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Reason Wafawarova on Thursday
A true revolution cannot stand on the legs of prescriptive methods as imposed by elites on the masses.
H uman beings are different from animals in that they are beings of pure activity, emerging from the world, objectifying the environment around them, and also having an understanding of how to transform the world around them.
Humans are not like animals that simply adapt to the environment: they are capable of development.
By nature humanity consists of action and reflection, and this is what politicians sometimes fail to see.
Politicians would love to manipulate human activity to an extent where they reduce everything to rhetoric and political activism.
Lenin pointed a long time ago that a revolution couldn’t achieve any of its goals through rhetoric or activism.
His famous statement is: “Without a revolution theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
There is always a revolutionary procedure based on a people’s reflection and action, as directed at the structures that need transformation.
This procedure does not make political leaders the thinkers, while the masses are mere followers or doers.
We have kingmaker-politicians in Zimbabwe who misguidedly believe that they are the custodians of the thinking business in the country, and that all other people have to play the role of perpetually admiring them, or doing what they say.
They believe any election process that does not follow their bidding is a flawed one, and they count anyone opposed to their views as illegitimate.
If the reality of the suffering of Zimbabweans is to be transformed, revolutionary procedure will require that there must be a shared ideology around which transforming action will happen.
This ideology cannot fail to assign the people the fundamental role in the transformation process.
The role of our people in the redistribution of land is not to line-up for offer letters so they can forever thank the benevolence of the political leader in the acquisition of that land.
Rather the role of the people is to transform their world through the acquisition of agrarian land.
Our unfortunate predicament is that we now have charlatans in politics – leaders who treat people like mere activists with no ability to reflect.
Indeed, some of our political leaders bear the responsibility for co-ordinating the revolution, and for giving it direction. This responsibility does not warrant the manipulation of the masses.
Any politician who is genuinely committed to liberation will always ensure that his actions do not proceed without the matching actions and reflections of the people he leads.
The revolutionary procedure must always stand opposed to the procedure of dominant elites. By its very nature the bourgeoisie is a class of antithetical people, and it is a huge contradiction to expect elitist procedure to lead to the liberation of the poor and the oppressed.
A true revolution cannot stand on the legs of prescriptive methods as imposed by elites on the masses. Once that happens, one can only talk of mass oppression, not of a revolution.
Revolutionary procedure is by definition an act of unity, and the leaders cannot treat the masses as their possession.
We have in our country some people in leadership who believe they have the right to prescribe revolutionary procedure on all others – those self-congratulating heroes who consider themselves custodians of our collective conscience and even memory.
These charlatans survive on manipulation, sloganeering and regimentation of our people.
These are no aspects of a revolution, and that is precisely because they are the tendencies that define domination and oppression.
True leaders of a revolution will never dominate the masses they lead.
True revolutionary leaders are sacrificial lambs ready to die for the cause of the collective community.
There are those leaders who cannot even dialogue with our people, and they openly retain and exercise the traits of the dominator.
These are openly non-revolutionary, and they do not care.
Yet we have others who seem to be totally misguided in the conception of their role as leaders, in the process becoming hapless prisoners of factionalism and sectarianism.
These are the leaders who have created unprecedented doubt over the validity of our revolution – leaders who have reduced our land reform programme to a pitiful act of patronage, and our economic empowerment policy to a mere propaganda tool designed to win cheap and directionless populism.
Revolutionary procedure demands that the oppressed actively participate in the revolutionary process leading to their own liberty, not as blind loyalists to the diktats of a dominant leadership, but with critical awareness of their role as foot soldiers of the transformational journey.
Loyalty to the revolution must make our youths who have borrowed from the micro-financing project repay the loans with honour and pride.
The moment we find ourselves celebrating the role of a messianic “sheriff in town” playing the role of super debt collector we must know that the revolutionary procedure has lost its way.
In a true revolution the greater cause of economic indigenisation of the economy would compel those who have borrowed from our revolving funds to do the honourable thing and dutifully repay the loans for the good of the greater cause.
When I repaid the money I borrowed from the Employment Creation Fund in 2004 the gentleman who served me at the ministry’s accounts department was petrified.
He told me that I was the only one from the whole ministry that had bothered to pay back the money, and he repeatedly asked me if I was sure of what I was doing, and if I really wanted to do that.
We cannot go far with a revolution executed by a people coming in the shape of ambiguous beings, people who are partly themselves and partly oppressors. Leaders with this kind of ambiguity will often live the imagination of heroism – violently claiming recognition for self-proclaimed valour and achievement.
The dangerous existential duality of such leaders has facilitated the perilous factionalism bedevilling ZANU-PF today, which in every sense fatally undermines the revolutionary procedure.
Our young people have been misled into aspiring to the revolution not as a road to emancipation, but as a shortcut to self-centered aggrandisement. Some of our leaders have chosen to use the revolution as a means of domination, rather than as a road to liberation.
No one can successfully carry the revolution for the people, even with the best of intentions. Attempting to do this is as good as carrying out the revolution without the people.
We cannot execute a revolution by threatening and manipulating the people.
We cannot use the same methods employed by oppressors to implement revolutionary procedure.
A revolution is defined by dialogue between leaders and the led, elected revolutionary leadership and the oppressed.
We want to end the economic misery in Zimbabwe, and for that to happen the revolution must begin to initiate a serious and courageous dialogue with the people.
There is no legitimacy in a revolution that excludes dialogue with the masses, as clearly seems to be the case in our situation.
Revolutionaries work with the people, they listen to the expression of the people, and they allow maximum participation of the people in the revolutionary procedure.
The revolution is not a perfect phenomenon. It is accountable to the people, its achievements are spoken of frankly and honestly, and so are its mistakes, its miscalculations, its challenges, and its difficulties.
We have to frankly acknowledge the miscalculations and errors of both the land reform programme and the indigenisation policy, the same way we hail the nobility of these initiatives.
This business of saying any form of criticism directed towards Government policy is treacherous is in itself a great disloyalty.
Only when we accept constructive criticism can we carry out this revolution to a successful realisation of its noble objectives.
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.
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