Apart from bad judgment, Ncube is a hero!!

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By Mthulisi Mathuthu

 

NEWS of Archbishop Pius Ncube's resignation would have come as no surprise to those who have been following the cleric's story since he was sucked into a very unpious sex scandal.

 

Whatever the outcome of the pending adultery lawsuit against him is going to be, it goes without saying that whoever planned the whole exercise of filming the bishop's bedroom exploits had done their homework to the last detail.

 

The obvious motive of this operation was to cause enough damage through a splash of a glut of photographs and videos that would cast a permanent shadow over the bishop's history and future work.

 

It is not wholly wrong then to say the archbishop has done the honourable thing to resign and save his Church from shame, and to win back public support that would have permanently evaporated if he had chosen to be his granite self in the face of a well-orchestrated plot executed with breathtaking skill by the state media and Robert Mugabe's security men.

 

To us, the bishop has paid his price. It is wrong to bed a married woman, and even more scandalous for a man of the cloth to conduct himself in a manner such as the bishop is alleged to have done.

 

Be that as it may, the effort to cast a permanent shadow over the cleric's record collapses of its own accord. Here is a man, who despite his own faults has remained consistent in his criticism of an evil regime that has never, even for a day, cared about the suffering of the country's poor.

 

What he condemned more than 20 years ago remains prevalent up to this day. In the early 1980's, Ncube was amongst the clerics who confronted President Mugabe with evidence of state terror against the ordinary people in the Midlands and the Matabeleland regions.

He remained resolute right up to this date in his conviction that Mugabe's regime was not about prosperity nor was it was about liberation. For standing up for us all, Ncube took fierce criticism and shocking name-calling, including from the First Person himself – Robert Mugabe. Mugabe labelled the clerics as "a band of Jeremiahs' prophesying for Joshua Nkomo".

 

Of particular concern to Ncube and those like him was the state's penchant for blood spilling, blackmail and deceit as a measure to destroy political opposition. Also of concern was the universal silence in the face of clear-cut state terrorism.

 

For the archbishop to have chosen that path at a time when many of today's so-called pro-democracy activists were praising Mugabe, proved he was and still is a brave and courageous man.

 

Today Mugabe's quarrelsome-brand of politics remains firmly in place and on the march. Nothing has changed, only that the players have changed here and there. It's still the same old way of thuggishly silencing dissent and diverting public attention from the real issues.

Thanks to Ncube, his colleagues then and the opposition of that time, we trace the current wave of universal scepticism about Mugabe's rule -- for what is it which today's human rights defenders and the opposition politicians are saying which Ncube didn't question yesterday?

The bishop may have fallen, but his word hasn't and will never fall for it shall remain true that Mugabe has not been good for Zimbabwe.

 

It shall remain true that we have today in Zimbabwe some clerics who are working hand in glove with a discredited government to undermine the march of democracy.

 

It shall remain true that somewhere in the din of the clamour for change is hidden the sinister voices of those who are in the government's payroll, some of whom may have played a role in the filming of the bishop's bedroom -- itself a gross abuse of a person's right to privacy.

 

Historians will in future look at the story of Ncube as a brave, naïve man. Brave because he stood for the truth at a time when Mugabe was a "hero" for many who today pretend they never fantasised about him as a democrat.

 

He refused to sail with the wind and listen to the lily-livered clerics who chose to remain silent when Mugabe's cohorts were plunging terror into the twin towers of freedom and liberty.

 

No doubt today his fall will be used by his enemies within the ecumenical movement as a reason to fear the truth which is what the government wants. Naïve? Yes. Here is a man whose fall was triggered by nothing but naiveté -- the failure to notice that the moment you take things to the sewer with Mugabe, you should gird your loins and watch out even in your toilet.

 

Mugabe has not only made his name in the sewers -- he literally resides there. There is no gainsaying that the bishop's words had the blessing of the world's powerful institutions, his church, politicians and the governments and the ordinary people of Zimbabwe. All he needed was to be intelligent enough not to slip into Mugabe's residence -- the sewer. But he did, and he has paid for it.

 

Yet his word shall forever remain in the mouths of all those chasing justice. His song we will sing even at the risk of being labelled 'Jeremiahs'.

 

He is a first class human rights activist, a great man who did wrong and paid the ultimate price. When will Mugabe finally be accountable?

 

Mthulisi Mathuthu is The New Zimbabwe news editor and can be contacted on e-mail: mthulisi@newzimbabwe.com
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