Unlike a leopard, this Zimbabwean crocodile’s unable to change his spots and is no angel, with a chequered past, writes

Don Makatile

IT WOULD appear that, for the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe, anyone but Robert Mugabe would do. Their Hobson’s Choice leaves them saddled with The Crocodile, a lesser evil than the one who had been visited on them for 37 long years.

Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, affectionately (this being an aphorism) known as ED, is no angel.

But caught between a rock and a hard place in the form of a nonagenarian who had plans to die in office and his 75-year-old former protégé, the people across the Limpopo would go head-in-the-sand with Mnangagwa.

But this crocodile is no leopard, which can change its spots. Mnangagwa has a chequered past.

Those who are left behind in Matabeleland have memories of June 26, 1983 when a mob of thugs wearing army fatigues were unleashed on them.

Atrocities soon followed after the Fifth Brigade was deployed in the area, ostensibly to punish Joshua Nkomo.

After they had left mayhem and gore in their wake, they were briefly withdrawn on July 22 – for retraining.

They returned on August 29 for more of the sickening same and again in late 1984.

When their guns were silenced, Gukurahundi was a scary word in the vocabulary of the Shona.

The brains behind Gukurahundi was Mnangagwa, the man who on Friday took over as interim president of Zimbabwe from the disgraced Robert Gabriel Mugabe, his former mentor.

The 20 000 ghosts of Matabeleland interred in the wake of Gukurahundi were nowhere to be seen on Friday as Mnangagwa, who has their blood on his hands, took the oath of office.

But chances are among those who shouted the loudest for the so-called New Dawn and the man it is centred on had relatives who fell in the 1980s when the new president was the Butcher of Matabeleland.

Years later, those who did not die on his orders hid from Mnangagwa, like Blessing Chebundo, a Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) candidate in Kwekwe

Central.

He remained in hiding throughout the campaign, but managed to inflict a humiliating defeat on Mnangagwa, says Martin Meredith, whose writing career on Zimbabwe spans decades.

Meredith says Chebundo survived several murder attempts for standing against Mnangagwa.

But when death struck at the core of the ruling Zanu-pf, The Crocodile’s soft underbelly showed. He mourned these deaths, a lot of them natural.

He wept for Moven Mahachi, who died in a car crash. Soon thereafter Chenjerai Hunzvi, aka Hitler, died from a mysterious ailment.

Like Mnangagwa, both of the deceased were Mugabe loyalists.

After one Zanu-pf apparatchik had ventured that “the party is haunted”, Mnangagwa was quoted reflecting thus: “We don’t know what is hitting us. Something unnatural must be behind this.”

But it was the self-same Mnangagwa, as state security minister, who would see to another blood-letting of those outside Zanupf, Operation Murambatsvina in the early 2000s.

Murambatsvina means, literally, getting rid of the filth.

On Thursday The Star quoted Mnangagwa imploring his countrymen: “No one is more important than the other; we are all Zimbabweans.”

But the truth is that he once saw others as filth, vermin to be exterminated.

Speaking from behind a veil of bodyguards, he promised them “jobs, jobs, jobs” on Wednesday upon his return to the country.

But as the man responsible for Zanu-pf’s business empire in its heydays, it was his job to ensure that the proceeds flowed only to the party elite. In 1992 it was revealed Zanu-pf’s fixed assets stood at Z$500 million or $75 million at the time.

It was Mnangagwa who held the key to how much could be revealed. He always chose not to say much, as in the case of the Chimbakwe Commission report.

Mugabe said it should be made public; Mnangagwa said no and he prevailed.

The commission, named after attorney Simplicius Julius Rugede Chimbakwe, who led it, “was a truth commission set up by the government to investigate the Matabeleland disturbances from 1983 to 1984 now referred to as Gukurahundi”.

Mnangagwa held the purse strings when Zimbabwe got involved, for gain, in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Again, it was his job to ensure the benefits accrued only to the members of the ruling elite.

The only voice that should matter in rebuilding Zimbabwe should be those of its citizens, who have thrown in their lot with Mnangagwa.

But this is the same man who had no respect for the judiciary and treated a free media with contempt.

As the speaker of parliament, he was once quoted saying:

“We should guard against the judiciary developing into an omnipotent entity devoid of any accountability.”

In his 2006 book Against

The Grain, veteran Zimbabwe newsman Geoffrey Nyarota, the founding editor of the Daily News, wrote of Mnangagwa suing the paper no less than three times.

The Star article quoted Mnangagwa taking pot shots at Mugabe in Karanga, their mother tongue. But this is the same Mugabe loyalist who was once expected to take one of the four empty graves next to Sally Mugabe at the Heroes Acre upon his demise.

Fast forward to November 2017 and Zimbabweans have already warned the SADC to stay out of their business. They plan to craft the new Zimbabwe on their own terms.

Key among these terms, it seems, is to erase the unpalatable history of ED, and begin to see him anew. God bless Zimbabwe.