Gen · 1 week ago
The proposed indefinite stay-away by Zimbabwe’s war veterans’ leader Blessed “Bombshell” Geza has failed to take off. Zimbabweans, particularly in Bulawayo and Harare and other small towns, chose to go to work today.
I see on social media that some citizens in the diaspora are angry with fellow compatriots back home for going to work, but we should remember that Zimbabwe has 95% unemployment, so if people do not go out to hustle, they will starve, so goes the argument.
The idea that people would get food from retailers or wholesalers was Alice in Wonderland stuff, it was never going to work or happen in a country where most businesses are owned by the corrupt cabal that the action intended to remove or loosen its grip on power.
Secondly, Zimbabweans want to be liberated from corrupt rule by a particular type of political group and politician, so without the traditional opposition throwing its weight behind Geza's call, his efforts were always going to be in vain even though they are noble and progressive.
The failure of this stay-away ends any immediate hope that citizens will participate in any liberation efforts unless mobilised by the traditional opposition, which does not exist, or by the military.
I will be blunt. Short of a military intervention to stop Emmerson Mnangagwa’s corrupt rule, he will now get everything he wants, including term extensions. He is relentless.
Zimbabweans will now be stuck with Mnangagwa until the day he dies and possibly will have to accept that his kids will rule them too with the assistance of his crooked cronies and clansmen.
Zimbabweans should forget about the 2028 election and as a local doctor mentioned on social media, begin working through the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. It is pointless putting your hopes in a process that you know too well will be rigged.
For him to fail to achieve what he wants, Mnangagwa would have to make a catastrophic mistake, like killing loads of people which will attract international scrutiny or firing his Vice President, General Constantino Chiwenga which might finally trigger a decisive response.
There is now nobody with the capacity to stop him, short of a military intervention or death.
Geza has tried, but there is no tangible citizen support that was forthcoming.
Geza managed to force Mnangagwa’s team to stop chanting the 2030 slogan and pushed them into another plan of bribing MPs with illegally parcelled land.
But after today, the dictator knows that Geza is now all alone, unless the military intervenes, which, as I have said before, is now looking highly unlikely unless they are provoked by the continued conspicuous consumption of looted public funds.
So, Zimbabweans must now accept the reality that their failure to sacrifice for their liberation by simply staying at home will mean more unemployment, more looting of public funds, more dilapidated hospitals and public infrastructure, and more economic pain all around.
Those are the grim political and socio-economic realities of Zimbabwe going forward, nothing less, nothing more.
Journalists will continue writing about corruption scandals, but only for historical records and as part of our job, and for many readers, it would be for entertainment value sadly. Some will just switch to issues that have positive mental health outcomes.
If you are young, have a passport, and have somewhere to go, my advice is to leave, otherwise, you will just become another tragic statistic of poverty, unemployment, and possibly death in a derelict hospital.
Ordinarily, Africans do not care about who is in power if they have the basic necessities of life.
But sadly, in Zimbabwe, those necessities will remain out of reach for as long as Mnangagwa and his corrupt cabal are in power.
As for the opposition, it is dead. There will be no pushback for reasons you all know.
You will remember that last year in May, I mentioned that three key countries to Zimbabwe's politics privately mentioned through their diplomats that, as far as they were concerned, 2028 was gone, and they were now looking at perhaps 2033 or even beyond to envisage any possibility of a change of government.
But as long as Zimbabweans remain fixated on the main actor syndrome and not an opposition movement, they must also accept being stuck in the current political ditch for a long time to come. What does this mean? It means more looting. For the diaspora, it means continuing to send money back home for the foreseeable future.
The tragedy is that Zimbabwean citizens continue to look for a hero figure rather than building a durable, collective movement that outlasts individual egos. Until that changes, power will remain concentrated in the hands of whoever seizes the moment, no matter how corrupt or undemocratic they are like Mnangagwa.
For foreign diplomats, it simply means accepting that they now must work with the government of the day no matter how corrupt it is, with no hope of any change unless there is a dramatic intervention that puts an end to the current political rot.
For General Constantino Chiwenga, it means kissing goodbye to his dream of becoming president. He must now tighten his security and pray that Mnangagwa does not make the un-strategic mistake of firing him because he might not be able to fight back.
If he still has an appetite for this job, he has to fight for it by coming out of the shadows, otherwise he will meet the same fate that destroyed Joice Mujuru’s career. Without her husband, she became a nobody, and without the military, Chiwenga will be just another brick in the wall.
For 74-year-old war veterans’ leader, former intelligence officer, and former Member of Parliament Blessed “Bombshell” Geza, keep your head up high old man.
You did what you could, and history will be kind to you for trying, at great personal cost.
Your beautiful home in Sanyati was burnt, your wife harassed, and now you are living in hiding. One would have to be a fool of monumental proportions not to acknowledge your efforts and say thank you for trying.
You have contributed to people’s consciousness about how bad corruption has become, and hopefully you will live to see the change that Zimbabwe so desperately needs.
Every struggle needs leadership; people cannot lead themselves. The idea that the Arab Spring was leaderless is rooted in ignorance and a lack of understanding of what happened. Without leaders to provide direction and inspiration, citizens cannot move forward on their own.
Citizens were given direction and inspiration by Geza, but quite evidently, they felt it was not enough to compel them to make sacrifices, such as simply staying away from work and enduring a little hardship for the greater good and a better future.
The dysfunctionality of national leadership in Zimbabwe has been fuelled by money changing hands, shameless ethnic alignments, corruption, and the absence of a shared national vision and values. Put simply, Zimbabweans are not united against the common enemy, corrupt rule.
The oversized egos that prioritise individualism over a collective agenda are self-evident, and they are among the key ingredients of today’s failed politics. Sadly, it is the ordinary people and the lumpen who cheer that individualism that will continue to suffer.
As Dr Solomon Guramatunhu has always said in my favourite saying of his, politicians are a mirror of who we are as a society. Every society has a leadership it deserves. When the society fundamentally changes, it will change its leadership too.
When citizens hero-worship politicians regardless of the mistakes they make, it means such a people deserve those leaders. When citizens demand more, the leaders will also change. For now, Zimbabweans are stuck with Mnangagwa and an elusive opposition that only exists in name and not indeed.
I conclude by saying that only something very dramatic will change Zimbabwe’s state of affairs.
It could be a military intervention that removes the current corrupt political leadership of Mnangagwa, but ultimately it will also serve the interests of the elites if the citizens are just by-standers, or a dramatic fall from grace for the corrupt if a few of them are arrested beyond the president’s control, leading to the public shedding its fear.
At this moment, any change will do, because the country was removed from the gutter in 2017 into the sewer. The question is who has the capacity to bring the required change? Only time will tell. By hopewell