About state media fiction writers:

“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

One of the titles I’m presently enjoying is Paul Collier’s Wars, Guns and Votes – Democracy in Dangerous Places (2009). The book makes important observations and one of the many nuggets goes: “If being honest and competent does not give you an electoral advantage, then the honest and competent will be discouraged. Crooks will replace honest candidates. One depressing indicator of such a process is that democratic politics in the countries of the bottom billion tends to attract candidates with criminal recorders…Evidently, one reason elected office is more attractive to criminals than the honest is that only criminals will take advantage of the opportunities for corruption. But there is sometimes a further reason: elected office provides immunity from prosecution” (27).

BOOM!

A recent news report says former Malawian president the late Bingu-wa-Mutharika chose Zimbabwe as one of the destinations where he could stash his cash, apparently under the guise of a Trust.

It did not come as a total surprise that he was “hiding” cash virtually everywhere under the sun under dubious charities even.

What came as a surprise was perhaps that he had chosen Zimbabwe, a country where other African despots have chosen to hide and have been welcomed as “friends of the government.”

According to Malawian news reports when Mutharika came to power in 2004, he declared that he was worth USD4.3 million, “but barely eight years into power – by the time of his untimely death in April 2012, his wealth had reportedly accrued to more than K61 billion (USD168 million).”

And then Zimbabweans are surprised why so many people are risking life and limb to contest as MP!

This is the way of the African political samurai: Stupendous wealth stands to be made, stupid!

Back in the 1980s and 1990s the Zimbabwean government loved slogans so much it came to define the nature of the politics of deceit favoured by the rulers. “Health for All by Year 2000,” “Housing for All by Year 2000,” “Clean Water for All by Year 2000,” “Education for ALL by Year 2000″ all clogged the public sphere. This was before the UN’s global commitments of the MDGs which were only adopted  in 2000. Indeed Zimbabwe must have been way ahead by then! But it turns out it was all in the name of winning votes because many years later, things remain the same if not worse.

The following photo-essay documents Westlea, a “new” suburb that is yet another pointer of how far the country has lagged behind in providing “housing for all.”

Find water where you can

A child plays outside his ‘house’

A ‘gated’ residence

Safe water?

It is interesting that politicians will say anything they imagine will win them the people’s vote.

Retired Colonel Tshinga Dube is quoted in The Herald telling a rally that “the Gukurahundi should not be used to block the revolutionary party’s (Zanu PF) efforts to bring development to the people of Matebeleland.”

That would be laughable if it wasn’t reference to an event some have labeled genocide.

“I know most of you are still grieved by the past events. This is painful but we must discuss it. If you elect us we will talk to the Government and solve this issue,” Tshinga Dube pleaded.

I wondered if Moses Mzila-Ndlovu was listening.

Indeed politicians take people for granted and the very fact that Dube actually said once elected into parliament he would engage government on this matter smacks of the condescending attitude that has become the hallmark of politicians claiming to have answers for problems unique to Matebeleland.

To his credit however, Dube did acknowledge that “people are not happy and of course we cannot just say it is over.” But then that’s exactly what the minister of defence has always insisted: Gukurahundi is over, deal with it!

A country whose politics makes a tradition of tragic deaths through suspicious automobile accidents can only have very little to claim as an “open society.”

Zimbabwe’s roads after independence are littered with deaths of prominent individuals who everyone knows had become a pain in the ass of the oligarchs. These were individuals expressing their version of the truth as opposed to the “official” line peddled by spin doctors and apologists of the political establishment. The dead men’s crusades would be perfectly in order in any country that is not North Korea.

That this continues to happen long after independence where Africa’s liberation struggle was short-circuited and chaos-riddled by ideological wars defined by the U.S.S.R and the U.S.A and went on to claim anyone from Patrice Lumumba to Amílcar Cabral to Thomas Sankara, to Zimbabwe’s own revolution that ate its own children from Josiah Magama Tongogara to Sydney Malunga points to a political tradition that is inimical to the very ideals the “new democrats” purport to espouse.

In Zimbabwe no accident that claims a prominent politician is an accident at all. It is just one of those things we have come to accept.

What is disturbing is that despite this, it still remains the chosen modus operandi of eliminating perceived opponents.

This cannot be belaboured here, yet the impunity is troubling.

Small wonder that many people here await the day not of healing political wounds but a day of retribution where those fingered in these acts of political assassination will have their testicles squeezed in the people’s angry court.

That Zimbabweans have an “insider” tipping prominent individuals that they are targets of assassination only makes this more disturbing because apparently there is very little or nothing these people can do to avoid what is increasingly their inevitable demise.

It’s only recently that one “powerful” Zanu PF don said of Energy Mutodi’s claim that the don wanted Mutodi killed: “If I wanted him (Mutodi) killed do you think he would still be alive?”