My champagne is still unopened

Friday’s announcement from Morgan Tsvangirai came as no surprise. For me it was a moment of resignation – I am resigned to the fact that following nine years of hard work, hours spent recording one catastrophe after another and the energy that has gone into saving the endless victims of the vile regime, we now have to accept the great compromise.

I have a bottle of French champagne long-stored in my fridge that remains unopened – we are not celebrating, far from it, we sit and try to figure out how the geriatric dictator is going to fool us again. I pray that he has no more tricks up his evil sleeve.

I look back at almost a decade of dedication to what has often felt like a trip to hell with no end in sight. The journey has been epic; continuous stolen elections, devastating events like Murambatsvina and shops collapsing under the draconian effect of price slashing, the beatings, the torture, the violence, the collapse of infrastructure, the desperate struggle to help victims hide and escape, the secret conversations with journalists and fellow activists, the hunger and the disease.

I often ask myself why bother, who cares? But the answer is easy, I have no choice, for if I and my colleagues did not bother then the pain of a generation of Zimbabweans would disappear into oblivion. It is essential to record every bit of evidence, then one day perhaps we will see justice.

But justice is not what we need right now. We need to stop the decay and the humanitarian catastrophe and if the MDC had not accepted the lukewarm agreement where would we be now? For sure Bob would have formed a government (remember he always carries out his threats), Tsvangirai would have had to flee back to Botswana and imagine how much worse it would be here in Zimbabwe. It was the right thing to do, and remember the GPA outlined that the AIG would only function for 18 months, until a new free and fair election can be held.

For all these years we, (and that includes every person at home and in the diaspora who takes time out of their busy lives to lobby and keep informed) have been part of the zpf regime’s problem. We now need to become part of the solution to turning around a decade of destruction.

Thank you, all of you, who have helped to keep the fire of activism burning and do not give up, this is a process, not an event.

This entry was posted by Still Here on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 2:50 pm. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.