Is Zimbabwe a victim of the Babel Curse!

Is Zimbabwe a victim of the Babel Curse? I wonder. But first, Tendai Biti. Quite a humourous guy, is he not? So humourous that he does not mind laughing at himself even. I am of course referring to his unremitting weight loss and his claim that veterans of the liberation war are behind it!

As indeed are girls he can't phone anymore! Food for thought. His right to happiness has been squandered by those who liberated him, those who loved him. Where would he rather be, rather be with?

Plucking fiction from the net
Seriously I think what is eating into the happiness of the young man is not so much all those things he blames, all those beings he blames. Rather, it is those things he thinks are beneficent, principally those things wished by the West for us, things which transform him from being a competent African activist-politician to a mere lackey defined by not so impressive histrionics.

I will mention just three such westwards-looking dramas he has done since the dawn of this moonlit year. A few weeks before this year's KPCS meeting set in the United States, Biti revved up debate on diamonds and revenues therefrom. To set the scene, he plucks the figure of US$600 million from the thin air, touting it as Zimbabwe's revenue expectation from her diamonds.

Marange is an unknown geologically, shall remain so until he funds the proposed mapping institution which has been on the cards since the inclusive Government came into being. So this fictitious revenue figure is computed from the size of residue mounds he saw when he paid his maiden visit, extrapolating from them the number of carats expected from each tonne of ore.

All these computations aided by reports - pseudo-scientific reports - from foreign activists intent on ruining Zimbabwe as a lawful diamond producing nation. They abound on the Internet.

When froth settled
He beat the figure of US$600 million to a national frenzy, infecting everyone with expectations of fabulous plenty. And hungry men are always expectant. No one wanted to be woken up from the young man's soporific figures. We loved them. They appealed to our injured sense of self-worth, revived our battered egos.

We slept dreams rich in expectations. No one quizzed the young man where he was plucking these fabulous figures from. Meanwhile, time went by, but rudely unmet by those expectations of plenty Mr Soft Beer had mated into us. The only things that swelled to the astronomical heights of that number were our ever deepening poverty and of course our hunger for some respite from it.

With agriculture down, industry down, all against an ever swelling import bill for things we used to grow locally, manufacture locally, a gust of searing reality soon blasted in. The exchequer was broke, virtually. Fictitious growth figures came down faster than Phaeton chariot tumbling from dizzy heights attained on wings of wax.

Finally, the froth was settling, revealing yawning depths, menacing emptiness. Meanwhile, KPCS was approaching. Questions were forming in some minds, triggered and fed by our own man's fictitious rhetoric. Zimbabwe had to be in the dock, although charges were hard to frame, harder to lay.  And Biti ramped up the fictitious revenue line, pumped it up to notes of near-hysteria. Not for local notice. For the notice of the Western members of the KPCS. The Americans. The Canadians. The British. Their shrill NGOs. At the KPCS in Washington, we met questions our own man had raised locally, with the burden to answer them falling on us. It took quite some doing to undo the damage. Act One, Scene One.

These terrible officials!
A few weeks after the KPCS saga, a certain young minister complained about a Ministry of Defence which will not submit to the austerity dictates from the Exchequer. The guilty Ministry had recruited well over 5 000 young men and women for the military, outside the budget. A whole brigade, more or less, without a budget for it! And the whole act was illegal, the youthful minister yelled in nationally helpful anger.

We had to be disciplined, to respect our own budget. Who could fault such an argument? Who? We all listened, sympathised and even applauded in fact. Only to hear that a few weeks after this bitter charge, the International Monetary Fund was on its way, coming for the routine check on national books, done under Chapter whatever. As with the KPCS, the stage had been set, skilfully set so the probing visitors would know what questions to ask, which corners to comb for appropriate charges.

Indeed after their usual ritual checks - themselves really a pretext - a letter was originated in the name of the selfsame IMF, asking for a meeting with the "offending" Ministry of Defence, the first ever time in the world that such a letter had been authored for the attention of such a sensitive ministry. The country had now found a new Commander-in-Chief, in the form and shape of the IMF!

When Defence squeaked, the young minister studiously denied ever having anything to do with the request! Indeed he could not have had anything to do with it. It had come from a mere official from his Ministry. These terrible, unpatriotic officials! Act One, Scene Two.

The story of sanctions
And just recently, the EU was set to meet over the illegal sanctions slapped on Zimbabwe well over a decade ago. The prospects looked quite dim for the British. In Europe, support for the continuation of the sanctions was wearing thin, very thin. Within Britain itself, Labour which had called for the sanctions in the first place was out of power, was very unpopular on the ground.

The governing coalition of the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems was having a major rethink on the matter. Not only were these sanctions insupportable within the EU; they had hurt British interests and influence on Zimbabwe quite badly. Britain had to turn over a new leaf, had to remake her world with Zimbabwe. Here at home, those in whose name the sanctions had been passed were groaning from the sheer disutility of the sanctions. They had become burdensome politically.

Stout abroad, thin at home
Just a weekend before this crucial review meeting in Brussels, something dramatic happens here in Zimbabwe. A young, bullish politician sets a rally for some place called Murombedzi. The place is close to the President's kraal. There home is lots of provocative, pre-event publicity clearly meant to goad the opposite number. Zanu-PF obliges and just a day before the Brussels meeting, inter-party political clashes are recorded, right in the President's front yard, with one Tendai Biti who never left Harare for the meeting, firmly implotted in the never-never saga!

The MDC-T propaganda machinery goes into a frenzy, imaginatively adding flesh and fresh, dripping blood to weather-beaten carrion of the veld. The rally had been stopped, violently stopped by Mugabe's "thugs"!

The idea is perfect: embroil and indict the President to remove from the British the dilemma over the lifting from the sanctions list persons targeted who include the President. They are a continuing outrage, unrepentant as ever!

Quite some drama, all performed for overseas telescopic observers. Tendai emerged the overseas hero, the villain of home. Tendai would be a wonderfully weighty politician, if only he could derive his cause and impetus from home. Poor guy, see how rapidly he loses weight, fleeing from a black rhinoceros upset by an earlier passerby, well before he completes Act One!

Why not us?
Are we a nation cursed by a bubbling thousand tongues? If one were to descend from Mars, would one discern what we want and seek, just from our perorations in the Press and other expressive platforms? I doubt. When you visit purposeful nations, it is never difficult to gauge their goals, aspirations and applications, all in an instant.

These permeate and reflect abundantly and explicitly in their national discourses. You feel the throb. You feel the thrust. You feel the direction. Indeed you glean elements of emerging convergence and consensus. Not us. Not us!

Uncircumcised thoughts
It does not matter which platform you access, when you access it. It does not matter which voice you listen to, when you listen to it. It does not matter in what language thought processes are conveyed, which style in which that is done. There is something decidedly unkempt, unprunned, ragged and untidy about us, and therefore about the national thought-process.

Myriad knots of short, undeveloped, incomplete, stunted even, spurts of un-thoughts, half-thoughts, ill-thoughts, variously and aimlessly tending towards nowhere. As a national mind, we are shabby, very untidy and undisciplined. And let's not pretend we are free minds, un-circumscribed thinkers. We are not. Uncircumcised maybe, but not uncircumscribed. We are heavily strictured in our thinking, hidebound in fact. So neatly hidebound that our thinking fits into various clusters that pretend to parallel a poorly grasped political divide that truncates our body-politic.

Thoughts that never coalesce
I seem to be contradicting myself here. Surely if our thinking fits into clusters, parallels the political divide, then there should be a method to the hubbub? One would think so. One would wish so! But not so with us. We are Zimbabweans, Zimbos for short. In our loquacious fury, we think we are coherent and cohering with our politics; we think we are building on our political predilections when in reality we are not.

We are strands that never meet, grains of shattered thought that never coalesce into a harvest, let alone germinate to give tendrils of anything promising. Just shredded un-thoughts and half-thoughts bereft of perspective, de-linked from previous thoughts, unrelated to thoughts to come, whatever, whenever.

That is us, Zimbos. And with such untidy minds, it is well nigh impossible to establish national purpose, national perspective at all.

The cosmopolitan mind
And don't get me wrong, assuming you can ever achieve the feat of the coherence for such condemnation. I don't believe in a unified, national thought, in constructing a mental monolith. That is undesirable, in fact impossible for so literate a society such as our own. Impossible especially when read against the variegated intellectual traditions which make us such a boiling, hissing pot ideationally.

The Rhodesians are here in us, here in full force. The British are here in us, in brutish shades. The Americans are here in us too, with their spacious theories. So are the Russians, the Cubans, the Bulgarians. South Africans, both in their defiant Afrikaner sense and their supremacist, elitist English sense, they are here, part of our national mental make-up.

The Chinese are beginning to be here too. The Indians, with their ingenuity. The Malaysians, minus their renowned sense of focus and industry. Zimbabwe is very cosmopolitan by way of intellect, by way of mind. It can never yield a herd mind, a unified mind.

The experience from criticising
Yet there is a wide chasm between a mental monolith and unified thinking, unified and disciplined focus. We don't have to be one mind; we certainly have to be one purpose, one focus amidst our diverse pursuits, diverse thoughts. And this is what I lament. Three or so years ago, we embarked on constitution-making. Not from a blank page.

Never. Rhodesia had made several constitutions, held several referenda to get these adopted. Admittedly we were by-standers then. But we agitated against all those efforts which for us became lessons in how-not-to-do constitutions. Very vital lesson for eventually constructing and managing national processes when our time and power came, in my view.

Then you have Lancaster House process, again removed from most of us: by geography and role if one was lucky to be old enough; by time, age and even generation, if Lancaster happened before one's time. But we read, listened, even saw. What is more, we were to build our agitation, our reformist politics around the foibles of Lancaster, real or perceived. If we did not reject Lancaster by way of its paternity, we rejected its patch-worked growth. Those patches, we alleged, had shrunk - creased - our freedoms. They had to go.

Stilted thinking
Today we have little boys who have grown into serious, office-holding politicians on searing critiques of Lancaster. But you also begin to pick the gems of the rickety national thinking. Lancaster was bad because it was a covenant for ending hostilities, for ending war. Quite a ringing argument advanced at the height of the same old war just resurged over land, the same land that caused the war which Lancaster ended! No, Lancaster was between the nationalists and the British. Again quite a ringing argument advanced by a generation that seems to feel righteous for not playing a part in that foremost, founding national assignment; a generation that casts a name for those who liberated it ("nationalists"), but without guiltily asking itself what its own name is, ought to be! Much worse, a generation whose mental make-up, whose dissent, whose grievances, whose revolting impetus, is wholly British yet decrying British involvement at Lancaster. Weird thinking indeed.

Hating the British by their money
But a searing critique which perforce implies a generation only too clear of what it wants in a constitution, clear about what it does not want in a constitution soon to govern it.

And you would think when they begin the constitution-making process, they would go about it with the speed, clarity and purpose that animated their objection of Lancaster in the first place.

Go about it in so a manner, with ideas so sui generis as to be completely alien, unrecognisable and unknown to the hated British of the Lancaster days! And of course we had no problems with British money funding those politics of objections to British constitutional ideas and involvement! That's us, Zimbos!

Home grown foreign economy
In 2000, we had another go at constitution-making. Really, really an expansive process drawing personages from across the spectrum. We went to every corner of the country, trawled the minutest of national thought for a representative outcome.

And this time all those wont to blaming time, age, the nationalists and the British, had the opportunity to participate, to shape events and thoughts so we could have that "home-grown" document to rule over us. We birthed the notion of "home-grown" well before the indigenisation discourse, well before Kasukuwere and his current indigenisation "outrages".

One would have thought that a people craving for a "home-grown" constitution would have been quite at home with a "home-grown" economy! And of course you cannot grow at home that whose home is overseas. It sounds commonsensical to me, is it not?

Driven by white farmers
When the draft was finally finalised, we rejected it roundly, which implied we did not find it home-grown enough. Fair. Fine. Until one reads contemporary history, contemporary confessions of constitutional white farming hitmen! Today both tell us that white farmers who did not find the land clause in the 2000 draft too sexy were in fact behind its rejection.

White farmers working with and through the MDC! Yelling the mantra of "home grown", we rejected a document on the prompting of a miscellany of hoary white farmers whose totem we don't know, whose villages we never knew, whose homes would not be ours until after the rejection, indeed whose homes would be ours eventually by what the home-grown but rejected draft sought to do!

And of course that draft broached the raft of constitutional commissions we now celebrate, broached the dispersed presidential powers we have since fetishised into shibboleth for any constitutional endeavour.

Ruing what we cast away
Let us move on with this narrative on national thinking, more accurately on the thinking within the nation. By the polls that followed a few months of rejecting the draft, polls of 2000, we were already ruing our rejection of the draft.

We had thrown away a good thing, thrown away the constitutional baby with the bathwater! In 2002, we rued; rued again in 2005.

By 2007/8, that rue had congealed into a precondition, had reared the likes of Madhuku and his NCA into agitators of national note, albeit synthetic, oversized and seasonal. We missed the 2000 draft in the harmonised polls, agitated for it from the ruins and rabble of the electoral conflict and the indeterminacy that followed.

Towards the end of 2007, we concluded some pact, thereby laying the basis for a temporary Inclusive Government whose one and only purpose was to prepare for a new poll: credible and clear by way of a winner.

Shifting thoughts
As days of power passed, with them the sweetness that had landed on our eager tongues, we started cobbling a new vocabulary, a new nomenclature, to replace the language of the temporary, by which we described the strange, interim creature we had ushered in through negotiations.

Tongues sweeping lips of vanishing sweetness that needed periodic renewal, our politicians - both old and especially new - started sliding in the notion of GNU - government of national unity, not just to acquit the new thing morally, but also to imply its desirable and even yearned-for permanence.

Who would challenge a construct rechristianed government of national unity? Anyone who dared remind all those politicians already happily fastened to the saccharine udders of the GNU cow - those whose Adam's apples were frantically teasing up and down those busy gullets - that this thing was only meant to be temporary, indeed meant to allow for new, decisive elections - such inconvenient persons were reprehensibly reproached and branded hardliners out to sink so perfect a thing.

So roundly reviled at birth, the inclusive Government had now morphed into the long sought after panacea we had been looking for! It still is in our stilted thoughts, our thoughts of such astonishing shifts and shreds.

Denying Kariba, delaying elections
But the Inclusive Government brought with it parchments of a constitution, parchments we named Kariba to make it both bream-ful and serene.

That document crystallised "our" constitutional dreams as dreamt by our negotiators, themselves the only ones with the fullness and peace to catch sleep. And the agreement was that this would be unveiled and adopted together with rules that founded the Inclusive Government, all for a hasty march towards new elections. Days went by. Weeks. Months.

A year. Another, with power getting sweeter, sweetest to an indescribable superlative. We had to find ways of delaying, nay prolonging this saccharine, governing experience. We turned on and charged Kariba. It was not people-driven.

It had so many faults. It had to be discarded. No one asked how the same negotiators whose people-ness we were now querying when it came to Kariba, had been representative, had been "people" enough to give us a governing framework called GPA which we never queried, on fact which we now wanted to endure, indeed which we found more deserving of democratic preservation than going to the polls, than working towards an elective mandate!

Never-ending hierarchies
So began the "people-driven" constitution-making rigmarole that went on and on for well over three years, all the time giving us glimpses of jaws that munched and chewed ceaselessly. Hitherto spectre-thin officials and participants grew supplementary cheeks, drooping cheeks, sagging stomachs, that needed frequent gym sessions to keep them in good tow.

Today the drawn out process has come to some hiatus, but is so far away from concluding. Its endgame is hierarchical: from drafters, to Copac; from Copac to management committee-cum-negotiators; from management committee to Principals; from Principals to Politburos-cum Executive Committees of political parties.

From those possibly to Central Committees or National Councils of governing parties. Then back to principals who may possibly trigger a new round of negotiations to consider new changes, new positions. Simultaneously, Copac, itself a committee of Parliament, submits a draft to Parliament, itself a sovereign arm of the State.

For what when the real action is with parties? And parties cannot be deterred by Parliament. They don't report to Parliament although they may report through it!

Incessant barks of puppies
In between passage to and from those hierarchical gradations, you have incessant barks from agitated little dogs. Mwonzora says the draft is final, implying he and members of Copac are ultimate! Hardly a day after barking, he is beaten back into line, groaning.

Amidst all that we have the national report which must still be vindicated; we have the second stakeholders conference which plays surrogate to the people and which must be impressed; you have the people themselves who must come in eventually by way of a referendum. And then their tribunals by way of a parliamentary process which must handle the outcome of the referendum, whatever it will be.

Contemporaneous with all that are by-elections which must be held in 38 constituencies, to an unknown outcome which can very easily change dynamics of governance, which may challenge the uneasy balance there is presently. That is the scenario, as untidy as it can ever be, as indeterminate as the election that triggered it!

Tinombonzi vanaaniko isu?
I don't know whether the untidiness comes from the process or from the people who are us, Zimbos. And as the puff adder slithers away, a swarm of hysterically chirping go-away birds follows, creating a very confused din.

Initially, we did not like constitution-making, abhorred the process itself. Then we seemed to suffer it, even participating in ideas it popped up in its wake.

We set standards by which to tolerate it, judge it even: devolution, weak executive, succession, neo-liberal values, etc, etc. No, these had not been captured enough and we would have none of it, we yelled confusedly.

And as we yelled - eyes closed - negotiators stole out of the room, found a new, quieter room well away from the din and the demos. They traded concessions, swopped conspiracies, giving rise to a new document called Kariba, yes, the same Kariba, improved by clauses pilfered from the 2000 draft! As we emerged from our Babel, jaws parted in tired yawns, we met a "new" draft, negotiated draft that bore resemblance to the Kariba we had rejected as not people-driven. We loved it and joined Mwonzora in agitating for its immediate adoption, even promising 82 percent endorsement. Yes, that mathematical, that exact! Meanwhile, we are still to read the document! Ha ha ha ha ha!!! Tinombonzi vanaaniko isu?

Icho!

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Nathaniel Manheru can becontacted at nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw