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Geoffrey Nyarota Correspondent
“MINISTER gets bullet parcel,” screamed the banner headline across the front page of a daily newspaper on Tuesday.
The gist of this article, which ran over two pages of the newspaper, was that the Provincial Affairs Minister for Mashonaland Central had received an AK47 bullet which was sealed in an envelope. Accompanying this bullet from the world’s most ubiquitous firearm, which is the assault rifle that both the Zanla and Zipra guerilla armies used against the Rhodesian security forces while waging the war of Zimbabwe’s liberation, was a written message.
The message allegedly advised Minister Martin Dinha to step down from office or “risk suffering the same fatal fate that befell the late Zanu-PF political commissar, Elliot Manyika, who died in a suspicious car accident in 2008”.
The article said the package had allegedly been delivered to the minister’s office just after midnight on Monday morning.
Delivery of the said package to Dinha, whom the newspaper described as very shaken had prompted him to go into hiding. The newspaper’s well-placed sources within Zanu-PF apparently told reporters that the parcel had been delivered amid “clear indications” that this was the work of “hardliners angling to succeed Mugabe in the nonagenarian’s fast-imploding party”.
The source of the alleged clarity of the said indications was left to the imagination of the readers. In an interview subsequently published in the same newspaper Dinha stated that he was not intimidated and he would not resign.
“I will serve my master and mentor without fear or any hesitation,” the minister said obsequiously, referring to President Mugabe.
On August 3, 2009 I penned and posted on my then Internet website, The Zimbabwe Times, an article in which I questioned the credibility of a claim by the then Finance Minister and MDC-T secretary general, Tendai Biti, that a live bullet had been sealed in an envelope and delivered to his Highlands, Harare, home.
The details of my Biti story, which I published under the headline “The sensational issue of bullets by post”, were that the MDC Pressroom, the official website of the MDC-T’s Information and Publicity department had published an announcement under the equally spectacular headline: “MDC Secretary-General Hon Tendai Biti receives death threat”.
“The terror-tactics of sending live bullets to Cabinet ministers is a sure sign that the desperate forces fighting the new dispensation are getting more and more desperate every day.”
The new dispensation referred to by the writer of the statement was the shotgun political marriage that brought together the MDC-T, whose leader Morgan Tsvangirai became Prime Minister, and the ruling Zanu-PF party of President Mugabe in unholy matrimony in the ill-fated government of national unity from 2009 to 2013. The MDC had repeatedly charged that members of the powerful Joint Operations Command of the military and some Zanu-PF malcontents were opposed to the government of national unity. The MDC-T’s “Bullet by post” statement drew for the first time a direct link between Zanu-PF and an act of sabotage against or a threat to the MDC-T. The party however refrained from presenting any evidence whatsoever directly linking its partner in the government of national unity to the dispatch of the said bullet.
“As a party, we hope that there will be full investigation on this matter and we hope that the justice system will move with speed in getting to the root of this matter,” the statement finally postulated.
In a clear display of ultimate, perhaps unacceptable gullibility, this particular story was soon flying from one end of the Internet to the other.
In those days a large number of Zimbabweans did not take kindly to criticism of the MDC-T. I however, summoned sufficient courage to express the hope in my article that anyone investigating the origins of the Biti bullet would refrain from jumping to conclusions while spreading the net wide enough to include, not only Zanu-PF malcontents, but other parties who might derive strategic benefit from the destabilising act where the Minister of Finance received a live bullet in an envelope.
The following is the list of targets for investigation that I proposed, together with the possible reason why the said parties might want to dispatch a bullet to then HonourableTendai Biti:
Zanu-PF elements fighting the new dispensation in order to strategically eliminate a man viewed as the most shrewd MDC-T stalwart as well as a strong pillar of the party.
The MDC-T itself in order to win public and international sympathy and support by portraying themselves as a party under constant persecution by Zanu-PF. At a time when the image of the party was constantly taking a battering for its participation in the GNU this was not a far-fetched notion.
Gideon Gono, then the beleaguered Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in order to derail Biti, a man who had effectively silenced, humiliated and emasculated him at the Central Bank, where he had been all-powerful.
A personal rival seeking to settle an equally personal score.
And finally, Tendai Biti himself, or an ally in strategising to strengthen Biti’s political credentials as an investment in the future, in a bid to upstage Tsvangirai.
Biti is now the leader of the MDC Renewal Team, a second generation breakaway faction of the MDC-T.
Back then I suggested that when interviewing Biti the investigators should particularly demand satisfactory answers to the following questions:
How did the minister manage to suppress the natural curiosity that must have been aroused by the presence and the weight of the lump in the envelope before he threw the same envelope in the dustbin?
Was the minister in the habit of throwing in the dustbin envelopes that arrive by post without opening them?
If the answer to the second question was in the affirmative then a natural follow-up question would be what then prompted Hon Biti to subsequently mount a rescue operation for this particular envelope from the dustbin, which led him to discover that this was no ordinary envelope and that, in fact, it contained a live bullet.
This line of questioning would have been premised on an assumption that anyone wishing to obtain a bullet of whatever calibre could easily do so in Harare at that particular time. I never received any response or comment either from the MDC-T of from Tendai Biti.
In the Dinha case this week when the newspaper approached the police in Bindura about the minister’s bullet claim they drew a blank.
“I am hearing this for the first time from you,” is what the Mashonaland Central police boss, Munorwei Shava Matutu told the newspaper’s reporters, who, completely undaunted, approached the office of Ignatius Chombo, the Minister of Home Affairs.
What clarification they hoped to obtain from Chombo on this particular issue I have been unable to fathom. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Chombo rendered himself unavailable for comment.
Meanwhile, the story about the Dinha bullet became mired in the usual Zanu-PF succession conjecture, which few Zimbabweans have the capacity to fully comprehend.
That includes the purveyors of succession verbiage themselves ensconced, as they are, in the newsrooms of Zimbabwe’s newspapers.
Online Reporter