2023 elections, Mugabe predictive intelligence
• Continued from last week
While the opposition MDC had benefited from a sympathy vote following the 2008 June Presidential run-off elections that became a run-over, several of the politicians in the GNU turned out to forget the need to distinguish ‘governing’ from ‘ruling’ Zimbabwe.
While Zanu PF campaigned across Zimbabwe, it seemed something was lost in the other camp and the 2013 elections came. With the mantra ‘(Robert) Mugabe is old’ gaining momentum, the 2017 political change came.
With a bit of hindsight, the Government of National Unity (GNU) players ought to have embraced the 2017 political change with a caveat: either a power-sharing arrangement or appreciation of a collective responsibility to end the Mugabe era.
All went very well until the August 1 election crisis erupted and many players in the 2017 political change realised they owned very little, except their bitter recourse to hate politics.
Outside interest was never appreciated. Analogously, village wisdom from our elders shows that those who sit at the negotiating table are never part of the menu.
While legitimacy issues and stuff took Zimbabwe towards hate speech and emergency of political unpalatable labels such as ‘our thing/ chinhu chedu; varakashi/ destroyers; chachedu/ it’s our time; or you cannot rig the economy,’ predictive intelligence never took over the entire political sector.
No one took Mugabe’s political statement seriously. At old age, Mugabe had created a state of panic when he said he would not vote for his former political party. This was no old age politics. One thing people did not seem to understand was that Mugabe made a press conference, (was it?), a day before the 2018 elections.
He did not castigate Zanu PF but said I will not vote for X-personality because I do not see Y-qualities. Read otherwise, he was saying I will vote for Y-personality because I am seeing P-qualities.
And the reason why about 600 000 presidential votes were lost is easy to get: Members of Parliament got 600 000 combined votes than the president.
Unless you do reverse predictive engineering, the likelihood that the same politics of numbers will be repeated in this election cycle ranges from high to very high.
Zanu PF needs to convince that the overhalf a million votes that their president lost were not reflective of a protest vote. If they do, they can win a landslide victory.
Similarly, the rebranded Triple C (Citizens Coalition for Change) is to win, it needs to manage Mugabe’s predictive intelligence pragmatically beyond focus on hate speech.
It seems the Mugabe day is on the calendar of celebrations but Zanu PF and Triple C did not celebrate it as ‘Mugabe Day.’ The reason for not doing so is a political one - if the current President of Zanu PF and Triple C ignore Mugabe’s statement as some old age emotional arc they ignore it at their own personality peril.
This is the real issue beyond categorical mistakes such as those that focus on bussing people to rallies; ritualising party names; resorting to comical and hate politics.
Winning 2023 elections is not about road blocks or evading such roadblocks; it is about predictive intelligence. Triple C’s agenda was the MDC-T/A but roadblocks made the Zimbabwe Grounds rally a success because a war of party legacy was given some national tone.
Similarly, the Triple C is focusing on politics of labelling personalities and not targeting Zanu PF as a political party. Let me sign off analogously by tapping from the village predictive intelligence of our elders.
We are where we are as a nation because we have failed the village test and create emotional arcs based on hate or violence trajectories, speech by speech.
How do we do that? We describe, in very factual, almost scientific way, the world of personality politics. Every now and then, one leader would slot in a few intimate details about ‘listening’ to their rival, something alien to politics but reminds us that predictive intelligence is absent.
This is actually a very fun political article to write. I have never taken on the voice of a somewhat direct (not attack) analysis before. Sitting with my golden grandparents, they would always look up to the sky and see a passing cloud, ‘ hore’ in Shona.
They will confidently say, ‘ nhasi inozhakana, pedzai ruhekeri urwo chimbichimbi/ it will rain today, finish off your tasks quickly.’ Their social statement was sometimes comparable to the shadow of the passing cloud/ mumvuri wegore, which we mystically shout with, ‘ Mwari adarika/ God has passed by.’
The village elders’ sage counsel stemmed from observed knowledge systems, but told from the perspective of exhorting the young generation to unite.
No process, very intuitive. They interpreted events and seasonal changes as they came; which was not necessarily predictable. I do not really know how they did what they did. There’s no real method, it all happened on a very village level.
Political parties in Zimbabwe need to take predictive intelligence seriously, if they harbour any chances of winning the elections. A seemingly eternal question is drawn from the remarks by the late and former President Robert Mugabe.
Whether he said he would vote the opposition under Nelson Chamisa or that he wouldnot vote anyone from Zanu PF, his predictive intelligence bears significantly on the outcome of the 2023 elections.
A public or private compromise between Mugabe and Zanu PF has not been shown to have been reached and the matter of managing the conflict between incumbent rationality and political party rebranding remains.
The Mugabe statement is an exclamation point in the legitimation of any party that competes with Zanu PF. It symbolises the termination of the revolutionary party’s great power epoch of social engineering, and also the definitive endpoint of Mugabe’s successors of they do not play their cards wisely.
In a country that symbolises a ‘house of (stone) cards’ the influence of personality politics will definitely influence the outcome of the 2023 elections.
The political party that faithfully presents and discusses the issue of declarative attitudes to a leadership trajectory will win the 2023 election.
A central question Zanu PF or the Triple C party should ask is about leadership. Should a political party, which in this case contains many separate components, be managed by different authorities?
When the Constitutional Amendments failed to remove the running mate clause, it meant that the issues of succession are settled. Any party in government can avoid leadership crisis easily without worrying about the leadership crisis that Zimbabwe witnessed in 2017.
I see this layer as a palimpsest, where various layers of players remain visible. Zimbabwe’s soft coup in 2017 takes us to another question: is pure evil possible?
When Immanuel Kant spoke about the moral evil inherent in humans, he is not being comical.
Those who use the politics of numbers should be attentive to the phrase, ‘do not underestimate fools in their numbers.’
When I was in form one, I liked history just because of three words with I read backwards, ‘People Making History.’ I struggled to understand why my history teacher was not letting the class read the book backwards to mean, ‘history makes people.’
What am I saying?
The veil of ignorance is slowly fading away. It is not a time to focus on hate speech or petty politics. Both Zanu PF and Triple C should be mindful of the impact of predictive intelligence in shaping Zimbabwean politics.
Around 1998, some two scholars wrote that if MDC were to give Zanu PF 15 years to renew its ideology then they MDC would perish. This was ignored by the united MDC and splinter groups remained.
The MDC was warned not to take people from civil society and put them at the helm of politics. This was again ignored. Those at the helm ignored the Mugabe clauses in the 2000 Constitutional Commission Draft.
And the effect: Mugabe was allowed to use land reform as a renewal tool. The MDC split because of the disagreements relating to the senatorial elections.
While the bloodbath that was witnessed in the June Presidential run-off in 2008 led to a government of national unity, Zanu PF finally got the chance to consolidate its power.
And the rest is history until the MDC itself regarded the 2017 military-assisted transition as a ‘collective decision’ by Zimbabweans.
The domestic and international community could thus not see the removal of Mugabe as a coup in the legal sense.
Convenient and morning-after-cumpoliticised approaches were used such as ‘couplite, soft, bedroom, guardian, stockholder, ideological coup together with other petty analytical references.
In all this, Mugabe’s predictive analysis was seen from the very early years of independence.
In one instance, he referred to the need to ‘bury head in the sand’ something that referred to forgiveness and letting go.
In some instance he referred to ‘moments of madness’ to describe springboard events such as Matabeleland and Midlands disturbances.
In other he would again point to the landslide victory by the late Morgan Tsvangirayi when he referred to 73% or so. All this brings us to the fact that of Mnangagwa or Chamisa decide to be disingenuous and ignore the Mugabe remarks, then the election outcome will continue to show layers of petty politics, which Mugabe monumentally predicted.
Hofisi is a deep thinker and introduced the ‘thinking without the box’ model of transformative justice in his doctoral thesis.