The road to 2018: Which way to go?
MADNESS — repeating the same thing expecting the different results. This is the easy definition that can be used to describe Zimbabwe’s political landscape. As usual, it amuses itself in an agenda that seeks to dislodge not Zanu-PF, but President Robert Mugabe. This is not a new story as I have once said, but it just has new faces exercising the same old system. When you continuously repeat the same mistake, it ceases to be one, it generates into being a habit, so allow me to address Zimbabwean anti-establishment affiliates as habituals. With the few weeks I have penned on this paper, I am already battered with all rants of being an apologist, propagandist, operative and the list is endless, but that will not halt me from allotting my reflective ideas with the prodigious preponderance of Zimbabweans who now trail my articles. Thank you broods of the soil, your responses gives me pleasure of preaching more good news to those who are still in dogmatic Egypt. I shall linger penning until all lost sheep realise the way, the truth and the life.
I have been told that I am finding political relevance by vilifying discourse of regime change, I have also been told that it is wrong. Anyway, it’s their provincial thought space, who am I to force them out of their utopianism? But alas, I will not get weary in objecting what I do not believe in and will not subscribe to political mediocrity. It’s my democratic entitlement as a citizen. If opposition politics and individual movements do not help solve the plight of my people, why should I sleet it when trends show that it has continually been a failure and is definitely waning come 2018. There is nothing palpating with believing in a movement that has always disappointed its people and is definitely repeating, and so today I start my journey of the road to 2018. Yikho khona lokho!
This will be a series that will unravel political happenings as parties prepare for the upcoming elections, which by the way will happen in 2018, not these social media provisos that hogwash us with hoopla that the Government should dissolve by Decembe ... hehehe imi ka imi!!! December is Christmas time; we celebrate the birth of Christ and nothing else — including kugarira nhanzva.
Anyway, let me extract some deposits from the memory bank of Zimbabwean realism. Opposition parties have failed dismally. That should not be disputed. People have lost faith in them. No need for scientific proofs to that. I am on record for dismissing social movements, but today let me hail them for being an alarm to “organised” political groupings. When social movements gained momentum, the masses realised that they do not need a party to air their views. Everyone took to social media to post themselves or type very long posts about their political dissatisfaction. The hope lost in opposition was announced by the #hashtag movements. They took over all the support if not most, of opposition parties, not that they had good solutions, but because people were tired of the same broken record which has failed to win against Zanu-PF since independence. The detest demanded panic as Morgan Tsvangirayi appointed two vice-presidents. Joice Mujuru and Tsvangirayi, once enemies, betrothed and a sudden hijack of social movement strategies to drive their failed agenda. Indeed opposition had lost ground and never expected that people can do what they have been trying over the past decades, but better. The sudden coalition is a reflection of panic and it confirms that opposition cannot take on Zanu-PF one-on-one hence joining forces. In Ndebele they call it “Ukuthelela” — ganging up. Let’s discuss the success of this coalition, perhaps I may shed some light on our #roadto2018.
The bitter truth the romanticised account of the Egyptian revolution in the Economist or Time magazines and others alike, the social movement leaders in Zimbabwe are again erroneous in thinking that the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak belongs to street protestors. On the contrary, the reality is that the revolution was a politicians’ affair, in particular the abhorrent Muslim Brotherhood, a political organisation with not only unparralled links to the Muslim world’s elite political class, including the Saudi royals, but also peculiar organisational skills. Indeed, the consensus among the Muslim world experts is that the Egyptian revolution would not have been successful without the Muslim Brotherhood. With that on record, a deeper analysis of current Egypt shows the insecurity in Cairo, the delays in developments and slow progress of administration. In other words, the stark lesson of history is that the protest movement needs to make a choice: either flounder as the Hittites of Algeria or succeed as the pragmatic young liberals, who forged an alliance with the political class in Egypt but are left with nothing to govern after destroying a lot of property.
Association by failure? The being of social movements is also timely. Recent developments in the country have seen their meddling with political classes in the opposition; this in itself is a recipe for doom. Their existence unaided is definite failure; their merging is undisputed catastrophe, either way they are bound to nosedive. I want them to note that the existence of social movements and opposition parties either as an idea, or as completely autonomous institutions in their pseudo-capacity, is not novel to Africa in general, and Zimbabwe, in particular. If there is one dominant party in a state, opposition political parties are inevitably bound to emerge because “power creates its own resistance.” In fact, the thirst for democracy, in Africa and beyond, has its roots stretching as far back as antiquity and their presence is not new as a phenomena but it’s the faces that have changed-trend shows that failure is imminent. The foregoing tells that democracy is a noble virtue that every regime wants to be associated with. Even though the concept of democracy has raised a lot of controversy among people, there are certain permanent features that have been conspicuous with democracy. One of these is political pluralism. The future of social movements and
opposition marriage Although Zimbabwe has seen a lot of opposition political parties emerge on its political horizons in the years preceding 1990, not even one of them has succeeded beyond winning a sizable number of seats which made them eligible to take over power from the ruling Zanu-PF party. This alone, is testimony enough that the history of opposition parties has been fraught with a lot of challenges. It has led me to posit that the fate of the opposition parties was decided during the war of liberation in the 1970s. The reasons behind the failure of political parties to come to power in Zimbabwe have become the subject of intense debate both inside and outside Zimbabwe with opposition apologist making armchair historian claims about uneven playfield, rigging, violence and all sorts of hulla buloo which in 2013 Tsvangirayi dismissed assuming he had won and later confirmed when he was ashamed that he had lost — it’s a pity for Richard. What is disturbing, however, is that despite their multiplicity, these explanations have done little to improve the masses’ understanding of the complexity of the problems c o n f ront i n g opposition political parties.
The main problems of these explanations have not only been that they have been parochial, trendy and partisan but they are also imagined, seeking to interpret the present challenges out of history and context. Moving away from the tradition of narrow and partisan explanations that abound on the topic, this article will definitely invite responses from informants on the topic in its analysis. It is quite interesting to note that despite the emergence of many opposition parties since 1980, it is regrettable that not even one of them has managed to oust the ruling Zanu-PF from power hence this should be a lesson to the masses who seek to join the bandwagon of failure. It is important to note that, among those parties that emerged, some of them made great contributions to democracy while others just disappeared from the political radar screen without making an impression or leaving a trail for the future to trace.
We bank on memory Turning from civil leaders into political leaders in essence created a “moral quandary of whether civic leaders should assume an overtly political role by holding elective office in political parties. This led to the new civil leaders being politically biased and actuated by self-interest and also led to the depletion of civic ranks in order to staff political parties. The leadership has shown difficulties in separating itself from its predecessors. Association with commercial white farmers brought a dilemma into the party, “the white commercial farmer assisted in forming support groups within the commercial farming areas and made donations in cash and kind to MDC” as one scholar (Kagoro, 2003) documented.
There has been a problem in the way the opposition calculated the social classes that made up its support base. As a political party, the MDC was created by a coalition of civic groups that were united more by distaste for President Mugabe and Zanu-PF than by any unity of political programmes. The emergence of this opposition has been merely an “anti-Mugabe reaction”, a counter to the glaring shortcomings of the ruling party. In short, it represents no positive alternatives. However, a close analysis clearly reveals that the party in its inception was mainly a marriage of convenience, for what common interests could labour share with capital and peasants and with white commercial farmers? The background has created problems of cohesion in the struggle between “the doves and the hawks, the leftists and the conservatives, the young and the old, patriarchs and the feminists”. In the long run this has proved to be the party’s achilles heel and a soft spot for Zanu-PF’s strength against opposition. Such a cosmopolitan composition is largely because the MDC was a hustle made political party made with the intention of immediately capturing power in less than a year and as such lagged behind in many respects, in terms of building a political base and selecting leaders with honour and credentials. This further hampered the formulation of its ideology. The lack of a clear ideological understanding and basis is not really surprising looking at the loose coalition comprising the MDC. As such, it was far much divorced from reality of its support base, in fact it had no “street credibility”.
There is a disturbing remark by some people, who argue, “Mugabe lost almost in every single urban area.” On the other extreme, the general feeling within social media in Zimbabwe is that Mugabe is an illegitimate leader. However, the reality is simply that the ruling party laid emphasis where it matters most; the rural constituencies while MDCs in their infantile ignorance concentrated on the urbanites that are just a miniscule component of the voting population and it still does. In terms of designing its policies both foreign and domestic, MDCs have been a dismal failure in comparison to the ruling party. Smart sanctions imposed on Mugabe and other Zanu-PF cadres have not resulted in any positive developments leading to the restoration of sanity in Zimbabwe. While managing to get diplomatic, moral and material support from the West, much of opposition has failed to articulate its issues to the electorate. While the opposition has been globetrotting, back home, the electorate are interested in practical issues; not necessarily regime change as espoused by the opposition. The povo clamours for sound policies for their immediate and future gains. If they really want to gain a foothold into the political arena, MDC should have changed tactics not flogging a dead horse.
Social movements and opposition should be talking a language common to all Africans and former colonised countries, it should be at regional level; eloquent in talking of struggling against neo-colonialism, at continental level; in support of the pan African agenda, and in the North-South divide; in support of the South’s clamour for democratisation of the international order. Conversely, it has advocated for the sanctioning of the Government, and leaders in the Government, which does not function at all as a result of state immunity. The opposition has concentrated on supporting the re-emergence of civil society and this has largely been because its viability depended on foreign funding and it has to be accountable to its funders. In this case, a less endowed party is not attractive to the common man as there exists, a likelihood of looting resources as the case of Zambia demonstrates. Since its formation, MDC/s has been therefore left with the daunting challenge of fighting a war on two fronts: dismantling Zanu-PF’s project and fighting the “common sense” view, and now, hijacking the struggle of the social movements which equally seek desperate attention.
In view of these overwhelming negative observations, coalition politics is unlikely to be the political way forward in Zimbabwe unless radical re-orientation in political studies takes place. Previous coalition arrangements formed ahead of elections have dismally failed to remove Zanu-PF and President Mugabe from power. The failure is definitely untameable egos and elite discohesion as a result of contestation for positions. This is the road Zimbabwe’s old coalitions have trodden, it is undoubtful that the new cart with Joyce Mujuru is heading that way. In the absence of ideological bonding, coalition partners’ unity is always superficial and fragile in the face of resistance from the dominant party.
Zapu presidents Dumiso Dabengwa, the MKD led by Simba Makoni and two MDC formations have all in the past formed coalitions that have yielded a divorce. They are always impeded by personality clashes. Come 2017 they would have divorced. This road to 2018 will be interesting to watch as they will constantly postpone their marches. There is no order there. #2018willtell
Micheal Mhlanga is a research and strategic communication specialist and is currently serving Leaders for Africa Network (LAN) as the Programmes and Public Liaison Officer. He also administrates multiple youth public dialogue forums in Zimbabwe including the annual Reading Pan Africanism Symposium (REPS) and Back to Pan Africanism Conference.
Feedback can be sent to michealmhlanga@ abakhokheli.org
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