By Correspondent.
Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe. (News Of The South) – On Tuesday touts and ZANU PF youths clashed in Chitungwiza. Residents armed with stones later joined in and ganged up again the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) who had come in to restore order.
This comes after demonstrating teachers clashed with riot police again on Monday in a show of brutal responses by a government that is clearly afraid of the shadows.
Touts also recently clashed with Municipal police in the CBD attacking and beating some into being hospitalised.
The scenes from both Chitungwiza and the CBD are watered down versions of the later stages of Arab Spring uprisings which led to the overthrow of the Libyan, Tunisia and Egyptian government.
However one’s mind is tugged at by the notions of revolution to wonder if the country has been waiting for touts to lead them into showing their anger at the government.
One of the accusations levelled at Zimbabweans especially at the height of the economic instability in 2009 was that we are a passive brood of ostriches with heads pushed into sand waiting for fortune to reverse the situation for the southern African nation.
The reason has been that the government has been allowed so much leeway in misruling the country whilst the larger population contrived ways to maintain existence without caring about facing it.
Speaking at a Transparency International (TI) conference in Harare last year Rudo Gaidzanwa, a University of Zimbabwe lecturer lamented the fear that grips many Zimbabweans.
“People say if you stand up on your own your head will be cut off but we should know better. A lot of civil servants working in rural areas contributed money to the PSMAS and the money was eaten and they could not access ARVs and died, but those in power could get ARVs and treatment with the poor civil servant’s money but the civil servants did nothing”.
She sarcastically said maybe they would move to Botswana and South Africa as has become the norm if things become hard here.
“We seem to have survived colonialism better than we survived independence and that I think is the biggest dilemma because in the colonial era we seemed to have managed to keep all things intact”, she said.
“We have lost the capacity to mobilise as we did during colonisation and can now accept anything”.
ZRP allegedly deployed over ten trucks of officers to the area to swiftly restore order before the disturbances grew into anything resembling a social movement and peace has been restored.
In the aftermath however we can still look at the events and wonder if the whole fear-gripped population had been waiting for touts, some of them drunken on Bronco to stand up against evil.
It had to take the leadership of touts for the residents to creep out of their shells and not with standing the immorality of whatever they did in Chitungwiza, the fact that they awoke is a positive move.
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