Nobleman Runyanga
Over the past two weeks social media has been aflame with opposition elements and other detractors demonstrating their frustration with their poor leadership and desperation to unseat ZANU PF to the extent of scraping the barrel by doing the unthinkable – comparing Zimbabwean life under the late former Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Douglas Smith, and after Independence.
One of the opposition supporters who ran with the comparison narrative is the diaspora-based activist who uses the moniker @LynnStactia on the Xplatform. She and her ilk have been claiming that life was better under the Rhodesian regime than in independent Zimbabwe. While, as a nation, we are facing a number of socio-economic challenges, nothing justifies idolising the racist and oppressive colonial regime.
People like Stactia are politically immature. They stupidly think that there is virtue in praising and idolising a by-gone oppressor regime all in the hope of unseating ZANU PF using social media. Fortunately, the world is not stupid. It will not take seriously people who praise a colonial government, which they never experienced having been born after 1980, and denigrate the Government of the day that was formed by a popular political party, which has been voted into power repeatedly since February 1980.
Only some Zimbabweans, who were born after independence and did not live under the Smith regime, find sense and rational in comparing the incomparable because they do not a lived experience of the colonial era. Those who have pre-Independence experience of life in Zimbabwe know of the racist nature of the Smith regime. They know the experience of being barred from walking along Harare’s Fist Street Mall because of one’s skin colour. The people who experienced the brutality and racial segregation appreciate the value of our independence because of some of the silly racial practices they went through in Rhodesia. For example, blacks needed a Letter of Exemption under the Liquor Act of 1951 to buy and consume lager beer and spirits. Coloureds and Indians did not have it easy either as they were not allowed in some places such as hotels.
People like Stactia do not appreciate what it meant to be compartmentalised according to race when travelling by bus when bus services were introduced in the 1950s. Each bus had three compartments. The front compartment was for the driver, while the one behind him was for white passengers. The compartment at the back of the bus was designated for black passengers. The two passenger cabins had separate doors to ensure that no race had contact with another. Stactia and other like-minded young Zimbabweans do not value our independence because they never had to be forced by the unbearable pain of the Rhodesian regime’s treatment of blacks to abandon jobs, studies and families to join the liberation struggle.
They never experienced how women and girls were treated as perpetual minors who could not enter into legal contracts or open bank accounts by themselves. Their fathers or brothers had to contract on their behalf. Those born after independence do not understand what the enactment of the Legal Age of Majority Act in December 1982 meant for the previously oppressed women of Zimbabwe.
Zimbabweans born after 1980 have no idea of what it meant to live during the Smith era when education for blacks was characterised by bottlenecks occasioned by very few secondary schools and a single university. They do not appreciate what the Government’s drive for more secondary schools, training colleges and universities is meant to achieve because they are not aware of the kind of skewed education system that it inherited in 1980. They do not understand what Government is aiming to achieve though its Education 5.0 concept as they never experienced the colonial education system which was calculated to create employees and not entrepreneurs or solution providers to communities’ challenges.
What can one say of the pre-independence land distribution imbalance which saw a few thousand whites occupying most of the fertile land while blacks were pushed to infertile and rocky land called reserves? Only people who experienced these injustices fully appreciate the land reform programme which Government implemented in 2000 after the British government reneged on its Lancaster House Agreement commitment to fund the country’s resettlement programme.
Although we are still experiencing challenges in some areas, Zimbabwe has achieved star status in areas such as education and health. For example, after Independence Government rolled infrastructure to ensure that each District and Province has a hospital. Rural clinics were built to reduce the distances that people walk to access primary health care services. The country has become a global example on how to roll out childhood immunisation under its Zimbabwe Expanded Programme of Immunisation (ZEPI). Zimbabwe is also a global positive case study on how to fund and manage HIV/AIDS using both social marketing campaigns and anti-retroviral treatment (ART).
The fact that we are still experiencing some socio-economic challenges should not blind us from the fact that the liberation struggle brought with it access to land, – itself the raison d'etre for the war – the right to vote and the elimination of segregation. This triumph over Smith should not be overlooked and tossed to the side just because some misguided thinking on the part of some youths born after Independence.
It is interesting to note that the pro-Smith young opposition elements have conveniently left out the role of the opposition in Zimbabweans’ socio-economic challenges. The late MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai is on record for agitating for sanctions against innocent Zimbabweans from regional neighbours and global powers. Since 2001 no opposition leader has come out to condemn or campaign against the illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabweans by the US and other western countries.
The omission of local opposition leaders in the Smith-Zimbabwe equation demonstrates that young opposition members are frustrated by the lack of sound leadership in their camp as well as the fact that it stands no chance on every front to unseat ZANU PF. The initiative is therefore a continuation of the opposition’s politics of sabotage which is being implemented to cause disaffection towards ZANU PF. It is a demonstration of the opposition’s failure to compete on the basis of sound ideas and practical solutions.
Instead of wasting time fighting ZANU PF by making stupid comparisons, Zimbabweans should be prepared to roll up their sleeves, put their shoulders to the wheel and boots firmly on the ground to work hard to solve the challenges we are facing as a nation. In 2022 another young opposition activist, Lisa Ncube initiated and drove a similar campaign and nothing came out of it. If anything, it galvanised the majority of Zimbabweans to hand another mandate to ZANU PF and President Emmerson Mnangagwa by voting overwhelmingly for them on 23 August 2023.
In view of the futility of these stupid political stunts, we should unite and face our common enemies as a united front. Zimbabweans, especially the youth, should get used to the reality that no long dead Ian Smith is going to miraculously resurrect from his Shurugwi farm grave and improve our country for us. None but us will turn around the socio-economic fortunes of our country.
