When we can't trust ourselves after Mugabe

"One of the commonest manifestations of underdevelopment is a tendency among the ruling elite to live in a world of make-believe and unrealistic expectations. This is the cargo cult mentality that anthropologists sometimes speak about - a belief by backward people that someday, without any exertion whatsoever on their own part, a fairy ship will dock in their harbour laden with every goody they have always dreamed of possessing."

When English language lost its mastery

I am heartbroken, really broken. Chinua Achebe, that illustrious pan-African writer of Nigerian parentage, is no more. It is a very dark day for Africa, darker for those of us who were raised on the staple of literature, foundationally English, transformationally African.

And to speak of African literature was to begin with Amos Tutuola and his Palm Wine Drinkard. What a short beginning for Africa, unlike Daniel Defoe, the father of the English novel who detains you for quite a while. The African writer started with a dither, expectedly so, what with a new language, a new genre and an anaemic and amorphous reader. But before long, you would realise Tutuola is in fact being polite, immodestly consigning himself to a small desert that swiftly courses down the throat, making way to a real big, tasty dish gingerly tackled from the margin, like hot pepe.

And Ah, what a dish, from the brewmaster, Chinua, son of Achebe! You began with Things Fall Apart, hurry too forward to No Longer At Ease, before realizing you skipped that key juncture where the rain began to beat us as Africans. So you pulled back, retreated to Arrow of God, that fiesta of African wisdom overflowing the brim of the English bowel, itself too shallow to contain, let alone carry bounty African thought.

In Arrow of God, you feel pity for the English language, you hear its creaks, see it pitifully get prostrated by the master's artful stretching of a language the British Queen so mistakenly took to be her own. In spite of its finicky brittleness, its rule-laid fastidiousness - phonetic and syntactical - this Igbo prodigy was able to bridle this English language to womanly submissiveness.

In Achebe's darning hand, English spectacularly lost its imperial mastery, traded its much-vaunted majesty for pimpish coquetry. Achebe harnessed and humbled it, thereby giving all of us the first line of imperial defeat. Before losing colony, England first lost her tongue. And Achebe led the assault.

Master polemicist
You moved on, reconnecting with the interrupted sequence. A Man of the People followed. Then Anthills of the Savannah. In between Girls at War, Beware, Soul Brother, The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories, Chike and the River, The Flute, The Drum - all these marking a huge mind in a playful interlude, between, before more huge tasks.

And if you are cerebral, quarrelsome like Manheru, you sought and found satiety in his most engaging polemics: the seminal Morning Yet On Creation Day. The waspish powder keg, The Trouble With Nigeria. Or the granary of polemical thought, Hopes and Impediments which carries Achebe's most celebrated, choicest harvests over his long career.

Carries the giant yams the size of a man's head. Oh Chinua! Of course I will not leave out Conversations with Chinua Achebe.

Then you have what for me is Achebe at his most compelling: "The Education of a British-Protected Child." It is a narrative which is both historical and philosophical, a narrative with enough barbs to expiate the African cynic, enough of gentle rebuke to show a writer mellowed by time and tribulation, a writer after a harsh altercation with society, now drifting towards a reconstructive mode.

 . . . but still a man with warts
His latest offering - by this death now turned valedictory - is "There was a Country" published in 2012. Frankly, I did not enjoy this latest offering which points to a rueful Achebe, a rueful Igbo nationalist when in fact I was expecting a disappointed Nigerian, a continental seer angry at African creation.

In this autobiographical book, Achebe explores and exposes the seething anger of his tribe, clearly showing that it is one wound which wrinkles of time will not fold, which his continental eye will not gloss over.

True, the Igbos were hurt during Biafra, ironically a post-independence conflict which negatively linked the leader of the Biafrans, Ojukwu, to this our country, then colonially known as Rhodesia. Apparently Ojukwu got arms from Rhodesia, and used them against the newly independent state of Nigeria.

Whatever his cause, whatever the cause of his people - the Igbos - this transforming of Rhodesians into quartermasters of his cause soiled him.

It was a foul blot on Biafrans escutcheon, which is why Africa never embraced this secessionist war.

Although this last offering by Achebe looks at the conflict from the angle of a grieving private citizen caught in the maelstrom of a post-independence bloody experimentation in nationhood, overall it reads like this great man of letters stumbles on one of Africa's narrowest social foci, indeed doffs to narrow loyalty using a medium, genre that abhors parochialism. For as an art form, the novel is universal. I don't grieve over this stumble.

It does not lessen Chinua, merely makes a being of sins, of common foibles that we all are. Go well, rest well, great son of Africa.

In the lap of an indifferent law
The referendum came. The referendum is gone. But its mathematics remain, buoying some, bloodying others. In the referendum, I am ready to show you the world in a grain of numbers! There is panic, absolute panic in the camp of those worsted by its numbers. So stunned is MDC-T that it can't even think of a clever spin to the whole result which clearly emits a rural stench.

For the document about to be our supreme law was carried by the rural vote. We can rationalise, but in our heart or hearts, we know who commands it, who loses when it is withheld, again who loses when it is marshalled to its fullest.

Come to think of it, Madhuku has better reason to make merry, better reason than the two MDCs combined, if they could. I hope I don't sound like I am contradicting myself. Previously, I postulated the two MDCs are set to reunite.

They were; they could, still. But after Kenya, the movers of this imperative have stepped back. Kenya, originally the venue, has become the message, a chastising one too. Truly forbidding. Raila, the supposed inspiration, today wallows in the courts, mercilessly swept aside, muddily dragged behind the compelling curse of fatherhood, the curse of his lineage.

The Odingas never ruled; they have always been governed, at best playing glorified subalterns - as Chief Ministers or on a good day, as Prime Ministers/Deputy Presidents. Their fate seems to be in the stars. And when that happened to Raila, he was too consumed in ambition to read the zenith to which his good Fate had catapulted him. Like Icarus, he sought more, craved for higher, for highest, beyond the limits of Providence.

He soared in false progress, ending up too near the fiercely burning sun, all on wings of wax. Man, know thy limit! That is the timeless homily we all inherit from the Augustans. Sadly, Odinga thought and dreamt beyond Fate. Today he has broken wings, ashen hopes to lick while squatting in one dark corner of an indifferent law.


When we can't trust ourselves after Mugabe
And the West, itself the mover of this pan-MDC quest - dream - also emerged from Mau Mau land badly mauled. Its vision for Kenya simply won't add up, for there on the stoep sits a wrong man! So the two MDCs will not be pushed, but might have to generate their own motive force in the direction of incestuous intimacy.

Thankfully there is a lot happening to push them in this direction, on their own. Long united in seeking a longer life for the GNU, the two shards found themselves fighting from the same corner throughout the constitution-making days, often for different but reconcilable reasons.

Much worse, some within their ranks crossed boundaries to embrace the other, often against their respective leaderships. Illustratively, the fear of a Tsvangirai presidency, steeped in the full powers "dzaComrade" - their fond shorthand for President Mugabe - saw elements from both camps forging trans-boundary solidarities, all against the man from Buhera.

While our simple media thought the powers of presidency as proposed by the draft were being trimmed against Robert Mugabe, in reality this was prompted by deep trans-formation fears of a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe which they feared would be a Tsvangirai Zimbabwe.

And this script was sold to Zanu-PF, which absent-mindedly reminded the fractious elements in the two MDCs that their fears were falsely founded on a supposed electoral triumph of Tsvangirai, which was well nigh impossible.

Privately, Zanu-PF took note of these strategic fractures. I also see the same media-led blindness in the term-limits clause in the new draft, so daftly read as aimed at President Mugabe.

Pleaaase!

Yet the clause does not bar incumbent president from standing. Quite the contrary, it gives the incumbent 10 more years, starting from 2013! Looking at the road the President has travelled, a long road which this draft generously seeks to make longer by another 10 years, just whose political career is being abridged by this clause?

You and me, we the younger politicians, must get the message loud and clear: after Mugabe comes the era of untrusted politics, of never trusted politicians. Which is why their badness requires curtailment provided by a whole constitutional stricture. We are bad, I tell you. What a rebuke!

The day Madhuku smiled
I said Madhuku has good grounds for sanguineness. He has, and this is why. But let's start from the premise that the Referendum was a dry run for politics, politicians and parties. For politics, there is a part of us which wanted to gauge the numerical scope for "third" politics, beyond the Zanu-PF/ MDC binary. I put Madhuku in this camp, even with his own legs kicking. His NCA lost the Referendum vote, dismally. But it won a numerical validation to what it had surmised all along, namely, that there is room for a viable third party, outside Zanu-PF and the two MDCs.

The votes NCA attracted may have been too small to dent the "Yes" vote. But they were numerically big enough to launch a movement, a party.

Numerically bigger when you consider two key points. While the two main parties got loyalty votes, Madhuku got the thinking vote. Potentially that makes his numbers very many, magnified. He commanded a leadership stratum, actual and potential, and that augments the quality of his numbers. I said potentially because that same strength is also the same weakness.

It is very easy to become another Enoch Dumbutshena and his elitist Forum party. Or more recently, another Makoni gazing the glory of shining stars amidst a people pricked by thorns and thus with an obsessive gaze on where to put their foot on the terra firma.

The cult vote
Second, NCA, when it becomes a party, shall draw from the two MDCs, both until now its principals to varying degrees. You looked at the geographic spread of the NCA vote, and you were struck by its national spread, of course with an indicative concentration in Manicaland, Madhuku's home province.

At least for Chipinge, it is clear Madhuku is already Ndabaningi resurrected, very bad news for Mwonzora and his MDC-T faction which hoped "sit" Ndabaningi's marriage, to use local parlance. Vutuza puts it so well, to the Ndaus, musharukwa is a cult. Who to be draped in it after so long after Ndabaningi's departure, that is the question. Except this is a vote culled by geographic symbolism - a cult gift - and therefore uninformed, shifty.

But Madhuku has some following in cities, themselves locales for politics of the future. Add to all that the precipitous decline of the MDCs, especially that with a "T", then you realise Madhuku has enough pastures from which to graze for greater, fatter futures. And it is more than just disenchantment with the MDC that carries Madhuku's smiling fate. It is active hostility to the intellectual makeup of its leadership as presently constituted.

Active hostility and disappointment within.

There is a strong feeling that MDC-T has been done down by a leadership equipped with a natural mind, a strong cabal of intellectuals which, having failed to grab away power from these leaders of nature, is ripe enough to strike it out with anybody. Madhuku is not alone. His jabs are not just for NCA.

Never against a legend

When you engage him when he is at his haughtiest, he will tell you the NCA is a party which has been recumbent, a party which has had to be embedded in both MDCs, until its time ripens. The big question is whether that time is now, as Madhuku seems to think. Further, he will tell you he is not foolish to pit himself against a legend, a reference to President Mugabe. No, he will bide his time. He is still young and can still wait, barring the maladies of these days which seem to be doing quite well to trim down competition ahead of its coming.

Or if he wants to force the hand of time, to push the sun and night faster, he will support Tsvangirai to get rid of Mugabe for him electorally. Or that failing, as he knows it is fated to, still to push the natural Tsvangirai to be electorally bludgeoned by Mugabe thereby resolving the succession issue in the badly led MDC-T, his natural hinterland.

He will tell you what we all know, including Tsvangirai, that after the next defeat at the hands of Zanu-PF we will not have MDC-T the morning after. I notice he has begun smiting Tsvangirai, meaning he has concluded Zanu-PF cannot be stopped. And because he wants to politically destroy Tsvangirai without disintegrating Tsvangirai's power base which he seeks to inherit, he will savage Tsvangirai alongside President Mugabe and Zanu-PF, to uphold the anti-Zanu-PF sentiment within MDC ranks. What shall be news is to get to know who from the current titular MDC-T members will show themselves to have been working with Madhuku.

When hi-tech campaign yields spam!
The MDC formations wanted to gauge their appeal, gauge the efficacy of their mobilisation tools. In the case of MDC-T, it has been about checking on the efficacy of voter clubs, the responsiveness of the urban youth vote.

The referendum result has been a devastating revelation. The strategy simply came unstuck. The party has been banking on a very mercurial stratum, a last-minute voter who simply won't be bothered, or will lazily trudge to a polling booth when all else is done for the day, and when the queue is short enough for his limited attention span.

Lots of new technology was deployed to rouse this diffident yet tempestuous age group. MDC-T messages became mere spam! There is deep soul-searching, tinged with despair.

Not helped by the weird radios which were supposed to help the two MDCs penetrate rural voters. Supposed because this was a big shot in the dark.

With improved reception for national radios, those little things spend the whole day blaring "National Ephraim", as National FM is fondly called, and of course Radio Zimbabwe, the biggest one of them all. These channels are suffusively Zanu-PF. Even in terms of message exposure, you are pitting the 30 minutes of nocturnal piracy against a whole day of lawful national programming, hoping 30 minutes is longer! And of course they forgot the stigma so fraught in rural areas.

There is no glory in jiving to a donor radio in a household with none of its own. Even that did not come to pass. The propaganda operation has been busted, which is why Priscillah was too close to baring her insides with anger.

Trading constituency for ego
What of the other MDC? Tragedy, real tragedy! Everyone from the southern part of the country knew fully well that the devolution argument had come to grief well before the poll, that it had been irretrievably lost never mind the face-saving tinkering that was allowed to move the referendum process forward.

The logical thing would have been for Ncube to mobilise a "No" vote in that part of the country, or around the country if he truly believed his self-serving argument that seven or so provinces out of ten supported devolution.

Yet he would not dare, as that would have meant exposing himself fully to the combined weight of the two major parties. He would dare not. In any case, he saw greater glory in his incidental recognition during the consultations on the constitution than in defending whatever view he held on the issue under examination.

While this stance saved him from the combined avalanche of the two parties, indeed won him some semblance of principal-ship, it disintegrated a whole constituency potentially built around the issue of devolution.

He traded that vital regional constituency for his ego, or so his detractors shall charge. Now it is well-nigh impossible for him to put the matter back on the electoral agenda after the referendum.

Or to seek an identity outside of the MDC-T with which he shared a platform during the referendum. From the referendum, he cannot gauge his worth, a situation far worse than that faced by the MDC-T which was able to gauge its worth, albeit negatively by way of the contracted vote.

Where numbers matter
For politicians, much is gained by simply reminding ourselves that our Americanised constitutional framework makes the winning presidential candidate automatically the winning party. It is a poor grasp of this most basic fact which misguided the "bhora musango" brigade of Zanu-PF  in 2008.

They believed they could do down the President and still emerge in control of government. With that understanding of the correct position, everybody will thus know that it is not what Harare polled which matters. It is the zone votes aggregated. And I am talking of the rural/urban dichotomy which shapes our electoral politics. In 2008, Zanu-PF undermined its otherwise cohesive rural for reasons and faulty reasoning I have already given above.

That is unlikely to be repeated, more so now after the smell of victory which has come with the referendum result. Any fractious tendencies in Zanu-PF stand healed Now and in future. With poll success so promising, everyone is trimming up for post promises. That makes for cohesion, as always does success, real or read. On the other side, the story is quite different, and for us in Zanu-PF scarily familiar.

We have had an indicative piece from one of the private papers, disguised as debate over campaign strategy. One side - hotly thinking and ambitious - wants a campaign strategy foregrounding the party, then situating Tsvangirai within that broad party framework.

The other - demurely loyal - wants a president-led campaign where Tsvangirai becomes the centrepiece, the strategy, the party persona. That way he is guaranteed of uniform effort, across ballots.

The former makes him anonymous, one in a throng. The paper is question puts it across like an MDC-T novelty, forgetting that is what was at the heart of Zanu-PF treachery in 2008. MDC-T seems to be following Zanu-PF, following it faithfully both in its ups and downs. The crucial 2013 poll finds it faithfully following Zanu-PF's downs, which is what seals its fate, anyway already prefigured in the referendum figures.

The metal blanket so hard to fold
And for Presidency, Zanu-PF needs only two rural Provinces to wash out Harare's nearly half a million voters which are certainly highest vis-a-vis the rest of the provinces, but decidedly modest relative to its voting strength.

The writing is on the wall. I notice the PM's press sought to make much out of the fact that only the PM went out to canvass for support for the referendum.

They hoped to then paste the "yes" vote on his forehead, hoping that would give him a headstart. Too bad, that reading cannot be made, against an overwhelmingly "yes" vote in rural areas.

Of course we all remember the MDC youth official from rural Dotito who openly told the stunned Prime Minister who had never visited Dotito that Zanu-PF is a party of great depth and harder to beat.

In his own words, it is the proverbial blanket of steel, too brittle to fold. Or the PM's official in charge of policy and research who gets assaulted by the PM's youth wing for alighting from a vehicle clearly spotting a Zanu-PF logo.

A party already in a defeatist mode can never work for success. The run on the party may have already begun. Things fall apart. Go well Chinua Achebe. Icho!

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