Rethinking the celebratory metaphors of Zimbabwe’s Second Republic
THIS Friday I had the opportunity to watch the colossally trending “Operation Restore Regasi” at the Theatre in the Park live cinema in Harare.
The play recollects the fresh anecdote of a Zimbabwe born anew following the resignation of the country’s former President, Cde Robert Mugabe.
The play offers an uncensored chronicle of the civil-military intervention codenamed Operation Restore Legacy.
The play features key perspectives which inspire the audience to have open-ended analyses which feed into the debate of the much celebrated and contested political transition that Zimbabwe entered into in November, 2017.
In the setting of the play, the former President’s home is a spectacle of the playwright’s actual and fictional narration of the tide to change that visited Zimbabwe on the night of 15 November.
I would not want to exhaustively narrate the plot of the play least I crush the wide-ranging anticipation of the play’s potential audience.
A similar commemorative reflection of Zimbabwe’s transition is meticulously articulated in Stanley Mushava’s award winning poetry collection. Through the panoptical binocular, the poet sees through the “Blue-Roof” after 18 November, 2017.
He bewails the scheming around another Patriotic Front and curses all that which led to that November “marching” to sanitise a legacy immersed in sewer. Now in his resting place — the Blue Roof conspirators are faking Karma against the voice of the people:
“Half-literate placards in the street can only scare a wimp.
These people have lived under the shadow of a petticoat;
Who fooled them to gamble with a Machiavellian cutthroat?
Innocents are buzzing for a feast in the mouth of a crocodile;
Plotters bi***ng around my name can’t help biting my style.
Power lights the same node in the brain as cocaine and sex;
Who would miss that having been my student of five decades?”
The play I referred to and the extract from Mushava’s poem are reflective of a past that is being rewritten. In the same manner, the political-economy dimension to this changeover is explained in by the Presidential Press Secretary, Cde George Charamba in an article he wrote in the Sunday Mail on 11 March. Charamba submits that:
“In any case, ED’s generation cannot be visibly eligible for blame over the 37 years of failings while being invisible and un-praiseworthy for the pre-1980 struggles which created the very Zimbabwe they stand blamed for ruining.
And to make this point and the preceding one is not to seek to place this founding generation beyond scrutiny. Or even to imply or suggest that they have an everlasting mandate to govern or mis-govern.”
Cde Charamba evidently indicates that Zimbabwe is navigating a renewed path to framing the future.
This analysis highlights how the ruling party continues to create road signs to the country’s political transformation. In substantiating this perspective, he further argues:
“It is simply to insist on sense, scale and perspective on the verdict we pass on it, in relation to supervening processes of postcoloniality.
Critically, it helps us situate developments of the past more than 37 years. We cannot choose but accept a broad evolutionary perspective by means of which we escape the pitfall evident elsewhere in our region and beyond where post-liberation politics — whether oppositional or governing — become antiliberation politics that repudiate a people’s founding processes, a people’s founding heroes and, thereby repudiates a Nation.”
In other words, a second republic has been born, but it has to continue defining itself within the broader sense of its terms of ideological origination. In so doing it safeguards its mandate as a vanguard of national interest.
While the template of our trajectory to change surfaced as a marvel that cannot be repeated elsewhere, it is inevitable that we are in a second republic frenzy. We all strive to wash away the old — its pitfalls, vices, ineptitudes and vices.
However, it is important for the new administration to curate a sight of the future which does not repeat the gloomy experiences of our past. At the same time good lessons and principles from the past must be embraced into the future.
This experience of the republic’s rebirth must situate its logic in the experiences of the strengths and the pitfalls of others who were in this similar path much earlier than us.
Spain entered into a Second Republic in 1931 after local elections returned anti-monarchist representatives in most cities and large towns. Although much of rural Spain elected promonarchist politicians, everyone, including King Alfonso XIII, knew that local caciques (local town bosses) controlled the vote.
Apprehending his death-defying position King Alfonso XIII went quietly into exile leaving Spain a republic for the first time since 1874. Just like in our case, the Second Republic was greeted with much popular enthusiasm which was reflective of a stalemate of mounting national challenges since 1980.
However, in the case in point, the momentum was lost as substantial sections of the electorate became mistrustful of the new regime. On the right, many members of the army and the Catholic Church feared that the Republic would curtail their authority, by placing political power in civilian hands and introducing secular education. Supporters of both King Alfonso XIII and the rival Carlist claimant to the throne, Don Jaime (and after his death in October 1931, Don Alfonso Carlos) were fundamentally opposed to the concept of a Republic.
Many rich landowners also opposed the Republic for fear of social changes it might try to implement.
When brought to perspective, one can notice that the current administration is entangled in the same situation whereby there are some sections of the electorate still hung up in the imaginations of the past and are determined to block the transition that Zimbabwe is mapping into the future.
Just like in our case in Zimbabwe, the Second Republic in Spain received broad support from the previously disenfranchised sections of the polity.
The Republic therefore emerged with hostile factions on both the right and the extreme left. Worse still, the supporters of the Republic were divided between middle class Republicans who wanted to create a more modern liberal capitalist regime, and Socialists of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), many of whose supporters expected radical changes, especially land redistribution, from the Republic.
As it stands, the ruling as the custodian of the Second Republic has a mandate to further bind the ideological terms of its existence.
The ruling has a mandate to solidify its functional structures so that it adequately serves all its constituencies in the interest of both the party and the nation’s continuity.
This takes me to my next point — borrowing from the experience of Nigeria.
One of many challenges that Nigeria had to overcome in the attempt to return to civilian rule, and then to have such a new system entrenched, was the fact that competitive politics encouraged recourse to sectional identification.
On the one hand, there is need for an understanding of the nature of the dynamics of Nigerian society, especially with regard to the phenomenon of ethnicity.
The coming of the Second Republic was never a cure to the problems of Nigeria. This is because the experience was clouded by euphoria and lacked fundamental ideological introspection.
The same was marked by the very phenomenon of Africa’s newly navigated path towards post-coloniality as diagonised by Frantz Fanon as the pitfalls of national consciousness.
Fanon’s condescension for the national bourgeoisie ascends from his consciousness of how their primary goal of decolonisation is not essentially transforming the political system and improving the situation of the majority.
Their prime wish is to gain access to the wealth and social status that had previously been requisitioned by the colonists. They wish to drain the povo and natural resources for their selfish benefit just as the colonisers did.
They simply have no heart for the povo and their immiseration which they are responsible for as a result of duplicating the character of the erstwhile oppressor.
In fact, “once a party has achieved national unanimity and has arose as the outstanding negotiator, the colonialist begins his manoeuvring and delays negotiations as long as possible” in order to “whittle away” the party’s demands. Consequently, the party must eliminate itself of extremists who make the granting of liberation charters problematic.
The result of such a path to decolonisation is simply a cloaked form of the former colonialism. Prior to decolonisation, the “mother country” realises the inevitability of “freedom,” and thus drains most of the “capital and technicians and encircling the young nation with an apparatus of economic pressure”. The young, supposedly independent nation, therefore, is forced to preserve the economic conduits recognised by the colonial regime.
The national bourgeoisie, in their incomplete and lifeless state, do not have the means to provide either capital or classy and refined economic leadership to the new republic, and must therefore have faith in colonial bankers’ loans and counsel, which all aim at forcing the new nation to remain hooked on its former coloniser just as it was during the colonial period.
The desire to end this dependence on the colonial powers leads the new country to attempt the impossible and rapidly develop an idealistic, organic, nationalist form of capitalism that is thoroughly diversified for the purpose of economic and political stability.
Additionally, Fanon projects that after colonisation the national bourgeoisie occupy the posts once reserved for colonists from within their party ranks.
Thus, the party becomes a “screen between the masses and the leadership”, and party die-hard revolutionaries are neglected as the “party itself becomes an administration and the militants fall back into line and adopt the hollow title of citizen”.
In conclusion, Zimbabwe has a mandate to uphold the good from the past and abhor all its negatives. Zimbabwe must perpetually thrive to be decolonial as the new dispensation gains its traction into future.