Professor Paul Rogers, in his studies of democracy, peace and reconciliation, introduced the term “lidism” to the world. As the word suggests, it is the term for a leadership trying to close the lid on a scandal, shut down alternative viewpoints and otherwise contain dissent.
In its practice, speeches at conferences get longer, the agenda is less relevant and procedural motions riddled with minor points minutiae while elephantine issues are carefully side-stepped. Party loyalists are rewarded and dissenters quickly distanced, or if they persist, denounced and denigrated.
Zimbos should be noticing all the above in the current national crisis triggered by our Owner’s larger-than-fiction desire to remain in power beyond his constitutional limit; never mind his pronouncement to the contrary.
In actual fact, that is a sure sign that you are dealing with a dictatorship, for the power of an autocrat lies in the capacity to confuse the audience as to what is real and what is an act.
Here, Zimbos are dealing with the type that would invest in the kind of opacity that enabled the proverbial Wizard of Oz to preside and rule over the Emerald City.
Gleeful anticipation!
Muckraker is always an honest fellow. Well, always tries to the best of his ability to be one. So he will tell the truth here. That he is one of those whose hearts danced with joy last week when a convoy of our armoured personnel carriers (APC) made their way towards the capital city’s north.
Sadly, that joy was not to be realised, so he remains prayerful while rubbing his palms in gleeful anticipation. Muck knows without any smidgeon of doubt that he was not alone in feeling like this. Many, in fact, a preponderating majority of Zimbos, should have felt the same. That is the level that the situation has since reached — if we can borrow words from past joyous episodes!
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Muck doesn’t know if such a feeling may sound treasonous in a country where just being alive appears to be enough serious crime on its own, but it would actually be amiss for one not to feel like that. Legal-wise, Muck thinks that it should be perfectly lawful to feel like that, based on the legal principle of precedence.
Our very competent courts have previously ruled that military-assisted transitions are perfectly legal in this country, so who is Muck not to enjoy the little of what is now left of his rights to the hilt by being ever expectant?
Someone told Muck that the decision to take the equipment to a car wash in broad daylight like that could have been a tactical move by some people to see how Zimbos would react — to gauge the public’s mood, so to speak.
If that was the motive, then those people managed to gauge the mood very correctly: Zimbos are expectant.
Isn’t it said if you allow a goblin to taste blood, very soon it will be demanding some more? Zimbos have previously tasted freedom (briefly) thanks to what would ordinarily be an illegality; so what should stop them from looking forward to a sweet encore?
Era of ‘truth decay’
So, disappointed that what he thought was repeating itself was not happening (for now), Muck decided to console himself by going into his library to read. And what he came across did not help rescue his crushed soul any better.
Reading the latest offering from Professor Martyn Percy, The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism, he came across this passage on the concept of “truth decay”: “One of the defining characteristic of the 21st Century — so far, at least — has been the corrosion of trust in facts. The condition of post-modernity is more of a description of such erosion than it is a driver of distrust.
“While suspicion of comprehensive accounts of events may signpost the deterioration in our certainties, societies that jettison truth and objectivity quickly disintegrate into dangerous forms of subjectivity. The impact on law and order, civic and political life, and justice and truth, has already been discerned.
“If opinion and personal experience are valued more than facts and lines between attitudes and beliefs are blurred with actual reality, then words themselves lose their power. Language, truth and logic begin to lose their currency.
“With that, the capacity to genuinely communicate is compromised, leading to less trust in political discourse and civic institutions. Disenchantment, cynicism and alienation quickly set in. The erosion of trust in facts — ‘truth decay’ — is a serious social and cultural problem.”
Should Muck add anything?
... the more they remain the same!
Roasted alive
Then Muck jumped to Emilia Viotti da Costa’s Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823: “It is hard to come to terms with the brutality of the slave economy. There were several Berbice slave uprisings in Guyana before the slaughter that took place in 1762-3.
“British reprisals were brutal. In the adjacent Dutch Guyana (now called Suriname), the methods of reprisal in the 18th Century were especially evil and vindictive. One sentence handed out in 1790 stipulated: The Negro Joosje shall be hanged from the gibbet by an iron hook through his ribs until dead; his head shall be severed and displayed on a stake by the riverbank, remaining to be picked over by birds of prey.
“As for Negroes Wierai and Manbote, they shall be bound to a stake and roasted alive over slow fire while being tortured with glowing tongs. The Negro girls Lucretia, Ambia, Aga, Gomba, Marie and Victoria, will be tied to a cross, to be broken alive, and their heads severed to be exposed by the riverbank on stakes.”
Just ask Blessed Mhlanga, Job Sikhala, Jacob Ngarivhume, Hopewell Chin’ono and every other Zimbo who happens to be outside of “the system”, you will understand much better that the more things appear to change, the more they remain the same!
We are all Joosjes, Wierais, Manbotes, Lucretias and Ambias in the eyes of those who own us, so we naturally are being slowly roasted alive while being tortured with glowing tongs.
Unfair
Muck might not be a lawyer, but somehow, he thinks that even the most borderline of lawyers in this country (read Ziyambi Ziyambi) can win hands down a case of unfair dismissal involving the two female police officers who this week were fired from the force for turning Mbare Police Station main gate into their own personal toll gate; charging every motorist US$1 to use that public entrance.
Muck actually struggles to see the offence that the two actually committed, considering that they were duly attested members of the occupation force that is passed off for a police force in this country.
Surely, for a defunded police force that is now surviving on the Police Retention Fund to dismiss its underpaid officers for just repeating — at micro level — what the force itself is doing at macro level, is stinking hypocrisy by Cde Shephen Mutamba & Co. Instead, those two officers should actually have been promoted to at least three ranks up for living up to the ethos of the force itself.
So, Muck is bitterly protesting the unfair dismissal of those two exemplary police officers in the absence of the police force dismissing itself first!
