I travelled to Washington, DC in early December last year and one thing that happened in the evening of my day of arrival set me thinking as I wandered the streets in the company of a newly found Burkinabe pal.
That was the time when Israel was hitting back at Gaza for the lethal Hamas attacks in its backyard that began in early October. Thousands of people had already died in both Israel and the Gaza strip, and the world was on the edge, still counting.
You know that, as a matter of foreign policy, the US considers Hamas a terrorist group and doesn’t mind sharing the bed with Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, whichever you prefer.
We were attracted to a park in the Embassy Row area where a loud hailer was blazing.
Hundreds of people had gathered in the park to listen to addresses by organisers of an anti-Israeli protest rally. One of the organisers spoke spiritedly and minced no words about how he would love to see American leaders burning to charcoal in the netherworld.
He called Joe Biden and his government murderers who were sponsoring genocide in Gaza.
This what I said to myself: If this was happening in my own Zimbabwe, that bloke, his colleagues and the people who had gathered in the recreational park, among them tourists on photo shoots, would all be in jail before they could even say “Hamas”.
They law enforcers would file a long charge sheet accusing everyone found in the park of terrorism and subterfuge. The cops in Washington DC, not too many of them, watched from a distance and even chatted with some of the protesters.
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But hate the Americans or love them, they have lots of respect for their own constitution, especially the First Amendment that makes the freedoms of speech, assembly, petitioning and belief sacrosanct. Which I certainly share because people must be free.
Six months down the line, I travelled to Mutare to coordinate a training workshop on disinformation that brought together more than a score of representatives of community-based organisations.
Just as we were doing introductions, two strangers casually walked into the room, stone-faced. I asked them to introduce themselves, upon which one of them said they were from security.
It must have taken them back a bit, but I insisted on knowing which security. Without being impolite, of course.
The one who talked, a burly dude, said they were from the Central Intelligence Organisation and the Police Intelligence. He was the one from CIO, I learnt later.
You could tell that when they sneaked into the room, the two operatives were tense and probably thought they had finally found a good job to do in Mutare.
But, after reading through the first day’s programme, the CIO chap seemed to have lost interest, hung around for a while and left his colleague with us for the two days we did the training.
I was happy to notice that the trainees were not flustered, probably because they are now used to these illegal intrusions by state security agents. Later, the Police Intelligence guy and I warmed up to each other and he even hailed us for doing such a workshop.
But the message was not lost. The Zanu PF government has become so paranoid ahead of the 44th Sadc summit slated for August 17.
These people see shadows whenever people gather. They are quaking in their boots because they don’t trust the very people they claim voted them into power at last year’s elections.
In other words, the Sadc summit has become a heavy curse to us here in Zimbabwe. Security operatives are out at every street corner, only short of your bedroom if they can help it.
You have already seen what happened to Jameson Timba and close to 80 other CCC members who are now rotting in jail for gathering at a private place.
The paranoid regime has decided to call them agents of regime change and wants to use their bare knuckle imprisonment as a stern warning to other people who may start thinking of protesting against President Mnangagwa and his musketeers ahead of and during Sadc.
They are not satisfied with the incarceration of Timba and team. You saw last week how they had to wait for some critics of the government to board a plane on a local trip, dragged them out and gave them a piece of hell during incommunicado detention at the Robert Mugabe International Airport.
The security agents are harassing people going about their business in town in Harare and get easily scared when they see more than two people talking about their woes and what not at the corner of Jason Moyo Avenue and First Street, which has always been busy anyway.
The country is on knife edge, as if we are in a state of emergency. There is so much fear, so much anxiety about what will happen to who next.
They have done bits of nice roads here and there for the optics, but people are not interested in that. You don’t have time for lipstick on a frog, especially when swimming in a croc-infested pool.
And people are wishing there were never any Sadc summits to do, especially if they have to happen in Zimbabwe.
Scared regimes tend to easily get involved in dangerous compensatory behaviour. They offload their insecurities on the people. People who don’t even know what shop sells toy guns.
Historically, major international summits have always brought the curse on us, innocent citizens.
And that’s because successive Zanu PF governments are pathologically paranoid. Yet you mustn’t be paranoid if you have the legitimacy to rule.
You will remember what happened in 1991 when Zimbabwe, then under Robert Mugabe, hosted the CHOGM summit in Harare. Ordinary people were literally driven into manholes.
The hard-muscle tactics that the Mnangagwa administration is employing on vulnerable citizens must surely shame Sadc, if at all the regional bloc has a conscience.
But the community’s dilemma starts well before the government begins treating its own people like roaches. There may be progressive minds within the Sadc leadership, but even these will come out with egg on the face for having Zimbabwe as the next chair of the Summit.
You will recall that the Sadc election observer mission produced the angriest report of all on the manner in which elections were held in Zimbabwe last year.
A year after, Sadc is handing over the chairmanship of the Summit—which is supposed to steer policies and actions of the community—to the very country whose elections the regional body condemned.
Fine, Zimbabwe was already the deputy chair, so next in line for the chair’s seat. This complicates the Sadc matter. We are not sure of the actual criterion or criteria used to select Zimbabwe as the deputy chair.
Loosely speaking, they say that, post-2000, Sadc decided to revolve the chair among its members. The problem is that Sadc has always been shabby regarding the model. It doesn’t specifically tell us how rotation must happen. Is it in alphabetical order or what?
Zimbabwe held the Sadc chairmanship between 2015 and 2016, when it handed over the baton to Botswana. If the chair was truly rotational, how come Zimbabwe was selected? This is nine years after yet Sadc has 16 members. You would have expected the other nations to take their turns before Harare.
Honestly speaking, there mustn’t have been a rush to give Zimbabwe the chair, considering its unpleasant history. I’m just stuck on how the country and its Head of State will handle elections taking place during our tenure as chair of the Sadc summit, in countries like Mozambique, Namibia and Botswana that are scheduled to go to the polls later this year. What legitimacy will the Zimbabwean chairmanship have considering that Sadc itself last year condemned our own elections?
Even in its shabbiness, Sadc could have done better. I don’t encourage this, but Ketumile Masire of Botswana held the post a record 16 times from 1980.
We have had several countries that attained independence or changed leaders after us taking the chair before we could do, despite having become free from colonial rule way back in 1980.
If there was rhyme and reason in that, then Sadc could still use its discretion to delay the Zimbabwean chairmanship, till we know how to run our own affairs.
In short, given the violations we are seeing and the bad record of our successive governments, Sadc has sunk to a new low from which it may never recover.
*Tawanda Majoni writes in his personal capacity and can be contacted on majonitt@gmail.com
