Super minister turns super victim

occurred, ostensibly targeting the same individual in the run-up to a Sadc summit, or do I pen a fresh piece even though the script and the player or players are the same?
You may wonder what I am going on about dear reader, but I hear one Tendai Biti’s house was petrol-bombed early Sunday morning, just an hour after midnight or thereabouts.
Shocked as to why anyone wishing to cripple MDC-T would bomb Biti’s house and not Morgan Tsvangirai’s, more like hitting the tail deliberately missing the head of a serpent, I scoured for evidence on the websites going apoplectic about the ‘‘sacrilege” and what do I find?
A picture of a bit of smoke-stained security wall where some plaster had fallen off, exposing about six bricks!
Plaster that was probably displaced by the impact of the device not its explosion.
Undeterred, the privately-owned tabloids screamed to high heaven; ‘‘Bid to kill Biti . . . bomb explodes at minister’s house (The Daily News Monday June 6, 2011)”; ‘‘Biti bombed . . . minister escapes death (NewsDay Monday June 6, 2011).”
Contrast that hysteria with their muted coverage of Inspector Petros Mutedza’s death, and you can’t help a sense of deja vu
I go through the copy to find how Biti ‘‘miraculously” escaped death only to be told he was not even at the house.
Where the copy had claimed ‘‘a powerful bomb had detonated” we are told further down an incendiary device, probably a petrol-bomb was thrown at the wall.
How a petrol-bomb can have a detonator and create a crater on a wall where its impact manages to dislodge a bit of plaster only a Martian may know.
But what is my point?
My point is the “bombing” at Biti’s house raises more questions than answers.
History counsels scepticism as we have seen and heard these stunts before.
Where MDC-T leaders create self-fulfilling prophecies ahead of major summits like the extraordinary summit of Sadc Heads of state and Government scheduled for Johannesburg, South Africa later this week.
This time they are particularly hard-pressed to portray Zanu-PF as the sinner given that their supporters were implicated in the recent murder of a police officer, 42-year old Inspector Petros Mutedza who was set upon and fatally assaulted by suspected MDC-T activists on May 28.
Though MDC-T tried to claim that Inspector Mutedza was killed during a beerhall brawl, evidence on the ground indicates otherwise, and I will not delve into that matter since it is sub judice.
On July 28 2009, just a few days before the Sadc Summit in Kinshasa, the DRC, Biti claimed his life was in danger saying he had received a letter with a live bullet inside it.
The letter, which Biti claimed, was delivered to his Chisipite house reportedly had the chilling phrase, ‘‘raira nhaka (sort out your estate)” but today, this our super-minister is still breathing and making enemies all over the place, not necessarily in Zanu-PF for that matter.
As part of the campaign, Biti was to give an interview to the British paper, The Guardian on August 5, 2009 in which he claimed he was living in fear of assassination.
“Yes, we (Tsvangirai and himself) are at risk [of assassination] and I think we are being irresponsible by having the lax security arrangements we have, certainly myself,” he quipped.
‘‘The fact of the matter is that we are in a struggle, a vicious struggle. The easiest and most opportunistic solution is to eliminate, and when you eliminate particularly strategic persons like Prime Minister Tsvangirai, you take the struggle backwards for many years,” the super-victim, sorry super minister opined.
If not Biti, it would be some other MDC-T minion who is ‘‘threatened” with death or some supporter who is allegedly hounded by Zanu-PF.
These sob stories set the agenda for MDC-T and its coterie of NGOs that always compile dossiers of alleged violence against their supporters which they exhibit at summit venues the world over.
These groups scour the Internet for gory images from places as diverse as Somalia to Sudan, giving any burnt or swollen bum instant Zimbabwean citizenship.
Now the problem with this MDC-T strategy is that it is now threadbare, only converts of the regime change gospel can swallow it, hook, line and sinker and I do not believe for a minute Sadc leaders can fall for it.
As one good friend of mine, Itayi Garande put it on one of the social networking sites, ‘‘If I was to give the benefit of the doubt to this story, I think Biti has more enemies in the MDC-T and in the civil service than in the Zanu-PF party. His recklessness is a boon for Zanu-PF. He is a liability for Tsvangirai and you can tell their chemistry is like that of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Morgan was comfortable in that party with his labour movement colleagues than with Biti.
‘‘They rarely have pictures taken together.
‘‘He is not in good books with many MDC-T top leaders, for example Bennett, Eddie Cross, Eliphas Mukonoweshuro and others.
‘‘Such a divisive element is actually a benefit for Zanu-PF, so they would not want him out of the picture. They would want a spoiler, and he is.
‘‘That’s why Morgan never responded to Biti’s claim that he had won the presidential election and was ‘the next President of the Republic of Zimbabwe’.
‘‘Morgan was embarrassed and does not give him any credit, to say the least, that’s why he hired other lawyers from outside the MDC-T during the GPA negotiations. He could never entrust that responsibility to Biti or Senator Gutu or Douglas Mwonzora.
‘‘They are liabilities, not assets to that party. The problem with lawyers; is that they have entrenched political meme sets; and everything is interpreted in legalistic terms.
‘‘They feel that somehow law is superior; yet mere mortals and simpletons like the legislators we see in the MDC-T are the ones who are passing those laws.
‘‘Biti should look within the MDC-T if he wants to know where his demise is going to come from.
‘‘No-one seems to smile in his presence. Show me one picture online or elsewhere where people are smiling in his presence,” he said.
I couldn’t agree more.
In fact, in the wake of the violence-ridden MDC-T congress in Bulawayo, Biti is reported to have confided to a senior Zanu-PF official that he was shocked to find that he had so many enemies in the MDC-T rank and file than in Zanu-PF.
It’s well known that Biti is reported to be head of a faction that wants to challenge Tsvangirai for the presidency of MDC-T and that there is no love lost between him and the man from Nerutanga village.
So assuming a real petrol-bomb was thrown at the security wall of Biti’s house, then police may need to look no further than Biti’s own party for suspects but since his party is well populated by former Selous Scouts who were well known for atrocities against the populace which they subsequently blamed on Zanla and Zipra, this looks like a Harvest House attempt to divert attention from the MDC-T’s role in the brutal murder of Inspector Petros Mutedza.
Since not even a police report of the alleged bombing was made for all of 17 hours from 1am when the bombing is alleged to have taken place to 6pm when a report was made, I remain to be convinced that this was not an MDC-T stunt aimed at raising dust ahead of the Sadc Summit in South Africa particularly given how Tsvangirai’s fulminations in Livingstone were exposed for the hot air that they were.
More so Zanu-PF would need to be terminally moronic to bomb Biti’s house just as the week leading to a crucial Sadc Summit where the MDC-T would play perennial victim was about to begin.
May the police get to the bottom of this matter.
caesar. zvayi @zimpapers.co.zw