adminMicheal Mhlanga
The dilemma of young Zimbabweans today in politics is the conflation of loyalty and exploitation. The failure is out of either ignorance or hunger as they struggle to distinguish between being religious to a cause and being tools of the political paranoid.
Should one decide to quiz the so-called champions of youth politics in Zimbabwe on what loyalty is, the best response you can get would be how one should be religious without reasoning and questioning any of the commands dispelled to them. A common mistake of failing to interpret the meaning of “nzira dzemasoja” is so popular among those who have become acquainted with passiveness. Such a disastrous thinking and practice renders the Zimbabwean youth as the best possible description and a definition of a most educated populace yet the least learned congress.
Youths, like other people in Zimbabwe, are thinking, creative and a diverse constituency. They are not intellectually or conceptually homogeneous simply by virtue of being young and energetic. Like other beings they are products of their circumstance and their response to those circumstances, many times they have fallen victim to their situation due to socially entrenched political ill norms.
Before we delve much into the commentary, it is good that we give a definition of youths especially in political spaces. A moment of digression to a discussion we had with my colleagues after a busy day at work, as we were concluding the day with a couple of drinks in one of the Bulawayo corners, one of the comrades presented a controversial understanding of the youth in politics. He aggregated and subdivided youths in politics into two categories that is the youth and the masses.
This aggregation can be used as a determent of their usefulness and their uselessness in political spaces. Tedious Ncube made two important distinctions between the youth and the masses. In his clarification, he defined the youth as a people conscious of itself in ways of politics, modes of thought and cultural heritage.
On the other hand, the masses masquerading as the youth is unconscious of itself; uniform and quantitative, devoid of specific political principle and cultural heritage and is without foundations and empty. This crop of the youth (masses) is the cause of this debate due to its emptiness hence becoming an object of propaganda, destitute of responsibility and lives at the lowest level of consciousness.
This crop of youth in its uncritical thinking has been an eminent threat to Zimbabwe’s democracy and the youth empowerment agenda, because of its naivety in thought it finds itself in spaces of significance, not because it deserves to be there but because of its accidental masquerade culture. This has been augmented by the current political Zimbabwean youth through a severe self-imposed patronage system.
The role played by young people in the strategies of rulers and in the ensuing outcomes has become a topic of interest in the discourse on political institutions. It can be argued that, besides obvious divergences in participation and competition, loyalty and exploitation differs in how much value each group of people provides to its political actors.
Over the past months, we have witnessed different young people making political inroads, ascertaining and affirming the youth voice in the political spectrum. Power contests, which are normal aspirations for any normal human being, are dispelled and confirmed through the youth voice — young people have become the currency for political transactions in all political institutions.
Should an aspirant not get the youth certification, their political endeavours are slammed and we conclude — you have no political legitimacy. I would be glad to give named examples, but my thinking is that, it is only true when we view this political paranoia as an ailment with a long-standing confusion of what loyalty is and what we mean by political exploitation.
Simply put, loyalty is a strong belief in an institution with an ordained conviction of what it represents and is built on. That conviction drives the congregant to be ready to lay down his life in defence of the institutional cause. Despite its demands of relinquishing betrayal, loyalty is only successful as a belief, it is upheld in rationality and objectivity.
Moreover, should the cause be in question or begin to lose trail, the loyals should start to question and exempt themselves from whatever does not reflect the ethos of what they were loyal to. Loyalty is all about institutions, not individuals. Should you be loyal to an individual you run the risk of being a puppet — surely a Giapetto creation, with strings attached. Individual behaviours shift and if one become loyal to an individual, not an institution, they are easy to dispose, that is the reason we see most of the former “glories” in youth politics looking very hungry in the streets — their loyalty was informed by the politics of the stomach.
One of the biggest hurdles in Zimbabwe today, apart from the historically entrenched economic paralysis and the overstated colonial legacy, is the failure of the youth to effectively define itself, its space and to remain in its stipulate definition. In the case of Zimbabwe, youths in political institutions are not informed by principles of good governance and proper political ethics, theirs is salivating for materialism even at the expense of its identity and the interests that it is supposed to be representing. In most political institutions, youth leaders assume the detective’s duties.
At one time, I churned a series which located youth in their attempt to reclaim their space, but I deliberately left out those who have found themselves in the cauldron of violence, being the machines of disciplining the political elders. Through selective intimidation, youth structures are used as a mechanism to discipline labelled rogue elements in any political setup, they are often discharged to conduct some witch hunting political orgies which in most cases do not even resemble their interests.
In particular, it is the militarist element, regrettably the most dominant feature of most political organisations that militate against democracy, places limits on youth empowerment and ultimately it provides a dubious justification for all that is done in the name of the youth structures.
We are regenerating a culture of embracing exploitation assuming its loyalty. We are keen to drench in sweat, chanting, trailing and celebrating hatred and animosity, as long as it benefits the shouting stomach we are fulfilled and ignore that we are nurturing a cycle of exploitation for political interests.
I am excited that young people have had the chance to have close contact with His Excellency through which he converses with the future of this nation. It is the Zanu-PF Youth League which has facilitated this interaction but I strongly believe that the Presidential Youth Interface traverses and stretches beyond partisanship, it is an open invitation to all young people to listen to once a youthful and intelligent man share his experiences and inspire the current crop of young leaders. A point to ponder, President R G Mugabe was one such young person who refused to be exploited in politics.
His delay into politics was informed by his loyalty to the belief that one has to first comprehend dynamics of knowledge, control of power in the world and a strong conviction that there is a lot he has to know before he becomes vocal and embarrasses himself.
I think it was Plato’s philosophy which kept on reprimanding him from hopping into politics — “Empty vessels make the loudest noise”. During his youthful days, the Chikeremas, and the Sitholes were the vanguards of the struggle, but soon were easily exploited and dispatched their loyalty to the institution, in any case, they were arguably not as intellectually acute like the young Robert then whom Colin Smith describes as a disciple of his own cause.
If we would ask His Excellency today on where our loyalty should lie, he would confidently tell us that “be loyal to the institution, be loyal to the republic and be loyal to the people who elect you. Do not confuse loyalty with exploitation.”
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