Editorial Comment: We must just ignore Tsvangirai Morgan Tsvangirai
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Tsvangirai

MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai longs for Rhodesia and the fleeting benefits it afforded small minds.
He is nostalgic about the Rhodesian economy, which, according to him paid him a good wage that was enough for him to buy as much beer as he wanted to drink, until he vomited.“When I was a worker in the mine in 1975, I was being paid Z$450 but those were equal to pounds,” he said on Wednesday.

“Takamwa doro tikange ticharutsa nemari iyi. (We drank beer until we felt like vomiting) . . .  We recall those days with nostalgia.”

Zimbabweans are collectively outraged by Tsvangirai’s servile, counter-revolutionary and juvenile mindset that believes that Rhodesia was better than Zimbabwe just because beer was more affordable then than now.

We all know that he is out of pocket, after he spent donor money on women and, probably, beer, and after Zimbabwe rightly voted him out of political office last July.

However, he is going too far to dramatise his material poverty, which on close analysis extends to a ridiculous poverty of intellect as well.

Every self-respecting Zimbabwean is angry to have one of them taking to a podium in independent Zimbabwe to declare that life was better in Rhodesia. Those who put their lives on the line to fight for this country and against Rhodesia to attain independence on 18 April 1980 and those who didn’t take up arms but recognise the essence of the liberation struggle — and they constitute the majority – are justifiably livid at Tsvangirai.

He  continues to insult millions of Zimbabweans who yearly celebrate their independence from Rhodesian rule and are going forward working to attain genuine economic independence and empowerment that is far deeper than ability to buy beer only.

It is revolting to understand that we had the misfortune of having Tsvangirai as our Prime Minister for four years. It angers us that we almost had this breathtaking shallow mindedness in State House.

We are pleased that Zimbabweans rejected it in July 2013. Tsvangirai is a dangerously ignorant figure who must never be allowed to run this country, otherwise Rhodesia would return.

But his reactionary remarks show us two fundamental flaws which we have always highlighted — his emptiness at a personal level and that of his politics.

Even in his limited worldview we thought Tsvangirai would understand that you don’t measure the goodness of life on the basis of one’s ability to have enough money to buy beer, of all human wants.

In fact the beer that he tells us was cheaper 39 years ago; therefore life was heavenly then, has historically been used by colonial governments to control blacks and those they sought to suppress.

It has been argued that whites in Australia have used beer, or still use it, to control aborigines by remote control without using force or the law. British settlers simply gave them much beer so they got intoxicated and forgot about the more important things in life — their independence and human dignity.

Even here in Africa, it has been argued that every black compound had to have a beerhall for blacks to occupy themselves physically and emotionally, not to ever think about how oppressed they were.

And Tsvangirai reckons that the cheapness of beer in 1975, equalled a good life.

His thinking also exposes his limited understanding of basic economics. We appreciate that to point this out is to tackle a simple man at a more superior level; challenging a master at draught to a game of chess, as former MDC-T secretary general Tendai Biti rightly said of Tsvangirai recently.

There are many factors that make beer more expensive now than it was when he was a mine tea boy. The cost of producing beer has increased over the past 39 years, necessitating price increases. Demand has gone up as well from colonial times when only whites were allowed to drink clear beer and blacks banned from taking it. Prices rise as a result.

That applies across the board. The money that one needed to buy a brand new, standard car in 1975 cannot buy a car of relative standard now, but that does not necessarily mean that life was better then than now.

Tsvangirai is a man who has discredited himself by his inability to grasp the simplest of issues. His Rhodesian politics and poor choice of words worsen that.

But have we not reached a stage where we must simply ignore this man? He has nothing left in him anyway, no face, no money and no political support.

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