In or out of power, Zanu-PF cannot be wished away

Dei kuri kwedu, taidei totoimba manhanga kutapira! Roughly translated, this Shona statement says: "If it was home, we all would have already sung praises to sweet pumpkins." Of course those who hail from a different speech community and culture, might fail to grasp the import of this statement. Yet it is profound.

The one who composes an ode to the sweetness of ripe, rotund pumpkins in a given season, quite naturally, is the one whose crop has healthily matured. Or else you are a thief.

And thieves don't sing themselves guilty, do they? So the statement is a brag, a boisterous assertion by a good farmer who can afford to turn his back on a season, unlike his neighbours still hoping for more rains. Another way of saying the same in the "now-now" parlance is: "zvangu zvatoita", which is to say, "I am done."

You cannot miss the triumphalism which always underpins such boasts. I bet my bottom dollar Zanu-PF continues to sing Oh la la la!

When the choicest cow gets gored
This week has been a pregnant one politically. A lot has happened, and in politics happenings need not be events or actions. Words, too, do happen.

Seen that way, I am sure few would contest this my foregoing assertion. It has been a week of mouthfuls, some of them passing for quite a hard chew. Check where our already constipated Prime Minister is as I write. Ukhonangale eAmeliiika!

It is a week which began with a hefty Sunday Mail interview with Professor Lovemore Madhuku, a man who came across clearly as having little more love to spare for his erstwhile comrades in the MDCs, foremost Tsvangirai. He made incriminating revelations only he could so easily afford.

He is not running for office this time around, and thus does not give a damn whose cow gets gored.

And it had been the premier's cow, the only one for whose wellness the man's whole eye focused.

And it has been the proverbial disaster of a vigilant cattleman who watchfully guards marauders from without, only to lose the choicest heifer to a violent stampede within the kraal. The real challenge, Mister Prime Minister, is not Zanu-PF; it lies within. I keep telling him.

Backhanded Tribute to Zanu-PF
And while that fresh wound was still weeping, in came Munyaradzi Chikweche with another mouthful. Too young to have fought in the liberation war, but old and vain enough to want to rename himself in the spirit of the liberation war, Chikweche, now better known by his "war" name, Munyaradzi Gwisai, had this to say:

"The truth is that a Tsvangirai State will be innumerably much weaker than the current Mugabe regime, and thus easier for the working class to confront.

"Moreover, having removed such an entrenched dictatorship such as the Zanu-PF one, the working classes will be much more confident of taking on the much less sophisticated, blundering and less credible Tsvangirai regime.

"Zanu-PF is a tried and tested dictatorship, developed over decades of years and whose hands are dripping with the blood of thousands of genocide victims . . . This dictatorship is strong and is going to do a June 2008 in this election because Tsvangirai's naivety and blunders have allowed that to happen." Chikweche went much further: "The MDC are more busy with the looting agenda. As you know the MDC ministers have been given $30 000, three cars and residential stands each, on top of what they already have. Their policies have been a disaster."

Latter-day Bukuninists
Prune this interview by Guthrie Munyuki, prune it clean of all rhetorical superfluities, you end up with very solid points from this dread-locked romantic socialist. "Romantic" because it is not what he has read and memorised from Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin which appears to guide him when he steps out of theory into the real world of people, political choices and actions.

Rather, it is the Zanu-PF/MDC binary and the emotion which this evokes, peppered of course by donor conditionalities, principally the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung or Foundation, which seems to shape him. Pampered and swelled by delightful, starry idealism habitually renewed by latest uprisings from any part of the world - all these and much more enkindle and fire Gwisai's infantile pseudo-Marxist praxis, so strongly reminiscent of Narodnism or its kindred, Bakuninism.

When the West sponsors dictatorship of the Gwisais
I mean I find it incredible that an avowed Marxist can ever find any comforting interstices in the politics of a British-led, neo-colonial outfit that MDC-T is, even entertaining the hope that its unenlightened leadership, once in power, will be easier to dislodge.

"Who will be in power in a Tsvangirai regime? Just how do you measure the power of neo-colonialism by its weak "native agency" and still pretend you are using scientific tools for social analysis?

"That the blunt weapon the British summon for bludgeoning a liberation movement will be suffered to govern once liberation-time nationalists have been ousted? Is it not disastrously naive for Gwisai to delightfully imagine that the British are battling to install Tsvangirai all to speed up the arrival of "the dictatorship of the proletariat", presumably under himself?

The British fighting to oust a Zanu-PF-led petit-bourgeois government for a leftist endgame arrived at via a Tsvangirai neo-colony? Or to imagine that Germany, itself the epicentre of European capitalism, picks up Gwisai's bills for a political endgame which goose fleshes the mildest of petty capitalists? But that is Gwisai for you.

Caught up in a binary
Let's quickly cast away the folly of social change theory belied by Gwisai's rhetorical flourish. He is not against capitalism in its neo-colonial form which the West seeks to perpetuate here whether through Zanu-PF's moderates, or through the MDC-T.

Of course he might be censorious of MDC-T's unenlightened variant of it, something never to be confused with opposition to neo-colonialism. Equally, of course he might be censorious of Zanu-PF's quality of governance, but that should never be equated with an opposition to a neo-colonial arrangement which we have lived through from 1980, and which we are just beginning to seek to overthrow.

Whether seen from the point of view of missing intellect in MDC-T, or alleged poor governance in Zanu-PF, Gwisai's ISO stance amounts to refining neo-colonialism rather than refuting and repudiating it. And this is where I have a real problem with Gwisai's ISO. And because he is trapped in the Zanu-PF/MDC-T binary, he misses real actions of revolutionary import already accomplished by radical elements within Zanu-PF, often against sprite opposition not just from outside Zanu-PF itself, but from within that party even.

Biti's Britain, Gwisai's Germany
And the Chinese experience instruct us towards tactical alliances (say Mao temporarily uniting with the Koumitang to oust Japanese invaders). A bona fide Marxist cannot fail to grasp that by localising ownership of land, the Zanu-PF nationalists domesticated class contradictions over that prime means of production, thereby simplifying the process towards eventual socialisation of this key resource. Do I need to tell this avowed Marxist that creating a national bourgeoisie away from comprador African politics is a giant step forward?

Gwisai must correctly read into current land disputes pitting the new, post-land reform African latifundias against landless peasants, something completely inconceivable under the era of the white landed gentry where the sheer halo of the white man forbade open class war.

It is that obvious, is indeed it is equally obvious to appreciate that moulding a genuine national bourgeoisie founded on real property ownership relations (land) on a continent for so long defined and defiled by an African comprador pseudo-middle class whose false power rests on minding overseas interests, marks a huge leap forward for the African revolution.

This Zanu-PF/MDC-T binary blinds him to very serious pseudo-class solidarities and cleavages within the MDC-T itself, solidarities and cleavages whose external causation makes it false to address the MDC-T as a homogenous player, falser to attach any meaningful consequences to the abilities or disabilities of its leadership in determining anything of real social impact to this society.

How do you keep battering a Trojan Horse hoping it will gallop one day? Does he not himself incarnate that paradox of false solidarities and cleavages I am talking about?

What is the difference between him and Biti, between Biti's Britain and Gwisai's Germany? Don't both bite the national interest the same? Anyway, is it Marxist analysis to contrastively read social prospects on the basis of attributes or lack of them, between Tsvangirai and Mugabe? What are persons to social processes in Marxist dialectics, if I may join Cde Gwisai for a moment?

Workers' rise via neo-colonialism?
These are some of the husks crying out for winnowing in Gwisai. What germ remains? Well, the backhanded tribute he gives to, or showers Zanu-PF with. Well, the brutally frank and accurate analysis he favours his allies in MDC-T with, even though it may be impolitic to do so.

I totally agree with him that Zanu-PF has deep roots and is implacably entrenched to be removed by any local political party in the forthcoming polls. That is a fact known even to the MDC-T.

I totally agree with him that MDC-T is "Innumerably much weaker", corrupt, naive and ever blundering to carry the day, any electoral day. Where I differ with Gwisai, and stiffly so, is in asserting that the weak MDC-T must be supported because the result will be "a much less sophisticated, blundering . . . less credible Tsvangirai regime".

Quite the contrary, the result will be a second Rhodesia: white-run, white-led and West-aligned, albeit with trappings of blackness. So formidable will it be that it shall take no less means than we needed to decolonize ourselves politically. Does not Gwisai read what the French are doing in Mali; what the British sought to do but failed in Kenya?

Or is he like the new CAR leader who thinks only South Africans - not the French - are foreign forces in that African country?

You don't take back the Zimbabwean people to near-classical colonialism and still claim "the working classes will be much more confident". It is a false argument, one only sired by a petit-bourgeois mind in order to opiate the masses for a suicidal political throwback on the name of "dictatorship of the proletariat". Hence the Narodnism I have referred to in the beginning.

A workers revolution cannot come about through installing neo-colonialism, surely?

The day our man went to London
What do you do when you lately realise you have put the wrong boy in the stocks? Such must be the painful reality the western world is facing presently over Zimbabwe. The past week saw Chinamasa, Mangoma and Misihairabwi-Mushonga going to London, all on the hospitality of the British government through its Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

Of course, there was another seemingly causal acronym, FOZ, in long hand Friends of Zimbabwe, better known as the Fishmonger Group, after a delicious restaurant at which they are habitual congregants for a "friendly chat" on Zimbabwe.

It is in Avondale, and "they" refer to a group of ambassadors accredited to Zimbabwe, principally Europeans, of British Dominions, of America and the Japanese. I must refer to Norway which while in Europe, does not belong to the European Union. In due course we shall test whether or not this group deserved the causal status it is accorded.

When Her Majesty's Treasury gave her enemy
Of the three ministers, I bet my bottom dollar it is Chinamasa who must have enjoyed the trip the most. For so long, Britain had become a forbidden fruit for this Minister so securely sat on the illegal sanctions list willy nilly! When your tormentors appear to relent - unaccosted - the feeling is always great and you step on their soil with vengeful vehemence.

I would have done that had such an opportunity come my way. Or done worse - mess the chamber pot deliberately so I acquaint those sons of Albion with the colour of my dung after so long a separation. And the British made the feeling sweeter.

They paid for everything, even extending stipends to this brainy cog in Mugabe's grinding wheel. More dramatically, Her Majesty's Treasury had to temporarily amend a law - Zimbabwe Financial Sanctions Regulations of 2009 - to allow Chinamasa to go a-shopping. And hey, the amendment was hand-delivered to Patrick Chinamasa, a native boy from Maungwe, by er...eh..er Her Excellency Deborah Bronnert. Tell me, who would not yell Mama! Come see what I got!

Undoing the British hate knot
And this VIP treatment was a foretaste of sweeter things to come. Patrick was the cynosure, the focus of all British attention, including the hosts. Mangoma thought he knew what pleased his handlers. He was wrong. By beginning of second day, the Brits literally suffered him. He had no audience, triggered no interest.

The MDC-T has lost its lustre. Priscilla, while much more circumspect, still suffered anonymity in the whole drama. And on a comparative scale, the British were left in no doubt as to where quality stood, where power inhered.

And thus who their real interlocutors had to be if matters were to be different henceforth, if matters were to turn for the better for them. And the media line-up availed to Chinamasa, not least the epochal BBC "HardTalk" programme, clearly showed the British needed Chinamasa more on a vocal walkabout in their streets and their homes where a truculent magnitude existed, than in their boardrooms.

And this was truculence which the British government, aided by its servile media, had studiously cultivated over the years, all against little, innocent yet important Zimbabwe.

The British had invited Chinamasa to help them change public opinion - British public opinion - to allow for greater room for a change of policy on Zimbabwe. For so long the British establishment had trained its citizens to hate Zimbabwe, loathe Zimbabwe, its government, its liberation party and its leadership. Or the obverse: to laud and adore the opposition MDCs, warts and all. And this induced hate and cultivated love respectively had been a 14-year effort, ever relentless.

Both impulses are now well entrenched. But today the British look back and around, ghastly realising hate has not eliminated their percived enemy; love has not borne them anything more lovely that the grotesque MDC.

In fact both impulses have cost them an economy, cost them influence, while bringing in alternative power, alternative capital, alternative politics quite unwonted. Such is the knot which needed a Zanu-PF minister to undo.

The war option Britain could never brook
It has been a long road since 1998. Give it to Great Britain, its foreign policy wreaked havoc for us in Europe and in America. It even shook our African support. But all that proved illusory, prolonging the fight in a way that built higher forms of resistance, newer skills and means in tackling powerful enemies, in defending old loopholes created by national complacency borne out of a belief that the world shall always be kind to us, indeed owes us fairness and goodness.

In all this, the British government forgot one cardinal rule of realpolitik: while governments may relish longer fights, economies don't, can't.

This is why for Wall Street, short, sharp wars are always better, always preferred, to a drawn out standoff. And that is not all the British forgot.

They also forgot that those who have already hit the ground cannot fall anymore. By 2007/8, Zimbabwe had already hit the ground and couldn't fall anymore.

It could only rise, or stay down. And the only way out of this stasis was for Britain to go to war, something which Britain was not prepared for. After all her generals - and that included Lord Guthrie, the man who would have fought such a war - had been here soon after our Independence, as young officers serving under B-MATT, the British Military Advisory Training Team.

They had a good grasp of what was here. They never thought it sexy, and did a good job in keeping the mad Brown, madder Blair, under leash. Even the recently retired British General - what's his name?- was here, too, as a young officer. So was Mr Bronnert, hubby of the current British ambassador to Harare.

The three decisive factors
Three key factors are at play, shall remain at play, thereby shaping Anglo-Zimbabwe relations and, with them, Zimbabwe's relations with the rest of the West. Politically, Britain under the Conservatives - themselves congenital realists - has realised that in or out of power, Zanu-PF cannot be wished away. Nor can the MDCs be wished in, after such a disastrous show of governance competence and moral turpitude.

Zanu-PF is rooted, and shall be, for a long time to come. Above all, it is the loadstar of Zimbabwean politics and even beyond.

Economically, Zimbabwe is highly mineralised, something long acknowledged from as far back as Cecil John Rhodes' era. It is an economy one would rather befriend than seek to destroy and antagonise. And Britain, Europe and America had done just that. Geopolitically, the era of colonial backyards and mono-mega economies is over.

The world has become poly-centred, with key new players emerging in alternative markets of Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. Business interests in the western world could not take any more costs from hostile foreign policies pursued by their governments.

Western cohesion against Zimbabwe was beginning to fail, with Britain taking the blame for it.

These three facts have been key, made more critical by the fact that Zimbabwe has been smart enough to leverage them. The initiative by, from, to, London had to come when it did.

Taught by the enemy
And it is noteworthy that Minister Mark Simmonds made it clear Britain was now pursuing a bilateral policy on Zimbabwe, quite a departure from the multilateral EU parapet it was sniping at us from. Britain agreed to drop a lie which had sustained the Labour policy for all these years.

Equally noteworthy that the British establishment never raised a finger when Chinamasa aggressively made it clear he had come to mend a bilateral injury founded on the divisive colonial land question.

Clearly, the establishment wanted this message to sink home into the British collective psyche. And it did, ironically from the lips of her supposed enemy.

The British government wants to turn over a new leaf on Zimbabwe, and this is the matter we have to address henceforth. Is such a change of policy desirable? What form must it take? How do we protect our interests and policies against gratuitous goodwill some within us might seek to offer the British, forgetting they least deserve it?

Revolutions are most imperilled when they sit down to negotiate.

American meltdown
I have just been looking at a letter sent to the Zimbabwe Government by Johnnie Carson, the American Assisant Secretary of State for African Affairs.

The letter does four key things: it acknowledges the Zimbabwe Government after nearly a decade and half of a standoff; it acknowledges and hails our national electoral process, itself the excuse for hostile American policy here; it pledges to recognise any government to emerge from the forthcoming elections, a position quite different from the absurd Morgan-Tsvangirai-must-win stance and mantra of America from Powell to Hilary Clinton. Well, Tsvangirai will not win and the western world is beginning to come to terms with that.

Lastly, Carson's statement suggests America is willing and ready to initiate dialogue on the removal of sanctions provided Zimbabwe admits foreign observers, including paring down this demand to inviting proxy observers of the American government, such as IRI or NDI.

In respect of the last issue, of course Carson is tantalizing us with the offer of a process which he himself cannot trigger or even influence.

Such an offer is thus duplicitous and must be thrown away with the contempt accorded to anyone seeking to condescend. But that offer, however false, shows how we have exhausted America's influence here. But that is not my point.

My point is for our strategic thinkers to now grasp the moment we are inhabiting, and fashion tools for advancing our interests and policies without flying into a birdlime.

Only Zanu-PF win can lose
I close this instalment by making the following key points. Whilst Zanu-PF has an upperhand already, it can only assume unassailable ascendency once it finishes a clean poll well in the lead. And the key is the word "clean".

A violent poll cannot be clean, which is why Zanu-PF must do much more than avoid violence; it must prevent violence from whichever quarter. Madhuku is right, the MDC-T sees its chances slipping away, and shall do any trick in the book to soil the poll.

Including provoking, sponsoring, staging violence. That must be stopped, as it shall be Zanu-PF and Zanu-PF alone to be blamed. To lose. I have no fears over our capacity to run a technically clean poll. We have already shown that capacity, making even our worst enemies recognise this. And they are in a bit of a bind, are they not? How do you acknowledge this excellence without destroying your case for the invitation of foreign observers?

The friends who would be enemies.
The so-called Friends of Zimbabwe are not causally related to the thawing relations between us and the West. They cannot be. They are part of that frozen quantity which needed and needs thawing.

If they are a fleck off that glacier, it all owes to our clear, strong and insistent foreign policy which has warmed the glacier, which has got us this result we see playing out. They reflect our victory, they did not cause it.

These are friends who would be enemies. We know what mischief they have been up to here, are still up to in this country. Left to themselves, they don't mean well. They have been made to play well. That means our strength is not in compromising gratuitously. It is in keeping us strong, stronger and steadfast so our suffering under sanctions for a decade and a half may not have been in vain.

Wrong boy in the stocks
Lastly, we have managed the sanctions issue quite masterfully. The West's pawns here have come to realise the disutility of sanctions to political canvassing. Zanu-PF has used this negative so well in mobilising national support, provoking national sentiment and tapping from it. It must continue to do so, to a thunderous outcome such as was secured recently by Kenyatta who awaits swearing in this coming Monday.

Not so much for itself as for national outlook. We must get to that threshold where it becomes a norm that whoever works with foreigners harbouring interests opposed to ours, should be made to smell foul in our electoral politics.

Never again should any politician count on foreign support to win power. Or to threaten any genuine power wielded in the interest of an historically disinherited people. Only then are we able to end the scourge politics that animate the MDCs presently.

And of course end the false righteousness of the likes of Gwisai who think they are more enlightened than Tsvangirai when in fact they do no better when pitted against encroaching, lewd foreigners.

An uneducated politician can only be cheated; an educated collaborator spouting the language of Karl Marx and struggling workers, is a downright cheat.  Europe and its illegal sanctions has created a situation where those originally meant to benefit from their imposition, find themselves having to defend themselves from voter charges of treachery against their own people. It is, indeed, the case of the wrong boy in the stocks. Icho!

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Nathanel Manheru can be contacted at nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw