Maravi

(ZIMBABWE GUARDIAN) MDC and the art of making impossible demands

MDC and the art of making impossible demands
Frank Chita

I NEVER quite understood the Movement for Democratic Change, as a party, from the day of its inception. The MDC likes to say that another world is possible, but is never quite sure of that world, or at least fails to articulate it properly.

No one really seems to know why they are where they are: in the inclusive Government. We know how they got there - through the back door. They just know they have to be doing something; but they don't get to do it. Infact, they do everything else and not that which they are supposed to be doing. Statecraft is not written in their political blueprint.

For instance, they join the government, and then spend time opposing the same government, asking for the ouster of some of the members of that government.

Kudos to the MDC though. They have mastered one form of art: opposing, but not initiating. They also know how to make impossible demands inorder to look important and busy, but doing nothing for the people.

Rather than debate issues, the MDC has mastered the "Cloward-Piven strategy".

According to David Horowitz, who coined the expression, Cloward-Piven is "the strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis." Named after sociologists and antipoverty and voting rights activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who first elucidated it, the Cloward-Piven strategy, "seeks to hasten the fall of (a government) by overloading the ... bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse."

Like a fun-house-mirror version of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine theory, the Cloward-Piven strategy dictates that the opposition will exploit that crisis to push through alternative policies in an impossible manner.

For instance, they ask for liquidity in banks, but campaign against the printing of money and against the lifting of sanctions. They ask for the appointment of Roy Bennett to an agricultural portfolio, when Zimbabwe's liberation struggle against white settlerism was fought against the likes of Bennett - white landowners who moved blacks from their lands and pushed them to servitude and second-class citizenship.

They encourage lawlessness in the country, and then blame the police for using brute force. For instance, the beatings that Morgan Tsvangirai endured some years ago, though not justifiable, only occurred because the MDC-T party had disguised an illegal political rally as a prayer meeting. Ironically, the MDC-T party had never held a prayer meeting prior to that day, and have never held one since.

Tendai Biti illegally announced the "victory" of Morgan Tsvangirai in presidential elections and yet complained when he was arrested for causing despondency. One wonders whether any western country would have found Biti's behaviour acceptable.

Interestingly, these events have been taken up by a clutch of propagandists--from internet news reporters and radio hosts, e.g. SW Radio journalists and others, trying to question why events like that could have happened, here, in Zimbabwe, a country of milk and honey.

The madness is repeated in parliament, where heckling and booing has become the order of the day. The august House has become the theatre for such Scooby-Doo kind of comic politics; where every motion from a Zanu-PF or non-MDC-T legislator is opposed, without its merits tested.

All of this, of course, is a reactionary paranoid fantasy against anything Zanu-PF. MDC-T legislators are agents of imperial change and they are quite happy to do the bidding in an august House on the pretext of representing the masses. But the looniness of it has not stopped -- more demands keep cropping up to make the country ungovernable.

Rather than laughing off the MDC-T strategy of making the country ungovernable as a Scooby-Doo comic mystery, it is impossible to blunt its appeal or limit its impact.

It is this strategy that guides MDC-T's every move to this day; not the need to better the Zimbabwean people. Otherwise how does one explain how "a party of excellence" can fight for sanctions against its own people; and use deaths emanating therefrom, to try and gain power?

Labels: CLOWARD-PIVENT STRATEGY, COLOUR REVOLUTIONS, MDC, SHOCK DOCTRINE

posted by MrK @ 4:21 PM