‘Memoirs of a political insider’
THE following is an extract from a forthcoming book by Zanu PF secretary for Administration Dr Obert Moses Mpofu titled, “On the shoulder of the Struggle: Memoirs of a Political Insider”.
“WE wish to make it very clear to all Zimbabwean citizens that the security organisations will only stand in support of those political leaders that will pursue Zimbabwean values, traditions and beliefs for which thousands of lives were lost in pursuit of Zimbabwe’s hardwon independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and national interests.
“To this end, let it be known that the highest office in the land is a straitjacket whose occupant is expected to observe the objectives of the liberation struggle. We will therefore not accept, let alone support or salute, anyone with a different agenda that threatens the very existence of our sovereignty,” then Zimbabwe Defence Forces Commander, General Vitalis Zvinavashe, said ahead of the 2002 Presidential elections.
Since independence, several socio-economic and political milestones have been recorded to the credit of Zanu PF.
A major part of the country’s current problems are embedded in the vestiges of colonialism. Zanu PF inherited a colonial state whose 1980 transitional fortunes and challenges resided in the structural currencies of colonial determination.
This explains the centrality of the liberation legacy in the consistent power dynamics in Zimbabwe. Having been in Government almost my entire post-independence career, I would be remiss not to also hold myself accountable for some of the problems which Zimbabwe is facing.
At the same time, I am also proud that, as a national liberation political party, Zanu PF has also strived to protect the legacy of the armed struggle. It is prudent to recall that the party’s long stay in power has been characterised by various internal contestations, contradictions and long-standing power struggles.
After all, Zanu PF was born out of the early contradictions experienced in 1963. Therefore, the DNA of contradiction has always been ingrained in Zanu PF.
My entire experience in Zimbabwean politics has proved the reality of another major “struggle after the struggle”.
This has been the fight between revolutionary forces bent on consolidating liberation gains and counter-revolutionary forces dedicated to entrenching the remains of colonialism.
The competition for State power in independent Zimbabwe has been fought by these two opposing forces.
In the face of these contestations, the military and war veterans have been the pillars of preserving decolonisation values.
For us in the liberation movement, our fight has been to preserve what fellow comrades died for in the struggle for Zimbabwe.
However, opposition supporters and their leaders feel that the liberation struggle has been devalued by the socio-economic challenges which Zimbabwe is currently experiencing. In the process, we have observed sponsored efforts to erase the triumphant nationalist past and its success in challenging the cruelty of imperialist oppression.
Today, there is so much hidden colonial presence in opposition and CSO (Civic Society Organisation)-initiated political protests.
The obsession with post-colonial mismanagement of national resources, corruption and abuse of human rights is ironic especially coming from the neo-colonial practitioners — who are vanguards of the vestiges of colonial relics. Selective amnesia pretends that the decline of the economy has been only precipitated by the ruling Zanu PF.
There is always a tendency to ignore that the colonial design of power positioned Zimbabwe to perennial colonial dependency.
Therefore, the contribution of colonial powers to Zimbabwe’s problems cannot be ignored. This justifies the centrality of the revolutionary element in the form of war veterans and the military as the vanguard of Zimbabwean politics.
The traces of colonial influence to our post-independence politics can be traced to Gukurahundi, ESAP, opposition and CSO-sponsored resistances to economic democratisation. Throughout phases of national turmoil, colonial influence can be identified to this day.
Western propaganda has vilified the vanguard role of the liberation legacy in the promotion of the posterity of the ruling party.
We have been made to think that the military is an entirely hostile element in our politics and that it must be disengaged from all political processes. This is ambiguous and misleading, considering the relations which existed between the military and the masses in the armed struggle.
Today, when the military asserts its revolutionary position on the politics of the day, we are reminded of the military capture of the State. This ahistorical approach of misrepresenting the role of the military is consciously targeted at influencing our people to abandon the liberation legacy.
Zanu PF as a revolutionary party has ensured that it secures all the key ideas devoted to ensuring that the liberation legacy is not wounded.
In the process, neo-colonial forces have been working tirelessly to rob us of the dignity of our liberation pride, which since independence has been under siege.
As an ex-combatant and an active post-colonial actor in Zimbabwean politics, I have been always interested in locating the role of the military in the Zimbabwean political landscape. There is no doubt that power dynamics in Zanu PF cannot be analysed without factoring the ideological presence and symbolism of the military in shaping internal contradictions in the ruling party.
The military is a decisive factor in Zimbabwean politics. Its role has been to ensure that Zanu PF remains on the path of ideological correctness at all times. Combined with the tenets of African nationalism, the values of discipline borrowed from Zipra and Zanla remain the binding terms of association in Zanu PF.
Based on this tradition, Zimbabwe’s period of political turmoil, produced by Western antagonisms to the land reform, witnessed pronounced military positions with regards to power struggles in Zimbabwe. The prefacing remarks above by the late Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF), Vitalis Zvinavashe, broadly substantiate this fact. After all, nationalist movements’ pre-eminence and the foundation for democracy across post-colonial Africa was derived from armed struggles.
Zanu PF as a party of Zimbabwe’s decolonisation embodies this major characteristic and this is a major perennial feature of the party.
The military in Zimbabwe is not only a mere institution of security and preservation of territorial integrity in the normatively postured modern political sense. Instead, the ZDF is also a vanguard of the liberation legacy.
The ZDF’s role in Zimbabwean politics is grounded in the memory of resisting the return of colonialism. The ZDF is, by all means, a defender of the nationalist project and its enduring objectives against imperialism and all neo-colonially aligned elements in Zimbabwe’s contemporary power struggles.
The decade of political turmoil
With the intensely hostile political environment between 1998 and 2008, the economy massively declined. The level of household poverty increased; unemployment was on the rise and international demonisation of Zimbabwe took an accelerated leap.
The tense political atmosphere in the country became the breeding ground for political violence with limited terms to arriving at social integration. The State had to intensify its resistance to the Western-sponsored opposition.
With sanctions also immensely contributing to the total fall of the economy, we had no other option but to resign to strengthening indigenisation and economic empowerment.
In the context of the prevailing crisis, it became evident that some high-ranking officials engaged in corrupt activities, threatening the integrity of the State. The crisis continued Zimbabwe’s international isolation, with many sectors of the economy being severely affected.
On many instances, the opposition, private press and NGOs misrepresented the political situation in Zimbabwe by falsifying cases of power centralisation, electoral fraud, a decline in the rule of law, judiciary partiality, growing constraints on the operations of the independent media, widespread human rights violations, a growing militarisation of the State and an increasing recourse to state-sponsored violence against opponents. The cumulative delicacy of the Zimbabwean State was both a cause and consequence of the wider economic malaise largely determined by global forces and their internal neo-colonial substitutes.
As the economy contracted, the financial resource base of the public sector was eroded and human capital drained away. This, in turn, led to diminished State capacity to plan and finance economic growth and ensure the provision of basic public goods.
Gross mismanagement characterised the public sector and that tainted the image of the Government. A major part of Cabinet deliberations centred on strategies which could be applied to deal with the vertiginous spiralling inflation, unemployment, productive infrastructure decay, decline of service delivery and high debt burden.
There was massive brain drain since the majority of the working class sought greener pastures in the diaspora. The height of poverty attracted international humanitarian assistance.
In the process, some NGOs used the opportunity to execute disguised commissariat work for the opposition. This facilitated wide resentment towards Zanu PF.
In response to this growing crisis, I had to ensure that the basic social needs of the people in my constituency were met. Unnecessary aid supplies were compensated by community-based development initiatives.
Support was mobilised to heighten grassroots political consciousness since some donor organisations were using aid to shape anti-establishment attitudes.
The success of this intervention was the continued dominance of Zanu PF in the entire Matabeleland North Province in every election.
Our provincial structures remained relevant to the cause of challenging imperialist efforts to dissuade our people from supporting Zanu PF. International media propaganda and colonially inclined local players continued to exaggerate the political situation in Zimbabwe.
In as much as the country was facing problems, which we all acknowledge, it cannot be ignored that the media and NGO efforts collectively contributed to Zimbabwe’s political-economic detriment. Zimbabwe was recurrently presented as a “failed” State in global indexes of international finance organisations.
We continued to be rated low in our governance, democracy and human-rights indexes to justify our international isolation.
This pushed away possibilities for FDI (Foreign Direct Investment), on top of the effect of sanctions. There were co-ordinated efforts to diminish the territorial integrity preservation role of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) and the Zimbabwe Republic Police.
The two institutions were presented as key actors in fostering cohesion and suppressing all forms of political dissent.
With intensified hostile propaganda on Zimbabwe by Western powers aggrieved since the land reform, the 2008 plebiscite was presented as unfair and Zanu PF was accused of gross electoral fraud.
In the end, this all validated the reality of the underhand neo-colonial activity, which was linked to the West’s support for the MDC.
With the externally and internally effected hegemony in the Zimbabwean political space, it has become apparent that the polarisation we have to bear is mainly centred on creating some disillusionment which will work in the service of removing Zanu PF from power.
Internal contradictions
The inevitable collapse of the economy after the land reform and the subsequent imposition of illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe by the West incited disgruntlement amongst many senior members of the party.
At this point, the longevity of Zanu PF was in crisis. The effects of confronting global superpowers hurt us beyond measure; the proverbial ethos of revolutionary unity was under siege.
In the previous years, the internal affairs of Zanu PF were not littered for public consumption. The Unity Accord and its amalgamating consequences to Zimbabwe’s political powerhouses ensured the strategic power consolidation and a sustained nationalist euphoria.
Even in our most troubled times, we have maintained a very discreet way of handling our problems. It was only once after independence that we experienced a major political shake-up with the rise of Edgar Tekere and his short-lived political outfit, ZUM.
With his exit from Zanu PF, the party’s postures and lived realities of unity remained intact until the MDC was formed. Even with the coming of MDC onto the political scene in 1999, we have managed to contain all elements with a destructive intent towards our survival interests.
As a result, factionalism in Zanu PF has been a subject of interest for our Western misanthropists through usual conduits of expression of interests such as the private press, opposition associated CSO-detractors and some Western embassies in Zimbabwe.
Otherwise, besides that, Zanu-PF had always maintained a culture of in-house conflict management.
Where disciplinary action was needed, the party called out or weeded out retrogressive elements. It was never the norm to discuss internal party issues outside constitutionally prescribed platforms.
It was only after the 2013 election that a new culture of “washing our dirty linen” in public emerged, continuing to this day.
This is unavoidable considering the central role of social media in shaping public discourse.
While this new tradition may have signalled a higher level of Zanu PF’s democratisation, those inclined to the conservative predisposition of internal conflict resolution saw this as a wayward approach to dealing with internal party issues.
At some point, there were wide deliberations at Politburo level for members to suspend their use of social media to dispatch contestations of power in Zanu PF.
◆ Dr Obert Mpofu is Zanu PF National Secretary for Administration
◆ To be continued next week