Spare us the theories Biti
by Alexander Kanengoni
30/09/2010 00:00:00
THERE is something helpful about the debates that Nathaniel Manheru has started. They allow us to talk to each other across the political divide, no matter how much we may disagree. It is another critical way to embrace one another. It may also teach followers of different political parties not to resort to violence when they disagree. About a week ago, Tendai Biti allowed us an interesting glimpse not only of his mind but also that of his party.
Judging by what he said in a contribution to The Herald last week, it appears MDC-T is at last trying to be nationalistic; to shake off the burden of the Rhodesian-driven white agenda. They have no choice if they want to remain politically relevant.
You could see a serious and honest attempt by the man to try and understand where we are going in relation to where we are coming from. It is generally true what he says though, that head teachers and their assistant teachers spearheaded the armed struggle to dislodge Rhodesian settler-colonialism. But his argument that they did not have the capacity to rule immediately raises an interesting point.
If they had the capacity to accomplish such a task, which was not mean by all means, they surely could use the same capacity to run the state.
Let's be realistic, it would be wishful thinking to expect these chaps to hand over power to some "armchair revolutionaries" from London and Washington. The sort of people that Jean Paul Sartre, in his preface to Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, described as a "manufactured elite and white-washed, walking lies".
I first knew Tendai Biti in the early nineties when we were both directors at a small donor-funded film making organisation and my immediate impression of him was that he wanted to behave more white than the whites that we worked with.
And I thought that was tragic for such an intelligent young man. A year or so earlier, I had had the same sinking feeling at the Book Cafe where John Makumbe stood up to tell us the most unforgettable discriminatory incident he faced in his life was during Rhodesia in the then Gwelo, when he was mistaken for a white boy and asked to pay double for a hair-cut.
John Makumbe, our poor friend from Buhera! I had thought he would talk about how we taunted and made fun of his lot as we herded cattle in the veld. I had thought he would talk about how we shunned his lot at school, refusing to sit next to them in class until the head teacher intervened. Instead, he chose an incident where he was mistaken for a white boy and he called that discrimination! What a tragedy!
Listening to the people that Sartre refers to as walking lies: listening to them talk in their slurred voices, you get the distinct impression they expected us to walk from the bush and hand them power to run the state.
Biti gives the disappointing impression that the decolonisation process, which Fanon describes as a programme of complete disorder, did not require much intellect at all, only brow. He is obviously wrong. This is perpetuates the myth that the people involved in the process were rowdy and unschooled; the perception that is being peddled about our own war-veterans.
By the way, Amilcar Cabral and Franz Fanon that he quotes as undisputed authorities and analysts of the post-colonial African state and its class dilemmas, were guerrilla fighters themselves. Cabral was the leader of the liberation movement that dislodged Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands.
Fanon was a medical doctor with the liberation movement that dislodged French colonialism in Algeria.
It is not entirely true that liberation wars were fought and led by teachers and head teachers.
Herbert Chitepo was a lawyer. Joshua Nkomo was a trade unionist. Eddison Zvobgo was a lawyer. Edson Sithole was another lawyer. Herbert Ushewekunze was a medical doctor. There was no way that the liberation war could be fought and won without a plan and a clear agenda to rule.
The agenda was to free the people and uplift their lives. Kenneth Kaunda called his agenda Zambianisation. Julius Nyerere called his Ujamaa. If we have made mistakes in our drive to empower the people, we will correct the mistakes as we forge ahead.
We went to war to empower the people. That has always been Zanu-PF's agenda. The land reform programme was translating our agenda into practice. The current indigenisation programme is a continuation of translating that theory into action. Unfortunately for Biti, it's a programme that he found already on the table and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
The only way to empower the people for posterity is to let them control the means of production: the land, the industries and the mines.
There is nothing mystical about running the state as long as you have a clear agenda. Burkina Faso's Thomas Sankara and Ghana's Jerry Rawlings are examples of popular leaders who achieved their success on the back of clear political agendas. Everywhere in the free world, people control their economies and destiny. No one is an exception, even South Africans.
It was the clarity of our political agenda that we survived the debilitating sanctions that people like Biti were foolish enough to ask the West to impose on us. He cannot deny that. The West is still astounded we survived the vicious onslaught. Gideon Gono's printing press at the Reserve Bank stayed permanently hot to save the country from collapse. He might be of peasantry background, as indeed we all are, even those that grew up on the farms, but the fact is he is a practical man with practical solutions that saved the country.
Nigel Chanakira got a taste of his own medicine: it needed Zanu PF to pull him to safety from the jaws of Rhodesian capital.
The same shall apply to a host others that Biti alleges are victims of Zanu PF DNA even though most of them are mere window-dressers in corporate organisations they have been put as custodians of white capital. There is nothing to emulate about activities that were going on at the ZSE at the height of our economic crisis.
It became abundantly clear that the ZSE had become part of the regime change agenda. It fuelled inflation to astronomical levels by facilitating selling of millions of shares using non-existent money. Gono's wailing press was far better because it ensured the survival of the state.
Their action did the exact opposite: to bring the state down to its knees and destroy it. How can Biti call people engaged in such activities the shinning generation of the new Zimbabwean businessmen that Zanu PF denied the chance to grow? What sort of growth does he mean?
A neighbour who works for a multinational company, someone that I have never really spoken to besides the routine, good morning, came to me the other day and I was surprised. I had always known him as an ardent MDC supporter and I believe he had also, always known me as Zanu PF supporter.
A long time ago, I tried to reach out to him but I sensed his hostility and kept away. It's true, you know. Personally, I didn't mind he was MDC but he seemed to mind I was Zanu PF. That's what I thought, perhaps I was wrong.
Anyway, he came to me the other day and got straight to the heart of the matter. He said there was a crisis at their workplace because the company had brought someone; he called him a sweeper, from New Zealand to become general manager when there were better qualified local people. I didn't know what to say. "The President is right", he continued angrily.
I was dumbfounded. He threw his arms into the air. "These people never change", he said. They needed someone like our president. It's the sort of company we all would love to see taken over. A-h-a, so the eagle had finally realised it could fly?
Jacob Zuma gave a disappointing interview on SABC two days ago. He talked as if he was not the president of the ANC and South Africa. There is a point where collective decision making ends, where the leader ultimately stands up and takes responsibility and says: I want the party and the government to do this.
That is what being a leader means, not to continually defer answers to fundamental questions to some organ of the party or government. Perhaps he had no answer to the critical question of empowerment of his people. He might try to run away from the dilemma of his people's continued disempowerment but it will soon catch up with him. So Tendai Biti can save us those high-sounding pronouncements and lofty social theories. All I can do is happily remind him that the head teachers and their teachers are already implementing those theories.
We read Fanon and Cabral and many other revolutionary writers under trees and in the rain in Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique, with guns slung over our shoulders. We also read thoroughly, Karl Marx and internalised his theories.
That is when we learned that socialism is not so much about sharing wealth as it is about creating it. And that all this is predicated on the ownership and control of our resources.
Welcome aboard. But remember, you are not bringing anything that the teachers and their peasant followers don't already know.
Alexander Kanengoni is a Zimbabwean author. This article was originally published in the Herald
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