An extract from a transcript of the presentation to various stakeholders in disability in meeting organised by the MSU faculty of law to discuss disability and employment in Zimbabwe. As I now conclude, here is the painful moment of truth for all of YOU in the disability rights movement especially those from the DPO’s. the reason why disability development has been hampered is that you take a lot of time appeasing unnecessary political spirits which have nothing to do with you. As DPO’s you are actually afraid of funding court cases of aggrieved persons with disabilities You say to yourselves, “What will Mr or comrade so and so say if he hears that I have taken him to court?” yet that Mr or Comrade so and so is at the centre of discriminating you.. I will just provide a very interesting example. For the past 21 years, you have allowed both the department of social services and its parent ministry thereof to misinterpret section 3 of the Disabled Persons Act for you and suggest that the director of disabled persons affairs shall be the director of social services. You fold your hands and go to meetings with that director and say “yes Lord”. You can’t even challenge that and argue that the way in which the section has been interpreted makes it unable to work. One activist actually s ys, “if you snooze, you lose. While we call upon all the other people to do whatever they can for us, our destiny must be in our hands. We can no longer allow a situation in which we will continue to rely on gatekeepers of charity to chat our way forward. It’s time to take things into our own hands and this has to be done through unity of purporse. When I talk about unity I am not saying we must agree in all respects. Disagreement is very natural. Currently, there are quite a number of women groups which are thereand they see things differently. Some are faminists, some are womanists, some are humanists etc etc but they have points where they rally around. For instance, when it comes to the talk of self representation, they unite and demand it. When it comes to other subjects like getting married you may find differences with the radical feminist saying no we can’t be subjected to marriage in its current form where we are controlled and womanists saying marriage in its current form is orderly. When talking to some colleagues in the movement, you get some saying that the issues of the blinds are different from those of the physically impaired and so on. That is true yet there are so many common issues. IfPresident Mugabe and Mr Tsvangirai could work together, it is hard to understand how Malinga and Mateta fail to work together. Indeed, we have more in common than Mugabe and Tsvangirai. Most of our challenges arise from the fact that we have allowed other people to do things on our behalf. I thank you.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 13:04:30 +0000
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