Maravi

(NEWZIMBABWE) The high-noon of ever changing semantics

The high-noon of ever changing semantics
10/10/2011 00:00:00
by Nathaniel Manheru

Forget the ongoing operations to subdue Sirte, Gaddafi's hometown. That is a sideshow, a real smokescreen meant to blind you to real developments which not only misshape Libya's future, but are sure to expose the real motives behind that war so gloriously waged in the name of the long oppressed and suffering Libyan people.

Needless to say this magnitude called the "Libyan people" has since been jettisoned, as a new high-stakes game unfolds, more in Europe and its ornate boardrooms where no cracked African feet ever trod, can ever tread, than on the sands of Africa's Libya.

As with all imperialist revolutions, our time is up, much like a used condom. The morning after a bloody war waged in our name, we wake up completely unwanted, firmly penned in the kraal of silence and insignificance.

The day of Heritage Oil PLC

Inching to the centre of smouldering Libya is a new persona: all white, all European, all business and quite oily! Last time I disclosed that the French have moved in swiftly to translate their hot bombs of war into full barrels of rich oil.

On that one, they moved faster than embattled Cameron's Britain, something the British have been anxious to even out. Well, they now have, achieving this with archetypal British resourcefulness! Britain's Heritage Oil PLC has now acquired a 51 percent stake in Libya's Benghazi-based Sahara Oil Services Holdings Ltd, all for a paltry US$19,5m.

The fallen Libyan oil company was formed in 2009, and now boasts foreign parentage well before it qualifies for corporate kindergarten! And its parentage was ceded by the TNC before the war was won, before Gaddafi had fallen, indeed before Tripoli had a Government.

From mercenary to deal fixer

If that does not shock you, how about the following detail? Well, Heritage used one John Holmes, an ex-SAS commando recruited by the NTC as part of mercenaries who helped with the war effort against Gaddafi! But to all of us lesser beings, dependent on Western media networks for information, it was Gaddafi who was using black mercenaries from African countries, including Zimbabwe.

The NTC, we were made to believe, was a mere victim of African mercenaries, a claim that set the stage for the lynching of black migrant workers who had broken their backs to build Libya, all in readiness for coalition bombs!

They get the money; they get the oil. We get a war; we get lynched; we get horizontal racism from equally servile Arab Libyans who now swap solidarity of the oppressed for animosity of blacks. We Africans!

Baneful legacy of Blair

This takes me to the subject of the week, namely the treachery of language and terminology in an environment of fast-paced politics. In such an environment, meaning becomes volatile and one must strive to keep pace.

To be a bit more technical, a fraught political environment always stretches the semantic range of words, creating a new situation where same words end up undermining the very cause that coined them, while propping the cause against which they were founded and ranged.

It is one legacy the world gets from the 1996 New Labour, Blairite Revolution where empty ideological jars are filled with the opponent's ideals, only homely rebranded. Tony Blair ascended to the throne on the ideological chariot of sleepy Conservatives. The message was very clear: New Labour is old Conservatives made more efficient and malleable through hybridised politics that borrow from any, every tradition.

This blend politics is what Fukuyama called the end of history. It buried old-style politics and politicians who believed in erecting Chinese walls between causes, between ideologies, indeed between parties.
The era of pseudo-events

My interest is language and how it is redeployed to accommodate these hybridised, opportunistic politics. Let us not forget that the MDC formations are bastardised scions of this kind of politics, which is why to understand Tony Blair and his New Labour, is to grasp what MDC formations try to do with clownish incompetence.

Keep in mind always that one abiding hallmark of this type of politics is imaging, branding, and mediased communication dominated by empty sound bites which become substitutes for real policy and ideology.

Thus in terms of such politics, you visualise yourselves as fighting "dictatorship" in a power-sharing set-up you are a part of; you support indigenisation that retains all corporate power in whites, while giving "empowered" blacks jobs only; you want beneficiaries of land reforms to have title deeds, while you stand opposed to land reforms themselves! You hunt with the hounds while running with the hares.

Similarly, the craving of a good and swaying image absurdly forces you to produce an "autobiography" authored by another person, indeed to launch memoirs without implying closure to your checkeredpolitical career, whether this stems from your own sense of accomplishment, or from hopeless defeat you seek to perfume.

The wish to be always in the headlines forces you to build fanfare on the most mundane. Such as turning the departure of your vice for another session in chemotherapy into a loud fanfare. It is called creating pseudo-events, all to impart industry to idleness, to impart consequence to the inane and flippant.

Remarkable transposition

This week, one publication reported that next week MDC-T's Eddie Cross will table a motion in Parliament calling on Government to "nationalise" all alluvial diamond mines and deposits. A second tier to that motion is reportedly burdened on another MDC-T MP, one Musundire who will seek to force a review of Indigenisation law so "a number of issues are clarified to allow the Government departments to share the same views on the policy".

U-uuh? A white MDC-T MP pushing for nationalisation? U-ugh? A white MDC-T MP pushing for nationalisation, together with his black counterpart who wants the policy on Indigenisation reviewed? Is this not a remarkable transposition of roles?

The race which became a rich class

I don't want to sound racist. Equally, I don't want to skirt around a crucial point for fear of being labelled a racist. After all, I maintain that given our history and material conditions as blacks, we are all incapable of being racists. Racism needs wealth to be born, wealth whose distribution is racially skewed. How does a man who owns nothing sing the virtue of his famished colour? Or deride the colour that glistens because it is materially well backed to full glory?

I have maintained that the one legacy we have from settler colonialism is that it created for us an owning class which shares a colour, created for us a colour which owns. Conversely, it impoverished and blocked a class, indeed barred a colour from becoming an owning class. That way race and class became interchangeable. I can't be blamed for that reality which was created by white settlers here, indeed which was suffered by my dark, black impoverished forebears.

Eddie Cross the socialist!

Today, we the aftermath of that racialised political economy stand in good or bad stead vis-a-vis prospects and resource ownership simply by dint of our colour and what it has been made to portend in the overall colour-scheme of colonialism. In post-independence Zimbabwe, the colour code rules, defining and governing one's life chances.

Now, this white MP called Eddie Cross - ex-failed Beira Corridor Group chairman - wants diamond fields nationalised, itself a "verb" from a socialist ethos! Similarly but contrastively, a black MP from depressed Chitungwiza, itself a dormitory haven created by the Rhodesians for disempowered black hordes to which he belongs, wants the policy of Indigenisation which is specifically designed to overthrow his baneful colour fate, wants that policy reviewed and revised, ostensibly to get "government departments to share the same views on the policy"! Food for thought.

When Zanu PF coughs

I pick on another matter, this time related to President Mugabe. The issue of succession of President Mugabe, we are told, has become national and thus should matter beyond Zanu PF. How so? Surely a Zanu PF unsure and likely to be destabilised by its own unclear succession policy must be a huge opportunity for MDC formations to grab power? Why want to help sort out Zanu PF succession mess?

How does the succession imbroglio of a dwindling party to which you stand staunchly opposed, become your concern, you who claim to be on the rise, who claim to have become truly national, to be set on an overwhelming endorsement by the voter? Does that not suggest you have no fate of your own, except that deriving from Zanu PF through whose succession cough you immediately catch a life-threatening sneeze?

Is this not an acknowledgment, albeit backhanded, that Zanu PF remains dominant and shaping, indeed that Zanu PF carries the fate of the nation, in which case what befalls it decides the fate of all? Of course the obverse to that is an acknowledgement and confession of your own puniness, your own effeteness, as a non-force utterly incapable of forcing history. Again, I leave that for now.

Awesome electability

Third, the issue of President Mugabe's age. It is a fact that President Mugabe is 87-plus. It is not a fact that death favours the old, always.

There are young, over-ambitious politicians who are unwell, yet hide behind young age to create an illusion of longevity. Professor Moyo broached that matter, to acute discomfort from those we know. The equation between age and death, young age and wellness, age and the imperative of succession, young age and fitness to rule, is thus a false one.

I doubt that when Zanu PF chose a leader, it considered the least mortal. This falls within the province of God, and let no frail man pretend.

Our constitution is very clear on the issue of age-related incapacitation. All incapacitation, including mental incapacitation, is enough ground for retirement, according to our law. Incapacitation as a medical condition, never as a political wish. And the best way to test that is a stethoscope, not vaulting ambition of the other.

You have this whole discourse on the President's health, a discourse so politically desperate to the point of seeking to proscribe the candidature of the President electorally! It is a desperate bid to technically knock out the President, all stemming from his awesome electability.

Culpable ignorance

Let's take the argument a little further, so we see whose cow is gored. If old age, itself a function of inexorable time, is culpable by Zimbabwe's exacting political standards, what is the status and fate of ignorance which cannot be blamed on time, which need not be inexorable, which is a function of capacity. Let's talk about that.

The MDC-T leader is a mere Form Four chap. I have not been privileged to check the fullness of his O-Level certificate. And the scholastic yardstick relates to one's mental make-up, itself a matter of capacity firmly falling within one's control, unlike time which, by the way, also takes toll, arguably takes greater toll, on a vegetative, vegetating mind!

We have many politicians who have gone back to school in later life, including, significantly Tsvangirai's vice? Why has not Tsvangirai improved his intellectual capacity, to be fit to govern? Surely it is a fairer question to pose than to ask
Mugabe to stop time in order to remain young?

Today we seek to glamourise ignorance simply because it afflicts a man we support, or can't be found in a man we oppose. Are we not more helpful to our leaders and ourselves by nudging the modestly educated to improve themselves, indeed by insisting on sound education on all those who aspires to lead?

When the devil beatifies

Another related matter is that of legacy, again President Mugabe's legacy. The argument is that Mugabe must give up power now to protect his legacy. Which legacy? When did that legacy begin, when did it end? What is its life span? When should it end? How was it made? How is it unmade? Who defines it? Who proclaims it?

I find it very strange that Mugabe's opponents - by politics, by ambitions - appear the ones wielding the beatification rod. The MDC leader is fond of telling the world he wants to protect Mugabe's legacy, and the way to protect that legacy is for him to leave presidency and politics to... eh HIM!!!!! Much like the rebellious Satan telling God to please die quickly kuti umambo hwenyu husvike!

MDC is trying to tell us Mugabe's legacy is best protected by a Mugabe who does not govern, who does not contest against the MDC, a Mugabe who places and leaves the fate of the Zimbabwean struggle in the hands of those who have been created to oppose it!

I have always thought the President's legacy is best assured by how well, the President persistently and consistently pursues the ideals of the liberation struggle which defines us as a people. Not by how quickly he capitulates to the MDC, thereby surrendering to the same Rhodesia he fought against only yesterday.

Meaning, the area of contest

We expect MDC which fears the candidature of the President to peddle such cajolling arguments. It is when elements within Zanu PF begin to embrace the same argument, the same "verb" of legacy, that one begins to worry. How does a party talk about the legacy of its own leader without implying closure to his leadership career?

Legacies, like memoirs, reflect on past deeds, past accomplishments of a career rounded up and closed. A legacy is not a five-year plan, a things-to-do proposition.

We need to mind our language, to be wary of a strange vocabulary which the enemy donates to us, both to smuggle his own agenda, and to incapacitate and blackmail us.

It is very easy to slide into a vocabulary of the enemy, to imply capitulation by what we say and how we say it. Politics require a language. Mobilisation requires the deployment of words, precise words that describe, justify and galvanise. These cannot be words of the other, or words whose precise meaning we have lost, or does not belong to us.

To a great extent, the contestation which will decide the fate of parties shall be more semantic than programmatic. This is what explains the Cross paradox, the Musundure contradiction.

The war Rhodesians are not ready for

Cross embraces nationalisation in the forlorn hope of an MDC win or installation, Libyan style. Two things to such an unlikely eventuality, give the MDC gooseflesh. Where Indigenisation will have empowered blacks by way of land and mines, a successor white-run but black-led government of the day, would then have to summarily expropriate those black beneficiaries of Zanu PF empowerment programme.

They know what that means. It means a racial war, a second bush war as the resultant political set-up will have turned out to be a blatant recall of the same settler regime, unmitigated by any form of governance symbolism.

The MDC will have won elections but will have lost stability and legitimacy. It would have to reverse land reforms, reverse the empowerment programme through a war of clear racial overtones. The white element running the MDC has no stomach for a second war.
Reversibility of land reforms

It is least bothered about land and the burden of restoring white land rights. Presently title of all acquired land reposes in the State through the 99-year leases which can be varied, rescinded or cancelled on many grounds.

That means whoever controls the State through Government, automatically receives title to all acquired land on which Africans have been resettled. It is very easy to reverse land reforms in a post-Zanu PF Zimbabwe. Now, if all alluvial diamond mines and claims are similarly reposed in that State, the ease envisaged in reversing land, will also apply to that vital resource which can then be reassigned in the name of new Government policy for what it already owns anyway!

The target of the proposed motion to Parliament are the Chinese and the South Africans who partner State or African entities in the diamond sector. The hope is that the white-dominated MDC prevails so it re-instates white interests here.
Still a Saul

Seen from that angle, it becomes clear that an Eddie Cross who favours nationalisation only in that sub-sector of mining where Rhodesians and Western mining magnets have lost or been excluded, cannot be a murderous Saul who has suddenly become a God-fearing Paul. He remains a hostile, supremacist Rhodie preparing the ground for a settler second coming.

Equally, a black MP to whom a segment of that Rhodesian politics-inspired motion is given, cannot be anything improved but what he has always been: a dutiful tool of white interests.

And between those two split aspects of the same motion is an un-split goal of reinstating white interests through an abuse of the law-making process, or through dilatory action launched from Parliament.

Why would one need to revise a law to ensure Government departments share the same views on a policy? Surely that is a matter for implementation, itself a mandate of the Executive? Anyway, which Departments are those? Zanu PF-controlled ones, or MDC-controlled ones, starting with the Prime Minister's Office?
Do we see the wiles of the enemy? The language is changing. So is reality. Icho!

Nathaniel Manheru is a columnist for the Saturday Herald

Labels: EDDIE CROSS, LIBYA, NATHANIEL MANHERU, NEOCOLONIALISM, NEOLIBERALISM, OIL

posted by MrK @ 5:38 PM