They are not joking when they tell you that Zimbabwe is a country full of educated people.
That’s mostly because, if they are not voting, Zimbabweans are always going to school.
Formal and non-formal school, where the difference is wafer thin.
It hasn’t taken too long for Nelson Chamisa to be dragged back to school after the 2023 elections.
It doesn’t matter if the education is in good or bad taste, he had to go school, without exactly budgeting for it.
And his head teacher is none other than Sengezo Tshabangu, a smart tortoise perching on a CCC pole and looking like he invented—refined, rather—post climbing.
What Tshabangu did, as you all know by now, is that he woke up one hot morning at his sangoma’s place and followed his dream that he was an interim secretary general at CCC.
Armed with that vision, he wrote a funny letter to the speaker of Parliament claiming that, with the powers vested in him by CCC, he was recalling 15 MPs and 17 councillors.
- Young vocalist making southern Africa dance
- News in depth: Fears of violent 2023 polls grow as ED fails to deliver on promises
- Chamisa party defiant after ban
- Letter to my people: Mthuli Ncube experiment has failed
Keep Reading
The speaker wasted no time in playing postman for Tshabangu, so the 15 got the boot.
That left the CCC poorer by 15 MPs and 17 councillors.
By the way, President Emmerson Mnangagwa went on steroids too, announcing a December 9 date for the by-elections as if that was going to remove the sanctions and get our railroads working once again.
Come to think about it, it seems like lots of people think Chamisa, the CCC leader, is just too dumb.
They assume he needs to be schooled all the time, needing to be writing corrections all the time.
You will remember that Douglas Mwonzora took him to school the other time, some two years ago, on exactly the same subject matter.
Dougie recalled many of Chamisa’s MPs, claiming that there were his, just as Tshabangu is doing this time around.
People love educating poor Chamisa by claiming ownership of what he actually owns.
Whether Chamisa is too dumb or just the type that hits teachers with catapult stones, it doesn’t matter.
There are certain things he must know about the Tshabangu drama.
Number one, that so-called strategic ambiguity doesn’t work in Zimbabwe.
The CCC insisted that it was going to operate undercover in order to avoid infiltration by Zanu PF.
That was one of the reasons why it rejected the repeated advice to form constitutionally-backed structures.
But it turned out that CCC was leaking like a sieve because it had as many infiltrators as it had genuine sympathisers.
Once you have two people in a room, you can’t be able to proof yourself from infiltration.
It gets worse when you have a million-plus loose heap of followers.
People are hungry out there. They will take anything just so as leap over to the next day.
Lesson number two.
Because you will always be infiltrated, what you can then do is to just lessen the chances of that happening by adopting smart mechanism.
In fact, if you get infiltrated, you also need to infiltrate rather than be a cry baby.
You see, the one thing that the Zimbabwean opposition, especially from the time of MDC, has never been able to do is to invest in good intelligence and security.
But if you have a strong intelligence unit, not only will you be able to detect threats; you will also be able to devise means of snooping into enemy territory.
Lesson three, have a constitution and structures, especially when you are an entity on who millions of people look up to you for salvation and a life.
The main reason why Tshabangu has succeeded in his shenanigans is that he knew nobody would be able to challenge his clearly false claim that he is the CCC interim secretary general.
Why not? Because the CCC has no recognised structures or systems that would make such a disputation sensible.
So, you see what Tshabangu did. He knew that CCC has no structures and took advantage of that to claim a structure for himself.
Lesson number four.
You don’t ditch long-time allies merely because you are not comfortable with them being around, as a way to preserve yourself.
It wasn’t good, for any reason, for Chamisa to shed off the likes of Tendai Biti, Welsh Ncube, et cetera.
Those guys are not going to like it. They will be bitter with you to the grave.
So, when you see a tortoise carrying airs around itself on a CCC pole, make sure that there is someone lurking in the bushes who is liking the little show.
I’m not saying too much on this one. If you know, you know.
Thing is, you don’t too many enemies, especially when you fought from the same trenches at so many battles.
Last lesson, don’t depend too much on your personal glory or imagination of high popularity.
The one problem with Chamisa he got so drunk on his assumed divinity and felt he could go it alone, more or less.
That makes some people angry with you. So, in order to fix you, they raid your kraal, take some of your cows and send them to the market.
It becomes easier when you can’t prove that the cows are actually yours, even though every villager knows that you started with one heifer inherited from your late father and grew the kraal.
*Tawanda Majoni writes in his personal capacity and can be contacted on [email protected]
