Maravi

Zanu-PF's possible demise

Zanu-PF's possible demise
By Editor
Sunday May 18, 2008 [04:00]

President Robert Mugabe’s warning against violence may have come a little too late but it’s nevertheless important and should be welcomed and supported. We agree with President Mugabe when he says “support comes from persuasion not from pugilism… let us build genuine support for the party and such support cannot come through coercion or violence…”

The violence that is going on in Zimbabwe cannot be a legitimate tool for anyone claiming to be pursuing a just and democratic cause. It must be brought to an end by all the political parties in Zimbabwe.

And turning to President Mugabe’s warning about a possible demise of Zanu-PF in the forthcoming presidential runoff if the party leadership and the membership don’t change the approach, we say it is good to begin by recognising the scale of their disastrous performance in the March 29 elections and of their problem.

The causes of Zanu-PF’s disastrous electoral performance are many. But we would like to identify some of them. First, Zanu-PF became associated increasingly with the most disagreeable messages and thoughts. Much of that linkage might have been unjustified, but since it was what people thought – what people will think – it must be appreciated as a deeply felt distaste, rather than momentary irritation. They cannot dismiss it as mere false perception. Zanu-PF was linked to harshness: thought to be uncaring about the people’s economic hardships.

Second, they abandoned almost completely, and as President Mugabe correctly pointed out, the qualities of loyalty and the bonds of the party, without which a party effectively ceases to exist. Passions about the future of their party and their country rightly fired people up, but wrongly led them to attack and despise their colleagues. Part of it was egotistical.

They must rediscover – before June 27 – the old instincts that led Zanu-PF members to support one another and to rally around. Loyalty was not a secret weapon: it was because it was so visible in public, and reinforced in private, that it was so effective. The impact of disunity upon them is clear to see. As they head for June 27, they must learn again to display the camaraderie and common purpose that are fundamental to a party’s prospects.

Third, they were thought to be arrogant and out of touch. Much of it may have been no more than personal mannerisms that grated on the public after years in office. Some of it was insensitivity. And when people looked at the composition of Zanu-PF, they thought it too elderly, or too vulgar, or too out of touch in vocabulary and perceptions, or in some other way, unfamiliar and unrepresentative.
Such distasteful perceptions can endure and do them damage for a long time.

As President Mugabe correctly observed, they should face these issues head-on and deal with them.

The last five years or so profoundly disappointed their supporters and disgusted many others. And those who were in Zanu-PF leadership and in government positions bear a particular responsibility.

People need a rest from them, and they need time to reflect and listen and come to understand one another better than they have of late. They certainly need to do a lot about themselves for them to stand a chance on June 27. They need better and improved organisation. They need to spread their appeal and attract different sorts of people to vote for them.

They need to take a fresh look into the new circumstances, in the country’s altered political map. The wheel of fortune turns and that which once appeared fresh, with the passing of time, goes to seed. There will also be need to take a deeper look and analyse the political history of their country.

Since political independence in 1980, the Zimbabwean body politic has been going through a Machiavellian moment, muddling through a soul-searching process of finding a widely acceptable political order beyond the country’s colonial heritage and meeting obstacles and opportunities along the way.

Against this muddling through background in search of political order, two salient issues have been at the forefront of Zimbabwean politics: national unity and democracy. The dialectical relationship between these two issues is central to the understanding of Zimbabwean politics.

Democracy is a much more important human ideal to strive for than national unity. The latter is not a human ideal, it is a matter of political expediency in the struggle for political power. To suggest that national unity is more important than democracy, is tantamount to making a historical conversion that alters the cause and purpose of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle.

National unity is a post-independence phenomenon in Zimbabwean politics without inherent virtues. The substantive meaning of national unity within the context of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe should be seen against the background of the quest for democracy. Without this context, it becomes misleading to suggest that there is something inherently sacrosanct about national unity. National unity must be a dialectical result of competing parties under common broad-based democratic constitutional rules.

Since independence, notwithstanding the tenuous multiparty provisions of the Lancaster Constitution, the Zimbabwean body politic characteristically lacked tolerant value premises, nor did it have functional constitutional qualities and mechanisms for accommodating more than on political party and national leader as a matter of serious national unity.

This problem was vividly demonstrated on May 27, 1989 by the then Secretary of the Women’s League, now the Vice-President of Zimbabwe, Joyce Mujuru who, addressing a Zanu-PF women’s demonstration against the formation of opposition Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM) by Edgar Tekere, said: “… in African custom, the father was the head of the house. If anything went wrong, a child could not complain to the father, but would seek other ways of doing so … You’ll never get a child telling his father to step down because he has failed to run the affairs of the house, but there are always ways of dealing with their problems. Even in a marriage, there is no family without its problems but there are ways to solve them.”

To suggest that the presidency of a nation is metaphorically equivalent to fatherhood in a family, and that citizens are equivalent to children, is a dangerous form of paternalism fundamentally in conflict with the possibility of democracy in a modern political system. Mujuru’s characterisation and application of African custom is anachronistic and false and yet it has been part of the case used, largely by politicians, for national unity in Zimbabwe.

The case has been based on a failure to appreciate that the price of modern political order is calculated on the basis of human rights, and not obscure customs of convenience. One such necessary human right is the right to form and join political associations.

During the days of Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), blacks in Zimbabwe were denied the right to form political associations. It is in this context that political parties, which later fought successfully for independence, such as Zanu and Zapu, were banned, while other smaller parties, such as Bishop Abel Muzorewa’s United African National Council (UANC) had their activities severely curtailed.

For Zimbabweans to experience the totality of political independence, it is necessary that they have the right to form political associations since this is precisely what they were denied for almost a century and because political freedom is the basis of all other freedoms. To suggest that political participation should only be meaningfully possible within the context of the machinery of Zanu-PF is tantamount to saying that what is good for Zanu-PF is good for everyone, a suggestion which is patently false as far as what is known about the diversity of the human condition goes.

The fundamental problem in the struggle for Zimbabwe was one of racism and not democracy as such. The basic ingredients for an institutional framework for national democracy were already present in Rhodesia despite, or because of, its racism. The existence of such a framework, which was largely due to intra-white democracy explains why Zimbabwe may be different from other African countries such as Angola which, like Zimbabwe, waged armed resistance to colonialism.

There are two possible explanations for the unsatisfactory performance of Zanu-PF on the question of democracy. The first is that, after independence in 1980, the pre-independence nationalism movement in Zimbabwe abandoned the goal of the struggle for democracy in favour of an ill-defined quest for national unity. We say ill-defined because it was based on the desire for a one party state of one form or another – de jure or de facto – and thus the concentration, rather than the broadening of power in the hands of a few.

The nationalist leadership obtained this type of national unity with the merger of Zanu and Zapu in 1987. While this was hailed as an achievement of national unity, the more honest fact is that the achievement was of unity between two parties which, although they played a decisive role in the struggle for independence of Zimbabwe, do not ipso facto represent everyone.

The political, cultural and economic interests of the Zimbabwean nation are too complex and by far larger than similar interests in Zanu and Zapu combined. The failure to realise this constitutes part of the explanation why Zanu-PF’s performance has been seen by some citizens to be unsatisfactory in that it has sought to restrict rather than broaden democracy.

Where as democracy in Rhodesia was racially defined and restricted to the whims and caprices of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front, there has been a tendency after independence to define democracy in terms of unity, peace and development under the guidance of one political party, Zanu-PF.

This failure to define national unity in broad terms has led to the alienation of many Zimbabweans who would otherwise support Zanu-PF particularly because of its contribution to the liberation struggle. What this means is that Zanu-PF has up to now not come up with a viable, non-racial, policy of national reconciliation which can broaden democracy in Zimbabwe outside monopoly politics.

This left many problems of accommodation still pending which have now come to hound Zanu-PF. There are still unresolved questions of accommodation between black and white populations and within Zanu-PF itself and other political parties like MDC that have emerged.

It is negative conservatism to assume and believe that any one party can ever have the final and perpetual solution to all problems of any social system. Such conservatism has no existential basis.
Cultural and political diversity is uniquely Zimbabwean and many citizens cherish this heritage to a point where it is futile to seek to alter this history on grounds of contrived political expediency.

June 27 is not far away and it will be interesting to see what Zanu-PF can do in this short period to alter the balance of political forces and win the presidential runoff. President Mugabe’s analysis of Zanu-PF’s problems is correct but partially so. And what is more important are the solutions they have to these challenges. They are indeed facing a very formidable opposition, one that is very well supported politically and financially by imperialism.

This is not different from what the Americans did in Nicaragua to remove the Sandinistas from power. And it is also not different from their activities against Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales in Venezuela and Bolivia respectively. This is a matter of fact, imperialism has taken advantage of just grievances of the Zimbabwean people to take control and direct the affairs of that country once again. There are lessons to be learnt from this. We hope other countries are following this very closely.

It’s clear to us that the best defence against imperialism is to operate in the most democratic way with unquestionable respect for human rights and maximum sensitivity to the concerns of the people.

Labels: ZANU-PF, ZIMBABWE

posted by MrK @ 3:57 AM