The fundamental aspect of any political ideology is its credibility not how exciting it sounds. Matabele are responsible for the conditions of their socio-political space; we are the only major blockade to the manifestation of our political dreams and we are the only solution.
While there is a role for populism in politics, it is credibility of ideas and only that that will drive and sustain the Matabeleland agenda. Clever ideas will win us popularity among our communities but wise ideals will earn us respect and credibility locally and internationally. We need to start working at bringing credibility back into our politics.
Now is the time to appreciate that we are the ones we have been waiting for; every action we take or are perceived not to be taking shapes the political credibility of the region. We need to let people believe in our politics and what we want to achieve and that can only happen when we can clearly show our understanding of the needs of communities we seek to represent. When people can share in our dreams, when people can make sense of what we want to achieve, they will willingly and voluntarily share in it.
Matabeleland people want liberty and freedom. We cannot build political credibility by promoting the freedoms and liberty for some people and not others simply on the basis of myopic ethnic stereotypes. We cannot wake up one day screaming out load for human rights of Matabeleland and wake up the next day calling for the exclusion of ethnic Shona people just because they are ethnic Shona, nothing else; there is no political credibility there.
Lessons from our Zimbabwean experience teach us that allowing for some abuse of human rights of some population groups for whatever reason opens doors for broader obstruction of everyone’s human rights in the future. Our politics has to work at closing such loopholes right now.
Let us not continue to commit political suicide by simply responding to ZANU PF systems and institutions. That only means we are never going to build a system and institutions based on our socio-cultural and political needs but will create obsolete systems that are merely a retaliation to ZANU PF while hardly saving our needs. We need to look at building systems and institutions that would create opportunities for our political integrity and authority to take root while destroying the credibility of ZANU PF systems and institutions within Matabeleland’s socio-cultural and political space.
A lack of realism in our modern-day political vision will cost credibility tomorrow. We cannot expect to build a credible Matabeleland political system and institutions by spending extended periods staring at ZANU PF systems and responding to things that warrant no response in the process giving unwarranted credibility to political impropriety. I have said this before, I will say it again: it is the ZANU PF system and institutions and not any ethnic group that we should breakdown to build a Matabeleland appropriate system.
MTHWAKAZI INDEPENDENT 