adminLiterature Rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
PART 2
Last week’s article offered a fervent articulation of the themes contained in the book under review, Our War of Liberation (Robert Mugabe 1983). The article expressed the key ideological tenets that propelled President Robert Mugabe’s engagement in the fight for Zimbabwe’s independence. The same ideological tenets were extracted from the aspirations of the masses to usher decoloniality facets of the contemporary benchmarks of post-coloniality. My focus this week is to assess the ideological personhood of President Mugabe as expressed in the introduction of the book. Then move a step further to explain this ideological personhood of the President in the context of Zimbabwe’s current power contestations explains the decolonial and neo-colonial aspirations of the “being” of the nation. My submission for this week is courtesy of the introduction and first section of the book, Call to Arms — The Basis of the Struggle and the Nature of the Enemy.
These particular sections of the publication under review are significant as they explicitly substantiate President Mugabe’s resolute proposition to fight on the side of the oppressed and his unwavering interest to suffer and serve the will of the people. The introduction of the publication characterises the ideological personhood of President Mugabe as nothing more than servitude to the freedom of Africans under the repression of coloniality. The introduction further articulates how President Mugabe was committed to self-sacrifice and self-denial in the quest for the liberation of the people of Zimbabwe. This offers the reader some understanding of the President’s resistance to forces of change summoned to his ideological personhood by the West. This has been affirmed through the ballots since the early plots of Western induced regime change mechanism. Povo yaramba–Masimba kuvanhu!
The people and the ideological personhood of Robert Mugabe
The introduction of this publication offers a chronicle of how President Mugabe’s instalment into the leadership of Zanu-PF was a response to the outcry of the people. His ideological conviction to the voice of the people became synonymous with the absence of courageous leadership which could confront the perils of coloniality. The introduction of the book clearly indicates that President Mugabe had won support to lead Zanu-PF as early as 1963 when the party was formed. However, due to his interest to curb eruption factional wars he let Ndabaningi Sithole to be the leader of the party. What comes out clear from the characterisation of the President in the introduction of the book is his somber degree of ambition compared to individuals like Ndabaningi Sithole and Abel Muzorewa. Msipa (2016) affirms this claim by arguing that President Mugabe was a moderate thinker and showed less interest in extravagant amassing of power during the war for Zimbabwe’s liberation. As such he was persuaded by the immiseration of the African populace to challenge the repressive political status-quo of Rhodesia, hence quit his job in Ghana to fight the UDI. On several accounts nationalists like Sithole disassociated themselves from what was perceived as the radical reprimand of the colonial system through arms (Tora gidhi uzvitonge) and the storm of the masses. As such the President is presented as a nationalist who identified himself with the outcry of the masses in the quest for radical dismemberment of the tyranny of Rhodesia.
This is the same force behind the endorsement of the fast-track Land Reform Programme under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe as early as 1997. This is because since the time of the liberation struggle the man’s power was derived from the people. His political mandate was and is still sustained by the dictates of the people which safeguard the values of national consciousness. The power of Mugabe’s Presidency was drawn from young men and women who took up military conscriptions in Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, Russia and China. President Mugabe’s source of power is derived from the gun barrels that fought the enemy and liberation theologies framed in the Pungwes and military bases which were the havens for the revolutionary man-power of our struggle for the country’s liberation.
Mugabeism: Re-living the values of the Chimurenga
Today ideological personhood of Robert Mugabe has been aptly summarised as Mugabeism. There are varying definitions of this ideological attribute attached to the person of President Mugabe. To some Mugabeism represents a multi-faceted motif of; decoloniality, redemptive economic epistemology. This school of thought presents President Mugabe as an intellectual personhood of Africa’s post-coloniality and Zimbabwe’s epitome of not returning to colonial bondage. This is informed by the values that the man has constantly embraced since his first point of commitment in fighting the Western enemies of Africa as indicated in the book. This is why Mugabeism is a prodigious opponent of the neo-colonial regime change project in Zimbabwe. However, in a crisis-ridden political environment especially here in Zimbabwe; it is difficult for such sober appreciation of the vilified character of President Mugabe to be applauded. The forces that are working to the service of silencing the redemptive voice of the masses denounce the legitimacy of Robert Mugabe granted to him by values of the people’s quest to break the chains of coloniality in its modern disguises.
This is because plentiful attention has been capitalised in concentrating on Mugabe as one responsible for crafting the immiseration of his own people contrary to the adorable disposition Africa perceives in Mugabe(ism). This hostile ecology of thought and perception of Zimbabwe’s political climate around Mugabe suggests an emergence of rethinking the nation around the person of Mugabe and the daily political experiences of those under Mugabeism. Zimbabwe is caught up in ideological schizophrenic terms of decoloniality and liberalism. All this is influenced by the need to provoke citizen thought on whether Mugabeism must be embraced or discarded. This is a making of the long war between the revival of the liberation legacies by Zanu-PF for political expedience and the ahistorical liberalist discourse fuelled by Zimbabwe’s opposition, MDC in its quest to capture power.
Due to these ideological apportioning lines of nationhood to credit one side is criminalised. Even the so-called liberals who advocate for tolerance have fallen prey to this vice. Hence running short of the virtue to embrace the culture “difference”. This suggests a major flaw of the country’s regime-change democracy movement now increasingly becoming a replica of the nationalist movement they grossly accuse of violence and political intolerance. Following the post 2013 elections in Zimbabwe, it is imperative to engage on the challenges of the regime-change democracy movement not only as a socio-political order anticipating that “Not only Mugabe must go, but Mugabeism must go.”
We need to elevate our analyses to validate how this anti-Mugabe rhetoric has sustained Mugabeism. To break down the matter at hand I will focus on the role of the civic societie groups as frontiers of the regime-change democracy movement and how they have failed to achieve political change in Zimbabwe and the tragedy that may befall their “Mugabe and Mugabeism must go” project.
The “Mugabe Must Go” Agenda
The proclamation of the above mantra was and is still used to lament the Mugabe-led Government’s firm grip to power in Zimbabwe. The mantra is not only responsive to Zimbabwe’s domestic policy failures, it finds its existence in denouncing the pro-people driven initiatives led by Zanu-PF largely the Western vilified Land Reform Programme. This anti-Mugabe agenda had Western backing since its inception. The opposition and its aiding Civic Society Organisations (CSOs) were the proxies of this agenda which gained acceptance in Zimbabwe’s urban areas unlike in the rural spaces where the ruling had high consolidation of power.
By 1999, Western governments invested millions into this project aimed at dethroning Mugabe. This was to pave way for Western anticipated democracy symbolically expressed in the power transfer from Mugabe to Morgan Tsvangirai by his Western handlers. This was the first error of this democracy model advanced through the whims of neo-liberalism in Zimbabwe. The Western meddling in Zimbabwean politics was more linked to the ruling’s historical attachment to colonial Britain.
Therefore it would be remiss to only associate Britain’s concern over Zimbabwe’s domestic politics as the then (1999) power alternative search. Instead, this was a reaction to the British’s overgrown miscalculation of the long embracement of Mugabe as “their boy”.
To their surprise, his rebellion to the Lancaster terms aimed at protecting white privilege in terms of land ownership followed. Through the influence of Western dictated democracy he was to cede power to another newly discovered boy of White interests in the person of Tsvangirai.
Unfortunately, Mugabe defiantly objected that dictation until this day. In reality, the involvement of the West in Zimbabwe’s politics was to substitute Mugabe with a conservative of British interests. This was the neo-colonial conservation which the war veterans through demands for land aided President Mugabe to denounce it. President Mugabe’s radical endorsement of the Land Reform Programme was a response to the nationalist direct mandate that had crowned him to the helm of the country’s power in 1980.
Therefore it should be clear that all local institutions financed to service the “Mugabe Must Go” rhetoric were not paid to marshal real democracy. Instead their agenda from the producers of their script was to stage Zimbabwe’s hunger for a foreign crafted democracy which CSOs were solely feeding into Zimbabwe’s leadership.
It is also a confirmed fact that the need to remove Mugabe from power was stirred by British neo-colonial conservative disappointments which were a making of the war veterans in the late 1990s. Contrary to their set targets,
Robert Mugabe prevailed and has failed to go since then. This is because the man’s stubborn ideological consistency cannot be challenged by project time-lined nationalism of leftist neo-liberals hired to do dirty work for Britain.
Mugabeism as a source of income for pseudo democrats
The failure to subdue Mugabeism is another detriment for the frontiers of the Western model of democracy –the CSOs. Furthermore, there is awash evidence of monopoly of the civic sector in the country. The CSO route had done more to improve the stomach infrastructure of their directors using the banner of saving the suffering masses for self-enrichment.
Of late there have been clear indications that deterioration of the political crisis in Zimbabwe gratifies the economic base of CSOs and their administrators. These are the theoretical pro-people interest advocates and practical self-aggrandisement individuals can be better described as civic society entrepreneurs.
The whole plot of pursuing democracy through the civic society became a business if not a means of employment creation instead of being a voluntary pledge to serve one’s community and their nation at large. This is why our civic society is now a staggering movement which has even failed to follow their taskmasters’ script to remove President Mugabe out of power for the past decade.
Mugabe(ism) now unmistakably serves as proof that Western democracy targets leaders rebellious to upholding the neo-colonial status-quo. Moreover, stands to testify that this fashion of democracy is solely focused on terminating office tenure of those leaders resisting the new wave of Africa democratisation through Western orders. Consequently this character of democracy becomes untrue to itself and worse those who see it as a model for political progress in Africa.
- Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network — LAN. Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on [email protected]
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