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@Jamwanda2 on Saturday
Drifting towards convergence
Whatever your politics, there is no escaping the poignant fact that Zimbabwean politics are gravitating towards some kind of convergence.
I am not particularly enamoured of what form and institutional mechanism which that convergence assumes eventually; other minds can apply themselves to that derived question.
My focus is on this primary development, namely the momentum towards convergence in our politics, in the process identifying its proponents and malcontents.
Imperceptible glacial movement
Superficially one could trace this gathering convergence to the August 2023 Harmonised Elections, or, before that, to Political Dialogue, POLAD, which naturalised the idea of meeting and working across political divides.
Except in the broader scheme of things, these are proximate developments. Those who see far and deeper, may have noticed some movement — imperceptibly glacial, if you ask me — well before both these important developments.
Of course our shrill and superficial media would never have noticed this, fastened as they are to episodic reportage, in place of trawling deep for shaping trends, whether evident or incipient.
A peek into Engagement and Re-engagement
When President ED Mnangagwa announced the policy of Engagement and Re-engagement, not many understood or appreciated.
Certainly only his inner coterie was privy to the thinking and the raging debate preceding this policy. I will allow you some limited peek.
Initially, the thinking was Re-engagement, which impliedly etched the geography of our diplomacy only around those countries which had taken a position against Zimbabwe under the First Republic, and because of the iconic Land Reform Programme.
It meant a diplomatic thrust focused on the West, primarily.
Challenging Re-Engagement policy
Further debate — I don’t know how I can get you to appreciate the degree of candour which accompanied it, candour which bordered on the irreverent – raised and poked several holes in this initial proposition of Re-engagement as the pillar of our Foreign Policy under the newly inaugurated Second Republic, also another hotly debated and contested concept.
Without going deeper, the new, post-November State had christened itself The New Dispensation, which really was a marketing, self-wish image, than a real marker of regimes as conventionally practised and understood in human history.
Mea Culpa as Policy?
On Foreign Policy, was Zimbabwe, through that Re-engagement Policy, pleading mea culpa to the West?
Atoning for exercising its sovereign right as an Independent African State: right to regain her land; right to pursue and chart an independent foreign and developmental policy; right to fashion her politics unimpeded by her erstwhile colonial master and her Western allies?
Was Zimbabwe recanting and repudiating her inherent right of sovereignty for peace with, and readmission into the good graces of, the West?
Put that way, the idea simply became odious, nay revolting to all concerned.
The Second Republic was not about appeasement; it stood on, and upheld a key founding principle: sovereignty. She had gone to war, sacrificed horrendously, and had won that war precisely for that seminal right it was now about to repudiate and abjure, impliedly repudiate and abjure through this suggested revisionist foreign policy!
Additionally, such a policy meant a frightening rupture between the First and the incipient Second Republic.
Between RG Mugabe and ED Mnangagwa, both freedom fighters and respective faces of the two consecutive Republics!
The world is not America or the West
Second, and buttressing the above key point, was the Second Republic merely about corrections or remedial interventions?
About concessions? In any case, if Re-engagement was all that was needed, was this not a confirmation that the World is American, or more generously, confirmation that the world is the West?
Recall that this had been the pillar propaganda postulate of the West against the First Republic: that upsetting and getting shunned by the West meant being isolated from the World! The late President Mugabe had fought against this fallacy by pronouncing a new, Look East policy; was the Second Republic about to shrink and sink the world into one, imperial Western Hemisphere, as wanted by, and pleasing to, the hegemonic West?
Why couldn’t the Second Republic show that the World: by landmass, by polities, by demography, by economies, by history, by civilisations, by science and technology, by developmental models, by partnerships, nay, by the makeup of the United Nations itself, was far bigger, wider and better than the traditional West, itself among the youngest civilisations and smaller continents?
Engagement and Re-engagement shaped
Several other arguments were tendered, all building towards a case for a wider, iconoclastic foreign policy.
The result was a prefixial addition to Re-engagement: Engagement! Engagement implied and restored the Second Republic’s latitude to break new ground, regain initiative by making new friends across the globe, and certainly beyond Europe, Britain and United States of America.
It unshackled Zimbabwe from old hemispheric histories, putting the whole globe in front as its oyster.
It gave the Second Republic a new initiative in a world in which, after all, old alliances and shibboleths were crumbling.
For starters, Brexit was in full swing, still unravelling.
The emerging era abhorred certitudes.
The new President had ably steered his think-tank through this new policy. Enough of this peek!
Beyond a surfeit of political rhetoric
Foreign policy thus redefined and refined, the next challenge was pouring and putting content into that policy.
The First Republic had given Zimbabwe a surfeit of politics, making Zimbabwe punch-drunk politically. It had also put premium on redistributive politics and expanded social services.
Expectedly, the economy was near exhaustion, its cake drastically shrunk, fragmented and creaking under burdensome social services.
Therein lay the roots of Economic Diplomacy whose working mantra became Zimbabwe-is-open-for-business. Simply, it revised and de-centred the trajectory of political diplomacy by foregrounding economic and investment activity ahead of politics and political rhetoric.
As with the Foreign Policy, more adjustment was needed: FDI had to complement, not displace, local investment initiatives.
Growth had to be inclusive, meaning room was needed for local actors. That got provided for.
Zimbabwe’s resource age arrives
The act of placing accent on economic diplomacy as well as hunting in non-traditional woods, while restoring and stabilising relations with the West, provided a dramatic tonic. Chinese, Russian and Indian capital came in noticeably, to then gain confidence until it grew into an avalanche. Chinese capital especially, went on a mad run in almost all sectors, principally in mining.
Exploration picked pace and Zimbabwe found itself on the cusp of a mining boom it now enjoys.
To crown it all, lithium was found and explorations galloped, spurred by the global shift to a de-carbonised world economy. Being the largest lithium country on the African continent, and the seventh in the world, Zimbabwe found itself again at the global centre, roundly courted by countless suitors, including by those from the hitherto hostile West.
Hard on the heels of lithium came gas and oil.
These unexpected developments gave a strong fillip to the notion of Re-engagement, all along languid and phlegmatic.
Helped by global tensions and broken supply chains which forced America and the European Union to drew up and even legislate for global strategic minerals they needed, and whose source markets needed to be stabilised and secured for assured supplies to the West.
Zimbabwe’s moment had indeed come, firmly riding on her resource endowments.
It owes to her versatile foreign policy that Zimbabwe, under President Mnangagwa, quickly reset herself to exploit this new-found leverage in her international relations.
Biden’s Executive Orders
By the time 2023 Harmonised Polls arrive, Zimbabwe’s Engagement and Re-engagement Policy is already on a higher plenitude, in fact in full swing, with hitherto hostile States making overtures, both directly and indirectly.
The acme of that whole process, which largely unfolded unnoticed and well away from public glare, was the seemingly surprising rescinding of Executive Orders by Joe Biden, the current US President.
Several behind-the scenes overtures had preceded this decision, a decision which to many looked sudden and unheralded. One day, a fuller story shall be written about all this.
An opposition deserted by the West
How does all this relate to Zimbabwe’s increasingly converging politics? Sadly, and happily at once.
Sadly, because in the run-up to, and after the August 2023 elections, it became clear to both the opposition and the West that ZANU PF was not about to go or be wished away.
Beyond this epiphany and for the opposition, it became clear that the fatigued West would not provide any further support or traction to them, post-elections.
Forget about the false noises made by the EU over elections, much of it coming from small, marginal, post-1989 newer members of the bloc originally from the Old Soviet Union, the real big boys of the EU were ready to re-engage.
In fact, they had begun doing so long before, yearly adjusting their sanctions in a way that glimpsed normal relations with Zimbabwe before long.
Americans were diffident, but in a way which suggested the anti-Zimbabwean lobby and consensus, much of it led by the State Department, was beginning to lose ground, its ground already cracking and even failing.
On the other hand, the solidarity of African and Progressive World with Zimbabwe was gaining in strength, steadily and inexorably.
From President ED’s inaugural ascendancy in 2018, Britain had begun on a long road to rapprochement with her stubborn former colony.
By the time Prince Charles became king, the talk in Whitehall was that of making up for decades lost in barren conflict.
All this was not lost upon the bickering Zimbabwe opposition whose electoral impetus, from its ill-fated 1998/99 birth, was always a derived one.
What makes all this sad is how beholden our politics are to outside influence, suggesting some deficit in national consciousness.
Harmonised Elections as Re-engagement
I kept penning that 2023 August elections were less about winning and retaining power, less about defeating the rag-tag opposition, and more about resolving Zimbabwe’s hitherto intractable foreign relations/affairs.
Not many understood or appreciated what that meant. Or why the battle was about securing from the world a clean bill of rating for our elections.
This is why the Mumba report was such downright treachery: it threatened Zimbabwe’s return to normalcy.
Of course Chamisa aided the process through sheer inadvertence.
His untidy leadership style simply compounded a crisis in the opposition whose roots lay firmly elsewhere, namely in a West which had grown half-minded if not coy and tired of opposing ZANU PF; or the obverse, grown tired of funding Zimbabwe’s profligate and accountability-averse opposition.
In any case that opposition had grown thoroughly non-viable, in fact a heavy and corrupt millstone weighing down the West’s capacity for new diplomacy towards Zimbabwe.
Well before elections, what would determine Zimbabwe’s Engagement and Re-engagement diplomacy would be her natural resources, not those flimsy electoral benchmarks or check lists.
The die had long been cast, happily for us as Zimbabweans.
A politician of zero bona fides
Like I said, many in the opposition understood this, and used this understanding to precipitate a leadership crisis under the opinionated and hotly disliked Nelson Chamisa and his dwindling cahoots of thoughtless diehards whose only claim to organic connection with the broad Zimbabwe populace was vicarious: they all rode on Chamisa’s much-vaunted yet inexorably diminishing charisma.
One cannot plausibly say Chamisa himself was unaware; he knew the game had changed, knew that his main flank was fatally exposed.
While he will not concede in public, he knew the future lay in parleying with ZANU PF; he made frantic pre-election efforts to secure a pact with the ruling party.
ZANU PF’s point-man
Indeed, those efforts from him caused President ED Mnangagwa to then designate Vice President Chiwenga as his point-man on any proposals for such talks, should these show themselves to be seriously meant.
That remains so to this day. What stood and stands in the way, is Chamisa’s own muddled thinking, his unbending ego and his sheer deceitfulness. He is one politician whom no one trusts, including his very own.
That makes him lack bona fides in and for anything, inter-party political parleying especially.
He kept shuffling his emissaries, dropping this one for another, who would be dropped too, sooner.
His ever-inflating ego, although diametrically supported by dwindling influence both within his party and nationally, still spurs him to set preconditions as if he wields any leverage.
All that suggests immaturity, discounting him as a serious interlocutor with the experienced liberation party which ZANU PF is.
To stand by or to join. . .
Elsewhere and post-Tshabangu, other remnant or breakaway formations made more mature and trustworthy overtures to the ruling party.
Overtures which were requited, and which built on the POLAD experience. Only those living in political cuckoo-land, or wrapped in integument of hard denial, were surprised by the great, all-party convocation at Murambinda Independence Celebration.
It had been long in the making; it had to happen; it happened, setting the stage for a new type of constructive politics for our country.
Chamisa can choose to stand by, or to join without any pre-conditions.
His future in politics will thus be decided, depending on which option he exercises.
Not even NewsDay will save him from his current politics of lonely, solitary obduracy Meanwhile, Happy Independence Zimbabwe!
Online Reporter