The truth will make you free

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For the majority of Zimbabweans life has become so unbearable that a huge bulk of the population including the employed can spend a day without a dollar in their pockets .

For the majority of Zimbabweans life has become so unbearable that a huge bulk of the population including the employed can spend a day without a dollar in their pockets .

Widows‚ the elderly and retrenched workers have watched as their hard-earned furniture and household appliances have being towed away to be auctioned for failure to pay bills.

Evictions and threats of eviction are a daily reality as most Zimbabweans have been reduced to perpetual lodgers. Owning a house has become an unachievable self-actualisation dream .

The average Zimbabwean family bears the burden of household debts as their meagre earnings cannot last the whole month .

University graduates graduate without a hope of getting a job and pensioners who worked for over 30 to 40 years have seen their life savings and pension schemedsbeing virtually eroded leaving them in grinding poverty .

Civil servants live from hand to mouth with the government struggling to pay their salaries whilst government officials continue with endless foreign trips epitomised by shopping for trinkets.

The irony is that when government officials are sick including the President himself they are treated in foreign hospitals because the health delivery system has collapsed .

The obscene wealth of Borrowdale Brooke with 34-roomed mansions owned by acolytes of the ruling kleptocracy is a sharp contrast to the grinding poverty of Makokoba, Mbare, Mkoba and Robert Sinyoka .

Most of Zimbabwe is in a worse state than it was during the days of Ian Smith and that is a sobering reality.

Zimbabwe, the jewel that was handed to Prime Minister Robert Mugabe in 1980 with the Zimbabwean dollar double the United States dollar and at par with British pound, has become a living memory of how misgovernance, corruption and ethnic cleansing can reduce a breadbasket to a basket case .

The situation in Zimbabwe has now become so desperate that the ranting and pontification of government officials about employment creation and empowerment has become like a “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing”, as Shakespeare would have put it .

Bulawayo, the former industrial capital of the country, has become a shell of its original self with most industries being reduced to funeral parlours ,churches and warehouses were fruits and vegetables are sold.

In spite of this overt poverty which is there for all and sundry to see yet Zanu PF functionaries continue to float in their own Utopia .

Infact the current scenario reminds one of Animal Farm where things became worse than they were during the time of “Jones and his men and yet some of the animals could be heard saying thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon how sweet this water taste”.

This blatant denial of reality is not limited to the fictitious literary world of George Orwell nor to the theatrical make believe world of suspension of disbelief but apparently our leaders have come to believe their own lies to a point that a whole tribe has being labelled by a whole head of government as “ignorant” in spite of the eloquent brilliance of the likes of Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu‚ the late George Silundika, Professor Callistus Ndlovu, and the revolutionary exploits of the likes of Moses Mzila Ndlovu a Kalanga man of great repute alongside the likes of Grey Bango a legendary businessman who contributed immensely to the liberation of the country .

The misguided acolytes of this latter-day fiefdom believe that Gukurahundi was a Western operation even though 25 000 Matabeles were killed in cold blood by marauding Fifth Brigade soldiers.

Who will ever forget Bhalagwe where thousands of Zapu officials were tortured and killed Nazi style whilst the whole world watched and kept quiet?

The blood of those slain Matabeles cries out today in Nkayi where pregnant mothers were raped and had their stomachs ripped apart .

The blood of 25 000 Matabeles cries out like the blood of Abel in the Bible and thank God for the Australian cables which have exposed ridiculous statements by Vice-President Phelekezela Mpoko that Zanu PF and Mugabe knew nothing about the massacres .

The blood of women, children and men summarily executed and buried in Kezi as their relatives were forced to dance on their graves cries out .

Today the arrogance of the government, their stubborn refusal to accept and to apologise for the Nazi like decimation of the Ndebele will not stop the visitation of the sins of the fathers to their children and their children’s children.

In other countries refusal to accept genocide acts such as the decimation of the Jews by the Germans is criminal. Its about time we brought people to account for their refusal to accept that thousands of people lie unburied in the land of Matshobana and the Mambos .

Not only these but the blood of Captain Nleya, Patrick Nabanyama and hundreds of activists who have been abducted, killed and tortured cries out and cannot be ignored .

Those who committed these heinous acts will never experience peace and soon or later will have to account for their deeds before the creator even though they be buried amidst pomp and ceremony at Heroes Acre comfortably lying on gold laced caskets they will forever face eternal damnation .

The world has not forgotten about the abduction and torture of Jestina Mukoko neither will it forget about Itai Dzamara, no, not anymore. Thousands can be buried in Bidi, Nkayi, Bhalagwe, Lupane and Tsholotsho, but the truth cannot be buried.

Dumisani O. Nkomo is an activist and writer

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