Symbol of Africa’s travails: Mama Winnie can’t die
AS USUAL, we begin with some housekeeping at home. They begin with a demand for electoral reforms and misuse of POSA. It is evident the MDC-T party and its leadership are still to fully absorb the shock of a military operation going civilian, being unmilitary as it were, when they thought they could use Operation Restore Legacy as grist to condemn the electoral playing field as uneven and the State as too militarised, as an alibi to mask their fear of the forthcoming electoral defeat staring them in the face.
They can’t believe their misfortune and sound so desperate as to be ridiculous in their rising daily demands to change the law just before their doomsday. Their antics are not helped by a global community that seems already fed up with the party’s churlish attitude towards any initiative carried out by Government to turn around the economy and to ensure national stability.
Soon the party will be exposed for all its grievous deficiencies — its leadership appears erratic in its pronouncements while the party itself has no policy. Attacking Zanu-PF and perpetually wailing about electoral reforms can never constitute party policy.
Here is how the MDC-T and its leadership have been caught off guard. Under the Public Order and Security Act (POSA), members of the public and political parties are required to “notify” the police if they intend to hold a meeting.
In Zimbabwe’s highly-polarised political environment, this law was deemed important in the interest of public security and order.
Over the years the opposition has threatened to unleash havoc as part of its regime change agenda, including its infamous “Final push” and the threat to remove former president Mugabe “violently” from power.
Consequently, under the old dispensation, the opposition under the late Morgan Tsvangirai often found itself blocked by the police from holding public meetings. Its violent demonstrations were met in equal measure.
Things have changed in a way the MDC-T and its alliance partners never expected. They are puzzled.
Following the launch of Operation Restore Legacy in November last year, they expected the situation to get worse — the police and possibly the army too, to be a ubiquitous feature on the national landscape. They expected security to be tightened.
It has been the opposite. The new MDC-T leader Nelson Chamisa has held almost 10 rallies so far since Tsvangirai’s death in February. He has bussed supporters across the country, yet he has never been denied permission to conduct his rallies.
He has ventured into Zanu-PF “strongholds” in rural areas at will. Nobody has waved POSA in his face. It must be frustrating to be ignored and denied an opportunity to tell Studio7 of how Mnangagwa is no different from Mugabe.
That is how he has been exposed as trapped in a time-warp of student politics, that despite his education, he lacks Tsvangirai’s maturity in his latter years as an opposition leader.
President Mnangagwa and Zanu-PF have decided to give the opposition free rein while they focus on matters of the State — women call it “silent treatment”.
Serious voters still sitting on the fence must be wondering what the MDC-T stands for besides deploying a youthful leader as a poor replacement for Tsvangirai. Even more are perplexed to grasp what the dangerous and divisive “generational consensus” slogan seeks to achieve in a nation sorely in need of unity, peace and national healing.
The economy too is in need of healing after years of Western strangulation. That awareness is not coming out from MDC-T rallies, POSA or no POSA. Instead we have a militant voice desperate to be heard for its noise more than substance, as a substitute for Zanu-PF than an alternative.
Give them enough rope to hang themselves, seems to be the message from President Mnangagwa to both his party and the police.
In the past few weeks the tack has shifted to “No reforms, no elections”. But even that can’t be a serious campaign strategy for reforms for a party which has rejected a Presidential invitation to discuss its demands and expectations.
Instead people are reading of ominous threats of violence, creating in potential voters a sense of siege. In short, the MDC-T is trying to hold the nation to ransom over its nebulous demands.
Those which make sense are being dealt with through Parliament and the MDC-T is represented by the few who remain after it nearly committed hara-kiri by recalling more than a dozen of its members and then boycotting subsequent elections.
Wayward NGOs
The MDC-T, it turns out, is not alone. The NGO sector, largely foreign-funded, has joined the bandwagon to give the reform agenda a patina of universal appeal. That’s strategic. So on Thursday a clutch of NGOs under the banner of Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition mustered around 150 members to its cursed cause at Africa Unity Square.
Chairman of the coalition, one Rashid Mahiya, said although they managed to hand over their petition for electoral reforms to Parliament, police stopped them from proceeding to the Ministry of Justice and ZEC offices.
He claimed to be seeing military people interfering even in the operations of local authorities. He said ZEC continued to “conduct its business in an opaque manner by failing to avail the full and detailed 2018 election personnel who are at the centre of key election processes in the spirit of transparency and accountability”.
Mahiya thinks Zimbabwe must strip naked for the international community before he can be satisfied. The NewsDay reports that his Crisis Coalition, in its petition to Parliament, also wants ZEC “to give unfettered access to key electoral process to local, regional and international observers without undue restrictions such as imposition of prohibitive accreditation fees, criminalisation of domestic observers or cherry picking regional and international ones”.
It made us chuckle. We were reminded of a recent retort by none other than Chamisa himself to an overzealous reporter who kept bothering him about goings-on in the party. Finally he hit out, telling the importunate scribe, “transparency doesn’t mean nakedness”.
But beyond laughter, it makes one question the sobriety or motives of these NGOs, or whether they appreciate that every nation has its security concerns and integrity of systems. What does “unfettered access” by every foreigner mean? To achieve what goal?
Yet the convergence of demands should not be surprising. President Mnangagwa warned two weeks ago that there were NGOs which come in sheep’s clothes, but hiding the jackal agenda of their funders.
He told the recent Africa CEOs Forum in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, that there were NGOs whose agenda was to influence electoral outcomes.
“. . . They assemble a team of what they call experts . . . from various countries and say we want to teach your people about voter education. They then come with gifts like beans and when you open the (can of) beans you find a paper inside which tells you whom to vote for. Such type of civil society is not necessary, we don’t need it,” said the President.
That’s how they forfeit the blessings the President had given them recently in Kigali, Rwanda, when he said NGOs were free to operate in the country and to criticise the Government so it could correct whatever was wrong.
Now it turns out they are carrying sinister agendas in the name of transparency, a demand which has all the insinuation that Africans are irresponsible and have to be stripped of their sovereignty during election time.
It’s the stuff our opposition is made of.
Farewell MaWinnie
Mahiya’s Crisis Coalition’s sponsored demands have even greater implications. There are nations to whom our sovereignty is no more than a formality; to whom we remain perpetual colonies clutching a flag.
When you contrast Mahiya’s agenda in Zimbabwe and Julius Malema’s radical demand for radical economic reforms in South Africa, you realise the magnitude of the tragedy Africa faces. You have on the one hand a “generational consensus” to advance foreign agendas in the name of transparency and accountability and on the other, the Economic Freedom Fighters fighting to restore the dignity of the black man through economic empowerment.
Just a river between produces radically different political and personality mindsets! For one cannot forget that across the same river we find the troubled spirit of Steve Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement, and now that of Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, that unconquerable spirit of resistance to white oppression.
A lot, but far from enough has been said and written already about this beautiful African liberation queen who breathed her last on Monday.
We are unable and not qualified to even attempt to quantify her contribution to the liberation of South Africa; more than that, her inspirational role as the very image of the uniquely militant African revolutionary.
To think that her womb gave this continent the kind of sons who think and believe the only salvation for Africa is the return of former colonial masters and have no qualms getting 30 pieces of silver to wear the black mask while advancing an alien agenda.
In her incarceration, torture, imprisonment by the apartheid regime; her tenacity and ability to endure it all and continue in stoic defiance, Winnie Mandela was not the individual wife of Nelson Mandela. She became the symbol of every African — man, woman, child — tormented over the centuries of slavery through to colonial rule and now under neo-colonialism.
She felt to the end, as many indeed still do on the continent, that ordinary Africans had been short-changed by majority rule; that the liberation war was not over until there was full economic emancipation, total freedom.
She died without illusions that the Rainbow nation was a gigantic deception.
That is why she was so sorely disillusioned with the Nelson Mandela who emerged out of Victor Vester prison in Cape Town of February 11, 1990 and on her deathbed, still prayed that Malema might return “home” to the ANC to give it more fire.
It was not yet uhuru. Reconciliation was dichotomous: whites kept their colonial privileges and blacks their poverty.
As a symbol of a war still raging on, Winnie Mandela cannot die; we can choose to kill her out of the slothfulness of spirit, idleness of intent and an abortion of the dream of Africa’s poor.
Let’s also not ignore attempts by those who have tormented Africa through the ages and centuries to destroy or undermine Winnie’s heroic stature by raising the spectre of a violent, murderous woman, downplaying the fact that she was forced by the circumstances of apartheid to sometimes re-enact her own existence. For our part we conclude that such acts only made her human, just like saintly Nelson Mandela’s failure to deliver economic freedom to black South Africans.
More important, Africans must identify their heroes according to their circumstances, which are invariably at variance from those who colonised us and stand to lose from land reform and radical economic transformation.
So long as we allow our political agenda to be set and our history to be written by those we should be fighting, such a history and agenda can never produce African heroes with a liberation sensibility.
We shall forever be bogged down in acts of retribution, vengeance, spiteful with-hunts and ultimately retrogression in the name of transitional justice and accountability for past wrongs.
Africans should not seek to be ruled by saints and angels, for in a world where racial arrogance, gross inequality and social and economic injustice are endemic, violence is inevitable.
That is the context in which human and property rights should be debated. That is the context in which democracy should be pursued. That is the only context in which freedom for the black man should be evaluated.
Africa can never achieve these higher goals when we rely on the standards and values set by those who retain control over what we seek to possess. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela understood this every well.
Our opposition here in Zimbabwe is her very antithesis despite years of Mugabe championing the same war as Winnie Mandela and young Julius Malema. If our Chamisas and Mahiyas had half the fire spirit of Mugabe, Winnie Mandela and Malema, there would be no disputed election in July, because when all is said and done, Africa has a shared vision, a shared destiny, a shared agenda — economic emancipation and an end to poverty.
Long live the spirit of Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. We cannot let her die, no, not yet, not until Africa is under people’s control again.