Tinkering SA overhauling Zim

March 31 Summit of the Sadc Troika on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation that was held in Livingstone, Zambia.
Job Sikhala wanted to know if “our leadership is not going overboard” in “its criticism of Sadc”.
Another reader wanted to know “why Sadc humiliated President Mugabe”.
The reality of the matter is that the Troika embraced and appreciated “the frankness” of what Presidents Rupiah Banda (Zambia), Hifikepunye Pohamba (Namibia) and Armando Guebuza (Mozambique) believed to be a report from the Sadc facilitator on Zimbabwe, President Jacob Zuma.
This report was in fact the Nkandla Village Document prepared when Morgan Tsvangirai joined President Zuma at his home village on March 26, in celebration of the engagement of one of the president’s sons.
It was a document whose content was manufactured over goat meat and other “delicious” (President Zuma loves that word) traditional dishes served at that function.
According to President Zuma’s spokesperson, Zizi Kodwa, Tsvangirai was at the traditional function to talk to the president, “bringing him up to speed with all the issues and whether the Global Political Agreement is being implemented.”
Kodwa added, “The meeting was in that context.”
Traditional ceremonies might be dancing matters, expres-sing the richness of our cultural backgrounds, but surely foreign policy, international relations and regional affairs are no dancing matters at all. That is why they should never be discussed in the dancing mood at traditional parties.
This writer believes President Zuma knows this very well, and it is hoped that he seriously did not believe that a single political player from Zimbabwe’s inclusive Government, one clearly shrouded in personal interests and unquenchable political ambitions, would possibly bring him “up to speed with all issues” to do with the GPA, and also provide a conclusive and fair judgment on “whether the global political agreement is being implemented”.
The report that came out of the Nkandla Village meeting between President Zuma and Prime Minister Tsvangirai was never officially availed to the public, but the communiqué from the Livingstone Troika Summit made it quite explicit that its contents were based on this “frank” report, which it “endorsed”.
What is clear is that the report was no more than minutes of the village meeting held over goat meat between President Zuma and Prime Minister Tsvangirai – and one can clearly see that the minutes were striated with the daily rhetoric used by the MDC-T to discredit their political rivals from Zanu-PF.
How the other members of the Troika swallowed and “endorsed” this report remains inexplicable and particularly inexorable for Zanu-PF and its leadership.
The facilitator was quite aware of how his report had been compiled, and necessarily hid it from Zanu-PF, so that decisions affecting the party could be taken in an ambushing manner. It was indeed a dexterous move by the facilitator and the preciseness was evident too.
Presidents Pohamba and Guebuza were baited and they swallowed the Nkandla Village report as representative of the Zimbabwean situation, even showering it with praises for its “frankness”. So, Tsvangirai’s “disappointment (with) insufficient progress” and “impatience in the delay of the implementation of the GPA” found its way from Harvest House, to Livingstone via Nkandla Village.
Article 15 of the Livingstone Communiqué captures all this and must surely be a historical milestone for the MDC-T. From the “frank” Nkandla Document, the Troika noted “polarisation of the political environment as characterised by, inter-alia, resurgence of violence, arrests and intimidation in Zimbabwe.
Again, this statement is directly borrowed from an “alert” online statement recently released by the MDC-T information department.
It takes no rocket science to figure out how it left Nelson Chamisa’s desk and ended up as Article 16 of the Livingstone Communiqué. It was adopted by the facilitator at Nkandla.
For a man who is vehemently expiating over a widely condemned diplomatic move of voting for the bombing of Libyans by ruthless Westerners, it is most surprising that President Zuma would rashly make another unverified political decision over an issue in international relations, more so involving a close neighbour.
The plagiarised demand by the Troika is most exciting.
Line upon line, word upon word, the Troika parroted another MDC-T information department line when they resolved that there “must be an immediate end of violence, intimidation, hate speech, harassment, and any other form of action that contradicts the letter and spirit of the GPA”.
It is not a wonder that Zanu-PF is not at liberty to accept a yet to be named team to be appointed by the Troika so that it can “assist Zimbabwe to formulate guidelines” for the next election, and to work with JOMIC. How is it expected of Zanu-PF to accept a team whose terms of reference will be drawn by a Troika that passes an MDC-T information department propaganda piece of act for a communiqué?
After President Zuma’s administration voted for the bombing of Libyans by European countries, in total disregard to the AU’s position for negotiations facilitated by a panel of African leaders, the Troika called for “adherence to the political track that was initiated by the AU, to pave way for a political solution in accordance with all its resolutions”.
Perhaps the Sadc Troika would want to explain why they think Europeans should adhere to a political track despised and disrespected by one of their own members, alongside two other African states.
The politics of South Africa and Zimbabwe have been of tinkerers versus overhaulers in the last 10 years. We have the politics of apartheid reforms, cosmetic improvements and adjustments, versus substantive structural change as evidenced by Zimbabwe’s overhauled land ownership and its radical economic empowerment policies.
It is the battle of reforms versus revolution. As a presidential aspirant, President Zuma played overhauler, passionately singing his trademark revolutionary song “Umshini wami”, and scaring the hell out of the colonially privileged white South Africans. They needed not have worried at all.
As a sitting president, Cde Zuma has been a perfect tinkerer playing the rainbow balancing act so cautiously that even a wire acrobat is left green with envy.
Sometimes tinkering with the system can be of some help to people; like being internationally hailed for producing a man who is so legendary as to accept to be honoured alongside his persecutors and jailers, or for being the first African country ever to host the Fifa World Cup.
Tinkering with the system has produced the legal green light for gay marriages in South Africa, and that too comes with praises from certain places on this planet, much as such praises are hardly ever appreciated by any of the African people. Tinkering with the system is the only reason South African colonial white commercial farmers have not joined their former counterparts from Zimbabwe in the post-colonial exodus. The white former commercial farmers of Zimbabwe met the overhaulers, and their South African counterparts owe their continued colonially acquired dominance on South African farm land to the rule of tinkerers. Julius Malema is very clear about this and the white privileged do not like him at all.
Zimbabwe itself did a lot of tinkering for 20 years after independence and indeed accolades befell President Mugabe like there was no tomorrow. He was knighted by the British in 1994 and these were the years we needed no visas to visit the United Kingdom. But tinkering is nothing more than a preliminary stage to large scale change. There cannot be large-scale structural change unless a very substantial part of the population is deeply committed to it.
Overhauling always has to come from the organised efforts of a dedicated population. This does not and cannot happen unless people perceive that the reform efforts, the tinkering, are running into barriers that cannot be overcome without institutional change.
Every serious revolutionary is a reformist and the tinkering and reforms in South Africa are indeed a foundation to the coming revolution. A serious revolution is founded on changes that come from below, from the organised population.
True revolutions are not founded on coups or Western engineered regime change games. If President Zuma thought he had a revolutionary for a guest when Tsvangirai attended his son’s engagement, then we now have a serious problem.
Tsvangirai is no more than Zimbabwe’s tinkerer aspirant, even a treacherous one. He wants reforms that are based on a donor economy – fully supported by Western economies at the expense of our natural resources.
The only reason people embark in a revolution is when they realise that institutions do not permit them to achieve just and proper goals.
South African economic institutions are a good example of such prohibiting structures, particularly for young black South Africans. This writer does not believe that President Zuma is blind to the colour characters of imperialism, seen apparently when one takes a glance at what is happening in Libya right now.
Hannah Arendt once wrote: “Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilised world.”
Indeed, imperialism requires racism. Most of modern racism can substantially be traced to imperial conquest.
If one takes a look at the intellectual debates in England and France during the 18th century, there were discussions about whether apes are different to blacks, whether they are human, and whether they can speak or have a capacity for a language.
One French scholar suggested that apes were smarter than humans because they pretend they cannot speak. He argued that they knew that if they spoke, they would be enslaved by whites, just like their black look-alikes had been enslaved. This kind of thinking has not entirely disappeared. Conquest is not easy to justify.
When one group of people conquers another group and suppresses them, there has to be a reason for it. The West cannot say, “We are imperialists and we want to rob Libya of their oil.”
Neither can they say, “We are racists and we want white commercial farmers to go back to the land taken away from them by the people-oriented Robert Mugabe.”
They have to say it is for the good of Libyans that the Western war planes are spraying lethal bombs across Libya; they deserve it; or, they actually benefit from it.
This is why Britain is claiming victory for “working with Sadc” in pushing for regime change in Zimbabwe. It is a perpetuation of the attitude of slave owners. Not many of these were honest enough to openly say they were enslaving people because they wanted exploitable, cheap labour for their own benefit.
They always said they were doing the slaves a favour and that the slaves needed them. We hear ousted white commercial farmers from Zimbabwe loudly saying their slave-waged labourers needed them and that they did these labourers a lot of favour.
Some anthropologists of the 19th century explained that blacks had curved spines because they were genetically adapted to picking cotton.
They argued that by making blacks pick cotton, the slave masters were helping them to do what they were good at.
These ideas are part of the imperial conquest doctrine in its historical or present setting. European imperialism is quite virulent and if we do not see it in what is happening in Sadc then we know no better than our enslaved ancestors.
European imperialists absolutely believe that we are the lesser apes who are betraying themselves by being able to communicate. Because we can talk, they can create puppets among us. Because we can speak, they can sponsor and smuggle documents to our own meetings. Because we can talk, they believe they can make us praise sanctions that actually harm us. The British feel outdone by the French at the moment. Sarkozy’s helicopters are bombing Abidjan freely and his sophisticated war planes are bombing Libya for fun.
How the British wish they had a military base in Zimbabwe. Now they want a roadmap to such a Zimbabwe – fully decorated with British military arsenal and intelligence assets. This is the roadmap the MDC-T is calling for, towards “free and fair elections”, only winnable by one party, the MDC-T. Zimbabwe already has a roadmap to elections.
There have been a total of nine general and Presidential elections in Zimbabwe since 1980 and the only people who seem to be lost on that roadmap are the leaders of the MDC-T. It would appear they have blinded the facilitator who inherited the position left by the real facilitator that Sadc once appointed to help deal with negotiations between Zimbabwe’s main political parties. It is this writer’s hope that the full Sadc summit to which the Livingstone troika will report will be wiser than its organs.
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