I was in Bulawayo last week — what a whale of a time!

 It was great to be in a clean city. There was no litter on the streets and I hardly saw any street people. I didn’t see anyone telling me where to park my car and I was assured that my car was safe.

In the evening I was taken out for an outing by my colleagues. The joint was clean and the waitresses beautiful and well-groomed. Later in the evening when the bill came and I asked my hosts how much I could contribute to it, they said ah-ah, they wouldn’t have any rand from me. (Unlike in Harare, in Bulawayo the currency of choice is the rand and they have got change too, because they have no problems with coins.)

My hosts were really my subordinates and I had brought some T&S with me but they were feisty, they told me to my face: “When we’re in Bulawayo we look after you; that is devolution!”

We laughed and became slightly more serious because that word “devolution” is on everyone’s lips in that part of the country. That evening for me devolution  meant good old hospitality and lots of free beer.

But the following morning I set out to find out what the people in that part of the country meant by devolution. I found it meant different things to different people.

The lesson I learnt from my research was that ours is a scarred nation and the scars are festering again and will soon be gangrenous and poison our body politic.

On my way back passing by Imbizo Barracks I recalled King Lobengula’s last recorded words when his army had been defeated by the settlers’ superior fire power. “To think that the Imbizo Regiment has been destroyed by mere Babes!”

The Imbizo Regiment is said to have been Lobengula’s elite force made up of his best fighters. I thought if international justice was an issue then or even immediately after the Anglo-Matabele War, the British South Africa Company should have been charged with genocide. How could they have used the maxim gun to literally mow down people only armed with an assegai?

To me the Anglo-Matabele War took a new significance — this whole thing about impunity. It was the beginning of a long story of mass killing in that part of our country in which the perpetrators got away without punishment; it was also the beginning of the concentration of power in the legislative capital Harare. We know there was a time at the inception of colonialism when Bulawayo was considered to become the capital of Rhodesia.

When in the early 1980s history repeated itself by another mass killing of genocidal proportions also masterminded from Harare, the people of this region really felt victims of the centre of power. Devolution to them means a kind of liberation from the tentacles of Hararian hegemony with all its genocidal connotations.

But can devolution be a national issue? I am interested in the history of Manicaland. I would say by the early 1970s the province was arguably the most developed in the country. There was modern infrastructure in place; almost every school and township had a telephone line. There were highly developed mission schools. Ndabaningi Sithole had already written a book; Herbert Chitepo was already a world-renowned lawyer.

When Zanu and Zanla relocated to Mozambique after the Chitepo assassination Manicaland became the battlefield for the chimurenga war. All the infrastructure was pulled down; the telephone lines that used to grace the skies were pulled down by the guerrillas and the mujibhas whose strategy was first to cripple the Rhodesian government by hitting hard at its infrastructure.

A tour of this province now will make one almost cry! It is therefore not surprising that most of the leaders of the opposition have come from this province. Name them: Sithole, Edgar Tekere, Abel Muzorewa and now Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara!
What would devolution mean to the people of Manicaland now that it has been discovered they sit on an estimated 25% of all the diamonds in the world; and also that they are nearest to the Indian Ocean through which most of our imports should come into the country?

What does devolution mean also for the people of Mashonaland West where Robert Mugabe hails from? The province has dominated power for 30 years and it seems all post-independent Zimbabwe’s development has happened there.

What does devolution mean to the people of Masvingo, another province also heavily scarred by the liberation war of the 1970s?

The call for devolution is evidence of a failure at nation building by the people who have been in power for the past 30 years. If they had been responsive to the needs of all the other provinces, instead of making national governance a Zezuru project, under which any other voice that spoke of the national consciousness was crushed by force of arms, there would be no call for devolution.

The Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project (MZWP) is emblematic of this wanton disregard of the needs of other provinces. Despite the issue of MZWP cropping up whenever there is an election looming, Harare wouldn’t give a damn about what the residence of the Matabeleland provinces use to flush their toilets!
The newly discovered diamonds of Manicaland, I can bet, will not be used to restore the infrastructure destroyed during the war of liberation; it will most likely be used to maintain the Robert Mugabe Highway! Already we have heard that money from tollgates has been channelled to the Mashonaland provinces in a skewed manner.

The failure at nation-building that we have witnessed in the past three decades is coming back to haunt us!

BY NEVANJI MADANHIRE

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