Of tweets and marches: Then what?
HARDLY two weeks from the impending harmonised elections the MDC-Alliance is strategically projecting a narrative of victimhood.
Having enjoyed a fair share of benefits from the electoral reforms which were key to the call for restructuring the voter registration system, promoting the neutrality of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) and the military, Nelson Chamisa has shapely criticised electoral processes ahead of July 30.
The MDC-Alliance leader has continued to solicit public sympathy in the interest of his candidature which he claims is under threat and yet he is not withdrawing his participation in the election.
His search for public sympathy is also ignorant of the media access that his party has enjoyed as well as the liberty for his party to host rallies in the rural areas.
Definitely, this is an election framed in the interest of preserving fundamental tenets of democracy. This is because we are coming from a past where such liberties were inclined to the benefit of the ruling party.
The current development in the reinvention of our political culture is a huge burden to the opposition whose agenda has always been to portray elections as violent and much more characterised intolerance of divergence.
The Amended 2018 Zidera script clearly indicates that the opposition did not expect a change in the election environment as far as the full implementation of electoral reforms is concerned.
Now that there seems to be a clear road-map to a free and fair election, the Chamisa-led opposition is working hard to neutralise the reality unfolding on the ground. It is as if the whole issue about electoral reforms began a month ago and yet Chamisa was part of the reform endorsement processes after the 2013 election.
The Amendment of the Electoral Act last year was part of a bigger process which occurred in Parliament with all parties being represented.
It was during such deliberations and consultative processes that Zec was legally constituted at the behest of Parliament and Chamisa involved in the whole thing.
Today, he is the same person mobilising the electorate to march against Zec accusing it of impartiality and being headed by an apologist of the establishment. As a result, this gives a misleading impression that the past has not exited our terraces of power. Of which that is a fabricated reality which is deliberately disconnected from the truth. The idea behind this misgiving is to falsely project the election process as less credible, flawed and worth dismissing.
While this is a genius pragmatic step by Chamisa to discredit an election that might not be in favour of the MDC-Alliance, it is disappointing that the citizens are being manipulated to driving an agenda that is divorced from national interest.
The MDC-Alliance has fairly executed this agenda through the social media. There is no doubt that hashtags have been a powerhouse of spearheading the opposition’s anti-establishment positions on national issues. However, time and experience has indicated that the elasticity of hashtags is strained as they monotonously become circumlocutionary around a single matter.
Within a tiny and thin tenure of existence the Tajamuka/ Sesijikile hashtag aggressively showed its ugly face on the timelines of those who had not jamuka-d.
Within that time frame another swift tide overtook the surfeit of the mundane peddled through keypad statesmanship. Tajamuka’s sell-by date was swiftly eroded by Pastor Evan Mawarire’s This Flag hashtag. For a little while there were panics that the man of the scriptures was going to turn the country upside down. While his influence seemed to reign supreme in calling out the establishment to concede, he called for the shutdown of the country.
The idea was welcomed on the pretext of its seemingly God ordained promise for a new Zimbabwe which the pastor had been long praying for. To his disciples, this was a well-deserved Sabbath and a mark of resistance to the establishment from above. Thanks to Prophet Evan.
After all, it was a man of God who had called the country to shut-down. I remember my other church-going friend likening mukoma Evan to Elijah who made the sun stand still. Likewise, Evan made the country to stand still in his view.
Being the pastor that he claims to be, Mawarire was able to gain sympathies from those who thought his selfproclaimed mandate to topple Robert Mugabe was divine. Whenever he uploaded his videos (in some cases wailing in front of the camera) many were convinced in their hearts he was the next Moses, but alas Moses never saw Canaan.
In November last year when the people of Zimbabwe came from all works of life to establish the foundation for the new dispensation, Pastor Mawarire had his phone and he was up and about on his usual selfie business. And just last week, he was among Chamisa’s marchers and of course he had to report that he was part of the marchers.
Enough about the pastor, but the point I am making is that there is no amount of social media mobilisaion which can break-down a strong structure of power. This is because real power does not reside in Facebook and nor is power nested on Twitter rants.
The good professor — one whose intellectual stature is so dear to me embodies the folly of twitterism. He Tweeted his way out and again he is trying hard to tweet himself back to the relevance that made him a darling to some of us.
There is real machinery which sustains power and not a collective of hate speech churned out through social media handles of polemic, less critical and blunt manipulative characters.
Likewise, no amount of demo livestreaming will threaten the course of democracy especially from the people in Binga, Nkayi, Mbalabala, Mhondoro and Marange who do not give a fuss about the social media.
After all, Zimbabwe is bigger than Harare. To use a single demonstration in Harare as a population sample of what the generality of the public’s political attitudes is not rational. How many demonstrations have been done in Harare aimed at arm-twisting the establishment to concede to the interests of the opposition? Most of those demonstrations have not achieved their interests simply because they don’t speak to real issues of transformation and key aspects of power to the men and women in the countryside.
This is because such places are the strongholds of the ruling party and moreover, the rural voter has limited access to ordinary telecommunication services, let alone, the internet, your Facebook and your Twitter. Instead he has access to the agricultural input schemes supplied by Government to meet needs for various climate conditions.
Even if internet access was in its great abundance in the rural areas, particularly in small scale mining and A2 farming areas, the ordinary beneficiaries of the ruling’s empowerment policies would not want to barter the honour of being masters of the means of production. They fear giving away their support to any political party besides Zanu-PF.
These communities have an intergeneration relationship with the ruling particularly its empowerment policies. These are the same communities who sacrificed their youth for the interest of our liberation. They connect with the ruling at an emotional level.
Apart from that, these are the descendants of men and women who directly felt the effects of the Land Tenure Act and the Animal Husbandry Act.
Their memory of being under any other rule outside that of Zanu-PF is a painful one, thus would want to promote the perpetuity of Zanu-PF in power.
Their connection with the ruling party is much stronger that the blind social media ties of hashtags, tweets and retweeets. It’s a relationship that has no fibre optic connectivity.
In Marxist terms, this is a relationship of shared historical and political materialism. It is a relationship founded on a timeless class struggle — a struggle epitomised by the continued need for the means of production to be owned by those who belong to the land.
It’s a relationship emanating from a past. A past that always resurfaces in the present every day. This is not a relationship that only surfaces when political elites want to pitch a particular agenda and get some police clearance to block the streets of the already congested capital.
Before the extinction of donor aid to the regime change agenda, mobilising masses to disparage the establishment meant money in the bank for civic society and the opposition. The factional make-ups and break-ups in the opposition are evident of the MDC splinters’ competition for numbers. After their failure to go it alone in their conflicting routes to attract white capital these comrades have come together as an alliance.
Therefore, do the crowds we saw on 5 June and on 12 July represent a lasting collective voice which shall be coherent beyond the election?
Sadly, the masses who marched on both rallies blindly did so — not conscious that they are part of a scheme to project the election environment as unstable simple because Nelson Chamisa believes that Zec must get instructions from Harvest House.
However, what is critical is that the MDC-Alliance and some civic society groups have been accorded the opportunity to exercise their freedom of expression. That serves as a clear demonstration that there is freedom of association and freedom of expression in Zimbabwe.
This further substantiates that the Mnangagwa administration is inclined to favour fair play and would not engage in the past political doping styles of violence, repression and silencing opposition. However, now that the election is going to happen without fail and Chamisa will be part of the running candidates what purpose did last week’s demo serve? Was Zec even bothered? ALTHOUGH some efforts have been made to revive the country’s economy it looks like nothing has been done on the clothing industry.
The Government authorities have tried in vain to stop second-hand clothes from entering Zimbabwe because people are buying them. As long as there are limited efforts put in place to revive our clothing industry it means the second-hand clothes from the banned bales will continue to flood our markets.
The Government through the responsible ministry should come up with a budget specifically for the revival of our clothing industry because some people are taking advantage of this to bring bales of used clothes which are cheaper. We once heard that there was a fund for the manufacturing industry especially those in Bulawayo but to my surprise I only saw one big company along Plumtree Road which opened. The rest are now being used by churches for easy money from worshippers. The cost of producing products is very high in Zimbabwe compared to other countries in the region and this has forced the prices of clothes in our shops to be very expensive and this has forced people to illegally bring second-hand clothes into the country and if this situation continues it means our industry will take a very long time to recover.
The Government can help our clothing industry to recover by sourcing some funds from friendly countries to revive this industry. I heard that there are some materials these companies need for their dayto-day operations but they are very expensive. Electricity tariffs are also very high and this is making their businesses difficult to operate.
We hope that a solution will be found urgently because even the few workers in this industry are also crying about their salaries which are very low when compared with other citizens. Eddious Masundire Shumba, Bulawayo.