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Chofamba

November 28, 2007

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Tsvangirai’s Prime Ministerial baby mamas

There's something incongruous about how Zimbabwean independent media journalists at home and in the Diaspora are reporting the debacle surrounding Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's marriage-that-allegedly-never-was. Whilst the state-controlled Herald has, predictably, gleefully reported on the 'union' and its attendant soap operatic saga, the independent press has bizarrely preoccupied itself with efforts to ‘uncover’ the ‘truth’ about the origins of claims that Tsvangirai had married his lover, Locadia Tembo, a wealthy businesswoman hailing from a traditionally ZANU PF family and whose sister is an MP in President Mugabe’s party.
Newzimbabwe.com published a story entitled The curious case of Tsvangirai’s marriage on Thursday which sought to reconcile the gaps between the Tembo family’s claims of a marriage between their daughter and the Prime Minister on the one hand, and denials of such a union by Tsvangirai’s spokesman Luke Tamborinyoka on the other. The story qu…

Zimbabwe police to mine diamonds

Diamonds are forever: Zimbabwe Republic Police Commissioner-General, Augustine Chihuri.
As I indicated in the piece below, Zimbabwe's security chiefs have made further moves to secure their corporate interests in the vast alluvial diamond fields of Chiadzwa in the country's southeastern district of Chimanimani. Curiously, the Zimbabwe Republic Police has set up a mining company and applied for a licence to begin operations there.

Read the full story.

On 'doing God' in Zimbabwean politics

On the matter of how political community must be organised and run, I believe in a secular rational-legal order. I do not want to live in a theocracy such as we have in some Muslim countries where religion is the organising factor of society and subsumes all life, with religious edicts and commandments forming the basis of law.

In many such countries we see clashes between fundamentalists and moderates over the interpretation of religious dogma, with claims and counter-claims of each group being closer to the mind of God than the other, and a massive denial of freedom to certain groups, such as women, on the basis of scriptural interpretation.

I want to live in a liberal democratic order where civil rights must be allowed that, among other things, enable members to pursue their religious freedoms. I want politics to be a rational exercise where decisions and choices are based on reason and policy making responds to the rule of cause and effect.

That is why I am very uncomfortable - e…

Ian Smith denied our African humanity

BORN at the height of the national liberation struggle in the late 1970s, I grew up in post-independence Zimbabwe. Save for hazy memories, I cannot claim to possess a concrete self-consciousness of life under Ian Douglas Smith’s white supremacist Rhodesian Front government. However, having been born to young and unemployed school-leavers of peasant background, my life as a toddler was to be circumscribed in a brutally physical way by the paranoid security policies of Smith’s government.

I spent my early childhood in one of Smith’s concentration camps in a small village called Chibuwe in Chipinge district, on the country’s eastern border with Mozambique. This was a major operational zone for the nationalist guerillas fighting for black self-determination. In order to cut off the guerillas from accessing logistical and political support from the masses, Smith’s government herded African villagers living within such areas into concentration camps, which they euphemistically called ‘protec…

Will Joice Mujuru survive, or is this the end for her?

In my view, it isn't just about Joice Mujuru, but her whole camp. Technically they're in a commanding position and I think this over the top intimidation tactic being used by the other side is the only way they can achieve their ambitions.

They can't out-vote Joice's camp and they don't have the numbers to carry through all those amendments to the party constitution that they propose to do. On those amendments too, it should trouble anyone in Zanu that they're really seeking to create a highly centralised power structure in which the leader effectively becomes the party, just as Zvobgo's problematic amendments to the national constitution concentrated executive powers in the office of the president.

These enormous powers are in effect not really meant for Mugabe, but for the one who will soon take over from him. And the question is, why would they bend over backwards, cede their power to block this, and allow the Mnangagwa faction to reshape the party stru…

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