"If Mukanya is a human rights defender, why did he run away?" ask Chinehasha P Guramatunhu

“If indeed Mukanya is a human rights  defender and combatant, why did he not stand with the masses when the old era was running roughshod over them?” asked Tondorindo Chinehasha, dismissively, in Bulawayo 24.

Thomas Mapfumo is a human rights defender and combatant and has proven his mettle a thousand times and a thousand times again. He has stood up tall and dared to criticize the regime for riding roughshod over the people’s rights and dreams when he was in the country and continued to do the same when he was outside the country.

We must dismiss the idiotic definition of the only worthy human rights defenders as those who never left the country “and stood with the masses” with the contempt it deserves. Are we to discard all the contributions made by Mapfumo and hundreds of thousands of others, Zimbabweans and none-Zimbabweans alike, are making every day in the fight for a just Zimbabwe just because they are not in Zimbabwe?

Even if Mapfumo had not lifted a finger to highlight the suffering of Zimbabweans from the minute he left the country; are we going to throw away all the good he has done in the past just because he is no long standing with the masses?

People like Chinehasha are quick at making a mountain out of a mole hill, they want the fact that, unlike Mapfumo, they have never left the country turned into a virtue. Ask them to name even one thing they have accomplished in all their years standing with the masses and they cannot.

“Indeed, cowards die early or is it not dead man walking? Brave men and women went through the 'ovens of trials and tribulations' and came out victorious, now you get the lily hearted coming out of their fox holes to claim the crown and mantel, hypocrites,” continued Chinehasha. 

Operation restore legacy was about restoring the dictatorial powers to loot, rig elections and use wanton violence to Emmerson Mnangagwa and the others in the Join Operation Command (JOC), the junta composed of the top brass in the Police, Army, CIO and Prison Services and a select few from Zanu PF including Mnangagwa and Robert Mugabe. Mugabe wanted to give the dictatorial powers to his wife and the G40 members outside the junta.

The November coup was about wrestling power from Mugabe back to Mnangagwa and the JOC junta. The removal of the dictator Mugabe does not mean the death of the dictatorship however much President Mnangagwa and his coup junta would like to (mis)present it as a transformative “new dispensation”!

What “ovens of trials and tribulations” have the November 2017 coup plotters and supporters gone through?

Indeed, it is Mnangagwa and the junta cabal who have masterminded and executed all the looting, vote rigging and political violence that has kept Mugabe and Zanu PF in power all these years. They are the ones who have ridden roughshod over our freedoms and human rights all these years and now they want us to treat them as heroes, our liberators from the Mugabe dictatorship.

What is worse, we are not free; the corruption, vote rigging, denial of our freedoms and basic human rights will continue. The Zanu PF dictatorship is alive and well; they have rebranded it a new dispensation, otherwise nothing else has changed.

If Thomas Mapfumo has returned to Zimbabwe thinking that Zimbabwe is now a democracy and not the pariah state ruled by thugs of Mugabe days, then he is wrong. The dictator Mugabe is gone but the dictatorship remained. Proof: the regime has kept all its dictatorial powers and it is gearing up to rig the elections.