Want to destroy anything - form and call it 'Zimbabwean'

So I don't appear a liar, let me contextualize and historicize my contribution. Let's start at the beginning – sort of anyway.

Let's start with the NDP -- the National Democratic Party. The NDP is the only party to have been truly 'nationalist' and not to have carried the chimera of the 'Zimbabwe' label. The NDP lived 'united' and only suffered death through banning. That was in the 1950s. But introduce the label 'Zimbabwe' – and then mayhem. Total chaos! Let's look at the evidence.

Enter ZAPU – the Zimbabwe People's Union, the party of the 1960s/70s. Zapu enjoyed only three years before becoming a two-headed political snake in 1963, which came with the creation (note, not the formation) of Zanu. As would turn out, it is this two-headed snake that entered the forked road of post-colonial rule in 1980 and has never since known which of the two roads each head is telling itself to go.

Having failed to be anything other than what it is, Zanu chose to swallow itself in-outside (not outside in) by trying to be Zapu while still remaining Zanu. It called this grotesque procedure the 'Unity Accord'. Today, Zanu struts the political landscape as this political polymelia only in love with itself but at total war with the rest of society.

Enter the 1990s. Zanu regurgitates Zum – the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (1990). Just a forum for venting personal anger, Zum expectedly goes nowhere. Zum was soon followed by Enoch Dumbutshena's Forum Party of Zimbabwe - FPZ (1993). Not knowing whether it wanted to be there or not, FPZ just ceased to be there. The FPZ was followed by another family squabble outfit, Margaret Dongo's ZUD – the Zimbabwe Union of Democrats (1998). A two-persons party (of Margaret Dongo and the then politically deranged Kempton Makamure), ZUD would quickly be divided into two 'spoils of political ego', with Margaret Dongo retaining ZUD and Kempton Makamure walking away with something called ZUD – Transparency Front (ZUD-TF). In an article in The Independent, 16th July 1999, the CIO boasted of carving ZUD up.

Throughout all these formations, the connecting thread in this catalogue of failure is 'Zimbabwe'. The 'revived' Zapu's fate is long cut out of for it. It is just wasting its time.

But that is not all, or historical. Look at Zanu-PF in 2014 when it has 'scored' its most important second 'victory' after the 1980 'victory'! The 'Zimbabwe' that it has howled and killed in the name of seems to have risen as monster that is now consuming it instead. Look at how Zanu-PF has receded into a cocoon of embarrassed shame at a time when it has 'recovered' its Zimbabwe (with a Zanu 'victory'). How come? However, that is not the subject of this discussion.

But how about the MDC – the grand Movement for Democratic Change? I hear many say the MDC adventure challenges my theory as it didn't have the 'Zimbabwe' label. Well, as I hope to show below, it doesn't.

But first things first about the MDC.
First, the MDC has never been a political party. Nevanji Madanhire recently called it 'a mere tendency' (Tsvangirai exposes tragic flow). I agree, but go a little further. With minor exceptions, the MDC are just a bunch of social activists and political agitators of the chaos fringe. They have spawned WOZA and various other activist outfits of whom the public have long grown tired of, including the insufferable NCA, especially in its new political prison garb. A poor template of the MMD in Zambia, the MDC was always politically doomed inside a soft shell when it was intended to land on a hard political surface. It fell short on all fronts, and declined immensely once you removed its more orderly element in 2005.

Second, the MDC was designed as an ambush weapon with no life beyond the ambush, whether that ambush failed or succeeded. A 'tipping point' had long been created for an MDC victory. Victory was all there for the take. It could only take the MDC to fail, as it has, three times! Third, the MDC were just Zanu-PF by another name. The 2005 split soon confirmed it. What we are seeing now is no longer confirmation but affirmation of MDC's (now MDC-T) Zanu roots.

So to come back to my theory, what we have had since 1999 as the MDC is in fact the 'Zimbabwe Movement for Democratic Change' (ZMDC). Anyone can now see Zanu-PF when 'king' Tsvangirai – oops President Tsvangirai – now calls on all his prodigal sons and daughters to 'come back' to the MDC 'kingdom'? The immutable, unchangeable, unchanging kingdom of the mob! Zanu-PF's traditional terrain now assumed gleefully by MDC-T!

I therefore nearly fell off my chair in disbelief when I recently read that Tendai Biti has called for the formation of a new political party which he called United Democratic Front, and the terms upon which this UDF is to be built. "And also this UDF, I am proposing must find accommodation within the liberation struggle. We can't put a durawall (precast wall) with the liberation struggle," Mr Biti said (Biti proposes new political party). While it is understandable that Mr Biti now finds it cold out there he is out of order to invite everybody to form Zanu-PF. But let's judge him on what he wants. He wants UDF to be 'accommodated within the liberation struggle' rather than wanting the liberation struggle to be accommodated by UDF, by our time. This is curious!  

It is important that I interpose and ask Mr Biti here. For some, there has only been one liberation struggle, that of Zimbabwe. But for others - the Ndebele - there have already been two, the anti-colonial struggle and the anti-Gukurahundi struggle, and with a third to go -- that of total and true Ndebele freedom. Which of these is Mr Biti referring to as the 'liberation struggle'?

But to continue with my theory, in essence, what Mr Biti is calling for is the 'Zimbabwe United Democratic Front' (ZUDF). And here we must pose, for we have hit a raw point of political divergence – again!

This brings me to the implicit question of my theory; namely, what is wrong about the label 'Zimbabwe' from whom so much wrong and so much failure seems in-built and a certified certainty?

First, one must acknowledge that there are many who see Zimbabwe as a success. God bless them! But even judged by any kind standard, Zimbabwe represents for the modern word everything that any State should not be (except if speaking the English language be used as a standard of anything given that English is just a language like isiNdebele).

The real problem, and the real reason why the label Zimbabwe is this political harbinger for disaster and failure, is because no one, outside Zanu-PF (not this Zanu-PF we all know and see), knows what the Zimbabwe project is. All we know for sure, and can all see, is that Zimbabwe is a conspiratorial project fighting and stabbing repeatedly at someone, and at any one point that person can be me or you. Anyone! And that is the biggest problem about this Zimbabwe. And that is what ZMDC has long been. Yesterday it was Welshman Ncube, today it's Mangoma and Biti and tomorrow it will be Douglas Mwonzora and Nelson Chamisa (by the way it's coming to you too brovs!). Who needs this?

In the last constitutional effort, people from Matebeleland suggested that that effort open up and place in the public domain what Zimbabwe is. As before, that has remained a secret, guarded conspiratorially. Little wonder that some have called Zimbabwe a Mafia State or a cartelized State.

Indeed, outside formal the formal reference of Zimbabwe, the question can still be posed legitimately and seriously: What is a Zimbabwean? Why are those who defend Zimbabwe or those who oppose it so ready to deny any association with it in private and outside its borders, including, its own ministers and public officials? Even its most public faces reject it in deed, going to seek treatment or die in foreign hospitals, or sending their children to universities abroad while lauding Zimbabwe's health delivery and educational systems with false praises.  

It is not surprising therefore that the political road of Zimbabwe is littered with carcasses of organizations of all types that chose to rubber-stamp Zimbabweness unquestioningly.

Turning to what needs to be done now, no one should waste anybody's time about forming a broad or grand opposition called or taking the name label of Zimbabwe, especially one modelled on Zanu-PF or the ZMDC. No one needs either. As it is, both Zanu-PF and ZMDC are presently shyly sitting on a 'new' constitution no one is using and everybody is embarrassed about.

For starters, any fresh opposition effort needs to deliberately de-Zimbabwenize and deliberately de-link from this so-called liberation mantra that has been nothing more than a slogan for abusing the people. ZMDC already failed there because it tried to be both at one and the same time.

Second, we need a constitution - a proper constitution – not this childish 'cut-and-paste' catalogue of boiler-plate constitutional provisions documentalized as a constitution.

In that fresh constitutional effort, we can open up, debate, define, and review what Zimbabwe is. But more than that, we can go beyond and outside the label Zimbabwe, as we indeed should, if the desire still remains that what is presently called Zimbabwe remains a 'unitary' state, something which other writers elsewhere, have emphasized is falsely asserted by the present constitution. Other than such an effort, and failing this, the people of Matebeleland, in particular, would be right to explore other avenues for political redress.

That new constitution would need to be sovereignty-based and sovereignty-informed, not this operating manual passed off as a constitution by political operators. Such a constitution should be the one underpinning and over-pinned by such a new political and constitutional order. A constitution can never create democracy, as Zimbabwe's 34 years have proved. But a democratic political process and democratic order can create a democratic constitution and consolidate itself under such a constitution. Zimbabwe is not a democracy and does not have a democratic constitution, despite the huff and puff of the ZMDC in the last 5 years.

In closing, let me suggest, perhaps controversially, that what is needed now -- given our particular experience under the label Zimbabwe – is exactly the opposite of Mr Biti's suggestion.

We don't need a broad-based opposition, or indeed, an opposition at all. I hazard to suggest that any opposition movement/party or other similarly structured entity is bound to be defeated again in 2018 -  this time for real - by a Zanu-PF that has nothing to offer than old-fashioned 'stability' for international markets and a good source of raw materials.

What we need is a simple technical vehicle, organized around civic society, with a simple and simplified message to get rid of Zanu-PF in 2018. And that message must be repeated ad infinitum between the time of formation and the elections.

But the fact that Mr Tsvangirai wants rule so much, as to flagrantly break every public promise he has made, must be every reason he must be stopped as much as Zanu-PF must now be ejected from power. Both represent a Zimbabwe that that nobody needs – ever needed – and which should by now have long been dead and buried!   

Instead of the road arrived at in 1980 being forked, it is now a political spaghetti junction!