Opinion / Columnist
Tsvangirai and the politics of despair, apathy
07 Jul 2017 at 06:30hrs | Views
Yesterday morning I received a WhatsApp message. On it was a graph. It was done by pan-African research network, Afrobarometer. The graph indicated that Zanu-PF is once again headed for a massive victory in next year's harmonised elections. The MDC-T is way behind. My reply to the sender was: "Someone will commit suicide."
It was a reflexive comment, not targeting anyone at all.
Over time we have been exposed to an opposition landscape that's hypersensitive and allergic to any and everything which portrays a truth it doesn't like, in a negative light, or at least, if that is the case, doesn't portray it in pitying tones as a victim of Zanu-PF chicanery. It is equally allergic to any and everything which finds positively about Zanu-PF. If it must be on top, it must be because the result or image has been "sexed up". Thanks Tony Blair.
Still, it would be fascinating to know in detail what the Afrobarometer survey said. But for my purposes, I didn't need to read the survey. I set off to work with my mind completely lost in the day's deadlines and the Spectrum. Then without warning, a NewsDay poster hit me hard: "Elections a waste of time." My word. Not so early. "Someone will commit suicide" wasn't meant as a prophesy.
But the coincidence between the Afrobarometer survey results and Ibbo Mandaza's resigned, fatalistic conclusion that elections were a waste of time for the opposition was pretty uncanny. Never mind MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai telling journalists on the same day as Mandaza's talk, that all the scattered prodigal sons and many others born out of wedlock would finally confluence by Save under the big tent called a grand coalition. It's called bravado. After all, he it was who caused the first mass suicide of MDC-T MPs when he recalled them from Parliament in 2015, leaving Zanu-PF to do as it pleases.
Mandaza's remarks are important in one respect: they make opposition politics easy. There is always a legitimate alibi for losing elections. You don't have to look inward; at your policies or manifestoes or what the greater population outside the confines of urbanites or social media, thinks of you. The greater population in communal lands and on farms doesn't matter anymore since 2000. They are ignorant people who would vote for unrefined politicians like Donald Trump.
He is telling the world the only voter who really matters is the clever urban guy who doesn't have a job. It doesn't matter how many they are. All they need to tilt the scales in the ballot is to be assisted with a reform of the law. That will swell their numbers to beat the resettled people who are prepared to shed blood in defence of the farms from which they now make rich harvests of tobacco, cotton, soyabeans, chickens and maize. People who are not looking for jobs but are creating them. These don't count.
It was reported that Mandaza told a University of Zimbabwe elections symposium conditions were not conducive for elections. "Electoral malpractices in Zimbabwe legitimise the illegitimate," opined Mandaza sagely. Where are you Alex Magaisa? It was only yesterday that you were cautioning your party against the politics of despondency!
Mandaza was not done. "If we are to have elections, we need to reform State institutions," he said. Together with one Tendai Biti, Mandaza is for something called National Transitional Authority. It doesn't require elections. It requires Zimbabwe to locate a mythical being fairer than the biased God of Israel who is full of revenge, a "neutral" being to preside dispassionately over our polarised transition to Canaan.
At most we have no more than a year before harmonised elections to either elect a new Government or retain Zanu-PF in power. One would expect serious intellectuals to know that it is only after those elections, if there is no outright winner, that people can start talking about compromises, run-offs and transitional mechanisms.
Of course, there are people in the opposition and civic society who understand that anyone who was in the liberation struggle or has served in the army or the police is opposed to their brand of democracy, a bourgeois democracy where individual rights are valued disproportionately far more than social justice for the majority. Reasoned thus, only those whose reputations are not tainted by association with the liberation war, the land reform or indigenisation are qualified to lead us to Paradise, even if it means recalling our hallowed Anthony Gubbay to "restore" constitutionalism.
Mandaza and ilk must envy how the white DA in South Africa has been able to hogtie and wobble the ANC government through constitutional provisions smuggled in by white beneficiaries of apartheid to ensnare liberation peace negotiators in their hour of delirious euphoria ahead of elections in 1994.
Tsvangirai spoke the same day as Mandaza and Afrobarometer, and beat the Sapes Trust boss square. Perhaps having behind his mind what Magaisa said not more than three weeks ago. The politics of despair and apathy can only inflict more damage on the MDC-T, he warned. Why would people bother to register and vote if the leadership made their fear of losing the next election a public secret!
So Tsvangirai was more guarded, jittery though he was, in his remarks.
Let him speak, obviously for the benefit of reporters: "For me, the 2018 election, we are going to win it, even in the face of rigging circumstances. We are going to win it and I want to encourage every Zimbabwean to have a mentality of saying we are going to make change come in 2018."
Beneath the bold exhortation was an anguished awareness by Tsvangirai that his chances are numbered. He had to "command" a coalition deal by the end of month so that "we will be able to have a strategy for elections because I think time is running out and we need to sit down and see how we can tackle the question of elections". Indeed, time is running out for both the coalition and for election preparations.
We thus found it hilarious that Tsvangirai should worry about a Zanu-PF preoccupied with "succession issues" instead of admitting his own failure to forge even a coalition of convenience. Zanu-PF can indulge itself because its machinery has gone well past "strategy for elections". It is campaigning. Where MDC-T is promising bourgeois democracy, Zanu-PF has democratised land ownership and is delivering maize. Where MDC-T is promising jobs, Zanu-PF supporters are earning money from selling cotton and tobacco.
We can understand Tsvangirai's dilemma; almost a repeat of 2013: to go in or to boycott? He sits with ideologues posturing as intellectual analysts keen to delegitimise an election by boycotting because they can't stomach the prospect of a fair defeat. A boycott can then bring in masters of the globe to install a legitimate "neutral" to ensure an opposition victory which Zanu-PF institutions couldn't deliver. The bonds of mental slavery are more enduring than the pain of liberation war.
It was a reflexive comment, not targeting anyone at all.
Over time we have been exposed to an opposition landscape that's hypersensitive and allergic to any and everything which portrays a truth it doesn't like, in a negative light, or at least, if that is the case, doesn't portray it in pitying tones as a victim of Zanu-PF chicanery. It is equally allergic to any and everything which finds positively about Zanu-PF. If it must be on top, it must be because the result or image has been "sexed up". Thanks Tony Blair.
Still, it would be fascinating to know in detail what the Afrobarometer survey said. But for my purposes, I didn't need to read the survey. I set off to work with my mind completely lost in the day's deadlines and the Spectrum. Then without warning, a NewsDay poster hit me hard: "Elections a waste of time." My word. Not so early. "Someone will commit suicide" wasn't meant as a prophesy.
But the coincidence between the Afrobarometer survey results and Ibbo Mandaza's resigned, fatalistic conclusion that elections were a waste of time for the opposition was pretty uncanny. Never mind MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai telling journalists on the same day as Mandaza's talk, that all the scattered prodigal sons and many others born out of wedlock would finally confluence by Save under the big tent called a grand coalition. It's called bravado. After all, he it was who caused the first mass suicide of MDC-T MPs when he recalled them from Parliament in 2015, leaving Zanu-PF to do as it pleases.
Mandaza's remarks are important in one respect: they make opposition politics easy. There is always a legitimate alibi for losing elections. You don't have to look inward; at your policies or manifestoes or what the greater population outside the confines of urbanites or social media, thinks of you. The greater population in communal lands and on farms doesn't matter anymore since 2000. They are ignorant people who would vote for unrefined politicians like Donald Trump.
He is telling the world the only voter who really matters is the clever urban guy who doesn't have a job. It doesn't matter how many they are. All they need to tilt the scales in the ballot is to be assisted with a reform of the law. That will swell their numbers to beat the resettled people who are prepared to shed blood in defence of the farms from which they now make rich harvests of tobacco, cotton, soyabeans, chickens and maize. People who are not looking for jobs but are creating them. These don't count.
It was reported that Mandaza told a University of Zimbabwe elections symposium conditions were not conducive for elections. "Electoral malpractices in Zimbabwe legitimise the illegitimate," opined Mandaza sagely. Where are you Alex Magaisa? It was only yesterday that you were cautioning your party against the politics of despondency!
Mandaza was not done. "If we are to have elections, we need to reform State institutions," he said. Together with one Tendai Biti, Mandaza is for something called National Transitional Authority. It doesn't require elections. It requires Zimbabwe to locate a mythical being fairer than the biased God of Israel who is full of revenge, a "neutral" being to preside dispassionately over our polarised transition to Canaan.
Of course, there are people in the opposition and civic society who understand that anyone who was in the liberation struggle or has served in the army or the police is opposed to their brand of democracy, a bourgeois democracy where individual rights are valued disproportionately far more than social justice for the majority. Reasoned thus, only those whose reputations are not tainted by association with the liberation war, the land reform or indigenisation are qualified to lead us to Paradise, even if it means recalling our hallowed Anthony Gubbay to "restore" constitutionalism.
Mandaza and ilk must envy how the white DA in South Africa has been able to hogtie and wobble the ANC government through constitutional provisions smuggled in by white beneficiaries of apartheid to ensnare liberation peace negotiators in their hour of delirious euphoria ahead of elections in 1994.
Tsvangirai spoke the same day as Mandaza and Afrobarometer, and beat the Sapes Trust boss square. Perhaps having behind his mind what Magaisa said not more than three weeks ago. The politics of despair and apathy can only inflict more damage on the MDC-T, he warned. Why would people bother to register and vote if the leadership made their fear of losing the next election a public secret!
So Tsvangirai was more guarded, jittery though he was, in his remarks.
Let him speak, obviously for the benefit of reporters: "For me, the 2018 election, we are going to win it, even in the face of rigging circumstances. We are going to win it and I want to encourage every Zimbabwean to have a mentality of saying we are going to make change come in 2018."
Beneath the bold exhortation was an anguished awareness by Tsvangirai that his chances are numbered. He had to "command" a coalition deal by the end of month so that "we will be able to have a strategy for elections because I think time is running out and we need to sit down and see how we can tackle the question of elections". Indeed, time is running out for both the coalition and for election preparations.
We thus found it hilarious that Tsvangirai should worry about a Zanu-PF preoccupied with "succession issues" instead of admitting his own failure to forge even a coalition of convenience. Zanu-PF can indulge itself because its machinery has gone well past "strategy for elections". It is campaigning. Where MDC-T is promising bourgeois democracy, Zanu-PF has democratised land ownership and is delivering maize. Where MDC-T is promising jobs, Zanu-PF supporters are earning money from selling cotton and tobacco.
We can understand Tsvangirai's dilemma; almost a repeat of 2013: to go in or to boycott? He sits with ideologues posturing as intellectual analysts keen to delegitimise an election by boycotting because they can't stomach the prospect of a fair defeat. A boycott can then bring in masters of the globe to install a legitimate "neutral" to ensure an opposition victory which Zanu-PF institutions couldn't deliver. The bonds of mental slavery are more enduring than the pain of liberation war.
Source - the herald
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