Chronicle Editor
Gibson Nyikadzino, Correspondent
Politics is a game played with cool minds! As an art of conducting the affairs of the state, it is also a skill and manifestation on how groups and individuals interact with each other. To drive good politics, strategy and interests have to be balanced in order to maximise on pending benefits.
Over the past two months, political sights from opposition party leaders in South Africa and Namibia importantly highlighted a missing historical and contemporary link between what politics and political maturity entail when it comes to the opposition in Zimbabwe.
Despite ideological differences with the governing African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has been a reliable political opponent to South Africa’s advancement of national interest and foreign policy scope.
For South Africa, the ANC in November last year instructed its MPs to support a motion by the opposition EFF to close the Israeli embassy in South Africa and temporarily suspend diplomatic relations. Reflectively, in early January, the EFF stood in full solidarity with the ANC government when it filed an application before the International Court of Justice against apartheid Israel.
In Namibia, the death of former state President Hage Geingob who was from the SWAPO governing party and the eulogies and homilies he received from opposition compatriots drew people closer in a time of national grief than imagining how to exploit the situation for political milestones.
McHenry Venaani, Namibia’s official leader of opposition in the National Assembly described President Geingob as a “worthy political opponent” and a “bridge builder”.
“I had the opportunity to oppose him for the past nine years. He could certainly be difficult, at times he made me angry and I made him angry, but he conducted a political transactional currency of a higher level that we could disagree as compatriots. We could always visit each other, we were not condescending. Geingob was a patriot who regarded his opponents as compatriots,” said Mr Venaani.
Between South Africa and Namibia’s governing parties and those that hold them to account, what generates a convergence of ideas among these groups are national interests. They prime their ideological beliefs and align them in the national interest to ensure predictability, political stability, security and where possible, economic prosperity.
Not only should national interests shape the domestic political fabric, they also inform how the state conducts and pronounces its foreign policy positions, interactions and position itself regionally, continentally and globally.
Both the EFF and Venaani’s Popular Democratic Movement are institutional and structural architects of their countries’ policies, at home and abroad. The condemnation of Israel by the South African government with the EFF’s support and the unity of the Namibians espoused by President Geingob’s death resemble national, political and social interests that should not be disrupted.
However, when the national fabric is dented due to discohesion, fragmentation and disintegration, difficulties emerge, primarily exposing the nation to forces of polarisation that exploit circumstances to entrench disunity.
As signs of good politics and political maturity, what happened in South Africa and Namibia has rarely been seen in Zimbabwe, where opposition political parties in parliament agree with and motivate government on a path that protects and safeguards national interest areas.
Zimbabwe’s opposition activists and politicians have been commending both the EFF and Venaani. Unfortunately, they commend them on what they know is correct, but cannot do in their home country because they are not sincere in their conduct of politics.
Because traditionally, Zimbabwe’s politics are a two-party arena of contestation, rarely have opposition legislators proposed to the ruling Zanu-PF party on ways Zimbabwe can challenge or lessen the burden of economic sanctions imposed by the West.
Since the turn of the millennium, the opposition in their variations have not been able to provoke national interest on topical issues, for example, on attending national events. It is the opposition’s claim not matched with deeds that they recognise Zimbabwe’s national heroes, yet except during the Government of National Unity (GNU), they have not (consistently) attended Independence and Heroes Day celebrations.
People like Fadzayi Mahere, Nelson Chamisa, Charlton Hwende, Tendai Biti and Job Sikhala among their coterie have denigrated Zimbabwe’s national liberators, both the living and the departed. What it means is their interests are not entrenched in the collective, but in the personal, self-serving ones.
This selfish desire for power in the opposition is also reflected in 2017, during Operation Restore Legacy. Back then, the opposition legislators coalesced around Zanu-PF’s parliamentary majority to put an impeachment motion on the late former President Robert Mugabe before he resigned.
To expose the opposition, they were already using post-impeachment proceedings as an avenue into Government as “the environment is prime for us to be in a coalition government and suspend elections.” Those were perspectives by other senior opposition figures.
What is unknown to the opposition is that personal interests do not tally with national interests, as national interests cannot be changed unlike personal interests.
A qualitative look at some opposition exposes how they are in politics for personal and selfish interests and not the national interest. In 2018, Mahere participated in elections as an independent candidate and lost. She later aligned herself with former Citizens Coalition for Change leader Nelson Chamisa whom she exploited and was later imposed as a parliamentary candidate for the 2023 elections.
Neglecting the needs of the electorate to pursue selfish agenda, she resigned from parliament to follow Chamisa whose political career ideologically, institutionally and strategically, is hanging by the thread.
Allan Markham (former Harare East legislator) also resigned from parliament. It ought to be restated that Markham at one point even so today, is against the country’s land redistribution exercise that benefited over 340 000 families.
He supported those who were keen on injuring the national interest of Zimbabwe which was buttressed by the land reform programme at the turn of the millennium.
There is no visible national, political, social and economic agenda that the opposition in Zimbabwe holds to.
Having no political principle is itself proving to be a principle in the opposition body politic where it is now empirical that the players there stand for purely nothing and therefore can fall for anything.
They are neither strong single-minded idealists nor one-dimensional pragmatists in their approach to politics. They are very much compromised!
Zimbabweans, remember we are one. This is homeland.
Online Reporter