The hypocrisy of Dr Arthur Mutambara
The Zimbabwe Times.
August 22, 2008 Petina Gappah
SOMETIMES, all I can do is look on in dumb befuddlement as the
world explodes into complete and utter madness.
Two stories caught my eye this week, the drugged horses at the
Olympic Games in Beijing and the now infamous interview in which
Arthur Mutambara told the West, all of it, from Australia to the
United Kingdom, to go hang. Presumably, the non-expansionist
Scandinavians are included, as is neutral Switzerland. Why stop
at America and Britain when you can damn the entire West, even
the tiny Principality of Monaco and harmless Luxembourg?
Mutambara's "go hang" was brilliantly inclusive in its
generalization, but it lacked a certain, oh I don't know,
Charambesque rhetorical flourish.
Go hang a thousand times, said George Charamba.
Go hang, said Mutambara.
I was at first amused by this interview, and I was going to roll
my eyes and move on to the next instance of human folly. I have
written enough about the man, I thought, and I will let this one
slide by. Then I started thinking about the hypocrisy of it all
and I thought, handingajaidzi makudo neanokamhina (Why allow
anyone to get away with murder, literally. - Editor). If the
editor can find the appropriate translation, he will put it in,
but the gist of it is that people should not be allowed to get
away with their ridiculousness.
In a stunning feat of Orwellian doublespeak, Arthur both boasted
about his Oxford credentials and said the West could go hang.
Here is the hypocrisy: Arthur's entire professional life in the
US, with the exception of a few months at McKinsey, was a series
of post-doctoral research fellow****ps at different universities
and at the NASA John Glenn Centre. Incidentally, we have all
seen puffed up CVs, and Mutambara's is a classic example - how
is it possible that a post-doctoral researcher in his 20s is
given the sole responsibility, with no supervision, to manage a
project that is worth more than half a million dollars, as he
claims in one of the highlights of his CV?
It is clear that he never held a tenure track position.
This by the way, as some have already observed, makes his
Professor title a wee bit dubious, I would have thought Dr.
Mutambara would be good enough, but if the Prof thing is such an
essential part of his self-mythology, that is his business. The
mythology surrounding Thandiwe Newton, the Hollywood actress
with a Zimbabwean mother, is that Newton's mother is a
Zimbabwean princess. So if Mutambara wants to mythologise
himself as a Professor that is for him and the man in his
mirror.
The main issue here is not the self-mythology, but that he was
the beneficiary of one post-doctoral fellow****p from one Western
university after the other. This, in addition to his Rhodes
scholar****p at Oxford, builds a pattern of a man who has taken
rather a lot from the reviled West. Then there is the
much-published fact that when his wife was pregnant, rather than
have the baby in South Africa where they lived, she flew to the
US to give birth there returning with a child with, no doubt, a
nice spanking brand new US pass****t. And as he boasted at a
gathering at Geoff Nyarota's house in 2007, and as he has
confirmed on his CV, he still has his US Green Card if
everything goes belly up with his political career in Zimbabwe.
So this is the same Arthur who is telling the West to go hang.
When the MDC split, David Coltart sat on the fence, before
deciding to throw his lot in with Welshman Ncube's formation.
After they head-hunted Arthur and parachuted him in to be their
president, sidelining Sibanda, Chimanikire and others and thus
ignoring the very democratic principles which they claimed had
been flouted by Tsvangirai, Coltart, Ncube, Misihairabwi and
Mutambara went on a tour of Wa****ngton, and of European
capitals, to introduce their new leader.
I do not recall them going to the Far East, but maybe I was not
paying attention.
I can tolerate many things from people in public life, but I
cannot bear hypocrisy. It is hypocritical for Mugabe and his
ministers to slam the West and still send their children to
universities there, it is hypocritical for Reason Wafawarova and
Peter Mavhunga to be electronic cheerleaders of Zanu-PF's
oppression, and to slam the West while enjoying good public
trans****t, and access to doctors, and all the food they can
afford to buy.
Mutambara's interview also revealed the close affinity that he
has to Zanu PF. Like Zanu PF, Mutambara has a misplaced sense of
entitlement. Zanu PF's is based on the claim that they
"liberated" us, while Mutambara's appears to rest solely on his
superior academic qualifications. "I am coming out of Oxford,"
says Mutambara. "Tsvangirai is an intellectual midget", he said
on a previous occasion.
And this is the man who has ambitions to be our President.
At law school at the UZ from 1991 to 1994, we had a fellow
student whom I will call Oliver. The first thing that we knew
about Oliver was that he had 15 points. The next thing we knew
was that Oliver had 15 points. And after that, we knew that
Oliver had 15 points. You get the picture. All Oliver could talk
about were his 15 points in English, Geography and History. It
was how he tried to impress girls and win the awe of his peers.
Never mind that a quarter of the class had 15 points, Oliver had
15 points and everyone knew it. We graduated from law school,
with Oliver surprisingly failing to fulfil his brilliant early
promise, but more significantly, within two years, Oliver had
been struck off the Law Society register because he embezzled
money from his law firm.
Good grades do not amount to intelligence, and intelligence is
not the same thing as wisdom. And intelligence certainly does
not amount to character.
Mutambara achieved excellent grades at school and university,
but that is not a mark of character. Mutambara may be brilliant
in his field of robotics, but he is also vain and egocentric.
His arrogance and pomposity simply diminish him.
The harder he tries to sound impressive, the more he just sounds
foolish and clueless. You can be sure that if you stood next to
him at a party, the only subject would be the luminous
brilliance of Arthur Oliver Guseni Mutambara. He has no
humility, no sense of humour about himself, no self-awareness.
He is contemptuous of others and dismissive of even the mildest
criticism to a degree that causes concern. And he is a
hypocrite.
For the love of all that is beautiful and good about our country
and ourselves, keep the man away from real power.
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