The spectacular failure of ZANU-PF, ANC and Frelimo

Recently, heavy rains hit a town called Mthatha in the Eastern Cape. The resulting floods killed 49 people across the province, but Mthatha was the worst-hit. On the day of the flooding, there were reports of children hanging in trees without any equipment or services to rescue them.

Hearing Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane speaking on the tragedy, you would have thought the dude was just an ordinary concerned citizen or some manager of a non-governmental organisation. He literally looked helpless and thoughtless. No one was surprised. It is what they expect of the African National Congress.

In Mozambique, young people went out in huge numbers in October 2024 to cast their vote in provincial assembly and presidential elections. Frelimo, true to form, ensured the vote was stolen. And not only that – they assaulted, maimed, detained and killed protesters and bystanders.

The catalogue of ZANU-PF's failures is shown daily on social media – rundown hospitals without medication, major roads reduced to dirt strips, ghost factories, horrible youth unemployment statistics…That Hall of Shame does nothing to the conscience of the former liberators. Ngoma ndiyo ndiyo.

Ruling by divine right
After 45 years, one looks back with huge disappointment and asks, can a liberation movement transform into a political party and govern effectively? It is not a new question. Prominent academics such as South Africa's professor of politics, Roger Southall, have written extensively on this.

When these liberation comrades were ushered into the corridors of power, we had not realised that they subscribed to a certain religion – they ruled by divine right. They were the chosen ones who would defend the nation and the people against the return of the vanquished enemy. ZANU and Frelimo see ceding power as giving their countries back to the imperialists. That is, of course, ironic because they have perfected the art of ensuring the mineral resources of the country are carted away with very little trickling down to the people.

In Mozambique, the COVID pandemic accelerated rural and urban poverty. A clueless Frelimo government has failed to create an inclusive economy. So whilst heavy investment has gone into mineral extraction and LNG, health and social services are unevenly distributed.

In Zimbabwe, a ruling party that is underwritten by the security apparatus has no intention of relinquishing the feeding trough. The pigs and the piglets must eat. It now begins to make sense why the Man from Zvimba was so insistent on a one-party state in the early 1980s and why he crushed ZAPU and ZIPRA and took all their properties (farms, equipment, trucks and archives). There could only be one rooster in the fowl run called Zimbabwe.

In March 2004, former South African president Jacob Zuma proclaimed that the ANC would rule ‘until Jesus comes back'. Unlike his ZANU and Frelimo counterparts, his party had not done the necessary groundwork of dismantling the constitution, the judiciary and politicising the security services. A protracted negotiated settlement resulted in a constitution that could not easily be dismembered without a challenge in the courts and the court of public opinion.

In 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa is creating commission after commission, task team after task team…But people are looking for a leader with a spine who will confront structural inequalities and deliver the promise in the preamble to the South African constitution: to improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person.

Election thieves need a clownish judiciary and a hungry opposition
ZANU and Frelimo have not had to deal with the ANC's inconveniences and so have perfected the art of rigging elections. Their effective strategy has been to compromise the national electoral bodies, pack the judiciary all the way up to the Constitutional Court with paid lackeys that will do the bidding of the former liberation movements. In Zimbabwe, the ruling party has discovered that a hungry and desperate political opposition thinks with its belly. Maybe it is a good thing that the so-called opposition has shown its "eatist" tendencies in advance.

But the question still begs: why are liberation movements so incapable of governing? How is it that people who could organise and execute an effective struggle against colonialism are so inept when it comes to developing and implementing policies that benefit the people they claim to have fought for and with? What is it about power that makes people who were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice become the biggest robbers of the national cashbox?

Could the answer be structural – that is, the founding architecture of the nation determines how it fares? Zimbabwe was birthed with an imposed and unfair settlement, and twenty years later, ZANU decided to deal with the land question in its own way and in response to perceived threats to its hegemony. True to form, nothing with ZANU-PF is ever fully thought through and seen to completion. Literally every day brings with it surprises in policy changes, or rather, decrees.

Whatever the answer to why these erstwhile comrades cannot govern effectively, the tragedy is that we must live daily with the consequences of their actions. That truly sucks.