… and then there are the lows

It’s hard to believe that the night before last the news was buzzing insanely with stories that Mugabe was on the brink of stepping down and going.

Tonight the news has swung like a pendulum with talk of a Mugabe crackdown against the opposition beginning. We saw him on TV seeing off the AU observers and almost immediately afterwards (like two fingers thrown up to the world) the news switched to the MDC MT officies being raided and riot police at the Meikles Hotel: apparently Tendai Biti, the MDC MT Secretary General was staying there.

When news reports say things like the ‘beginning of a crackdown’ the words many Zimbabweans hear instead is ‘this is the beginning of the end’. The impact on a very tired activist friend of mine, worn out after long nights of working and years of being heartsore for the Zimbabwean people, was a big knock sideways. She sent me a blog to post up for her and her words speak volumes:

There are times when you have simply run out of energy, the fuel tank is drained and you are stuck on the road to nowhere. For tonight, Robert Mugabe has won the battle. He is a thief – he has stolen our hope, our trust in what is good in life, our dreams and our aspirations. He has taken our children and wrenched out of them their innocence and laughter. He has taken our old people and deleted any happy memories. Their time is spent asking why, where and how will they survive.

That’s what life is here today, it is merely cut down to survival. Our emotions are drained, we are numb and lifeless. How could we not have expected this?

I receive the phone calls – people looking to me like I am the way to seeing the light and I smile and I lie: I say to them “We have won parliament. It is the beginning of freedom. Celebrate our victory over evil.”

How are people going to survive? How we will the food come back into the shelves, into the ground? How are businesses going to survive with an economy in freefall? How are schools going to open when the teachers are fleeing? How are the sick going to heal?

How can we make Zimbabwe whole again?

I know why she is so shattered tonight. It starts with exhaustion, a deep bone-numbing exhaustion. That kind of tiredness genuinely takes a physical toll; quite a few people in our community have come down with bad colds.

The down-swing continues with us ordinary people – who want nothing more than a quiet, decent life – being buffeted left and right and up and down by the powerful forces of media reporting. Those carefully pronounced foreign newscastor voices that I can hear booming from my TV into the room next door where I am working: “…MUGABE HAS BEGAN HIS CRACKDOWN…”. Their voices, filled as they seem to be with drama and impending doom and disaster, can sweep a tired person right off their feet and knock them to the floor.

We drop down further still when our children want to go ‘jolling’ with their friends, but in these uncertain times we aren’t sure if that’s wise….? What if the riots start? What if the police do crackdown and they’re caught in the middle? How will we get to them quickly enough? So we say ‘no, wait a little’ and their frustration grows too and adds more tension to the day.

A good rest is a big help, and I know my friend will feel a lot better in the morning and bounce back fighting as she always does. I’m sure that it will be my turn soon to drop like a stone and for her to say to me, ’stay strong and be positive’.

My own mood lifted after a phone call from a friend overseas who’d been watching the TV that night in the UK. Apparently a bunch of politicians were interviewed on the TV and she said the general consensus was that Mugabe was too arrogant and proud to go through a run-off against Tsvangirai because it was tantemount to acknowledging that the people hadn’t really wanted him the first time around. That would be hard for him. Despite the news, they all seemed to think it was the end for him.

I am now a bit wiser to the fluctuations and doing my very best to resist them and keep a sane focused head through this. I am appreciating that that small chat with my friend was merely swapping one outsider’s perspective with another’s.

I think right now that we need to stay focussed on home and ourselves and our core objective. And that objective is held in the kernal of a simple truth that we have the right to choose our own leaders; we have the right to a bright and positive future; and we have the right to insist on our rights. We are not criminals and we are not bad people. We do not deserve the life Mugabe and his regime impose on us.

I am not a pundit so do not claim to have the answers. But I do know that we are going to need our energy and our strength of character and determination more now than ever before in the next few days. I’ve been mulling over Mugabe’s options with regards a looming ‘run-off’ election. I’d be interested to know what other people think.

What are Mugabe’s options realistically?

1. Go through the run-off against Tsvangirai and unleash violence on the people and rig the result to the last paper in the box. I am hoping he is too arrogant to do this (as my UK friend seems convinced of now), but what if he does do this? We just need to prepare and stay calm and keep our eye on the ball. What’s different now is he has to go through a run-off in the face of a nation that already knows he is a loser and in a weak position. He also has to do it with the world staring at him like he’s an insect under a microscope.

2. Avoid the run-off and retire. I hope so, but this will involve losing face so it’s a hard one for me to imagine him doing as much as I would like too.

3. Try to bluff it out and declare himself the outright winner and refuse a run-off. This is very Mugabe-esque to me, but he has to deal with the uncertainty of how the world and the people will react. It isn’t that I think he cares about what anyone thinks – he doesn’t – its more that I’m not sure how he can ever begin to hope to solve the crisis facing him with hyper-inflation etc, if the world thinks he has stolen the election. He needs legitimacy to get the help and investment he needs. At the end of the day, its the economy that’s his biggest enemy, not the opposition. Poverty speaks directly to our lives; not even Mugabe has come with an AIPPA-like law that can silence those truths.

4. The final option is the talk, the fear that everyone has been expressing tonight with the latest news – of him avoiding a run-off by imposing military rule. Maybe, but this must be kept in perspective.

At this precise moment in time Zimbabwe is incredibly calm. The air is thick with expectation, but the people are quietly, peacefully, patiently waiting. The one thing Mugabe’s government has taught us how to do very well is ‘wait’. We queue for everything. So we can wait.

To me, to suddenly declare a military takeover in this climate of calmness would be impossible for him to justify to the region or to the world, or even to the Zimbabwean people. There is no instability. We are not trashing shops, looting property, or hurling stones at the police. We had elections and he lost; its called democracy (although our version is a bastardised version of democracy) and it happens in lots of countries around the world. It isn’t an argument for military control.

So maybe he needs to poke us a bit and make us frightened and force a reaction to create the necessary conditions. Maybe that’s what the raids on a hotel are about? Especially a hotel where journalists were staying? And why not arrest a couple of journalists too to make damn sure the media don’t miss the actions. He can certainly rely on them to ramp up the drama and drum home the fear.

Could Zanu PF really be even more scheming than that? Deliberately trickle out the results over a long period of time. Promise that they will be announced then shortly after say they won’t be for logistical reasons. Then not long after that swing around and start announcing anyway but very late at night some four days after the elections.

I am personally finding the ZEC intensely irritating and insulting at this stage, and the late nights and early mornings and sleep deprivation were beginning to wear me down and make me lose my rag. But nope, on reflection, carry on ZEC; I can withstand that rubbish. I’m calm now and the tactics ain’t gonna work! I’m a Zimbabwean: I can wait. Besides, if I’m up late so must you be. I hope it wears you down too!

Don’t be conned Zimbabwe. Stand firm. Don’t give Mugabe the excuse that he is looking for and that is to provoke a violent confrontation which he can then use to legitimise using force to steal your rights.

Mugabe is like a pimp or a gun-toting drug dealer; someone who puts a lot of stock in ‘control’ and ‘face’. He needs to swagger and look fierce and tough and strong. He thinks boasting about “degrees in violence” or “coming down hard on the opposition” is smart and strong. But really, he’s just a brat. The people who admire that in him are mindless fools who can’t distinguish between ‘bullying’ and ’strength’.

He really is nothing more than an old man who has come to the end of his years on this earth by fighting his own people. And that’s fairly pathetic, if you ask me. I can only hope that what we’re experiencing tonight is more of the same Mugabe swigger-swagger-strut-stuff.

I am determined to not let Mugabe scare me. I plan to try to consciously hold my nerve in the face of his horrible bullying of our nation – and God knows it probably will be a rough ride and cruel. (What do we expect? This is Mugabe we’re talking about!) But I / we all have important work to do and we can’t afford the distractions that fear brings to the table. Freedom is so close I can almost taste it.

This entry was posted by Hope on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 3:39 am. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.