Tongai Philip Mukarati
LADYSMITH; KWAZULU-NATAL: Today is Independence Day in motherland Zimbabwe…BUT …are we independent when homeland is so sour.
Every soul including the children of looters harbor scotching willingness to escape to other lands where as a second citizen you are treated as and so comfortable in that arrangement you are. This sadly reflects that we are harboring desires of Smith enslaving us again.
So, what does this day have worth celebrating?
The day used to have political relevance but that again has been stolen from the masses by Zanu PF. For the common man, politics is about exercising your choice when it comes to electing leaders.
Unfortunately, that has been ruthlessly taken away to the point where it’s now a crime to prefer any other political party outside the ruling party. They have managed to outlaw it to the extent of killing people for power. There is evidence to this extent. People have disappeared simply because they have exercised their right to vote. It’s sad, no, it’s tragic.
Elections at every level have been rigged to the extent that people now feel it’s pointless to exercise their right to vote. The interesting thing is the way Zanu PF has even managed to extend the rigging to its own internal elections.
If election results are not manipulated, duly elected Parliamentary and Senatorial representatives are shamelessly recalled and now we have in parliament the leader of the opposition being someone coming from a party whose leader only garnered a paltry 45000 votes and the opposition party with a leader who got 2.1million (according to the ZEC cooked figures) being the minority.
We can’t even begin to talk of economic independence. It would be a waste of time, words and effort.
Needless to say, there has been a subtle transfer of economic power from the minority white population, at independence, to a few blacks led by the first family and the politically well-connected. The rest of the populace is now even worse than they were 30 years ago.
The long and short of it is that 18 April is a day that has not only lost its relevance and flavour for most Zimbabweans, but it now represents probably the very things we do not want to see as a citizenry. I happen to be the same age with Zimbabwe, and when I look at where I am and where I should be, my heart bleeds. How did we get here?
Tongai Mukarati is a Zimbabwean journalist currently based in Kwazu-Natal, South Africa. He writes in his own capacity
