MDC becoming a blunt instrument of history

Two weeks ago I penned a piece which used an esoteric term - zeitgeist - to make my point. I got a few calls from angry readers who wanted to know what kind of English that was, and why I thought it was their bother to know such a difficult-to-pronounce-let-alone-to-comprehend term.

Among these angry callers was one Killian, himself a bosom friend. He offloaded a few friendly invectives on me hoping I would be stung into explaining the meaning of this word. I stood firm and stubborn, furiously silent as indeed I am always wont to, when stuck in such sticky situations. His daughter, an avid reader of the column by his own recommendation, had phoned him from some university in South Africa demanding to know what the terrible word meant. He could not help and must have felt inadequate as a father! Mercifully he forgave my sins, gave up on me and went quiet for a while. But under an hour later, he was back and I expected the worst. Surprise, surprise, he came back much satisfied. "Hiya-a, ndazoriwana. Ndaakuziva zvarinoreva zizwi rako." The next few moments were spent in a sweet telephonic banter, after which we both went our different ways, he a word richer, I a friend stronger.

Simon of Cyrene
I am used to hard words from my readers. That is their prerogative. That is the cross I have to carry like the biblical Simon of Cyrene. And Simon hailed from Africa, North Africa to be specific. Hailed in other words from a continent of burdens, a carrier continent where creatures of burden are born, raised and then "exported" elsewhere to the white world to be abused through to the grave. It is interesting that it is Joseph of Arimathea, himself a rich Jew, who lends his tomb to Jesus for burial after crucifixion. Joseph would never have been the bearer of the heavy cross, itself a chore of servitude, a chore for Africa, for Africans. Even the Bible, it seems, works with a hierarchy of human colours.

A columnist must never abuse his or her readers. He must learn to absorb insults however gratuitous, but should have the sharpness of mind to elicit real issues from a pile of invectives, issues to follow up so ideas and knowledge continue to thrive.

Fighting staleness
But a columnist must do much more than state the obvious, do more than explore complex ideas in everyday parlance. He must present ordinary ideas in extraordinary ways so society is jolted out of the stupor of generations. So society it is not habituated to dead ideas now fetishised by time, custom and practice.

When I am dramatic I always tell friends that a bad habit is like a journey into the lavatory. Itself an odyssey of necessity, nay of endurance, the lavatory where this peculiar journey ends can very easily become a comfortable habitat if you stay too long. As you get in, you are hit by the stench, even darting out a globule of saliva in involuntary protest. But as you busily go on your mark, then getting ready for the go of relief, the effluvia no longer assaults your fine, civilised senses, no longer registers. You become a happy contributor to the commonwealth. You might as well be munching a bun from the head, while expelling the unwanted matter from under. You have made your own input to the effluvia. Gentle reader, pause for a while to ask why the other name for that small house is "toilet". Come on, don't be shy. Break the word etymologically: "toil" + "let"! You got it! I don't delight in muck. I am no maggot. But hey, this is a powerful image on how unthinking societies get used to fetid ideas. Zimbabwe should never be one such society. And the foulest of smells comes from the lavatory of taboos which forces you and me - forces all of us - to obey false sensitivities, forces us to toil around bad ideas which should have been challenged generations ago, for faster human progress.

Zeitgeist again
Zeitgeist stands for the spirit of the times, or spirit of an age. Wikipedia goes much further. It refers to the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambience, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era. The word comes from German, with "zeit-" meaning "time" and "-geist" meaning "spirit". I cannot think of an English word that captures the same, which is why I found myself having to pelt the reader with that most difficult word.

When censure polices better than gunpowder
In our own environment, zeitgeist daily plays out negatively as those things we regard as unAfrican. You do them and the retort from elders is "hazviitwe", or a more menacing "kwedu hatidaro". Once that verbal sanction is pronounced, you quickly back off. Those from Masvingo put it even better: "hazviihwe-ee!" You are left in no doubt about the unacceptable. I want to believe each people, each culture, each nation has its own way of defining, marking and policing its ways, of enforcing boundaries forbidding any transgressions. If you are unfortunate enough to spend some time in that little great cold island called the United Kingdom, hardly a day passes without a symbol of law and order - codified or uncodified - reminding you that "this is not British", that "this is not how we do things here". And "here" is not place; it is class, ruling class to be specific. It is amazing how much power for normative compulsion and compliance such a simple phrase tends to mass and hog over time, over generations. It becomes the guardian of an established order, indeed more effective way of "policing the crisis" without resort to gunpowder. And the establishment has come to use it as the "first resort" of a sanctioning power.

Why Rhodesia never dies
Nearer home and nearer history, you asked a Rhodesian what they were fighting for and they would be quick to tell you they were fighting "for our own way of life", but without telling you in concrete or specific ways what passed for that "way of life". Yet this phrase was strong enough, powerful enough to raise an army, deploy it and tether it to mortal combat for well over 15 years, indeed commit the Rhodesian Army to unjust governance for nearly a century. To this day Rhodesians refuse to die, Rhodesians never die long after the State and administration which gave polity or territory to their ideas, worldview or "weltanschauung", has died, killed by the Second Chimurenga in 1979/80.

What was that "way of life" so powerful enough to be a bulwark against powerful values of liberation and human equality, so powerful enough to pass for some causa belli, indeed so resilient enough to linger on powerful, long after the demise of Rhodesia? I hear you saying wakatanga futi Manheru nemazizwi ako! Well, you will be alright by the end of this piece.

When angst bends down in prayer
My problematic instalment called for the fostering of a powerful zeitgeist as a formidable defence against the betrayal of the Zimbabwean revolution. I raised this matter in the context of Zanu-PF's own succession debate, a debate that seems to worry even the MDC formations. You would have thought they have their own leaders, their own system which should delight in Zanu-PF's succession predicament. The other day Tsvangirai chafed that the succession issue is much more than a Zanu-PF affair. It stood to affect the whole country, he opined, in the process making his party a baffling stakeholder in its own antithesis. Lately, the gentle reader could not have missed Tsvangirai's mournful reminder to all Zimbabweans that indeed President Mugabe is of, and from God. He must be prayed for so he runs this country with wisdom, Solomonic or close to. On that regard he joined vanaComrade Mutasa in apotheosising President Mugabe. Yet here was the MDC-T leader's angst communicating itself as a request for prayer.

Truthfully, nowhere is the issue of President Mugabe's mortality more acutely felt, more wistfully debated as within MDC structures. Of course the President is always the first to assert his own humanity, to insist he is only of clay, like all of us. I would go slightly further than his own modesty to assert that he is of better clay, which is why next week we celebrate his 88th birthday. Uku vanaTsvangirai vazuro vanzwa nekushodoka panyama zvese nepandangariro!

Larger than life
My point is that this was a front-handed tribute by an opponent, something quite unusual in our clime of polarised politics. Yet Tsvangirai was conceding to a major compulsion in Zimbabwe's politics. Beyond the bicker of party politics, there is a recognition of the President's place both in contemporary politics and in history, whether past or future history. He has become a symbol of this Nation and its politics, shall ever be, however, one looks at him as a politician of the day. This point even his staunchest opponents concede, in spite of their politics, indeed in spite of themselves. And when Western think tanks speak of deZanufication, they are acknowledging this larger-than-life dimension of the President.

Father Zimbabwe
I saw this at work with Joshua Nkomo when he lived, see it even now as he sleeps eternally. Amidst the fratricidal politics of the early eighties, there was a grudgingly conceded recognition that indeed he was "Father Zimbabwe". Indeed as he lay in his coffin, still and cold, none other than President Mugabe, his erstwhile political opponent, bowed down to acknowledge him as the patriarch of the very country he himself as President ran and governed daily. And all this after the then Zapu had been subdued in the vicious politics of the eighties. And each time this country is menaced by the evil airs of irredentism, President Mugabe is quick to recall for the nation the mhiko, or pledge he gave to the late Vice President as he lay his last moments. "Robert keep this country united. Unity, unity, unity! Get back the land and give it to the people. They have waited for too long." Before long, the burly patriarch breathed his last. It was a mere pledge from a dying old man which has become such a powerful prophecy with each day that passes, with each challenge we face as a people. This is the level of reverence, of myth-making I am talking about, a transcendental level whose appeal and meaning far surpasses political point-scoring. Such an idea, so profoundly felt can actuate human actions in a given direction. Such an idea goes a long way in defining a people and what they are ready to lay down their lives for. My faith tends to repose in such, never in erring man/ woman.

Tribute to MDC
At that level I am ready to concede that whatever other evil "airs" Tsvangirai carries on his back, whatever other evil airs he might have brought upon this land, his party supplied an important ingredient to the national body-politic: that of opening up a liberation project long straitjacketed or made rigid by wartime military regimentation. It is this ethos of militarism, itself a necessity of struggle, which threatened to permanently transform itself into authoritarian governance in peacetime Zimbabwe. To say so is not to suggest MDC is a conscious force of good. Rather, it is merely to concede that opposition is always built around a perceived weakness of the ruling party, built around a need lacking in reigning politics.

I daresay the problem of regimentation or seeking a monolith, has been a characteristic fault line of all liberation movements when they begin to govern. In the case of Frelimo and MPLA, it took a war to transform the regimentation of the days of struggle into new politics of non-military persuasion that fit a democracy. In the case of the ANC, it is taking a very worrisome form of over-concessions to a neo-liberal ethos in a way that is threatening the very soul of the Freedom Charter. Today the ANC faces an existential debate, not so much from contradictions similar to those faced MPLA, Frelimo, Zanu-PF or Swapo, but from how it has more than accommodated white South Africa and international capital in a land crying out for redistributive justice, crying out for a bit of levelling. It is coming across as if the ANC has deserted the Freedom Charter. Malema made the same point on Monday this week, even suggesting that the ANC Youth League which he sees as the hope of the original ANC, should be ready to exist and operate outside of the ANC. It is a foreboding moment for the ANC, with its current leadership having to come to terms with the overbearing fact of a Malema who is ceasing to be a maverick, an aberration, by fast becoming a voice that harkens to a forgotten yet defining item on the agenda of black South Africa, through the ANC.

Navigating a bad patch
When you view Robert Mugabe from this broad perspective of varying experiences of liberation movements in our region, you begin to appreciate his political acumen as a statesman-founding leader, while understanding Tsvangirai as a blunt instrument of history that is about to be irrelevant if it cannot reinvent itself for a more useful role away that cut for him by the neo-colonial Caucasian factor. Zimbabwe could have gone the bloody route of Angola or Mozambique, in fact almost did. He averted it through the Unity Accord of 1987. The Agreement was a milestone in consolidating a unitary state. But its downside was ESAP as an antipode to the reviled one-party state, itself a leftover from the regimented politics of the sixties and seventies, a leftover from the politics of liberation still fumbling for a governing model and order.

That is when Zanu-PF should have learnt that a bad governing idea can easily trigger a monstrous overreaction in a disenchanted populace. Zanu-PF could have been swept the Kaunda way. That, too, nearly happened in 2000 and most recently in 2008. And yet it was averted. After all any regime is at its weakest when it seeks to reform itself. The constitutional process of 1999/2000 could have swept Zanu-PF to debris. It owes to Robert Mugabe's stewardship that Zimbabwe was able to have its own Chiluba without throwing away its Kaunda together with the bath water. What a better way of managing change without enduring the horrendous costs of false starts to nowhere as happened during and after Chiluba, until the advent of the corrective Cobra!

Museveni's theory
And going by what has happened, it is clear the Inclusive Government has turned out to be a way of equipping the revolution without drowning it. It recalls President Museveni's lecture to Deputy Prime Minister Mutambara during the Smart Partnership in Munyonyo, near Kampala. The revolution, he said, had delivered Independence and now needed technicians to move it forward, but without dismantling it. The so-called opposition forces, added the witty President of Uganda, are technicians who must strengthen the revolution by giving it technocratic skills. They should never seek to overthrow it.

Clear milestones on a long road
Or Zimbabwe could have gone the South African way of bending over backwards to accommodate the white man. It almost did during those years of reconciliation which left white Rhodies wondering why they had resisted for so long if only they had known black majority rule would create a better paradise than the false one under Ian Smith. It owed to Robert Mugabe that two decades later, Zimbabwe subverted this false peace it had procured through what seemed like betrayal of interests of the black majority. You trace Mugabe's leadership, you see clear milestones along his career, milestones which more than measure his tenure. They mark the fate of a people. But what is more, they set values, set goals, reflect aspirations and show complex skills of preserving an imperiled revolution. What for me is so overwhelming is that ability to discern goals with such clarity beyond the temptations of comfortable office, beyond the allure of poisoned friendship and false adulation from the wily West. Robert Mugabe would have died a hero, could still recover heroism in the eyes of the West by a simple deed: renouncing the interests of his people, denouncing them all for greater peace from the white man. It is happening all over Africa, which is how Caltex can "kill" all rivers in the Delta region while Nigeria continues to be governed so well in the eyes of Europe and America. It is happening in Zimbabwe, which is why some with war credentials think of their careers through appeasing white interests singly or through sellout alliances with the MDC. Revolutions have been betrayed by such personalities.

Living by the ballot alone
People talk about the Arab spring and what it portents for the rest of Africa. It is usually talk of democracy, good governance and all that. Good luck to all those who believe in all that crap. Yes, crap. After all it takes a fool from Africa to believe that a hungry man is appeased by freedom of expression, good governance and the rule of law. That is why the first thing we Africans met at birth was a ballot box and a well written newspaper, not mummy's tit. How else do you read a continent which is told by the World Bank that its crisis is one of governance? That was in 1989. Go ahead and become foolish if you so wish. What I know for a fact is that while misgovernance has provided a focal point for dissent in North Africa, at the heart of this great perturbation is bread and butter. We have entered a new phase of the social question, and the so-called Arab spring is but a harbinger.

Upsetting the applecart
Has anyone stopped to think that governments under pressure are exactly those led by proponents of peer review? Leaders like Wade who sought to feed their hungry people with the bread of good governance. Leaders held high by the West as model rulers of sound macroeconomic management. Mubarak and Ben Ali fell within this group, assuaging their hungry people with the bread of impressive statistics of FDI. What upset the whole body-politic in Tunisia was a self-employed man's apple cart. It was not a raped ballot; it was not a banned newspaper. Rather it was a simple livelihood of a graduate vendor reckless upset and ruined by a policeman on duty, a policeman policing Tunisia for multinationals and home-grown small predators feeding off crumbs from the table of the high and mighty.

Facing Africa's angry masses
I go back to Egypt. The revolution will not finish. Its embers will not die down even though the soldiers have granted the ballot, and even though the Muslim Brotherhood, long exiled from mainstream politics, are now in the saddle, with a comfortable majority. The environment there remains disturbed, vote and ballot regardless. Contrast that with Hamas in Palestine which built its power around a social programme which it then harnessed for a sustainable anti-Zionist sentiment. Contrast that with Libya, recently liberated, yet already rocked by the social question. We are on the eve of the era of Africa's hungry masses now demanding a place on the table. They need food. They need resources which are theirs by God, the white man's by imperialism.

Yes, between now and that vision will be false gods, as with Boka Haram in northern Nigeria, or the angry youth in Senegal who think Yussour Ndour is the saviour. But as each ballot solution comes and goes, as each ballot olution fails, leaving them hungrier than before, they will keep asking questions, keep looking in all directions until they begin to locate where exactly the shoe in pinching. It is already happening in Latin America where the social question is toppling bad leaders, installing good ones who are social reformers. The liberal model has reached tipping point on the continent. It no longer washes. For goodness' sake, this is an era of resources, an era where the people demand to eat also. That is the new zeitgeist. This is why Robert Mugabe is assured of a quiet retirement, away from the angry demos. He is in sync with this new spirit of the African age.

When a worker asks history
This is why Tsvangirai is fated to die a blunt instrument of history. Baked in the oven of white causes, backed by whites against the interests of his people, his quarrel with the ordinary Zimbabwean shall always be over life and the means to it. Thanks to Mugabe, Zimbabweans now know it is not their fate to live poor, to die hungry and asset-less. Thanks to Mugabe, they now know that on food there are no elders who must eat first and last while children are send out to play. They now ask questions about economic affairs of their country. Who is Mimosa? Who is Zimplats? Who are both without our resources? Why are we not eating too? Two decades ago, these questions were unthinkable, were taboo. A eating white man was natural. We were still drawers of water, hewers of wood. Now the native has seen and judges leadership by how well it delivers on social issues. Unless he is blind, very blind, Tsvangirai should have seen by now that Zanu-PF has cleverly toppled politics of "democratic change", to replace them with politics of the stomach, of ownership. He keeps upsetting unions who can no longer be appeased by small wages from a slender neocolonial State that merely polices white interests. In the jobs-versus-ownership argument, he is sure to lose. There is a new spirit in the country, a spirit of ownership. It shall take us very far as a people.

New song, Zanu hymn book
And see where Tsvangirai's altercation with the Unions have taken him. To Chiadzwa where he now talks about the virtues of "bloody" diamonds, the same diamonds he says America must ban from the world market. A week ago he told us Mugabe is from God, pray for him. A week later he tells us our diamond fields are world class. At has been a week a sea change. He now maintains that diamonds must be enjoyed by Zimbabweans! In that regard he has joined Tendai Biti. It cannot be comfortable to be in the MDC camp, what with positions that shift daily. And you watch as good grade tobacco begins to hit the floors. Our learning Prime Minister shall visit the floors to speak loudly on the virtues of land reforms. And again, he will upset his white benefactors who expect him to reverse land reforms should he get to power. The Prime Minister and his political acolytes are slowly succumbing to an invisible but overwhelming compulsion.

The compulsion is in the air and no politician dares resist it, dares go against it. It is the same compulsion which is now forcing the Generals in Egypt to stand on the side of national interest, while defying and daring America to cut her aid over the crackdown on intrusive politics. It is the same compulsion which shall force Goodluck Jonathan to come to terms with the predatory economics that privileges Caltex, while leaving rivers dead, community blackened by oil waste. Indeed the same compulsion which is at work in South Africa, today personified by Malema. He has already supplied South Africa's hungry and poor with an idiom that gives a name to their social predicament.

Throughout Africa, the epoch of the subaltern has come and multinationals can no longer buy out the angry, demanding demos. It is cultivating that new, compulsive climate toward the quest for social justice within and between nations, which will make a difference between betrayal and revolutionary continuity. To create a compelling zeitgeist, to create a climate of ideas, values, aspirations, expectations powerful enough to compel and condition in-coming politicians: that is the key. From that perspective I think President Mugabe has and is doling very well. He shall continue to rule from the grave. Happy Birthday Gushungo.

Icho!

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