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themselves and for those they care about, all based on the quintessential value of tolerance.
Tolerance is about realising the greatness of diversity of interests and desires people have, so great that often we do not even understand why others should think and behave the way they do.
But we must acknowledge their right to do so, if only because we cherish the same right for ourselves.
Last week, this writer discussed the concept of free speech; and by far the best way of accommodating free speech is tolerance.
The very definition and possibility of society is based on tolerance, involving people getting along peacefully all the time and co-operatively most of the time.
Peaceful co-existence and co-operation are not possible until we recognise the entitlement of others to their choices and give them space accordingly.
The familiar rub is the common paradox of tolerance, where societies are at the risk of tolerating those who are intolerant and allowing movements to grow which foster intolerance.
In Zimbabwe we have the dilemma of having to tolerate those whose views are a huge risk to the ownership and control of the very natural resources through which we claim nationhood.
We have to tolerate those among us who in blissful ignorance form political parties that rely on the funding and support of terrible people whose strategic interests over us are to plunder our wealth to enrich their own backyards.
The profoundly dismaying example of today’s Zimbabwe illustrates the point. What started as a shining example of majority rule where a diversity of political parties took part in peaceful elections for 20 years has been stabbed in the heart by people who decided to masquerade as a popular labour party so they could hand our country over to their Western handlers and funders, breeding intolerant and subversive activists wishing to remove the incumbent government by force, with the leader of that party at the forefront of advocating removing the sitting Government “violently.”
A series of attempts to remove the sitting Government by force were seen in the first three years of this century – from the remarkably flopped “mass stayaways,” to the so-called “Defiance Campaign” of March 11, 2007, itself the height of intolerance as police orders were ignored, the law disregarded, people got bashed: and there were Zimbabweans having to start the long and shameful journey of talking to each other through the efforts of neighbours.
The shameless journeys across the Limpopo to decide when and how we should have elections, even who should participate in them and the path we should take in the event one of the parties wins the election must just stop.
A country allowing a desperately struggling and apparently hopeless head of a neighbouring state to be its mentor can only be described as a laughing stock, a sad tragedy and an incredible danger to itself.
It is like a husband and wife always heading to the Pastor’s house, to a relative, a mentor or to some other counsellor with a view to undress each other and to wash their dirty linen in the houses of others.
The marriage will always dismantle to nothing in a matter of time.
If you can’t run a home from its own boundaries do not expect a neighbour to successfully run it for you. That is absolute madness from a pure point of logic. Ask any Pastor worth the name what happens with marriage cry babies that do not believe in solving their own problems, preferring instead to pretend to be taking solutions from numerous interventionists they invite in their marriage. First is the shame of being the laughing stock of others, including the invited mentors themselves, and then follows the inevitable demise of the marriage. When two fools get married, the natural expectation is their divorce.
We can sanitise the efforts of that bunch of South Africans masquerading as facilitators of peace among us as a SADC baby if we want, even by extension make them appear like an AU creation – the so-called “African solution to an African problem,” but the sad reality is that their efforts are a vulgar mockery to our integrity and dignity as a people, hailed as such intervention may have been. We have played the fool before South Africans for far too long than can be reasonably tolerated. The circus must just stop. It is not fun anymore.
The remedy for the paradox of tolerance is that tolerance must not tolerate intolerance if it is to protect itself. But if tolerance comes to a point where it is intolerant of something, it is surely in breach of itself, at least that would be the logical response.
Indeed it is natural to think that tolerance is a warm, woolly, fuzzy feel-good attitude; a principle: an ethical demand that everyone should respect the rights and liberties of others.
But tolerance is not a demand to licence just anything whatever, as some activists may believe in blissful ignorance.
Tolerance does not and should not accommodate behaviour that threatens the rights of others; such as the fundamental right to self-determination and independent nationalism, itself the chief cornerstone to the attainment of national independence by all former colonies and protectorates.
Tolerance as a principle is a demand to respect others’ rights and entitlements even when one does not agree with their views or share their interests.
Giving away the control of the country’s resources to foreign allies infringes on the collective right to self-determination as is shared by Zimbabweans in general, and as such cannot be tolerated even if such a goal was to be pushed by glorious rhetoric on the glitter of democracy and justice.
The central place of tolerance in a nation is such that it stands among other principles that stop it from being a merely flabby acceptance that anything goes, “madiro aJojina” in Shona.
Such are the limitations and regulations resulting from the principles of pluralism and individual liberty, which essentially require tolerance, but will always indicate its rational limit, which is: intolerance of anything that causes harm, physically, socially, individually or collectively.
It is the insistence on this principle that will explain why tolerance cannot and must not tolerate intolerance. Those who cannot tolerate the view that African states have a sovereign right not only to correct the colonial imbalances that face them, but also to assume full control of their resources and countries are in themselves very intolerant, and in return they cannot and they must not be
tolerated in Africa.
It took a long two centuries of the worst kind of intolerance; the kind that gets people to kill each other, for England to produce a consensus on the need for tolerance in matters of religion. The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was a direct response to the doctrine that sought to impose conformity of belief by the use of force.
John Locke seemed shocked that anyone should seek to impose religious conformity by force, but that was the prevailing opinion from centres of power.
We have in Zimbabwe and in many parts of Africa today some people who seek to impose political conformity by force, and this maybe by the primitive use of the bludgeon, or by other forms of coercion like economic strangulation and such isolation as we have seen with the placing of individuals who do not conform to MDC-T politics on sanctions lists from Western countries.
Whether is by the blatant use of the bludgeon or by the refined hard power of economic strangulation and sanctions, the coercion of individuals into conforming to political beliefs is a sign of crass intolerance, primitive arrogance, and inexplicable insanity.
The feigned dismay by political leaders when alerted that there is political violence aimed at coercing people towards specific political choices is nothing but a rhetorical device, its aim being to appear like democrats or statesmen, when in reality this despicable intolerance is a culture across Zimbabwe’s political divide, where mainstream parties Zanu-PF and the MDC-T are sometimes grossly intolerant of those who are not their supporters, even when dealing with rivals during the holding of internal elections within the respective party structures.
A case in point was the Bulawayo street battles between violent youths belonging to factions led by two candidates who were running for the MDC-T chairperson’s post in the province earlier this year.
Zanu-PF seems to be better structured to avoid internal violence, or is it that the party has perfected the art of imposing candidates and scaring would be dissenting voices? Whatever the true position there is no denying that there are Zimbabweans out there who claim to have been coerced to make specified political choices by activists from both Zanu-PF and the MDC-T. Such claims are a mockery to the fundamental principle of tolerance.
Defending freedom of thought naturally and quickly leads to the defence of freedom of expression. The two ideas of tolerance and freedom of speech have always been entwined from the early stages of the history of democracy, just as the two are closely linked in the shared difficulties faced towards their attainment.
Both tolerance and free speech are fundamentals in any open society in which individual rights are respected and protected. Without free speech, all other rights are impeded inadvertently. When one is silenced one cannot lay claim to any of one’s other rights or seek remedies for their abuse.
A society in which free speech is central must be a highly tolerant society, because it will not infrequently happen that someone will be offended by someone else’s utterances, this being an inevitable concomitant of free speech. Social cohesion and free speech can only successfully co-exist if there is agreement both in principle and practice among members of the same society that they are prepared to tolerate opinions, sentiments, attitudes; and above all the expression of all three, even when all the three are radically or offensively different between the members.
There is a difference between indifference and tolerance. If we do not mind what others are doing, even when what those others are doing is seemingly strange, weird or absurd, this cannot be described as tolerance.
It is indifference. But tolerance requires an amount of work and effort on our part.
This is because tolerance is an active thing.
Tolerance calls for the recognising of the right of others to be different from ourselves, and allowing them the space and opportunity to speak and act from their different perspective, of course under the usual constraint of not harming others in the process.
Tolerance involves putting up with the fact that others seem odd, or offensive, or disagreeable. We have all the right to put up an argument with them, to try and persuade them towards our own opinion or choices, to criticise them even, to satirise them, to mock them if we so wish – thus exercising our own freedom of speech in return – but never ever are we to forbid or prevent them, or to harm them.
As we saw last week, free speech is not in itself absolute, and equally tolerance does not and cannot mean a limitless acceptance that anything goes. The demand for tolerance is a genuine one: it requires that people put up with a great deal of what they might not like at all, just because the other party is entitled to speak or act that way.
The dilemma of tolerance is that it allows too much margin to the intolerant.
When we defend the right of people to their opinions what we do is to also allow unsavoury opinions to flourish, even to attract followers, perhaps including our own children.
We allow people who hate free speech and tolerance to exploit the principle of tolerance and free speech so that they can even succeed in overthrowing democratically elected governments, or worse than that, in overthrowing our society and its liberties.
The anxiety of promoting free and fair elections where popular policy positions are unlikely to triumph at the polls because the electorate has been intimidated by strangulation and economic sanctions is a reality many developing countries have had to face in the recent past. Palestinians were soundly punished by Israel and the US for their democratic errors after they voted Hamas into power instead of the US favourite Mahmoud Abbas.
Zimbabweans have been under heavy intimidation and punishment from Western powers for failing to vote out the Western-hated Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party. Now the dilemma is for Zanu-PF to tolerate the intended beneficiaries of this gross meddling by Western powers, to allow them to go to elections totally unimpeded as they ride on a prospect of carrying a majority vote by voter intimidation tactfully carried out by their economically powerful masters from Western capitals.
However undesirable the fear against the intimidation of the electorate may be, it must never justify the fear of “one man one vote,” as what prompted the Algerian military to overturn the outcome of the 1991 elections, which had reportedly given power to the Islamic Salvation Front.
The risk that tolerance will breed puppet politicians that may give away control of the country to foreign powers is a real one in a country like Zimbabwe, and yet it is a price that tolerance exacts – a price that perhaps has to be paid.
The price can only be avoided by eliminating the meddling of foreigners in the political affairs of Zimbabwe, at the risk of breaching tolerance towards the beneficiaries of puppetry politics, the political parties that today stand funded by Western countries via IDAZIM, the main conduit organisation through which most of the MDC-T funding is channelled.
Toleration happens to have two dimensions. We have on the one hand toleration of the existence of others who have different views and ways of life, something that does not necessarily mean that one cannot disagree with them or criticise them.
Conversely, being tolerated carries with it an acceptance that one is going to have to tolerate the disagreement or criticism that comes from others. Those who lament the criticism of the MDC-T in the mainstream media must be reminded that this criticism is coming because the MDC-T is a tolerated party, allowed to compete unimpeded in the political field, and it must be remembered that the tolerated must accept that their alliance with aggressive Western powers will be criticised, mocked, satirised, ridiculed and heavily discredited to the maximum capacity of those in disagreement.
Just like MDC-T is tolerated, the reality of being hated for the choice of accepting funding and political alliance with the British must also be tolerated by those who receive such funding.
It is a breach of the principle of tolerance for anyone to accuse The Herald of “hate speech” when the paper publishes articles that criticise MDC-T, and it is emphatically unacceptable for anyone to seek to halt the publication of such criticism of MDC-T in The Herald, simply on the basis that the criticism is not in equal measure to that directed at Zanu-PF.
Why should it be equal?
The Herald’s only call is to verify facts before publishing, to publish opinion as opinion and facts as facts, not necessarily to balance between the amounts of criticism levelled against one party in comparison to another.
Is it intolerant to expect a Zimbabwean political party intending to govern the country to respect the revolutionary norms of the legacy of the liberation struggle that brought about national independence? Or is it intolerant for the Zimbabwean military to expect that all politicians seeking to govern the country should exhibit reasonable conformity to the values enshrined in the liberation ethos?
The first question is an easy YES for most people, and we hear often that “we all respect our liberation struggle and we respect our heroes who died to liberate this country,” all this coming from the political leadership often accused of demeaning the liberation struggle and its values.
It is conformity to these values that elicits resistance, especially from MDC-T.
It is not like this political leadership is full of bucolic boofheads who cannot figure out the honour and dignity of reverencing the liberation ethos. For these politicians, failure to conform to these values is not a choice but an inescapable requirement for survival. Simply put, the MDC-T fears getting broke should they anger their funders by singing the same song with war veterans.
Tolerating MDC-T as a political party is one thing, but tolerating their alliance with subversive external powers is a totally different thing, and must be treated as the threat it actually is. How the
Zimbabwean security system has failed to bust the link between Western funders, IDAZIM and MDC-T is a remarkable puzzle, only explicable to those who have failed to uncover the apparent link.
So unhidden is the link that Munhumutapa Building houses a group of people who openly receive salaries from IDAZIM apart from the paltry hundreds of dollars per month they receive from the Public Service.
These people were brazenly planted into the government system by the US Embassy, sending them as a parallel government working from the Prime Minister’s office, not in the service of Zimbabweans but that of the imperial masters.
The threat of puppetry and clientelism is to a resourced developing country what the threat of terrorism is to an industrialised country. Both are egregious threats to the welfare and wellbeing of the masses.
While puppet politicians have loudly complained of being treated unjustly by those who hold on to nationalistic values, it must be noted that the US and the UK have applied equal if not more draconian measures against perceived terrorist threats in their own backyard.
The UK has its biometric identity card system, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, restrictions on free speech, and plans for prolonged periods without trial.
The United States has its draconian Patriotic Act, Guantanamo Bay, and other reversals of due process and civil liberty provisions that are far too many to mention here.
It does not matter that tolerance and free speech are threatened by the UK, the US or by the Zimbabwean Government.
There has to be a robust and sustained response to any threat to tolerance and free speech.
Simply on the basis of principle and the need to maintain an open society, one has to continue to argue the case for tolerance and free speech on every occasion of their being covertly or overtly compromised.
Every Zimbabwean must insist that all of us accept the fact that tolerating others is not indifference but hard work and effort, and that the work has to be done, not only accepted.
This means supporters of different political parties must co-exist, and even befriend each other, regardless of how distasteful the ideologies of the rival party may be.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on [email protected] or [email protected] or visit www.rwafawarova.com
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