Who will guard the Zanu PF tyrants? that is the question of our time!

“If we had a responsible Government, and ruling party we wouldn’t need more prison officers.” Dube was commenting to my article “Gearing up for brutal repression”.

 

In the article was decrying the Mugabe regime’s failure to come up with measures to address the country’s worsening economic situation which, in turn, is causing real suffering and hardship on the populous. Of course there is a limit to how much suffering the people can be expected to endure in silence before they demand to be heard raising the spectre of serious social unrest such as rioting or worse.

 

Sadly it is the social unrest and not the economic meltdown that is causing it that the regime is keen as mustard to deal with. It is already beefing up the state’s brutal repression machinery – 650 new Police graduates, 11 000 Prison Guard recruits and a $200 million state of the art Spy University for the CIO – to ruthless silence and punish all criticism and protests!

 

What Dube raises here in the age old question “Who will guard the guardians?”

 

The Roman author, Juvenal, posed the same question but in a more social setting of the home. Since wives cannot be trusted, he argued, keeping them under guard was no solution because the guards cannot be trusted either.

 

In the interest of gender balance; Juvenal would have said the same about husbands. Add the fact that sexual attraction is no longer confined to the opposite sex and the social problem assumes yet another dimension of complexity!

 

What we are talking about here is not wives or husbands we cannot trust but rulers, national guardians. The Greek Philosopher, Plato, did put a lot of thinking into who should be considered suitable to be guardian, ruler, and having carefully selected the ruler then his view was the ruled should be able to trust the rulers to behave properly and it was absurd to suppose that the rulers should require oversight.

  

Mugabe and his Zanu PF thugs have never behaved properly and therefore they are certainly not what Plato would have ever considered to be suitable rulers.

 

Socrates, another Greek Philosopher and thinker said, “From intoxication we said that they (guardians) must abstain. For a guardian is surely the last person in the world to who it is allowed to get drunk and not know where on earth he is.”

Socrates was talking of alcoholic intoxication in Zimbabwe Mugabe and his Zanu PF dictatorship cabal have been drunk on something even more potent and highly addictive – political power. And for the last 34 years Mugabe has absolute power - power in its most potent and undiluted form.

 

The Police, Prison, CIO, etc.; these are all important State institution necessary to keep law and order, enforce the law and to punish those found guilty of breaking the law but all these are only valid in a society where the rulers, untrusted with the powers to direct and control these State institutions behave properly and for the common good. In a dictatorship such as we have in Zimbabwe the rulers do not behave properly and the only law that matters is that the rulers are above the law and do as they please.

Mugabe has politicised State institution like the Police, Prison, Judiciary, public media, etc. so that instead of them serving the common good they now serve keep him and his cronies in power at all cost! Mugabe has used the Police to silence his critics and the public at large. Since his regime has failed to address the underlying causes of the economic meltdown he knows the populous will become more restless. His response is not to do something to end the economic meltdown but rather to silence public protest against the worsen sufferings.

 

So the simple reply to Dube is that in this Mugabe regime, Zimbabwe does not a responsible government. It is up to the people, the electorate, to ensure that the Mugabe regime is remove from power and replaced with a democratically elected government the nation can trust to behave properly.

 

As for the answer to the age old question “Who will guard the guardians?” The answer has to be the people, the electorate. So Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess today because the Zimbabwe electorate have been naïve and gullible, at best; what good is having a guard if he or she does not have a clue of the task before them.