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Poor Priscilla. It must be very painful to dangle lifeless on the noose of your own philosophy. My readers will recall that the one MDC official I have debated in the past is Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga. I respect her immensely, which is why then I felt obligated to debate her party’s views on the so-called devolution.
And devolution is itself the first innocuous step towards a deadly endgame: that of centrifugal politics likely to challenge the indivisibility of Zimbabwe. I am all for great Zimbabwe, never for a smaller one. I am no narrow nationalist.
After all, we are already badly shrunk, geographically and by way of fame, relative to Mwenemutapa’s territorial and image legacy.
Legacy of expansiveness
Our past speaks of a giant empire whose borders went beyond current Zimbabwe’s puny borders. That empire reached the shores of big waters of the ocean. It traded on high seas, interacted with great civilizations from the Middle and Far East.
The landmarks are there for anyone to see, there in territories that abut us. Even linguistically, traces of its sprawling boundaries are marked by trans-border speech and cultural communities.
By way of example, the Venda people now of South Africa, play mbira, regard Shona as the language of their oracles. They annually visit the misty mountains of Mberengwa to reconnect with their spirits, the Remba spirits. I do not need to refer to the Kalangas of Botswana, or to one of their leading singers whose songs are not just in Shona — heavily intoned Shona — but which sing praises to, as well as recreate legends of the Great Zimbabwe.
The Ndaus in Chipinga, their kinsmen across the border in Espungabera and beyond. These speech and cultural communities straddling borders bespeak of one gigantic nation we once were, with great Zimbabwe as its power hub.
The Rome of Southern Africa
Of course at some point in history the centre could not hold, which is why this great empire declined, collapsed, but not without leaving behind imposing markers of its awesome, stupendous grandeur, however bygone.
The late Mudenge — may his great soul rest in peace — used to compare us to Rome, used to call us the “Rome” of Southern Africa. Our power and influence radiated outward, well beyond the current demesne. That Rome, late Mudenge used to say chidingly, was unaware of her greatness — both geographic and by way of her great civilisation — does not diminish her influence and heritage, both obvious and inherent.
Now inheritors of such an expansive heirloom, of such expansive breath, surely can only suffer their present territorial size, surely can never aspire to anything much less? We can only feel encased, smothered in our present borders, we of the great empire? What more with less?
There was something about Ncube and Misihairabwi’s MDC, something about their political vision, which seemed to beckon us to some shrunken glory, to far lesser, smaller times than our bequest, than history would ever won’t us.
And I find it strange and ironic that these politics of shrunken glory, shrunken size, speak in the name of a region whose legacy to this country is that of a slow, painful but inexorable drift towards larger state formation.
Beyond Nguni identity
I don’t know how Priscilla and Welshman read history but I am very clear about one thing. Mzilikazi, and Lobengula after him, both pursued politics and military campaigns which far transcended Nguni identity and needful territorial claim. Demographically, the original Ngunis were too few anyway to sustain a life of conquest and leadership in an era that was decidedly martial and expansive territorially.
Mere remnants from the original group that ran away from the Zulu nation, that survived wars against the Boers and Bechaunas, in their northward odyssey. To survive, they incorporated other tribal formations, well beyond the original people of the South.
Through continual conquest, they extended boundaries beyond the present day Matabeleland Provinces and Midlands, the three areas which the Ncube MDC claimed it had a decisive electoral hold, the three provinces it hoped would resonate with the message of devolution. Of course the new boundaries after 1836, and before 1890, give us very rough and fluid cartography.
The boundaries depended on the efficacy of given raids, depended on how keen and how long Lobengula would stay his power in given localities he would have overrun, indeed depended on how able local communities were to reorganise themselves for resistance against the Ndebele king’s occupation. And there is enough historical evidence to show that boundaries of contestation kept shifting, with some Shona communities quite able to beat off Lobengula’s marauding impis.
Drawing lessons from narrow nationalists
But all that is not my point. My real point is that through both Mzilikazi and Lobengula, Zimbabwe was already evolving towards larger territorial and political formation. The colonial forces merely rode on this momentum, which is why the only potentate they dealt with was Lobengula, even though their initial occupation was Mashonaland.
The outline of present-day Zimbabwe was roughly apparent. Our legacy from the two kings is thus a drift towards larger national formations, towards multicultural, multilingual society.
Not this Mthwakazi nonsense, or its mild equivalent by way of these devolutionists who called themselves MDC, who wrap themselves in pale green, while seeking to deflower nationhood. If you have a firm sense of history, this should be obvious. But why am I wasting your time, dear reader, on people who have been rejected?
Writing as if the people did not speak emphatically on July 31, loudly rejecting these narrow nationalists? I still bother you about these narrow politics simply because we now have a rare opportunity of discounting them forever, extirpating them from our body politic.
We have a strong result from the polls, a result that vindicates broad national politics. Beyond that we have leading individuals who have been mauled badly by narrow politics, mauled in very personal ways. Priscilla is one such and her present predicament must yield far reaching lessons to us all.
High drama, long lessons
As secretary-general of one of the MDC factions, she campaigned on a regional agenda that visualised a narrow Zimbabwe made narrower by centrifugal tendencies her party was fomenting. Her mantra was devolution is our revolution.
Her emotional trigger was her Ndebele matrilineal parentage by which she sought to overlay her politically discordant Karanga patrilineal roots.
She split her family, nay herself, the same way she sought to split the country. The hope was for a motherly electoral result. I come from your own womb, she opined at some rally in Matabeleland South, why won’t you raise me politically?
But that never worked, whether for her personally, or for her party broadly. She lost, lost dismally. So, too, did her party which was wiped off the radar mainly by Zanu-PF, marginally by MDC-T, both of them ironically with Shonas for their presidency.
It was much more than a rejection of narrow politics; it was an affirmation of larger, trans-tribe, trans-region political formations that both Zanu-PF and MDC-T are.
And the aftermath of that rejection was equally significant, for me even more significant. To redeem Priscilla, Ncube decided to put forward her name under proportional representation. That card took her to Parliament, making her a legislator that she is today. She represents Matabeleland South.
Or so she hopes to. And so begins the high drama which dispense long lessons. Matabeleland South is angry, very angry. It rejects Priscilla, preferring one of, from, their own. Of course the rejection is politely couched, pruned of all tribal language. But its tribal and regional import is very clear.
She is not one of us, they say, and thus cannot represent us. Some go as far as telling her to go back to Masvingo! Clearly her support base has grasped her regionalistic campaign message, has taken to heart the narrow politics she and her party espoused and propagated seemingly against rival parties. In defeat her shattered constituency has invoked those same politics, deploying them to reject her. What painful irony, what great lessons!
Khupe on a stampede
Another great lesson, again from the opposition. The badly trounced MDC-T formation took a position to disengage from structures of government it says emerges from a poll result it does not recognise. Fair enough. Until of course you read that Madame Khupe, once-upon-a-time Deputy Prime Minister of this great country, gets caught up in a rat race for some position in Parliament!
She is part of a mad stampede for a Parliamentary post which attracts a salary comparable to a ministerial one! Could this be a way of beating July 31, the closest she can get to reinstating her premiership outside the GNU that created it?
And the race gives you shades of desperation in post-GNU MDC-T: Mpariwa, Matibenga, Khupe etc, etc. Reality continues to seep in and the word in town is that MDC-T’s ex-Ministers, starting with the biggest, vanetsa kukumbira zvikwereti.
The big house he cannot afford
For all their public anti-Zanu-PF posture, the MDC formations are all dying to reconnect, at the very least for some lifeline. Allow me to illustrate.
The President’s Office calls back vehicles purchased or issued under JOMIC. And hey, it does not matter how those vehicles came about. Once in, they become assets of the State.
The response from Mangoma of MDC-T and motor-mouth Mwonzora is to say the three parties who used to be in the GNU must meet to wind down JOMIC and its assets. If this is not one big plea for contact tell me what is.
The parties will not meet in Parliament, will not co-operate in Government, but have no problem in meeting over a few cars. Was this meant to be the thin end of the wedge? Or the recent claim by Tsvangirai that he cannot go to attend the UN ostensibly because he has a date with the President. Except the President was in New York for the UN? The objectives were dual, contrapuntal.
One, to find a clever way of disguising bankruptcy which has set in, disguising desertion by donors. Two, pleading for a meeting with the President but without openly asking for one! You want another one? Here it is.
The ex-prime minister is desperate to start a conversation on the Highlands home. He needs it badly in the wake of a heavily encumbered life.
But he faces two mighty hurdles: he cannot afford the house, even if it were made available to him at purchase price; he has to engage President Mugabe, a man whose presidency and administration he repudiates. How do you recognise the President only for purposes of claiming benefits?
Or recognise his signature which authorises those benefits? Already he has hatched a plan he thinks might work for his desperate situation. He has embarked on a campaign of dropping the matter into the captive press, hoping the system may be drawn out. Well, it will not.
The day Madhuku brought mirth
Madhuku, Madhuku, the professor. I respect him and admire his rare ability to read legal situations uninfluenced by his own political predilections or ambitions. It is a rare skill nowadays, rare in this age of unconditional, wholesale advocacy.
He got me laughing the other day. If you want to understand the new Constitution, he advised, go to Chinamasa, never to Biti or Mwonzora. Both were snoozing, fast asleep when the document was being put together. Or simply distracted too deadened by GNU opulence to have followed the constitution-making process which ended up being a Zanu-PF affair.
This is why, he rubbed it in devastatingly, the MDC-T is so ignorant of provisions of the new constitution they claim to have written, so ignorant to the point of approaching wrong courts! He was not finished with his former allies. They accuse me of being Zanu-PF, he further cut in, merely because I correctly interpret a constitution they claim to have co-written with the same Zanu-PF! Flawless reasoning if you ask me.
Moving away and with the whole space
But this is not what redeems Madhuku. Here is what does. He has now transformed NCA into a political party in which he is interim leader pending congress which he envisages sometime next year.
There is a furious debate around his decision to transform the NCA into a party, and not vacating the NCA seat to make way for a new leadership of the same body which is reputed to have sired the MDC. Before we even get into the merits of the arguments raised against him, let’s check who is making the arguments.
It is the two MDCs, separately but converging.
One immediately gets suspicious. Did the two MDCs, again separately, hope that Madhuku would leave NCA for his new party so the NCA could continue to sire new parties?
Or kill old ones as Madhuku hopes to do with the MDC formations? Hope that Madhuku would leave the NCA vacant so they themselves would re-occupy it and, what is more, use it and its structures to bite back Madhuku, to foreclose him politically? Again, Madhuku has shown he is no fool, indeed has shown the two MDCs are the real fools.
He has moved on, moved with the strategic space so to speak! No one can demand that NCA business be wound down way of an indicting audit. It merely has been transformed, not superseded!
Admitting closure to the constitution
But that is the easy part. Here is the harder one. All along NCA was a single-issue campaign platform, a campaign platform for a new constitution. Now it has transformed itself into a full-fledged political party with ambitions to replace Zanu-PF. Ambitions because Madhuku himself can’t put a date to it, thinking it may take place in ten years time. But what takes immediate effect is an oppositional role, much wider in scope and focus, and pitting political NCA against the MDC formations for the oppositional niche. Well, the good professor has made,hopefully knowingly, a major concession: that the new constitution has indeed come and is indeed done, courtesy of the GNU parties. That gets him to start off on a limb, does it not? It means progress is possible without him, nay, against him, as indeed happened during the referendum. It means he goes into the next poll with nothing to show, against adversaries who shall brag about shaping the new constitutional dispensation. If this is not a done deal, why supersede the NCA? Or will he want to still make the constitution an issue? Against a ringing referendum result? Thereby pitting himself against the combined might of Zanu-PF and the MDC formations? We wait to see.
Guilty a million times over
Secondly, social democratic party? Haaaa! The Germans, the Foundations whose raison d’etre is promoting social democrats worldwide! And Madhuku has a long history of getting sponsorship from these multiparty Trojan Horses for Germany abroad. And Madhuku has a long history of doing consultancy work on our national politics for them. There is a powerful recall here, very powerful and thus potentially devastating to him.
All German political parties converge on their Foundations to enlarge German influence abroad. The Foundations are locales for consensual party politics of a Germany going overseas. For all of us that takes us to the horror of the Westminster Foundation, itself a vehicle for a tripartite British political party intrusion into Zimbabwean politics. Is history repeating itself? And the message is very clear: if Westminster gave us Morgan and his ignorance, the Foundations have improved the German-led intrusive western act, yielding a whole professor of law in the hope of a more enlightened intrusion. Otherwise the template is the same. And while ignorance mitigated Morgan’s treachery, enlightenment nails and compounds Madhuku’s guilt a million times over.
Hoping for nuances foreign to politics
Thirdly and lastly, Madhuku’s prospects rest on two issues. How to handle Mugabe, not so much as a politician, but as a liberation icon who remains in politics. His initial pledge was to let Mugabe retire before jumping into the fray, all to meet a successor generation of politicians who will be his age mates, a generation he saw personified by Kasukuwere. He vowed he would never throw himself against a legend. Today he has done just that, jumped into the fray, when Mugabe is still active politically. And he is already engaging him in dog fights. He still pledges loyalty to the ideals of the struggle which Mugabe led, hoping political society shall be nuanced enough to distinguish criticism of Mugabe the politician from irreverence of Mugabe the icon.
What may be decisive is not how, if at all, Mugabe responds to Madhuku’s taunts. What may be key is that Madhuku has now allowed his generational peers and rivals to fight and finish him off using Mugabe the icon as the weapon for the demolition job. They now have a good vantage point from disinheriting him from the liberation legacy simply by offering Mugabe as a parapet. Or the converse, by launching him as the deadly missile against Madhuku. And the President does not need to say much. Just one liner will provide a deadly opening to attack dogs that bark and bite with the vigour and fury of Madhuku’s age. In a way Madhuku has been made to jump into the fray at someone else’s time and pace. That is not strategic.
Bedding back bad man
Second issue, tactically Madhuku means to throw both MDCs into distress by washing onto his shore all the debris from them. He hopes to attract rejects. He may very well do. Already there are many available for his taking, with clear indications more will be spewed his way. I find it fantastic that Bennett, Kay and Freeth can defy and call down Tsvangirai and his leadership, but still get away with it. But not councillors and mayors, all of them black. Just whose party is the MDC-T? Who are its real shareholders?
Check who gets away with it! Why are errant whites beyond the reach of party disciplinary machinery? This is breeding bitterness and dissent within the MDC-T, which means more dross for Madhuku. Of course Welshman is facing massive desertions, again creating more debris for Madhuku’s tactical needs. But what is going to be the strategic consequence of such an inheritance?
As long as Madhuku sees himself as successor or rival to MDC-T, it shall be very difficult to dodge its contradictions and even fate. While the NCA might today constitute a plinth for the new party, tomorrow it could easily turn into fault-line.
After all, was it not Madhuku himself who used to brag that his men were embedded with both MDCs? If all it takes is an aim(em) and a bad(bed), surely it must be very easy to return the favour, indeed to turn yesterday’s bad men back into old MDC-T bed!
Ask Welshman and his rebels. Ask Priscilla how easy it is to hang dead on the noose of one’s past ideas and associations.
Icho!
Online Reporter