Biti says Zimbabweans are a miserable group going nowhere

Former Harare East Member of Parliament Tendai Biti has described Zimbabweans as “a miserable group of going-nowhere people stuck in hatred and bitterness”. He told The Herald that Zimbabwean politics was dominated by intolerance and hatred.  “We need to go beyond politics and craft a vision of Zimbabwean-hood because unless we do that, we are accelerating on auto-pilot to a position of oblivion, a position of nonentity. Zimbabwe’s politics is dominated by intolerance and by hatred.  I shudder to open any newspaper because what you read there is hatred and vitriol and diatribe.  But newspapers don’t create this, they are just a mirror image of the society that they are from — a reflection of what we have become, a miserable group of going-nowhere people stuck in hatred and bitterness.  We need to convert these predatory and vicious cycles of exclusion into virtuous circles of inclusivity and that is the challenge and obligation on this generation.” Biti and 20 other legislators were expelled from Parliament this week after the Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai faction applied for their expulsion because they were elected on an MDC-T ticket but had since left the party.  Biti and his group are challenging the expulsion. “The issue of the expulsion of the 21 members of Parliament is a tragedy for democratisation politics in Zimbabwe. It is also a tragedy for national politics. It is unprecedented in any part of the world that democratically elected members of Parliament can be eliminated as we saw on Tuesday. But the country will continue moving on and the challenge is how do we rescue and save our country? Just because 21 MPs were fired I don’t think we suddenly got US$40 billion in direct investment in the country. It won’t happen.  So nobody except the forces of evil benefited from this.  What it means is that unless we are able to focus on things that put bread on the table we are wasting time,” he said.

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