Possessed with obsession

In Zimbabwe ZANU-PF preaches deep love of country and people, and there is no doubt the party was founded on true liberation aspirations of the time, and that the liberation legacy has continuously shaped the party’s policy-making process.
After independence the party futzed around with a number of economic and ideological models — starting with socialism, sliding into capitalist social welfarism, on to surrendering to Bretton Woods economic prescriptions during the notorious ESAP era, and back to the current independent nationalism where capitalist ownership of the means of production is being deliberately adjusted in favour of the indigenous people. The experiments are quite in sync with other post-colonial ventures by other developing nations.

Needless to say the MDC-T was founded in the protest politics spawned by the hardships visited upon the country by ESAP, and it is the solidarity of workers against the capitalist brutality of this IMF-prescribed programme that gave us the face of Morgan Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe’s political landscape.

While ZANU-PF relied on the barrel of the gun to fight its colonial-era enemies, the MDC has relied on exacerbating economic decline in the hope that its political enemy falls with the crumbling economy.  When the economy declined to its lowest ever levels in 2008, ZANU-PF did not die along with the Zimbabwean dollar. Rather the circumstances created a coerced four-year marriage between the ruling party and the MDC formations.

The MDC-T’s stint in government neutralised its sting in politics as the protest element naturally disappeared with incumbency. In fact the MDC formations were literally possessed with the obsession of incumbency that when the term of the coalition came to an end not even one politician from their ranks was ready for it, and ZANU-PF had to literally drag its screaming and kicking political opponents to the polls — dragging SADC and the courts into it all in very dramatic ways. With the protest trump card eliminated by prevailing circumstances, the MDC formations had to try matching ZANU-PF in policy politics, and clearly Welshman Ncube’s Access, Control, Transformation, Initiative, Organisation, New technologies and Sustainability (ACTIONS) programme and Morgan Tsvangirai’s Jobs, Upliftment, Investment, Capital and Environment (JUICE) were no match for ZANU-PF’s economic empowerment policy, delivered in the most populist of ways one can imagine.

The result was a ZANU-PF landslide victory in Senate and the House Assembly, coming alongside an emphatic win in the presidential race.
It was a bamboozling defeat that left the MDC-T in a huge mess, Ncube’s MDC comatose, and Tsvangirai has just become a shattered man — seemingly with everything around him crumbling in a spectacular manner, much to the delight of ZANU-PF supporters, and perhaps of his political competitors from across the political divide as well as those from within his own party.

In an apparent bid to regain long-lost political footing, the MDC-T has recently been audacious enough to try an impetuous alliance with the workers, obviously desperate for an inconceivable reincarnation of a long-gone historical phase.

Tsvangirai and Nelson Chamisa clearly believe that the only hope they have in making the political grade in Zimbabwe is more economic hardships for every Zimbabwean, and that is the only reason the two MDC-T front men find it necessary to stand by the underpaid Zimbabwean civil servants and other disgruntled workers. While the workers hate their circumstances and the factors causing them, and justifiably so, the MDC-T leadership loves their suffering, and hopes for the worst.

But the ZCTU’s position on the MDC-T is very clear. The union leadership is more than convinced that the MDC-T is not sincere in its solidarity with workers, and other union leaders like Raymond Majongwe have been very clear about this. But what must be interrogated is ZANU-PF’s patriotism rhetoric. If we do not force the wheels of accountability to turn, what started as genuine love of the country and people can easily do the opposite of what it sought — endless shame rather than national honour.

Long back in 1794 there was a nationalist oriented revolution in France led by Maximilien Robespierre. He justified a terror campaign by his comrades saying: “The terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice,” in the pursuit of “peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality.”

When the horrendous reign of terror became too unjust,  Robespierre was singled out as the sole scapegoat and he was guillotined without a trial.

Liberty and equality are as noble as any of ZANU-PF’s people oriented policies. In fact the land reform policy is centrally based on liberty and freedom, just like economic empowerment of the indigenous people is.

These are great political goods against which no logic can ever be found.  However, when a noble principle becomes possessed with obsession it goes insane, and ultimately it accomplishes the very opposite of what it seeks. The Zimbabwean revolution cannot be allowed to head that way. We cannot degenerate to a situation where love for one’s people becomes an absolute. That becomes racism and bigotry. Love of equality cannot be allowed to turn into the supremest thing, because when we do so we breed hatred and violence towards anyone who has led a privileged life.  It is the tendency of humanity to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods, to elevate such causes to unthinkable extremities. This is why ZANU-PF must watch against racialising its policies, and must be a justice-driven party as opposed to a vengeful outfit.  There are many who have used ZANU-PF’s policies in pursuit of unjust personal vendettas against others, or in greedy pursuit of undeserved wealth.

That kind of injustice can only achieve the opposite of what the liberation legacy stands for, and when the time comes there will always be a few victims to pay the price. It is not honourable behaviour for any people to have political leaders elevated to messiahs, or to treat political policies as saving doctrine, or to turn political activism into a kind of religion. This kind of political cultism is doomed from every one of its angles.

We cannot allow fear to become a chief characteristic of our political life. The greatest sign to show that a political leader is functioning as an idol is fear among the followers. We cannot centre our lives on idol leadership, because when we do so we become dependent on it. But we know that political leadership is fallible and no amount of fear or hero-worship can immortalise it.

When any between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai is threatened in any way, it is a sad predicament if Zimbabweans’ response is complete panic.

We must as moral and ethical human beings be able to say “What a shame, how difficult,” but we must never come to a point where we say, “This is the end! There is no more hope.”

We cannot be proud citizens in a country where an election victory by a rival political party results in others openly declaring their resolve to leave the country, and those that remain pray fervently that the winning party may have a disastrous reign where everyone suffers as has never been seen before.

We cannot be proud citizens of a country where the absence of certain leaders from power means death for others who support them. We cannot be proud Zimbabweans in a country where others believe that if their policies and people are not in power everything must fall apart.  We all are  aware of the amount of agreement between ZANU-PF and the MDC formations, thanks to the four and half year coalition term that ended in July last year, that infamous GPA era. It revealed a lot of common ground even between President Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai.

How insulting it must be for all of us to see the same politicians now refusing to admit how much agreement is between their parties and themselves, and instead focus on obnoxious points of disagreement.  When the points of contention are made to overshadow everything else, a poisonous environment is created, and that is exactly what the politically-stranded  Tsvangirai is hankering after — chaos and confusion.

Opponents in Zimbabwean politics are not considered to be simply mistaken, but to be evil. That culture must change, and it is rampant across the political divide. Some whose views have been criticised have described me as “an evil writer,” and the list of evil people in Zimbabwe’s political landscape is endless. We cannot have a country we are proud of when the winning presidential candidate is considered by others to be only a president for those that voted for him. To make this myopic reasoning logical our constitution must declare a 100 percent majority for one to be the country’s leader, and we all know that democratically that is nonsensical.

The polarisation we see in Zimbabwe today is a sign that as people we have made political activism a form of religion, and with that we will never accept the moral legitimacy of any winning candidate other than our own choice.

Sadly Tsvangirai subscribes to this dogma and his utterances after the July 31 defeat were quite unfortunate.
We need to take stock of these constant political cycles of overblown hopes and disillusionment. We have to stop the tide in this increasingly poisonous political discourse between our competing parties. This disproportionate fear and despair when one’s political party loses an election is not healthy for us as a people. We have to stop this habit of deifying and demonising political causes and ideas. It leads to political idolatry where we make for ourselves gods out of political leaders, and frankly that behaviours is uncivilised, undemocratic and barbaric.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

REASON WAFAWAROVA is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.