Thank God the charade is now coming to an end

Thank God the charade is now coming to an end. Hallelujah!

Two days ago the Lower House of our Parliament passed Amendment 20 bringing us a stage closer the operationalisation of the new Constitution. Hopefully Senate, the upper house, will do the same, speedily. This process has been noisy, very noisy. Regrettably, its closure will not signal the return of quiet.

We will swiftly go into the election programme, whose mode is already consuming us. But a different kind of noise, a better noise I must say.

There are some poignant points to make, a good number of which have already been made by other commentators. I defer to them as I make a small one which should provide some entry into this week's piece. I wonder whether many of us remember that the legislative instruments which ushered in the Inclusive Government routinely took less than an afternoon to process and pass legislatively.

There was an exceeding sense of speed, more speedy; haste, more haste. The august House operated mechanically, supersonically, and no one was needed to whip anyone into line. Even the talkative MDC formations lost their otherwise restless tongues in this on-rush into the so-called GNU. Power beckoned compulsively and no one tarried.

The day the deaf and dumb spoke
In sharp contrast, this week's Amendment 20 moved tardily, a-day-a-process labour of pain, with the MDC formations interminably lining up to give mighty speeches in eloquent, elaborate dilation. Even the deaf and dumb, in their noisy numbers, scrambled ungainly up to give their maiden speeches, a mere month and half shy of a full five year term of remarkable indolent, sleeping  silence.

Suddenly they had tongues, these mute ones of all but one time. Their party had told them to render it rare, valedictory duty, an easy one at that, that of studiously wasting time through seedless, arid perorations. The agitation in Zanu-PF was unmistakable as the formations played more to talk, harder to get. And not to play into their hands, Zanu-PF had to endure painful silence, all in the hope of quickly exhausting MDCs' speaking ardour.

Forced silence is never golden. All that brings out one beautiful lesson on power: always faster to get in; always slow, very slow, to get out. And power, in its own pursuit, knows no desperation.

Any prolongation, even by a few hours, few minutes or seconds, still satiates. This is exactly what happened in the last two days of inane debate, whose sum result were some few amendments - all grammatical - by people who can't even string together a simple English sentence, let alone read the esoteric subject of constitutional law, or its actualisation in the form of the document in question.

Dog bites stone, not hand that throws
Thank God it is over. Antonio Gramsci provides a very interesting clue to all these happenings. He talks about "expiation" speeches flowing so poetically from minds and mouths that seek to avoid the fundamental problem of the day.

Through empty processes and words, they seek to divert "the attention and the passions of the masses to secondary objectives", to hypocritically conceal " the historical-political responsibility of the ruling class (thereby) channelling the people's rage against the material and frequently unconscious instruments of ruling class policies."

What follows in this excerpt is a typical allusion of Gramscian beauty.

The whole idea in all such meaningless perorations is to make the deluded masses behave like the proverbial dog "that bites the stone and not the hand that throws it." If truth be told, this whole  constitution-making saga was one gigantic, very expensive diversion by a warring middle class, a section of which has progressive intentions.

Helpfully our masses are a lot more enlightened, which is why they played along while ensuring they used this elite exercise to advance their own interests. And this they did.

When the masses bite the throwing hand
The masses made sure a stronger land clause was put in, into the draft. They made sure their inherent resource nationalism, itself a faculty that saw them pick up arms against settler colonialism, found ringing expression in this bourgeois document originally meant to get them to bark at, and bite the stone, never the hand throwing it.

They made sure they used the constitutional exercise to suture those rifts imported into their lives by the tag of factional politics which threatened to eat away into Zanu-PF, to date their only organisational ally in their struggle for sovereign ownership of their resources.

Much more, they used the exercise to mobilise themselves in readiness to recapture and regain total and exclusive control of the State without whose patronage the land - their principal gain so far - would remain both dead and precarious as an economic asset.

The State which the peasant had paid for so dearly through his own fallen combatant-son and daughter, had slipped away - well almost - in the last elections creating political conditions for a possible reversal of all gains made so far. But just as well. They needed a concrete experience of what it means to survive as a landed peasantry but without a friendly, supportive State. Biti did his damnedest to bring the horrendous costs home and the peasant, already bitten once, was twice shy politically.

The tyranny of time
No peasant went to the referendum with the idea of a new Constitution as a foremost preoccupation on their mind, as the battle trophy for the day.

A battleground maybe. It had never been an issue in the first place. In place of freedom of expression, of association, of assembly, he worried more about tending a healthy crop on his newly acquired piece of land. And to do that he needed inputs which he had grown accustomed to getting from a Zanu-PF-led Government.

From results of the 2008 elections, that taken-for-granted package had vanished as its author - Zanu-PF - wilted and drooped like a willow. Every peasant went to the referendum principally to demonstrate the re-ascendency of Zanu-PF politically, and flowing from this, as the first bid for regaining exclusive State power.

The second bid would come by way of the actual harmonized general election, which is exactly what the adoption of Amendment 20 allows to happen soon after. The referendum was a dry run which had to come right.

And it did. To the peasant, the charade in Parliament in the past two days was important in so far as the last hurdle to the eagerly awaited elections was removed.

And removed it was, for soon after the upper House (which Zanu-PF controls) has cleared the document, the whole action shifts finally and irrevocably into the hands of Zanu-PF: by way of the Presidential assent and declarations; by way of time-tabling the electoral way forward, which will be done by Minister Chinamasa, fully Zanu-PF.

The way is now clear for elections by June 29, or a few weeks later. Last Thursday was the last day and date for MDC formations power over processes, the last day for any more indignities from that quarter.

The game is up. I suppose they never quite got it when the President philosophically pontificated on the inexorableness of time, and with it the inevitable denouement.

The MDC formations have lost not just power, process and time. They have also lost the moral high ground. The saintly pose is over and an epoch purgatorial pain kicks in.

This fast-to-get-in, slow-to-get-out power equation will come back to haunt them. When a people have endorsed a document through a well-attended referendum, through an unequivocal result, delay amounts to an attempt to abort their Will. After the referendum, matters did not have to come back to Parliament.

Or to be arrested from a predestined trajectory by little dirty hands abusing parliamentary process.

Or if matters had to come back to Parliament, to do so only for adoption formalities. The two day delay, while sounding short by calendar time-reckoning, exhibited a certain terminal craving for clinging onto to power about to be lost, something supposedly alien to our so-called democrats moving towards change. The only movement we saw in those two days of infamy was in the direction of abortively seeking to prolong the sweet nap of ill-gotten power in a village already wide awake, already up and about.

Skating on thin constitutional ice
But there is another way of looking at those two long days, beyond their illusory calendar shortness. Between now and 29 June, which is when Parliament is dissolved or dissolves itself, every day, every hour, every minute, matters, is precious. Anyone who spends such precious time so recklessly, fatally tampers  with the constitutional question of this country. I will show you how.

The new Constitution - more accurately one about to be - provides tight time-lines within which processes antecedent to the actual polls must tightly fit.

And those able to read these time-lines against the virtually empty hour-glass of Parliament, will tell you we are already skating on very thin constitutional ice, even without the exacerbating time-wasting mischief from the MDC formations. Any processes that fall beyond 29 June invariably raise issues of constitutional legality.

It does not matter that this sinning generation may elect not to raise them, itself a clear testimony of a cross-party conspiracy to operate outside the constitution. The fact is we will have exceeded the time allowed under the constitution. By so doing we will have set a precedent that shall justify power abuse in the vast future.

Where there is no state of war or an emergency, we have no reason to overspill the June 29 deadline, absolutely no reason to fall back on the three months constitutional allowance only meant for crises. It amounts to constitutional indiscipline, something the incumbent President avoided at all cost, even when he had real grounds for doing so.

Once you begin to see matters from this angle, you begin to realize what monstrous treachery is belied by the day-long delay the MDC formations subjected us to this week. Much worse, you also begin to appreciate that this day-long delay buys them months of unconstitutional power beyond the peremptory month of June. It is ugly, indeed a very dangerous precedent.

Buying a patch before the dress
Uglier when you also remember that one of the formations suggested an amendment to the new Constitution even before it is assented to, thus before it becomes one. The amendment would seek to free this Government from the tyranny of constitutional time! My goodness! We are already proposing an amendment to a constitution which is still a Bill, well before it becomes law?

Let us look back. The whole debate around the need for a new constitution fed fat on an emotive but useless argument that the original fabric of Lancaster House Constitution was too patched to afford even a fleeting glimpse on the original garment.

It carried 19 patches, and those with sartorial experience will tell you once a garment has that many patches, it is time you looked for a new garment altogether.  We acquiesced to that foolish argument, even though we knew that it was those 19 patches which tamed Lancaster beyond the imperial designs of its authors, and which nudged it towards our wish to morph beyond a model neo-colony that has been the bane of most of Africa.

Now how does one relate to this new s situation where our architects of a "new Zimbabwe" are already tidying up a patch,  in readiness to patch up  garment that is still behind the storekeeper's table? All this not to end 20 racial seats reserved for white settlers. That was done in earlier amendments.

Not to end white dominance over our land. Again that was done during the Lancaster dispensation.

And not even to settle a festering political question, which is what the GPA did. Or to advance any of the motives which underpinned the 19  ideas that gave patches to Lancaster. This time we have a patch in readiness simply to extend the life of the Inclusive Government beyond its constitutional time! Simply to appease those craving to wield power without the unnecessary inconvenience of going for polls! What an ignoble motive!

What level of constitutional discipline are we engendering and naturalizing in the body-politic? Even while Mugabe is still around? My goodness!

We gave ourselves 2-term limits through the new constitution simply because we cannot trust ourselves with power the way we trusted Robert Mugabe with lots of it. As if to remind ourselves that indeed we are dangerous to constitutional order; that we can't be trusted with power?

We are already ousting a supreme law before we have it? And we bawl about Security Sector Reform? Who needs a military coup with unlawful civilians such as these, such as we are?

The dirge that was not sung
Here is a personal one. Does the Prime Minister know that after next week his Office will be a constitutional outlaw? Don't tell me about transitional clauses. I don't care about those.

The fact is his Office will have no business barking orders to anyone when it cannot be found on the constitutional map. It will be a talkative illegality and there will be many only too ready to taunt the Prime Minister thus. From next week he will be a very enfeebled man, whatever polite processes we have put in place to assuage the incongruities of the interregnum. Which means?

Well, that his real salvation is in pushing for early elections so that he is spared this constitutionally-induced twilight.

It is far better to hurry on and lose elections than to stretch it out and attract whispers of irreverence and derision. The title of ex-Prime Minister carries more dignity than the taunt of a man who pretends to be a Prime Minister in a dispensation of Executive Presidency, under a constitution which does not recognise him. He has been shed off.

I suppose this is why the MDC is pushing for a longer interregnum beyond June 29, an interregnum  without a Parliament. It makes the whole structure illegal, does it not? Including the presidency which will be ruling without full oversight.

This is what the MDC formations want, for it produces overall illegality, produces a more comfortable milieu for a man clinging to a non-existent post and power! That is always the problem if your own advisers are no longer loyal.

No one warns you of the suicidal dimension, no one reads for you the quiet dirge underlaid by the "aya ndiwo makorokoto" song so jubilantly sung after the adoption of Amendment 20.

Publish the dead
There was another ruse, this week. After making so much noise about the cleaning up of the voters' roll; after so much noise on voter registration, the MDC formations are now exhibiting even greater discomfort with both processes. They are worried that so many dead people have been removed from the voters' roll. They want the names of the dead published so they can prove that indeed the dead are truly dead! Only yesterday they worried that the dead lived on the voters' role.

Mudede heard them and obligingly decided to cart the dead to the cemetery. Now they want those who have now died on the voters' roll to now get exhumed for a new funeral pyre!

And for the sake of MDC formations we must publish names of all who have died in the past five years or even before, so families of the dead can endure a second emotional anguish! This is what acute power craving does. It makes us want to bark at, to bite the stone, not the throwing hand.

Icho!

nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw