WILL MISHEK SIBANDA BECOME CHIEF SECRETARY TO AN ILLEGAL CABINET?

SIBANDA Mishek

I am prompted to write yet another `People I Once Knew’ entry here, having been reminded some time ago by a VOA News report (Jan 2, 2009 - see ZWNEWS Jan 3) of my encounters in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe with Dr Mishek Sibanda. I know that he has served for some years as Zimbabwe’s Chief Cabinet Secretary. At the time of writing, a new cabinet, shortly to be appointed by the usurper, Robert Mugabe, will be an illegal one.

Mishek was my former lecturer at the University of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in 1978 when I was in my final year of part-time studies for a Masters degree in African History. He was employed at that time as a lecturer in the History faculty along with Dr David Beech, a towering scholar. Now sadly deceased, Beech wrote learned books on Shona history. Sibanda had come fresh out of the University of Sierra Leone to teach in his home country but clearly knew little about the particular aspect of history that I was being taught. David Beech rather showed off his very superior knowledge while Sibanda remained mute most of the time. It was an unusual situation: I was the sole surviving M.A.student (two others having dropped out along the way). There were these two pairs of eyes staring at me while I racked my brains to remember what history had been told to absorb and prepare for the lectures.

Dr Sibanda and I were to meet again several times in different circumstances and this was before he was sent off to Moscow as Ambassador for Zimbabwe. The first reunion came in the eighties while he was employed – presumably by ZANU PF - as the private secretary to President Canaan Banana and was resident at Government house in the eighties. I wanted to present Banana whom I had met years earlier during the seventies – (and this is another story which will be to be found eventually in my memoirs) with a copy of my 1980 update of my Who’s Who of African Nationalist leaders in Zimbabwe. The book included a portrait with a brief, captioned CV of the President. I had contacted Sibanda who, to my surprise (and delight at the time), invited me to tea at government house. I was ushered into the presence of his boss who, even more surprisingly, personally served me tea out of an exquisite filigree patterned china tea set AND offered delicate cucumber sandwiches. I think the Reverend Canaan Banana was still performing in Socialist mode but was somewhat confused by the residual protocol of the old colonial Government House. His secretary, Sibanda looked on quietly while we conversed very formally, the President and I, about our past encounters in Bishop Muzorewa’s office in Harare more than a decade years earlier and we exchanged polite views on the future of a country now freed from Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front government.

The Rev. Banana lost his job when Zimbabwe’s Constitution changed in 1987. He was removed from the office of non-executive President while Mugabe was anointed (you could say now that he was self-apointed) as the country’s first executive President.

The next time I met up with Mishek (we were always on first name terms) he was ensconced as a civil servant in government offices in Harare’s Central Ave (Compensation House) - as was my civil engineer husband in another department ( Water Development). Mishek worked for a government Ministry whose description I have forgotten for the moment. This time, the ubiquitous Dr Sibanda had undertaken (moonlighting, I suppose) the editing of the history section of an Encyclopedia of Zimbabwe which was being produced by Quest publishers. Among my contacts and friends was Kay Sayce, overseeing the project, and it was she who suggested that I should be asked to submit updates for the encyclopedia of the current political leaders’ biographies. Mishek was to be in charge of the work which I submitted and for which I was paid 5c per word.

It was an age of innocence: I was truly shocked when, in the course of the work, Mishek corresponded with me using government stationery for what was essentially a commercial operation and for which he too was being be paid. “On Government Service”, writ large across big, brown envelopes had replaced OHMS (On Her Majesty’s Service). Formerly, a colonial civil servant would scarcely have dared to use these for anything but government business. Some time later, postage stamps were added because it had become clear to the postal service that it would be swamped, cleaned out perhaps, by new civil servants availing themselves of what they regarded as a free-for-all postal facility (In the final event, even these stamps went out of fashion and I know not how the system worked after that)

Cautiously, I kept my thoughts about Mishek’s irresponsible behavior, or call it petty thievery, to myself because I needed help from his wife who had a job in the National Art Gallery and I wanted her collaboration with an International Artists Workshop which I had been asked (by Mrs Pat Pearce) to organize. But that is a story for another blog. This quiet man, Mishek Sibanda clearly knew which side his bread was buttered: working for the ruling party may have had its glory at the beginning. What a shame that his name, like the rest of them in that dreadful trough will go down in ignomy when the history of a once great country is written.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell