By Danai Sipho Mugano
In 2019, Emmerson Mnangagwa scrapped fuel subsidies and jetted off to Asia and Russia, confident that he had done the “right thing.” The people, he believed, would understand the economics of temporary pain.
They didn’t, obviously. As fuel prices shot out of reach, protests erupted. Police and soldiers went door to door hunting dissenters. By the time they were done, more than a dozen Zimbabweans were dead.
Mnangagwa cut short his trip, tweeting piously: “Violence or misconduct by our security forces is unacceptable and a betrayal of the new Zimbabwe. Chaos and insubordination will not be tolerated. Misconduct will be investigated. If required, heads will roll.”
Of course, no heads rolled. The job was done. The good-cop, bad-cop act had worked. The man who had been in charge then, Constantino Chiwenga, is now the darling of some, from ordinary folk desperate for change, to an army of social media influencers. He is, we are told by his marketers, a reformed Constitutionalist who will save us from Mnangagwa’s brazen attempt to rip up the law and, if some of his supporters have their way, rule for life. He is working to arrest the new criminals surrounding the President – again.
With the old opposition dormant and corruption now a national sport, our desperation has reached Olympic levels. So, in this desperation, we’ve started making up heroes. If none exist, we’ll manufacture one. That’s how the “new” Chiwenga is being built; a clay figure made out of wishes.
Suddenly, he has changed. He’s not the same Chiwenga we know, the one who fired 16,000 nurses in 2018 for daring to ask for better pay and medicine, claiming the “labour issue had assumed political overtones.” Nor the one who sacked 500 doctors later that year, until Mnangagwa, playing the “good cop,” reversed it. Nor the one who threatened businesses in 2019, telling them: “No, it will work, you will not work. Simple.” No, that Chiwenga is gone. The new one has good PR, we hear, just when we needed an alternative the most.
Now, everything he does is supposed to carry some grand political meaning. If he talks about value addition at a business meeting, it’s proof of rare economic genius. When he’s sent to Dodoma for Samia Suluhu’s sham inauguration, his cheerleaders insist it’s not just official duty. It’s a trap, they told us. Schemer Mnangagwa, they say, wanted to smear Chiwenga’s obviously spotless reputation as a democrat who would never, ever crush the opposition. The same man who, just three years ago at a rally in Kwekwe, said of the opposition: “You see when you crush lice with a rock, you put it on a flat stone and then you grind it to the extent that even flies will not eat it.”
Even his most mundane acts now bring out feverish analysis. When he says the violence in Tanzania is “quite disturbing,” we’re told he’s actually condemning Suluhu – while attending her inauguration. What an icon. The media are jumping in on the act. One excited news website headline even declared: “Chiwenga rips into Tanzania’s post-election violence – describes it as disturbing, days after Mnangagwa salutes ‘visionary’ Samia Hassan.” When he wears his ‘Number 1’ uniform at a military parade, as his predecessors have done over the years, he’s sending some coded power message.
There is a leadership vacuum. ZANU-PF is rotten to the core, and the opposition is toast. In this dark void – cue Fadzayi Mahere’s daily scream for “new leaders” – some among us are like kids moulding imaginary action figures out of clay. We’ve been here before. We make them what we wish them to be, not what they are, then act shocked when the first rain washes them away.
There is the Chiwenga you wish existed, and the one who actually does. Trying to carve out a Chiwenga you wish to see, out of the one who actually exists? It will not work. Simple.
