By Dr MASIMBA MAVAZA
On the 13th October 2021 a man from Harare known as Nelson Chamisa who is believed to be a political party leader attempted to enter some villages to give a political speech. His speech did not go as planned. Thousands of people from Masvingo province blocked the road to Charumbira in Masvingo province. Chamisa has no known party but we will refer his gang as MDC Alliance.
MDC Alliance spokesperson Fadzayi Mahere blamed the attack on ZANU PF even though it was clear that people rose on their own not on party grounds.
Mahere said in a statement: “Over 200 youths mobilised by Zanu PF have violently attacked president Chamisa’s convoy and advance team on their way to meet community leaders in Charumbira. The contradiction here is too loud. How can Chamisa be in an advance party.
Despite the allegations the MDC did not make a report to the Police instead they reported to social media and their handlers in the West. The question a patriotic Zimbabwean should ask is. Is this a coincident? The United Nations is visiting Zimbabwe in few days and Chamisa cries victim. MDC from nowhere goes out with videos ready to provoke the peaceful Charumbira and Masvingo people. Videos and pictures shared by the MDC Alliance showed at least one vehicle, a Toyota Fortuner used by Chamisa’s security aides, with windows smashed and parts of the body damaged. Dozens of people carrying placards denouncing “sanctions” could be seen blocking a rural dirt road. But no video of the actual stoning of the car neither was there a video showing where the car was at the time of smashing.
A message sent by Mahere to her handlers and shared on social media said
“This political violence that’s being meted out at president Chamisa’s delegation is cause for extreme concern and a clear act of desperation by a bankrupt, illegitimate regime that has failed,”
This message is well calculated to invoke sentiments that Zimbabwe is preparing a violent election. It is a well planned idea of tarnishing the image of the country and the party. This shows that Chamisa is so selfish that he does not care as to what will happen to the people of Zimbabwe as long as he gets his attention.
Chamisa is so predictable he reports to his handlers in a bid to portray ZANU PF as a party in fear. He said “They are terrified of the unstoppable groundswell of citizen support for president Chamisa and the broad alliance forming in every village and every town to win Zimbabwe for change.” This is the narrative he wants the world to believe as he goes around provoking the people of Zimbabwe.
The MDC Alliance says Chamisa is engaging citizens, students and civic leaders to build a broad alliance for the 2023 elections. The MDC Alliance leader is traversing all the country’s 10 provinces for the consultative meetings.
In a very bizarre allegation the mentally unstable MDC Youth secretary Ostallos Siziba claimed the attack on Chamisa’s aides was an “assassination attempt” to stop him from a “resounding 2023 election victory.” What a joke Chamisa and his goons are.
All this noise about violence has only started ahead of the visit by the UN inspector and ahead of His Excellency the President’s visit to the UK. The MDC has not stopped its childish and diabolical satanic purpose of plunging Zimbabweans into a perpetual poverty through sanctions.
The rural people are very clear that Nelson Chamisa is our only source of bringing in total poverty in this country.
When the patriotic people of Masvingo saw the devil coming smelling of sulphur they blocked their roads. Village administrators determined that the situation was too volatile to allow the speech to go on as scheduled, and fell back on a contingency plan to stop the poison from being spread in their area. Protesters also occupied the growth points and refused to be contaminated by the over polluted MDC Chamisa.
The opposition led by Chamisa published a statement the next day expressing its disappointment with the reactions of the protesters and promising to hold accountable those who preventedChamisa from being heard once they get into power. They are already issuing threats before they are even voted into power.
The acting National Political Commissair described the protest as “warranted” because in his views, and in the the position of the law, Chinamasa boldly proclaimed that “there is no right to hear someone speak.”
FIRE takes no position on whether the protest was “warranted.” Villagers have a right to nonviolently protest a speaker, so long as the speaker is still allowed to be heard. The answer to bad speech is more speech, and a peaceful protest is the quintessential example of more. MDC is dead wrong about the lack of a right to listen.
The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin.” Comrade Chinamasa was defending the right of Masvingo villagers not to hear the speech of Nelson Chamisa who was scheduled to appear at several places in Masvingo in his boost for more sanctions against Zimbabwe.Those views are not widely popular in the Rural Zimbabwe. While It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral, and other ideas and experiences which is crucial here they have the right to refuse to hear it as-well.
To force free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right not to hear as it would be to rob him of his money.”
Cde Chinamasa was right the freedom to speak requires the freedom to hear.What free speech rights did the villagers prevent? Did they jump up in his speech? Did they grab him and pull him aside?”
Speech is different from talking. It necessarily involves the communication of thoughts from a speaker to an audience.
The villagers of Masvingo knew that they would be robbed of the information necessary to making political and economic decisions, and of knowing what others in society, outside their immediate circle, were doing if they were to allow Chamisa to vomit his poison in their hears. They could not allow to have their soup poisoned.
For all its fundamental importance, however, free speech is not treated by our society as an absolute value there is is a freedom to hear. Any one who tries to force his speech on the good people of Zimbabwe will face serious resistance and Chamisa saw it first hand. It is constrained on occasion when it collides with other values. These include the value of justice and the value that says we should not cause unjustifiable harm on people’s conscience. Consequently we have laws concerning national security, defamation and contempt of court – to name the most obvious – all of which constrain free speech. The villagers in Masvingo took their rights up and stopped any corruption of the mind by the indisciplined Chamisa.
The allegations raised by Chamisa that the assertion made by the villagers that they do not want to be polluted amounts to political violence is idiotic and immature. Political violence is violence which is perpetrated in order to achieve political goals. It can also describe politically-motivated violence which is used by non-state actors against a state (rebellion, rioting, treason or coup d’etat) or it can describe violence which is used against other non-state actors. Non-action on the part of a government can also be characterized as a form of political violence. Chamisa did not make a report to the police the reason is very clear. He wants to accuse the police of not helping him when in actual fact Chamisa was the perpetrator of the misunderstandings and his fat bullies trained by their new recruit Jimmy Kunaka were the ones who actually caused injuries to innocent unarmed villagers.
Due to the imbalances of power which exist between armed MDC vanguard and the villagers political violence took the form of asymmetric warfare. It can often include attacks on civilian or otherwise non-combatant targets. Villagers were targeted collectively based on perception of being ZANU PF yet they were only voicing their disapproval of a man who has caused the suffering of the Zimbabwean people.
The MDC believed that their political systems will never respond to their demands and they thus believe that violence is not only justified but also necessary in order to achieve their political objectives. They believe that they need to use violence in order to intimidate their populaces into acquiescence.
Chamisa found it first hand that
Your voice matters. You have the right to say what you think, share information and demand a better world. You also have the right to agree or disagree with those who want to address you, and to express these opinions in peaceful protests as was done by the Masvingo villagers.
Exercising these rights – without fear or unlawful interference – is central to living in an open and fair society; one in which people can access justice and enjoy their human rights. But Chamisa unleashes his bullies who fired guns in the air and into the crowd.
Governments have a duty to prohibit hateful, inciteful speech but in this case it was the villagers who used their authority to silence deceitful MDC.
It is sad that it is only when there are events coming up that the opposition go all out to provoke the people and the Police so that they get a reaction. The behaviour of Chamisa this past week was horrible and should not be tolerated. For how long shall we suffer the black mailing of the childish MDC and it’s stooges.
Chamisa has ED to thank. If it was cde Robert Mugabe he would be in prison now.
Zimbabwe is the only country we can call ours. We need to build it brick by brick.
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