The oracle: Don’t just swallow mango seed, Cde Tyson

Obituaries
Local Government minister, the excitable Saviour Kasukuwere’s latest shenanigans at the Harare City Council and his utterances in Guruve where he poked war veterans in the eye exposes his apparent belief that power means kicking people in the mouth, needless rubble rousing, arrogance and impunity.

Local Government minister, the excitable Saviour Kasukuwere’s latest shenanigans at the Harare City Council and his utterances in Guruve where he poked war veterans in the eye exposes his apparent belief that power means kicking people in the teeth, needless rabble rousing, arrogance and impunity.

BY TANGAI CHIPANGURA

SAVIOUR-KASUKUWEREE....

Kasukuwere appears to admire the notoriety that his predecessor, Ignatius Chombo earned himself during his unremarkable long stint at local government and is determined to walk in his hero’s footsteps.

During his infamous rule at local government, Chombo was notorious for seeking to run day-to-day operations of local authorities, shamelessly usurping the powers of chief executive officers and mayors of cities and towns. He is also accused of grabbing land wherever he wanted around the country.

This is the route that Kasukuwere appears bent on taking when he should be concerning himself with policy-making issues at the ministry. Like Chombo before him, Kasukuwere has begun to display sickening arrogance and outright tyranny — going about bullying and frustrating MDC-T-run councils through naked abuse of the law.

And, unlike Chombo who had at his disposal working instruments of harassment and abuse in the statutes, Kasukuwere does not have the law on his side because of the new Constitution. But then Tyson, a law student, appears ignorant and not well-versed with the law as he bulldozes his way into Town House using an archaic law.

His focus is on flexing muscle, it doesn’t matter in which direction — a bull in a china shop. He reportedly told mayor Benard Manyenyeni when he met him at the National Sports Stadium on Independence Day last Monday that: “If Mushore continues to report for work, I will fire you!”

Zanu PF wants Josephine Ncube for the powerful post of Harare Town Clerk and that is the only thing that the party’s political commissar is blindly pushing for. Whether or not it is legal, does not seem to matter to Kasukuwere.

So it will have to take the courts to open his eyes, but the embarrassment and exposure of Zanu PF as an arrogant and lawless bully would have been done.

Kasukuwere’s bullish personality appears to know no bounds. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s proverb, “If you want to swallow a mango seed, you first of all calculate the diameter of your backside,” must have been coined for such characters.

For reasons known to him, Kasukuwere is deliberately reckless with his mouth, provocatively spewing verbal diahorrea at all and sundry while declaring invincibility. He was in Guruve on Thursday when he turned on freedom fighters, calling them “…mad — real idiots, complete idiots”.

He was reacting to sentiments by the war veterans that an ex-combatant would be the ideal person to lead the Zanu PF commissariat. They were expressing these views to their patron, President Robert Mugabe, suggesting that the incumbent, Kasukuwere, who has no liberation war history, was not, in their view, the best person for the post.

“I will not resign. I’m not going anywhere. I will die in this position as political commissar of Zanu PF. Who are you to tell me to go? …. There is no room for madness. If you are indisciplined, tough luck. Some are going to cry foul after the disciplinary committee deals with them,” Kasukuwere ranted.

The excited youthful minister went on to rubbish arguments presented by the war veterans to do with ideology of the party.

“Don’t invent ideology in your own way to suit your own circumstances. Don’t tell us about ideologies as if you defined them. Ideology is ideology… We will not be moved,” he fumed.

It appears Kasukuwere is out to build a “hard nut” reputation for himself. It began to show during his time at the indigenisation ministry where he rode rough shod on companies. He carried with him this ridiculous madness to his present portfolio where he bludgeoned hapless vendors off the streets in his futile attempt to rid the capital of unemployed masses trying to eke out a living in an economically rundown country.

He, however, soon gave up and today, street vendors, including “traditional healers” have flocked back to the streets.

This arrogance and unrestrained partisan behaviour by Kasukuwere reminds me of that trip he made to Bulawayo, accompanying then local government minister, Chombo on a mission to punish Bulawayo council for refusing to endorse his appointment of the party’s choice for a special interest councillor.

That day, Chombo literally declared war on the city of Bulawayo because the city had chosen not to appoint a certain individual handpicked by him.

City fathers are obviously much better-placed to know individuals that are able to serve their cities than ministers could ever be and it boggles the mind why Chombo got so irked that this particular individual was not acceptable to the people of Bulawayo – just as Kasukuwere is furious about the refusal of Harare to appoint an individual of his or his party’s choice to the post of town clerk.

So, in his anger that day in Bulawayo, Chombo told thousands of people at a rally that he was going to fix the city council by forcing them to reduce rates and tariffs. The effects of such action would be to cripple the city, making it unable to deliver service to the people and therefore ungovernable.

Kasukuwere, who was then Youth, Indigenisation and Empowerment minister, went on to insult the people of Bulawayo by telling them to refuse to drink water from boreholes and demand to have water drawn into the city from dams and the Zambezi River!

Chombo proceeded to literally incite people to revolt against their own city. He called on the people to demand the immediate restoration of street lights, smooth pot-hole free roads, abundant modern market stalls and so on.

This infrastructure collapsed under the watch of a government, led by Chombo and his colleagues in Zanu PF who superintended over an economic free-fall in the years after 2000. Since then, there is not a single city in Zimbabwe that has working street lights, smooth roads or good service delivery system.

It is this thoughtless “hard nut” mentality that lulls many a politician into believing they are infallible beings who can do whatever they want with whoever they choose. They end up swallowing mango seed regardless!

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