Chamisa left the fact-finding mission deeply unimpressed

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The name of the old Triple C activist “beaten” in Murehwa is Morris Seremani. Morris as also the name of one turncoat freedom fighter who betrayed the Liberation Struggle, and led Rhodesian soldiers to ZANU’s rear camp in Mozambique for a wanton slaughter of hapless refugees.

The victims of Nyati were too young to bear arms, but good enough fodder for the racist Rhodesian army. In 1980, Morrison Nyati would be accidentally located at Mbare by returning comrades who included survivors of that massacre.

He met his swift end, but without deleting this shameful legacy of betrayal which he personified, and which seems to haunt every generation in our Zimbabwe. The name Morris, it would appear, carries an immortal sin.

Only a cast in a pseudo drama

I was, all along quite sympathetic to Seremani and his “beaten” fellow “victims”. But Seremani’s interview with some nondescript online propaganda television channel ZEEMTV which, alongside MEDIAZIM, belongs to Triple C through its dutiful organ, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, has totally changed my view.

I now know Seremani and his team as one big cast in a drama meant to milk global pathos. Theirs was pseudo-event enacted by their party, Triple C, for its hearts-and-mind campaign against Zimbabwe, and for propaganda use by its benefactors in the West in their rabid, anti-Zimbabwe campaign.

Fiction cannot endure scrutiny

In hindsight, elements of this pseudo-event are now falling in place. The cast had to involve aged men and women as emotional triggers for their empathetic propaganda value. A cast-within-a-cast took the form of seemingly hostile interrogators who harangued the aged “victims” for cameras.

The escalation and climax came by way of an “assault” on these aged “victims”, all to produce a video rich in verisimilitude for viral circulation on social media. That done, the “victims” would be done, to then get swiftly evacuated from Murehwa’s Ward 7 ostensibly for safety and medical attention in Harare. Fiction cannot endure, let alone suffer rigorous scrutiny.

So the victims needed quartering in opposition safe houses ran by a consortia of NGOs, again under the umbrella of Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition. Representatives of western embassies – themselves Triple C’s funders – would then take turns to record sob-tales and take images of distressed faces, thereby having props for a plausible narrative on Zanu-PF-instigated political violence.

Total media gag

But something gave the game away. Triple C blocked media access to these so-called victims of political violence. Surprisingly, even the instinctively and habitually pro-opposition NewsHawksLive, itself a George Soros’ Open Society construct built for the Opposition, was also barred.

This provoked an angry response through its Twitter thread! Rule One: there is always a chink in the armour of every propaganda effort. A yawning chasm in this case which left the whole act wide open and exposed.

Dead media bait

More holes in the fiction were to follow. Barely 24 hours after this Triple C embargo on media, ZEEMTV, complemented MEDIAZIM and Triple C’s well-known “stick” of uneducated digital warriors, swung into action. Led by one Haruzibgwi who is in self-exile and himself a rabid Triple C digital warrior, Triple C sought to inveigle the media into feeding off a poorly choreographed ZEEMTV propaganda interview with Morris Seremani which broke all rules of broadcast journalism.

This was circulated on social media to bait mainstream media. With the exception of a few Triple C-affiliated media outlets, the mainstream media shunned this guided “story” which soon grew anaemic before withering to nothingness.

Not helped by a more gripping story of the callous gunning down of three innocent souls by Muvhevhi, an ex-ZRP detective, and his subsequent arrest in flight in Mozambique which made a good distraction. The Murehwa story quickly died. So much about the story here at home!

Enter the British Lords

Abroad, the British House of Lords, led by the captious Lord Jonathan Oates, was initiating a debate on the desirability of Zimbabwe’s readmission into the Commonwealth, following a positive report by the Commonwealth’s penultimate fact-finding mission which had visited the country a few months before. The prime contention of Lord Oates, himself once-upon-a-time temporary school teacher in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, was that Zimbabwe’s imminent readmission into the Commonwealth Family would cause “severe damage” to the “reputation” of the body which brings together former victims of British colonial imperialism.

Such a development, added the British Lord, would undermine the tradition and culture of “human rights” in the Club, quite apart from the fact that Zimbabwe’s readmission would amount to a betrayal of “Zimbabwe’s people’s struggle against tyranny….” The Lord’s nightmare was that the “UK government was not minded to oppose readmission [of Zimbabwe] because it did not want to be isolated on the issue”, more so in view of the fact that the Commonwealth Mission led by its Secretariat had conclusively established that “significant progress [had been made by Zimbabwe] in its journey to rejoin the Commonwealth Family.”