Mbare-bred Killer T’s popular lyrical verse, Kana Ndanyura, is a love song by a love-smitten dude sunk deep in endearment who is exhorting the world not to intrude and spoil his amorous tryst.
Though used in the ballad in its smitten sense by an awe-struck lover-boy, this piece will literally use the aphorism Kana Ndanyura to depict the sinking fortunes of former liberation movements in SADC that met in Johannesburg over the weekend to devise means and methods of getting themselves out of the deep waters.
Though etched on the music market as a romantic ballad, this piece will use Kana Ndanyura as a mournful lamentation by the tumbling and sinking political tribe of the region’s former liberation movements that met in Johannesburg, South Africa over the weekend.
The former political behemoths that strode the region’s politics like a Colossus met amid a dwindling support base by dint of performance illegitimacy.
They met in a strange and embarrassing context as some of them, like UNIP of Zambia, have disappeared from the political map, some such as the ANC are now governing through coalitions while others such as Zanu PF are barely clinging on because of brazen violence and rigging.
These liberation movements have been at the epicentre of the failure of the post-colonial African State and their political fortunes have been literally sinking in successive elections as voters have serially rejected them at the polls.
Kunyura is a Shona word which means sinking or falling.
Indeed, Kana Ndanyura may yet assume a political meaning given the sorry plight of the sinking support for the liberation comrades which, like the dinosaur, have failed to adapt to the demands of the brave, digital 21st century and the rising new generations that are now demanding jobs and functional economies, not dry liberation war rhetoric.
To borrow a line from Killer T, these liberation movements go into elections with a sense of entitlement and an arrogant attitude rooted in history: Munozviziva ndiri makuruwani (you know we are your liberators).
In the last elections, the voters in Botswana and South Africa had other ideas and harshly judged the BDP and the ANC respectively for their lack of probity and failure to deliver optimum services.
No one gave Duma Boko and his Umbrella for Democratic Change a chance. But they wrote a fantastic story in history when they ended a 58 year political dominance by a liberation entity called the Botswana Democratic Party.
The ANC garnered a paltry 40 percent of the vote and found itself governing through a coalition for the first time since 1994.
Recent electoral upsets have sent shockwaves across Southern Africa, Apart from Botswana and South Africa; significant opposition victories in Seychelles, Lesotho, Mauritius, and the near-upset in Mozambique have heightened concerns about the relevance of liberation war politics in the lives of the people today.
Indeed, liberation war rhetoric is just no longer cutting it with the voters.
Perhaps former Mozambique president Joaquim Chissano summed it up well when he told delegates over the weekend that the liberation movements have deviated from what they stood for, that they are not open to criticism and that they have abandoned the people.
Source: Nehandaradio
