By Luke Tamborinyoka
Sydney Gata, the late ZESA boss was a man synonymous with darkness, given the incessant power outages during his long tenure with the national power utility utility.
But the well-known public secret that Gata was a man of darkness did not stop Mnangagwa from throwing him into the national limelight as a national hero.
Yet if anything, Gata deserved the lime-darkness of a national villain, not the limelight granted him as if he were as a man of valour, as Mnangagwa described him when he addressed the Gata family at the family home in Borrowdale.
Sadly, our national heroes’ acre has now become a national villains’ acre, given the infamous and iniquitous records of most of the men and women interred there.
Mnangagwa’s record in celebrating failure is now a matter of public record.
In April this year, this column bemoaned ED’s penchant to reward mediocrity when he named transport Minster Felix Mhona, Agriculture Minister Anxious Masuka and then Public Service Minister July Moyo as his best performing Cabinet ministers for 2024.
Yet these Ministers were the culprits who had overseen the total collapse of the public transport system, the command agriculture corruption and the paltry salaries of civil servants respectively.
Now he tells us that Gata, the man who has blacked out a whole nation for years, is a national hero. ED even extolled what he called Gata’s distinguished and valiant service in providing power to the nation, which we all know is a non-existent record!
All we know is that Gata was the human embodiment of our national darkness, who at one time even blacked out ED’s state of the nation address in what some of us hailed then as an ironically graphic illustration of the true state of the nation!
But then Mnangagwa is fond of these men of darkness, hence his close association with one Wicknell Chivayo, yet another man of darkness who could not light up the town of Gwanda despite being paid millions of taxpayers money in hard currency.
It all proves that ED too is a man of the works of darkness (mabasa erima) after it emerged that Gata’s wife, Angeline, the deputy minister of primary and secondary education is sister to Molly Mayahle, ED’s customary second wife.
So Mnangagwa is Gata’s brother-in-law.
Gata was also previously married to the late President Robert Mugabe’s sister Regina.
But given the current relationship, it is no wonder therefore that ED declared him a national hero. Gata was ED’s jolly good fellow in their favourite pastime of romantic trysts.
Instead of sparking power and light to the people of Zimbabwe, Gata sparked love in Chipinge and continued to spark and generate favour with royalty through his voracious sexual enterprise, first with Mugabe’s sister Regina and now with Mnangagwa’s sister-in-law (muramu) Angeline.
Of course, we hear ED’s relationship with Angeline could be far much more than that, moreso now that Gata is dead.
Gata is a Shona word with two meanings. It could mean the local custom of consulting diviners and spiritualists to establish the cause of death (kurova gata). It could also refer to a very steep ascent _(kukwira gata) .
But without playing God, I can guarantee that Gata will find going to heaven a very steep ascent indeed.
My own take, even as a mortal human, is that Gata will not see Heaven because he dismally failed to abide by God’s simple exhortation in the book of Genesis: “Let there be light!”
In his capacity as the ZESA executive chairman for years, Gata failed to comply with God’s exhortation to provide light to the Almighty’s people in Zimbabwe, itself a sign of gross incompetence for which he has surprisingly been rewarded with the country’s highest honour. .
Tomorrow, a pitch darkness will light up the national graveyard, with the mournful crowd reflective of the national funeral of lack of power that we have sll braved for years under Gata’s stewardship.
May His Dear Soul Rest In Eternal Darkness.
Luke Tamborinyoka is a citizen from Domboshava. He is a journalist and a political scientist by profession. You can interact with Tamborinyoka on his Facebook page or on the twitter handle @luke_tambo
