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(HERALD) Makoni’s campaign illogical, devoid of principle

Makoni’s campaign illogical, devoid of principle
By Chinondidyachii Chinondidya-Chinosekerera Marar

When Julius Nyerere observed that there is a difference, a distinction even, between being educated and being qualified, few people clearly understood what the former Tanzanian President really meant. But now they should, especially given the way in which Simba Makoni inaugurated his bid as a presidential candidate for the March 29 2008 elections, as well as the manner he has conducted his campaign ever since.

Both are sufficiently clumsy to give food for thought, food for thought for a conscious Zimbabwean to wonder where a man who hopes to take on the mantle of leadership loses his strategy.

There is no doubt that Makoni is entitled to offer himself as a presidential candidate. It is his constitutional right to do so. But as a scientist with a reasonable base of training will have been introduced to the principles and concepts of objectivity and logic, Makoni should realise that the twists, U-turns and contradictions that have characterised his campaign so far are totally illogical and devoid of principle.

Where does the morality of his "upbringing" in Zanu-PF’s liberationist ideology become re-defined in the name of his perceived historic calling?

Asked, at his second Press briefing, to reveal his backers (whom he had earlier said were "big-wigs" in Zanu-PF), Makoni offered a clever-by-half response by stating that "it would be absurd to bring to the high table the millions and millions of people who back me".

Today, he says the big-wigs he was referring to are ordinary people he expects will vote for him. On whether he had renounced his allegiance to Zanu-PF, he hurriedly insisted that the question did not merit an answer, arguing instead that it was necessary to look to the future.

On land reform, Makoni talked of "equitable" land distribution. Now, given that land re-distribution was largely completed 4 years ago, Makoni’s "land re-redistribution exercise" implies returning land to the settler colonists.

Strange that Makoni fails to realise that this kind of language — of "redistributing" land — is the kind of language that even the leadership of the MDC sell-out party has since abandoned, because it knows that the same has no support among Zimbabweans.

On the party structure, Makoni was decidedly and deliberately evasive, clearly showing that he doesn’t appreciate that the type of procedure of government-formation he proposes — one outside a party system — is strange and new to the public. The public sees party systems as the main institutional framework of party competition and cooperation through which is structured — and can be realised — the type of representation on the one hand, and consensus-building and mode of governance on the other.

Yet the "educated" Makoni refuses to tell people how he intends to govern without a party; refuses to accept that people have a right to know.

Well, perhaps his party structures are the Bretton Woods institutions from which he has been promised money to fix the problems of electricity, water, and food shortage in the country!

Instead, Makoni talks of governing through a National Authority, drawn from MPs he expects will cross the floor and join him. Certainly Makoni needs to be reminded that the Zimbabwe constitution does not provide for floor-crossing.

And in any case, Makoni should recall the experience of Malawian President Bingu waMutharika who, faced with a similar situation, hurriedly put up a party structure after finding it extremely difficult to pass a budget last year.

And as far as Makoni is concerned, his is a "revolution for renewal". Surely we must feel amused when we hear an aspiring president describing himself as a gifted and intelligent person but fails to realise that revolution is not a one-man band; rather, revolution is by the people: built in word, in dialogue, in deed, in work, and in action with the people.

It cannot be made by one person on behalf of others or by those others on behalf of the one person, but by both acting together in unshakeable solidarity. True revolutionaries — Comrades Mao, Castro, Chavez, Ahmedinejad, and Mugabe — knew and know this only too well. They clearly understood and understand the concept of building consensus with people when prosecuting revolutions. But Makoni doesn’t.

Then he proceeds to say Zimbabwe cannot continue to be ruled by those "who are still tied to Chimoio". How can a serious presidential candidate lampoon Chimoio? Is it that Makoni is attempting to erase the legacy of our noble struggle against colonialism, or he simply seeks to gratuitously despise the brave veterans of that struggle? To what end?

And, does it not occur to the esteemed Doctor that it is not possible to extirpate revolutionary ideas from the minds of people who contributed to the liberation of this country, and more importantly, that he is alienating a section of the Zimbabwe population without whose support he would never rule this country?

Ah, ndiko kukanganwa chazuro nehopeka uku!

Babamudiki, ndoo chiiko ichi chamunotiitira?

There is indeed clear evidence that Makoni, who overrates himself, has been unable to see what the likes of Roy Bennett, Treasurer-General of the MDC-Tsvangirai faction, see. Speaking of Makoni, Bennett wondered "how and where in the world does someone parachute into a presidential position never having addressed a branch meeting in the rural areas?"

The main subject of our discussion is to debunk the general assumption that having a degree, or a string of them, or a Professorship or a PhD for that matter, argues for intelligence or education.

It doesn’t necessarily mean so. To the contrary, it shows that one is qualified, and a qualified person is only literate, which is not the same thing as being educated or being intelligent. An educated person is able to interpret and harness the phenomenon around him, is able to reason, and to possess logic and common-sense.

Thus, only a qualified person, Makoni, as opposed to one who is educated, chooses a plush five-star hotel as a springboard from which to launch his bid for the highest political office in Zimbabwe.

Similarly, only a qualified person advises people to access his manifesto on the Internet, which the vast majority of average Zimbabweans have no access to. And too, only an "educated" person claims that the upsurge in voter registration immediately after his presidential bid shows that he has support.

This is a very unscientific way of reasoning. I for one knows of people whose one and main reason for registering to vote immediately after Makoni made his bid was to make sure their votes count against him.

One gets the distinct impression that Simba Makoni, himself a media construct, suffers from the mistaken belief that his "reputed" eloquence in the use of the English language translates into intelligence.

He sure seems to have imbibed the old adage of, "Ah, wamunzwa chirungu chake, vakomana murume uyu ari intelligent! Haabviri!" Makoni should know better that eloquence in the use of English, a language imposed on us by colonialists, does not translate to intelligence at all.

You see, Makoni — who does not love people but pretends he does, because love is at the same time an act of courage and a commitment to other people — has been on a crusade to exclude the very same people he avows he loves and respects.

He refuses to disclose to prospective voters the real people behind his project and, except for Dumiso Dabengwa, Kudzai Mbudzi, Ibbo Mandaza and Nkosana Moyo, he denies association with even those already known to us: SABMiller, a South African Breweries company, and Citigroup, an American banking institution.

Makoni has shown a peculiar reluctance to establish a permanent relationship of genuine dialogue with the people, and serially presents himself to prospective voters like a teacher who presents himself to students he considers as his necessary opposite. Indeed he presented himself as an elitist projecting "knowledge" as a gift to be bestowed on those who know absolutely nothing. This concept corresponds to what Jean Paul Satre calls the "indigestive" or "nutritive" concept of education, in which knowledge is "fed" by the teacher to the students "to fill them up.’

Clearly, then, there is no denying that Makoni who — unable to overcome alienating intellectualism or false perceptions of reality — considers people to be abstract, isolated and unattached to this world — in short, objects. The fact of the matter is that dialogue cannot exist in the absence of love of other people: "I do not love others therefore I cannot enter into dialogue with them."

Instead, he seeks to talk to them through the human rights language of rule of law, democracy and good governance that we often hear from the Americans and the British.

And in trying to convince people of their suffering, he seeks on that basis to organise or regulate the way information enters their consciousness, their perception — information that he and he alone considers true. Thus we find Makoni trying to use the current economic hardships as a pretext for manipulation, indeed an attempt on his part to use people as docile pawns in his reckless game of political opportunism.

Makoni’s ultimate objective is to domesticate reality and to "make" his own truth from which he either excludes people from participation, or only allows them pseudo-participation, so he can organise the political process that feeds into his ambition. He tries to deceive. He takes people for granted. For instance, he promises that once he gets into power then vanhu vachakorobha mudzimba nemidzonga yenyama, vagotsvaira zvivanze nemabhanduru emuriwo!

Makoni is unable to live with others in true cooperation and solidarity. Yet he should realise that any situation in which some person or persons prevent others from engaging in processes of enquiry, participation and decision-making is one of intolerance, and that it dehumanises.

The means used are not important: to alienate other people from their own decision-making is to view them as objects. In that sense, no-one can be considered authentically human while he or she prevents others from being so. Company chief executives or board chairpersons of organisations must similarly watch out against these habits!

The reality is that in politics as in business, one cannot impose oneself or one’s ideas on others, but rather that there should be true solidarity, and that such true solidarity requires trust in people, love and genuine communication, all of which generate critical thinking about reality.

And the thinking that is concerned about reality does not take place in ivory-tower isolation but in communication with others for, for a fact, the "I" cannot exist without the "Not I"; conversely, the "Not I" depends solely on that existence.

It indeed is shocking that a person of the presumed stature of Makoni — who should be incarnating a rediscovery of the humanising vocation of the intellectual, as well as demonstrating the power of action to negate perceptions of elitism — kick-starts his ambitious political project from two platforms that make it difficult for him to reach out to the thoughts and experiences of the vast majority of prospective voters, and yet still describes himself as a man of the people.

Lastly, Makoni has been long enough in Zanu-PF to know that Zanu-PF is a set of ideas, or ideals, around which people have rallied. The ideals that characterise Zanu-PF are liberationist: self-empowerment, dignity and sovereignty.

Today Zimbabweans suffer economic hardship because we are at war with imperialists. We want to maintain a legacy. So today if President Mugabe departs from the same ideals, zvese zviya zvokuti "VaMugabe woye" zvinenge zvapera! So, in departing from the ideals of Zanu-PF, Makoni has not only abandoned the people but has also turned against them.

He, too, should know that he was created by Zanu-PF. Inhiyo yeZanu-PF. He owes his current profile to Zanu-PF. At 30, he became a Minister, courtesy of Zanu-PF, after which the party internationalised him by making him the first Executive Secretary of Sadc.

In 2005, both the party and government, including President Mugabe, vigorously lobbied and campaigned for him to become president of the African Development Bank. Perhaps that is where he got the idea of becoming president!

So for all his life, Zanu-PF has been like a hen to Makoni, a hen in the sense of huku iya inoteta, ichitsvara yofukunyura kuti nhiyo dzayo dziwane zvokudya.

But today he has rejected his own mother, and yet continues to want to feed on what the mother has hunted for all the chicks of Zimbabwe.

Ah, Makoni, surely it doesn't befit a man who has benefited from Zanu-PF, your mentor and mother, to turn against it and yet, being a chick, inevitably find yourself uchitevera panenge patsvarwa neZanu-PF uchiti chobo, chobo, chobo!

Labels: LAND REFORM, SIMBA MAKONI, ZIMBABWE

posted by MrK @ 10:43 PM