Africa Press-Nigeria:
George Shire, you are very right my revolutionary soul mate. There was a turning point way back in 1976 to 1977 at Chimoio in Mozambique. Robert Mugabe wrestled leadership.
Clutching a folder of prison-earned — if not dubious — degrees, Mugabe was foisted upon the leadership of the revolutionary national liberation movement.
All that ascent was due to the machinations of a semi-literate Solomon Mujuru, aka Rex Nhongo.
Mujuru’s claim to fame was that he was a serial party hopper in exile.
Starting off from Zapu, he jumped to Frolizi, then to Zanu onto Zipa and back to Zanu.
By his peripatetic chicanery, he formed a go-nowhere politico-military duo with Mugabe.
Mugabe had “amassed” degrees, all of them adding up to nothing beyond a gripping English eloquence.
He then lodged his Queen’s grammar into his own brand of crypto-Marxist lexicon, devoid of any literary heritage.
In 37 years of his long rule, the momentum of the Zimbabwe revolution would eventually sputter.
Ever resilient, it had a lucky escape in November 2017 with the glorious revolution and Operation Restore Legacy.
This was the culmination of a smouldering and bitter falling out between Mugabe and Mujuru.
The General ended up consumed in a ball of fire.
Now unfettered, Mugabe launched into an attempt to conjure a family dynasty out of a revolutionary party.
All came to nought. He would die a bitter and ever-plotting geriatric.
So sulky he was to the point of shunning interment at the National Shrine he had built!
Throughout all this political skulduggery, the project to transform the economy became a task threatened and postponed.
Instead neo-liberal economic ideology and praxis took hold and thrived all the way to putrid national economic atrophy.
I do recall the fateful television debate.
The irascible Ibbo Mandaza was unceremoniously shouted down by an imperious Bernard Chidzero.
The minister had been marshalled into ZTV studios to save an official embarrassment. One after another of his cohorts from the World Bank-IMF had been mercilessly exposed and cut down by the then-incisive arguments of Mandaza.
All in all, it closed as a dark night indeed for unfettered national economic discourse in the Mugabe epoch.
