by Nathaniel Manheru
14/05/2011 00:00:00
ASK friend or foe. Just what is that grand, electrifying idea to have emerged from the recent MDC-T congress held in Bulawayo? What is it? Can someone please shed some light? Among the striking features of this otherwise colorless congress was how principal documents of that gathering soaked in the liberation ethos of Zanu-PF.
Tsvangirai's main address saluted "comrades and friends"; the congress resolutions spoke of "our umbilical cord to the struggle for the national liberation in Zimbabwe and our mandate of fulfilling the ideals of the liberation struggle".
I am sure this was quite baffling to those who had something to do with the libration struggle, something quite revolting to those who have something to do with keeping MDC firmly on the neo-colonial rail.
Which regime?
This characteristic schizophrenia runs through the same documents, principally those to do with resolutions of the congress. Among the unresolved issues is that of the party's place and role vis-a-vis Government, itself a foremost outcome of the national liberation.
To condemn or to embrace it, to stand away or with it, that seemed to be the unresolved question. I will illustrate. The party celebrates its eleven-year survival in a harsh environment of "an unloving, criminal, predatory State and political party".
In the same vein, it again celebrates "millions of Zimbabweans" that have been "butchered, tortured, traumatised and victimised at the hands of the regime".
But, which State; which regime; which has subsisted for eleven years so deserving of condemnation? That the condemnable regime embraces the GPA epoch makes the condemnation even more baffling.
Vain hope
Soon after that "celebration", the party underlines its cognisance "of the strategic importance of entering into dialogue with the regime." In that same line, there is a recognition "of the limitations of the GPA and the inclusive Government."
But, there is a clear awareness that the party has a role in the current Government, and even a claim to, and appropriation of, current Government programmes for purposes of augmenting its programme of action. I mean all the 14 action items under resolution 12 amount to pilfering from a Zanu-PF Government agenda as it has been redone under the inclusive Government, which by the way has not sired a single new idea since its inception.
I wonder how the Chief Secretary feels about this misappropriation and vulgarisation of the Government agenda by a political party! I wonder how those mindlessly hopeful Zimbabweans who see a 1789 in the MDC feel about this grand self-confession by their party that indeed an MDC-T government shall be nothing but about Zanu-PF's bequest to the inclusive Government. Maybe that is why the party is so averse to elections.
Bird or mammal?
So, does the resolution document amount to a party that has repudiated its own role in the State and in Government? Or, a party that finds itself in a new and invidious situation where it must repudiate what it is party to, in order to remain recognisable and relevant as an entity?
A party that perforce repudiates a structure whose continuation it is fighting tooth and nail to ensure and preserve, all against any suggestions of an abridging electoral process?
If the party confesses to an umbilical fastening to the liberation struggle, itself the founding ethos of the current State of Zimbabwe; confesses to a role in Government and animates it's agenda with ideas from the same State, Government or regime, whatever epithet suites it, what, apart from incompetence and equivocation, puts it apart from the current body-politic and its overall Zanu-PF derived goals?
False pedigree
That MDC-T faces a crisis of pedigree is without doubt. Equally, that this puppet party is resultantly schizophrenic is, again, beyond gainsay. Sired by the West, but seeking legitimisation in sensibilities of a people born out of a liberation struggle, it is neither surprising nor unexpected that the MDC-T seeks to gain by forgery ligitimating liberation credentials, ethos and language register. But the real test comes in upholding the values and goals of that struggle. This is where the second trait, that of schizophrenia amply shows.
One did not have to read too far to test the party's claim to "umbilical" connection and commitment to the national liberation and to the ideals of that liberation struggle.
In that respect, resolution 12 held key. Somewhere in the body of that resolution is tucked an action item which reads: "Ensure that there is meaningful broad-based empowerment of Zimbabwe through the creation of jobs and foreign direct investment as opposed to narrow and elitist indigenisation policies that promote cronyism, self-aggrandisement, clientelism and the destruction of the economy."
Next to that item are two more, both of them crucial to the party's claim to the liberation agenda. One reads: "Ensure that the administration of national resources particularly diamonds, gold, platinum and other resources benefit all the people of Zimbabwe."
Next to it and last in the list is that which reads: "Ensure that finality is brought to the land question in Zimbabwe and that there should be security of tenure, the restoration of market for land and more importantly that every Zimbabwean despite race or political affiliation is entitled to own land."
Needless to say these items in the crucial last resolution focus on indigenisation, control of natural resources and the emotive issue of land, all of which constitute the centerpiece of the liberation agenda.
To that extent, they wield key to revealing how far and how sincere the party is in engrafting its own politics onto the stem of national liberation. Let us test that.
Indigenisation fears
The first of the three crucial items does more than announce an action item; it implicitly comments on the current discourse on the same. It prefers the word "empowerment" to "indigenisation" and does actually use the two terms appositionally.
That implies and suggests a crucial difference in the way the party views this whole issue, vis-a-vis Zanu-PF, the party that authored the policy in the first place.
Ironically, the founder party of that whole policy uses both terms, not interchangeably, but sequentially for a crucial reason. Zanu-PF speaks of "indigenisation and economic empowerment" in that order, with the notion of indigenisation playing loadstar to the whole meaning of the policy.
That crucial word unambiguously spells out who the policy targets, namely that category of Zimbabweans who are in the majority in the country and were historically disadvantaged before 1980, the year of our Independence.
The sequencing thus couples the target beneficiary population to the intended action of empowerment, as well as to the sector where that action is expected. Crucially "and" is not so much a conjunction as it is a word of uni-directional complementarity. The people to be empowered must be indigenous and the empowerment must be in respect of the economy, principally its ownership and control.
The MDC-T formulation of the same proposition makes it clear that the word "empowerment" is the only one acceptable to the party, and crucially works in contradistinction and contradiction to "indigenisation" which it says is about cronyism, clientelism, self-aggrandisement and the destruction of the economy.
And, the party takes the trouble to erect semantic boundaries so the word empowerment may not run away with unintended meaning. For the party, empowerment means "creating jobs and foreign direct investment."
How this differs from Esap or any neo-liberal, structural adjustment programmes meant for Third World backwaters by the leaders of the first world and their instruments of global economic control, I honestly cannot say.
Crucially, the MDC-T definition makes it clear the party is not only repudiating the liberation struggle and it's goals; it is actually making an economic proposal of the status quo, with all its attendant racial asymmetries and inequities.
Semantic boundaries
And with semantic boundaries so set in the direction of preservation of the status quo - a Rhodesian status quo - the other two matters can only fall neatly in line.
The MDC does not want control of strategic minerals; it merely seeks their "administration" for the benefit of "all the people of Zimbabwe".
It cannot be difficult to point out that "all" and "broad-based" constitute a semantic cluster.
Is anything being suggested which is crucially different from "the creation of jobs and foreign direct investment"? Anything crucially different from the beguiling imprecision on social groups as they have evolved over our troubled, racially truncated history?
And does the item genuinely refer to diamonds and other minerals, or it mentions other minerals preemptively to deflect any criticism on singling out the diamond sub-sector, itself the only one in the mining sector where indigenisation and economic empowerment has made quantifiable gains?
Noteworthy, the resolutions came a few days before the expiry of a Government deadline on mining conglomerates to submit their proposals on indigenisation. Significantly, the resolution was indifferent to this deadline. Instead, it seemed to proffer a counterpoint, or a crucial outlet to those for whom the indigenisation bell tolled.
Security of tenure
As we all know, the issue of land is key to the liberation project. It is a key test to any claimants to the liberation ethos. Again the MDC-T resolution betrays clear ambiguities to this its supposed heirloom from the liberation struggle. The notion of "finality" in respect of this cornerstone issue would seem to suggest a whiff of radicalism far exceeding that imbuing the rival Zanu-PF. Until one gets to three crucial phrases: security of tenure, market for land and every Zimbabwean owning land.
The first two are interrelated and do counterpoise the idea of leaseholds, with the State owning title to land, which Zanu-PF advocates. The MDC-T has always agitated for the return to the dispensation of title deeds, using the specious argument of agricultural funding resting on securitisation of borrowings through such deeds.
This, they argue, unlocks value on land, in the process creating a market for land. And markets are where goods and services meet demand, are they not? Except not all goods in such markets come from voluntary suppliers. Some come from involuntary owners who are themselves delivered to the market, willy-nilly, life, assets, prospects and all. They are called defaulters in simple English.
Two ownerships
The strategy is quite clear: take full advantage of endemic vulnerabilities of the new farmer to simply throw him and her to the deep end of the market so the land that he got from so much blood, escapes from him through the quiet logic of markets.
Who in this world would then accuse the MDC-T of having reversed land reforms? Who? And the seemingly generously wide reference to an unconditional accessing of land for all "despite race" has an in-built menacing meaning, not now but in due course. Why should a child of the liberation struggle obssess about "race" in that open way yet he is discomfited by a reference to race, which is so loudly implicit in indigenisation?
Why should a party which rejects security of tenure for indigenous people in the national economy, helpfully push for the same notion in respect of the land issue? If ownership and securing that ownership in respect of land does not worry the MDC-T, why is the generalisation and extension of the same ownership principle so hair-raising and "economy destroying"?
With the clustering of FDI, job-creation for natives, administering instead of controlling, securitisation and restoring land market, a whole worldview emerges to characterise this wayward claimant to the liberation struggle.
It is a worldview of a colonial status quo in which blacks remain job-seekers, battening on margins of economic processes that are taking place in their country. The only crucial difference the MDC-T will bring to this status quo will be that this time, there will be full-time pseudo-governing cheerleaders to glamourise it all!
Hegemonising ideas
So, far from siring a grand idea, the MDC-T congress was about savaging already existing grand ideas, including those already realised on the ground. When Zanu-PF met in Mutare last year, its grand ideas rang loud and clear, rattling all those who stand opposed to, and threatened by those ideas. Significantly, as the MDC-T spouted vacuous resolutions, the corporate world which the MDC-T claims as its own, was a worried entity.
It worried not about what was going on in Bulawayo. Rather, it worried about what had been decided on in December 2010 in Mutare by Zanu-PF. In other words, while MDC-T was busy moulding a pseudo-event, Zanu-PF was quietly exerting governing pressures against those standing in the way of the realization of liberation ideals. That was the crucial difference between custodians of a legacy and pretenders. No one need wonder who wields the hegemonic idea in Zimbabwe now.
So what grand idea salvaged the MDC-T congress? Simply none! After seriously threatening itself with consuming internal violence, the MDC-T could not have been in a position to think anything at all.
What we witnessed was a congress by a self-preoccupied party. Inevitably, all its perorations - where they were intelligible - were expressly inward and introverted, or meant to hide that inwardness bereft of introspection.
In the run-up to the congress, the party had shown its givenness to gratuitous violence, both against its own and outwardly against anyone it read as Zanu-PF. Graphic images had been captured by its own captive media, itself an indication that the violence had been mounted on too grand a scale to be tucked under, indeed had gone so runaway to be kept invisible.
It owed to Zanu-PF propaganda that for the entire duration of the congress, the party's leadership was still trying to exorcise the stalking demon of intra- and inter-party violence. Let it not be forgotten that the party had invested heavily on projecting itself as a victim of outwardly generated violence, an image which the month preceding the congress had done superbly much to banish. Its handlers were left gasping, more so against the much-hyped Extraordinary Summit of Sadc, set for Windhoek, Namibia.
Extended thought
The second major handicap to the party's ability to conceive grand ideas remains inherent to its nature and circumstances. Without itself having been born around a crucial grand idea, MDC-T remains a creature of whimsical circumstances wrought by the fluctuating fortunes of those whose grand idea it was to found it.
From being conceived as an instrument for dislodging a liberation movement, MDC-T has been mutating into many things and forms since it's founding in 1999. From the loose structures of riotous urban mobs it was at it's founding, the quisling party for a while became Chiluba's trade union-based MMD look-alike, before sloughing off that identity for something akin to an ANC/Democratic Alliance in-between.
A little later when it was deluded by Khama and the goading West into thinking an armed struggle was both possible and viable in Zimbabwe, the MDC-T sought to fashion itself after Renamo, with all this effort legitimised under the so-called Congress of Democrats. Today MDC-T is not quite sure whether it looks up to Kenya or to boiling Libya for a model and inspiration.
However one looks at it, the party cannot think. It can only act on thoughts already developed elsewhere. However one looks at it, MDC-T can never settle for a definite role; it can only shift between chairs as it adjusts continually to ever-changing requirements from abroad. It remains congenitally tied to ideas of the sponsoring Other, an extended Thought!
Let me sharpen the point contrastively. What made the 1789 French political activity pass for a revolution was not that the person of Louis XVI was guillotined. Rather, it was that France killed the idea of kingship to catapult itself into an era of republicanism.
A whole movement of scholars had done tremendous work to turn the human eye away from God and the King - the latter being viewed traditionally as the former's deputy - to the People as the new Deity.
Then on, France would look to a new Sovereign called the People, never up to a metaphysical Being called God as setter of governing rules, or His proximate face by way of Kings! Before then, man could no imagine how else he could be governed without reference to the ten commandments, king and God.
Only after Lafayette and Robspiere did France know a new god called the people, a new setting for power called the Assembly. The French Revolution was thus founded on a new locus of power, founded on a grand idea which ploughed the old under, while creating a whole new ethos of power and governance.
If the French had contended themselves with merely killing a king, they would have simply got another one, as indeed had happened in previous times in epoch of monarchs. The point of departure came when it replaced regal institutions with something else.
The grand idea
Similarly, the two liberation movements - Zapu and Zanu - were propelled by the grand idea of bringing about national liberation, itself crucially a proximate goal. The ultimate goal was ensuring real, all-round power for the oppressed masses of Zimbabwe, starting with the recovery of their land.
The idea amounted to a seismic shift quite different from simply chasing out the white man or administering affairs of the state as is being suggested by the MDC-T. While the MDC carped about readiness to govern, the crucial question remained that of governing under which grand idea.
It could never have been about the so-called "change", itself a standard noun for anyone wishing to come to power. Whilst the MDC thinks it invented the word "change", little does it know that the same was Zanu-PF mantra between 1980 and 1985.
I recall President Mugabe in 1980 telling students at Hartzell High School the following: "Change, change, change, forever change! You dare not resist change, for to resist change is to resist life itself. Only change is permanent."
No one has put the issue any clearer, any better ever since. Not even the MDC. But it does underline that change cannot itself be the grand idea, let alone a peculiarity of any given political party.
Who needs security sector reforms?
Equally, the idea of a "new Zimbabwe" could not have been the grand idea. Simply, that phrase means absolutely nothing at all. It is worse when there is no grand idea proffered around which the much vaunted new Zimbabwe will be born, or old Zimbabwe get reborn.
In any case, both change and new Zimbabwe cannot be constructed on a desiderata of an existing inclusive Government and still remain new, let alone exclusive to MDC. Crucially, the MDC-T's pet project has been what it terms security sector reforms. This is meant to nebulously refer to its proposals at dismantling structures set up to defend the revolution soon after its inauguration.
But there is a fundamental question that begs. Whose idea is security sector reforms? Who needs it? Surely it cannot be an MDC which is ready to govern? It cannot be given that with winning an election comes the transfer of all instruments of governing, not least the security structures.
Surely the MDC cannot agitate for what it stands to receive as a natural consequence of its electoral victory, which it claims is certain. We saw the same in 1980 when Zanu-PF won, against all odds.
One is amused to see naive newspaper spilling so much ink on suggestions that Zimbabwe's security sector is set to be reformed by the Sadc facilitator. Really? I thought Zimbabwe is actually shaping South Africa's security sector, all in the spirit of capacitating a sister liberation movement?
Does anyone give a thought to this matter, let alone to the desirability of a foreign power, however friendly for now, playing such a role uninvited? Moulding security structures of another country is something one does after defeating that country, is it not?
Not meant to govern
The third major handicap for the MDC flows from the second one. It relates to the total absence of leadership in the party. Bereft of grand founding ideas, MDC-T needed neither an educated leadership nor a mature cadreship, both at its founding and after. It is significant that the MDC-T leadership came from the shop floor; significant that it's driving membership came from mere students with no experience or maturity to take over and govern the republic.
They were never meant to govern in their own right. They were meant for graduated chaos through which Zanu-PF would web toppled. What would then follow would be a dependent structure aided by "a massive hand-holding", itself a crucial imagery from MDC's handlers.
When stiff challenges in the country in 2008 brought power within reach of the outfit, significantly the model became one of integrating MDC-T personnel with the so-called progressive wing in Zanu-PF, both to steady this political fluke, while imparting to it governing legitimacy.
The wish in MDC-T for a divided Zanu-PF, from which it is hoped will emerge a cooperating wing with which to govern Zimbabwe, bears out this crippling handicap which MDC picks from birth.
Night of long knives.
The immediate result of this is the dogfight for leadership in MDC-T, fatally against a looming general election. Months leading to, and crucially Bulawayo itself, found the party in throes of a vicious leadership scramble, the worst ever experienced, to quote a senior MDC-T actor confiding to Zanu-PF actors.
In fact far more serious than the bloody conflicts which had taken place in the provinces were the nerve-wrecking, behind-the-scene intrigues which marked off Thursday and Friday as unparalleled nights of long knives for the party's leadership.
During those two crucial days, the whole structure see-sawed between jockeying factions. "It was tough, very tough! They could have wiped us off had it not been for the fact that we had to work really hard on Thursday night. I never realised I had more enemies in my own party than I have in Zanu-PF. In fact I have friends in Zanu-PF."
These were words from a senior member of the party, wounds bleeding fresh from the Congress. How he had "worked really hard" to turn matters around, he never really quite said!
Ballot bought and stollen
But his was just one view. The other came from an extremely embittered don-cadre. Angry that tables were turned against him on that crucial Thursday, the don cryptically remarked: "I have never seen such evil corruption and downright treachery."
He was referring to how a rival faction had moved with "sacks and sacks" of money on the night of that crucial Thursday, to simply buy support, thereby causing the needling upset. That provided clue on how the first official had worked "really hard" to bring about a turnaround. Indeed none other than the leader of the party itself was quoted complaining about how a number of Western embassies, crucially two, had deposited huge sums of money into accounts of a preferred rival faction.
"They are dividing my party", Tsvangirai complained soon after. If the MDC-T has in the past complained about a stolen ballot, here it was now complaining loudly about a bought ballot! How does a party which cannot grant itself a clean ballot ever demand one, let alone promise it to Zimbabweans? With that kind of mischief and the means to fund it, it is clear Zanu-PF as to gird for a dirty, corrupt poll! This is what the whole issue about ZEC is all about.
Young Turks
In all these narratives, the recurring pronoun is a distancing "they" to accusingly denote organised internal antagonisms within the party. That the MDC-T was going to congress badly fractured needed no divination. It had to be divided, what without a grand idea to play glue to its membership each of whom was obeying big ego and vaulting ambitions. Much worse, it was a party meeting under an ominous cloud of an externally desired and designed leadership change.
Let no one forget Ambassador Dell's judgment and recommendation, a judgment which the West largely accepted. The issue of Tsvangirai leaving leadership of MDC-T is no longer an issue for debate. What remains at issue is the advisability of dropping Tsvangirai at this crucial stage.
The consensus is that it is not; that the man is synonymous with the MDC brand and thus must be suffered until after the crucial elections have come and are gone. If MDC under Tsvangirai wins them, as is unlikely, then the West must have enough leverage for massive hand-holding to make sure the damages from Tsvangirai's poor judgement are mitigated.
If he loses, as is most likely, a new leadership which has been waiting in the wings will then step forward to challenge him, easily reminding him he has lost the contest from 2000. The change strategy in Bulawayo was thus not so much to rock the boat as to prepare it for eventual rocking.
That meant paring down support structures from Tsvangirai as he retains lonely, insecure presidency, while preparing ground for the young Turk who cannot be immediately rebranded in time for the impending poll. Hence the least understood phenomenon of a vicious struggle for the control of positions just below presidency, right down to the village.
America's anointees
The media mistakenly focused on immediate challenge to Tsvangirai's presidency as if that was ever probable or desirable. Or on poor Mudzuri as if he carried an larger prospects or clout both as an individual and as a figurehead of a faction.
No one focused on Dell and those he wished could rise internally to replace the intellectually disabled Tsvangirai, and therefore how the whole congress marked a huge step forward for these American anointees. Then the media would have understood why seemingly junior leaders began and ended up stronger brands than the leader of the party.
These junior leaders, especially two, invested heavily on own images, with their austere portraits following every delegate from the conference venue through to the dining hall, indeed from the conference venue right before the toilet seat where each delegate at one moment or the other, would sit otherwise in idle contemplation amidst all sorts of strange emissions, had it not been for these portraits bearing down on them.
Strange radicalism
Cape Town? Well, another crucial hint at what is so wrong with this party, so soon after its supposedly renewing congress. Soon after the Bulawayo congress, Tsvangirai left for Cape Town, all in the name of the Southern African chapter of the World Economic Forum. There, the MDC leader created shock waves by coming down heavily on the side of indigenization. Indigenization was not about nationalization; I was about value, he told his astonished, predominantly western audience.
He went further. Indigenization was government policy and would not entail any compensation to adjusting corporates; the subsoil assets would be Zimbabwe's contribution to its 51 percent stake, again he told his audiences, all well aghast. Then came the big one: why was there no metal market on the African continent, itself home to most base metals. He buttressed his naughty point by underlining he had been a miner for well over a decade and half! Who would contest that?
Which takes me to a crucial question: why didn't the MDC leader use the platform of his Congress to give us such clarity, indeed to immortalize this very crucial matter through an appropriate resolution? Why would a leader with such clear views, such authoritative experience in mining, not steer congress debate towards this grand idea he seems to articulate so well? Why the discrepancy?
Did the spirit of the Lord visit him soon after his party disbanded, empty of grand ideas? Or could it be that something had greatly upset him, spitefully prompting him to take a strong position against western capital?
Destabilisation of his party through chequed factionalism sponsored by western embassies at the congress? I don't know. Whatever it is or was, could very well tell us whether MDC-T is in theory ready to govern or to grovel. Icho!
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