Those who slept through the revolution

By Stephen Mpofu
This pen celebrated a belated but a hope-filled dawn break the other day, recently.
When the Organ on National Healing, Reconciliation and Integration was first set up in early January 2009, this pen wrote in these same columns calling on leaders in the Global Political Agreement (GPA) to consider holding joint public meetings to rally their supporters to the cause of co-existence and tolerance.
With no positive response to that rather impassioned plea, it seemed that the pen had merely whistled in the dark until the announcement a week ago that leaders of the three political parties in the inclusive government would start addressing joint rallies across the country next month.
Ideas do often take long to get implemented, as is in the case in point nevertheless; better late than never.
The impending meetings should demonstrate the potential of the organ in which the three political parties are represented by three ministers as a great prospect for a march forward by Zimbabweans in unity, notwithstanding their diverse political persuasions.
At the joint rallies the GPA leaders should drive to the fuller home of their audiences the spirit of:
l National healing, national healing, national healing
l Reconciliation, reconciliation, reconciliation
l Integration, integration, integration
These three values ought to form a tripod on which unity will sit, like a cooking pot on hearthstones with every Zimbabwean salivating for nourishment by the “pot’s” contents.
It should not be lost on Zimbabweans that some of their leaders slept through the revolution that gave birth to Zimbabwe from Rhodesia and, on awakening, these people are surprised by economic and social changes that the revolution is pushing in the transformation of the country’s social order.
What this therefore suggests is that for these leaders to be born again, they should go through a revolutionary baptism of fire helped by colleagues who saw it all happening from the bush where they ran the gauntlet of mosquitoes, snakes, bitter weather conditions and worst of all, blood-thirsty rebel Rhodesian soldiers as well as their black running dogs.
Therefore, the public rallies on their own will neither help the new beneficiaries of the revolution nor their counter path leaders who returned to the mother land riding on the coat tails of the revolution either. This is because one does not learn much or anything at all by merely talking.
After delivering their addresses the leaders must plunge into the crowds to touch them and to have heart-to-heart engagements with them for a feel of the people’s heart beats and of their joys, desires and aspirations.
It is only when the leaders rendezvous with the people in a state of inter-subjectivity that they will listen, learn and be led by the people in order for the leaders to lead the people more effectively.
These inter personal encounters will also enable the leaders to inspire and transfer their own hopes for the future to the audiences.
The present situation in Africa whereby leaders address public meetings then flee from the scene to be held up in their fortified residences to which access by povo is often by written permission – to wait for their surfeited faces to reappear on television screens, and to hear their own voices on televisions and radios before reading their own words in newspapers – should be blamed for the tragic detachment of most African leaders from their people.
Some of the leaders are surrounded in their inner circles by “yes-men” who are not very helpful in giving the leaders both the beautiful and the ugly situations in their country for the leaders to prescribe appropriate solutions.
On the other hand, some leaders, especially those who bolted out of the classroom and dare not return there to enhance their capacity to grasp and rationally deal with any challenges confronting them, are incapable of selective listening and so become gullible for lack of any capacity to tell the woods from the trees.
In their direct contact with the people at the rallies the GPA leaders are likely to build bridges between them and the people and establish alliances for a harmonious Zimbabwe and a realisation that no major successes in a country are achieved by individuals nor by individual political parties either but by groups in society who share a similar vision for their own betterment and a bright future for all.
In general, in Africa, top political leaders are nearly always not given the opportunity by their aides to meet personally with the people they address, but are rushed away from the people “for their own security”.
This pen contends, however, that the leaders’ security should be transferable to the people by creating a social order that is conducive to peace and stability and this includes provision for their adequate sustenance since poverty and hunger, for instance, have been known to be responsible for conflict situations not only on the African continent but elsewhere abroad as well.
GPA leaders working in alliance with one another will obviously neutralise any tendencies among some of them to use coercive power, which has often resulted in political violence.
The leaders are also likely to inculcate in each other a bias for action for positive change in the country and dissuade one another from riding roughshod over the values of Zimbabweans by acting, for instance, as foreign horses of gay rights or of some such negative values. It is said bad leaders take care of themselves first with some of them saying: “I must be feared, worshipped and be rich while I am still at it.”
But good leaders, it is also said, take care of others first so that the latter will see the good in them and take care of the leaders next and for as long as partnership remains good, and not like that of the rider and the horse.
Thus, while the first example is of leaders who are introverts, the second category is of leaders who work for the best future of their people and so qualify themselves as being futuristic leaders.
It is the latter kind of leaders that Zimbabwe should vote for in the coming elections because they are an embodiment of the future in flesh and blood and therefore also touchstones of social and economic advancement.
Therefore the “me-and-my people” type of leader should be eliminated from Zimbabwe’s political landscape and be replaced by leaders who will always proclaim, “Our people and me.”
From the foregoing it is clear that tolerance is a sine qua non for peace and stability in any country.