Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-One day history will be saddled with a bulging sack of a fact that it can’t discard but one it can’t also co-opt as a ground-breaking incident in the fight for economic emancipation or Pan-Africanism.
It will simply be there as a testament of fact and nothing else. A real nothing, a bride in menopause, pregnant with history and unfertile for the future.
The Million Man March and its large numbers of bused in ZANU PF supporters will stay with us as a reminder that once this country was on the path to the abyss as man sought to stage-act political dramas at the expense of grinding out results for economic salvation.
For all that the Youth League has tried the MMM can never be propped up into a vibrant political action that warrants historical recognition as permeating every pore of its body is a manufactured realism that refuses acceptance.
Whereas the MDC demonstration was suffused with the pain and anger of a people fighting for their lives in a country bedeviled by myriad problems, the MMM comes across as a larger than life dinosaur whose presence is a large question and believability is non existant.
What’s the purpose? So what?
The proffered explanation by Simon Khaya Moyo is as vapid as the many vague explanations already given before.
“This is a special march led by our dynamic and resilient Youth League and we need to give them maximum support because it is rare to undertake such as exercise in recognition of the role of our icon President Mugabe has played throught the liberation struggle and the post-independence era”, he said.
The chosen larger than life method to honor President Mugabe ultimately serves to curtail the realism of the action as a mere act of recognizing his actions.
What it does is reveal a deeper fear of reality by the whole party in the aftermath of the MDC-T demonstration and the economic malaise that has left the government clueless.
Faced with a non-productive industry, high un-employment rates and a worsening reality the government has sought for high sounding philosophies about African ethos and grandstanding about Mugabe’s exploits, as hide outs from the grim realities of everyday Zimbabwe.
President Mugabe’s history, the true and the manufactured, have come to be the solitary debris of a revolutionary wreckage quickly gathered into an emergency fire for heat whenever a maelstrom of trouble threatens to sweep ZANU away.
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So far that has always worked as the image of Mugabe, at 92 and lilting out small tales as the national granny has begun evoking in many much plight and sympathy ultimately shared for all the party into false victories at the polls.
The attendance numbers at the march are meant as a salve against the attritious sand that is the economic numbers stating that the country is on the deathbed and they won’t mean a thing tomorrow.
The million man may have come but the bond notes are also coming and jobs are still not there, companies are still shut and shutting.
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