war, or Artemis, the goddess of fertility.
All these gods appear to us like nothing but ridiculous practices of uncivilised ancient peoples. Equally we openly condemn the slave masters that took our African ancestors across the oceans to the Americas, and we furiously loath the European colonisers that partitioned Africa among themselves in 1884, just as we are absolutely appalled by the historical acts of the murderous English convicts that carried out the callous genocide that nearly wiped out an entire Aboriginal race in Australia.
The reality is that our contemporary society is not fundamentally different from these ancient ones we often ridicule and condemn. In religion we have contemporary forms of idols and shrines – perhaps not exactly in the form of people bowing down to statues. Equally slavery is not a forgotten ancient brutality. We have contemporary forms of slavery, colonisation and conquest. If Libya was not conquest in 2011 probably nothing is.
We still have the gods of beauty, power, money and achievement reigning supreme even if the statue gods are today derided as primitive pagan images. It might be laughable for anyone to kneel down before the statue of Aphrodite today, but surely many women of today are driven into depression and eating disorders by this obsessive concern over their body images. Perhaps this is why some of today’s crowd pulling commercial preachers claim to be sent by gods of miraculous weight losses, or miraculous hair growth. A weight loss miracle is a top drawer attraction for an average woman today, and the commercial preachers are on the money with this one.
Yes we hardly know who Pluto was, apart from reading that he was the god of prosperity, but listening to contemporary prosperity gospel preachers teaching about the sacrifice of something they call “seed offering,” one begins to see people that are being taught to sacrifice the welfare of their children, parents and other dependants — all in the hunt for wealth and prestige. So much faith, sacrifice and time are dedicated to this god of prosperity today, much as the apostles of this deity are smart enough not to make people bow before the statue of Pluto in this day and age. Of course that would be simply laughable.
Scandals that often smite high ranking personalities like politicians only prove that materialism seeks greatness at the expense of goodness. New York’s governor Eliot Spitzer destroyed his career by involving himself in a high-priced prostitution ring, more or less like Prime Minister Tsvangirai has irreparably destroyed whatever was left of his image by the much publicised philandering with an endless string of women – from gullible girls, desperate divorcees, stranded widows, to prostitutes, and even subordinates.
The god of success is very hard to appease, and this is why the insidious breed of puppet politicians gracing the African scene can go all the way to sacrifice their own countries to greedy imperial powers.
Money makes up the strings by which the limbs of a puppet politician are manipulated around, and it can take on divine attributes, and our relationship to it can easily approximate worship and obeisance. This is precisely why our civic sector in Zimbabwe is anti-pro-people policies and very hostile to the economic empowerment of local people.
Most of our people in the civic sector are not driven by the moral values they so much preach about. Rather they are driven by an obsessive greed that reduces them to donor mongers masquerading as justice seekers. Of course foreign donors have their own selfish undeclared intentions, and these hardly ever coincide with the needs of locals. It is sad when the sanitisation of these evil intentions is done by our own people – all for the selfish drive to benefit from the funds of the imperial aggressors.
As Apostle Paul wrote to Colossians, greed is not only bad behaviour, but also idolatry (Colossians 3 vs 5). We have among us people who idolise donor funds to the point of sacrificing the destiny of their own country, and among them are politicians seeking to occupy the highest office in the land. We live in a sad day for Africa.
Money can easily become much more than just money. It can be a powerful life-altering, culture-shaping god — an idol that can break the hearts of an entire nation. Western money bags altered the MDC from a workers’ party to a liberal pro-profit outfit fronting the cause of imperial powers, and that almost happened overnight, transforming in the process Morgan Tsvangirai from a respected union leader to a deplorable champion of capitalist rights.
We are so fixated on the problem of prosperity, just like we are on the ideology of democracy and liberty. We define these concepts by pointing to “those rich countries over there,” and that has become our greatest undoing. Just like athletes sometimes get so obsessed to reach the Hall of Fame level as to get to the point of taking steroids, we have politicians so obsessed with the hunger for power that they can sacrifice even the national interest just to get the fame that comes with the greatness of leading a nation.
These are people who can support and stand with anything that can leverage for them a pathway to power — even if it means burning down the country they wish to lead, so they can facilitate their ascendance.
We had the Contras ravaging their own country with full military backing from the United States in the seventies and the eighties. Nicaragua was economically strangulated and militarily ravaged just to make sure that Ortega’s Sandinistas were removed from power to make way for the unpopular pro-West Contras.
We had a similar script for Zimbabwe when about 32 Western countries connived to illegally sanction the country in retaliation to the compulsory land reclamation that pushed out some white commercial farmers from colonially acquired farm lands in 2000. The strangulation was upheld and supported by Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC; more for its weakening effect on Zanu-PF, and less for the support of the ousted white commercial farmers. It was a matter of different goals but one strategy, and the unholy alliance was of course cemented by money, as it still is today.
The MDC support for the strangulation of the country was a clear show of willingness to be great rather than good, especially on the part of Tsvangirai — a shameless resolve to achieve political greatness at the expense of the people’s good.
Democracy is good thing, just like liberty, freedom, financial security, or athletic prowess, but when a good thing is turned into a supreme thing; then there is often this obsession that leads to this particular thing overriding all other competing values.
This is what the mantra about change became at the formation of the MDC in 1999. Change became the overriding political factor that elevated some of the most unmeritorious characters to high ranking public offices like parliament or senate.
In the name of change the insane were voted to lead the sane, the uneducated to lead the educated, the stupid to lead the wise, and the primitive to preside over matters of civilisation. As a result Zimbabwe’s parliament has had the worst mediocrity ever known to post-independent Africa, thanks to the politics of the MDC. The greater the good the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes. This is how counterfeit gods are created; this is how counterfeit prophets arise, how a counterfeit gospel is preached, and so on and so forth.
The greater good of democracy must not make us create for ourselves a counterfeit sovereignty, a counterfeit democracy, a counterfeit independence, and we must remember always that democracy is about aspiring to be ourselves more than it is about carrying out a political ballot impressive to all others.
A peaceful and non-eventful voting process is not necessarily the mother of democracy. The mother of democracy is made up of the material needs of the people — the bread and butter matters of society. True democracy is born out of the economic ballot and not the political ballot. We want political leaders who are willing to be good rather than great — leaders that will seek the good of the people they lead more than they seek the greatness of their own names and legacies.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.
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