Opinion / Columnist
Is this all politics in Zimbabwe can be - rabble-rousing and violence!
01 Jul 2011 at 08:12hrs | Views
The rabble-rousing of the MDC-T is seamless. Its propensity to violence, previously denied, is now fact. When tested, MDC-T is a salami slice of Zanu-PF. Yet when left alone, it seems to fold inwards, hapless. You get the sense it is devoid of self-belief, almost apologetic for its own existence.
MDC-T seems to need something external to itself to 'drive' it. That something is not difficult to find. It is Zanu. There is another driver, in the form of 'handhandling' but that is not the subject of discussion on this occasion.
From inception, MDC-T has defined itself by Zanu. Mugabe must go, was its rallying cry!
MDC-T is only positionally anti-Zanu. But politically it mirrors Zanu, in terms of its desire to dominate and in terms of its preoccupation with power, power, and more power. Operationally, it is striving to out-Zanu Zanu, becoming more like Zanu in the process. Witness the recent beauty contest MDC-T called its Congress!
But you will marvel more at the Congress's aftermath. Losers, who could not win at the Congress, found their way back into the MDC-T NEC weeks after losing at the Congress, appointed, yes, Zanu-style, by the Dear Leader. A true 'kitchen' cabinet!
Ideologically, MDC-T and Zanu are exactly the same though both believe, erroneously, that they are ideologically different.
Both are ideologically un-rooted. Both confuse cause/mantra for ideology.
Zanu takes the anti-colonial struggle, a cause, (which it prosecuted badly and did not even win) as an ideology. On the other hand, the MDC-T sees its anti-Zanu mantra as an ideology. If believing in nothing as a moral and political glue is an ideology, and if power, power and more power is an ideology, then MDC-T and Zanu share them. Beyond Zanu's flatulent socialism of the 1980s nobody today knows what Zanu is ideologically or what it believes in. Everything is calibrated by expediency, is measured by power, and is deterministically short-term.
Everything is reduced to a simple formula: anti-, anti- and ant-. It is largely the same with MDC-T. Nothing connects everything, everything represents anything. And for policy, it is volume, quarrels, and denunciations!
Like Zanu, MDC-T is also politically noisy and frothing. Like Zanu, MDC's politics is about 'dealing' with this or that enemy. It is just attack, attack, and attack. Like Zanu, its brand of politics is bombastic, calamitous and empty. There is no programme of hope, beyond being anti-Zanu.
Who can ever forget Zanu's Gore re this and Gore re that of the 1980s (Year of this, Year of that). Who can forget about 'Ngomo' and the 'dissidents'? Who can forget MDC's (now MDC-T) shrieking 'final pushes' and 'stay-aways' of it early days? Who does not see that MDC-T's real enemy is Welshman Ncube and those he 'represents'?
Now, like Zanu, MDC-T (and sadly on this occasion, MDC-N) has started on the politics of parading 'defectors'. Soon it will be funeral politics, where like Zanu, the MDC-T leadership will be gate-crashing funerals to deliver political speeches. In the past the MDC has been seen to 'steal' crowds.
Poor Mbuso and Thandi. Whatever it is that caused them to betray the conscience of their father, if what is reported is true!
The other side of our political coin is of course Zanu, with its 'degrees in violence'. For Zanu, violence is now a perfected art. Its violence is consummate and cold. And when Zanu is facing an election, violence is turned into political entertainment. The violence shocks and disgusts the uninitiated, but those who come to know it, it completely disarms. Delivered with 'matter-of-fact' inhumanity, the violence dehumanises perpetrator and victim alike. Only the most evil of perpetrators would remain to continue with their violence. That is why Zanu re-cycles
them, quickly kicking out those of them who are 'damaged goods' and recruiting fresh ones, election after election. After the drama of elections, these dangerous people are released to live among us a normal people.
I bet nobody now remembers anything about Washington Madaba, the infamous 'Green Bomber' who 'fled' Zimbabwe into Namibia and
">gave interviews to BBC Channel 4.MDC-T seems to need something external to itself to 'drive' it. That something is not difficult to find. It is Zanu. There is another driver, in the form of 'handhandling' but that is not the subject of discussion on this occasion.
From inception, MDC-T has defined itself by Zanu. Mugabe must go, was its rallying cry!
MDC-T is only positionally anti-Zanu. But politically it mirrors Zanu, in terms of its desire to dominate and in terms of its preoccupation with power, power, and more power. Operationally, it is striving to out-Zanu Zanu, becoming more like Zanu in the process. Witness the recent beauty contest MDC-T called its Congress!
But you will marvel more at the Congress's aftermath. Losers, who could not win at the Congress, found their way back into the MDC-T NEC weeks after losing at the Congress, appointed, yes, Zanu-style, by the Dear Leader. A true 'kitchen' cabinet!
Ideologically, MDC-T and Zanu are exactly the same though both believe, erroneously, that they are ideologically different.
Both are ideologically un-rooted. Both confuse cause/mantra for ideology.
Zanu takes the anti-colonial struggle, a cause, (which it prosecuted badly and did not even win) as an ideology. On the other hand, the MDC-T sees its anti-Zanu mantra as an ideology. If believing in nothing as a moral and political glue is an ideology, and if power, power and more power is an ideology, then MDC-T and Zanu share them. Beyond Zanu's flatulent socialism of the 1980s nobody today knows what Zanu is ideologically or what it believes in. Everything is calibrated by expediency, is measured by power, and is deterministically short-term.
Everything is reduced to a simple formula: anti-, anti- and ant-. It is largely the same with MDC-T. Nothing connects everything, everything represents anything. And for policy, it is volume, quarrels, and denunciations!
Like Zanu, MDC-T is also politically noisy and frothing. Like Zanu, MDC's politics is about 'dealing' with this or that enemy. It is just attack, attack, and attack. Like Zanu, its brand of politics is bombastic, calamitous and empty. There is no programme of hope, beyond being anti-Zanu.
Who can ever forget Zanu's Gore re this and Gore re that of the 1980s (Year of this, Year of that). Who can forget about 'Ngomo' and the 'dissidents'? Who can forget MDC's (now MDC-T) shrieking 'final pushes' and 'stay-aways' of it early days? Who does not see that MDC-T's real enemy is Welshman Ncube and those he 'represents'?
Now, like Zanu, MDC-T (and sadly on this occasion, MDC-N) has started on the politics of parading 'defectors'. Soon it will be funeral politics, where like Zanu, the MDC-T leadership will be gate-crashing funerals to deliver political speeches. In the past the MDC has been seen to 'steal' crowds.
Poor Mbuso and Thandi. Whatever it is that caused them to betray the conscience of their father, if what is reported is true!
The other side of our political coin is of course Zanu, with its 'degrees in violence'. For Zanu, violence is now a perfected art. Its violence is consummate and cold. And when Zanu is facing an election, violence is turned into political entertainment. The violence shocks and disgusts the uninitiated, but those who come to know it, it completely disarms. Delivered with 'matter-of-fact' inhumanity, the violence dehumanises perpetrator and victim alike. Only the most evil of perpetrators would remain to continue with their violence. That is why Zanu re-cycles
them, quickly kicking out those of them who are 'damaged goods' and recruiting fresh ones, election after election. After the drama of elections, these dangerous people are released to live among us a normal people.
I bet nobody now remembers anything about Washington Madaba, the infamous 'Green Bomber' who 'fled' Zimbabwe into Namibia and
Zanu has made violence, bodily and property, 'acceptable'. It is not just the people of Zimbabwe who have accepted it, the world long did. In the world out there, that acceptance presents as indifference. On the theatre of violence, Zanu is left to continue its violence on the most vulnerable, emboldened by the world's indifference.
How about on the murder front? Here Zanu is peerless in Zimbawe, whether as Zanu or as Zanu hiding behind the institution of the State. Zanu's true record of political murder is yet to be written.
But in Zanu murder is not confined to Zanu as an organization or a party of government. Powerful individuals in it have been implicated. The recently deceased Edgar Tekere (he was a serving minister) murdered a White man at the stroke of independence in 1980 and escaped long incarceration by presidential pardon. The current minister of Home Affairs, Kembo Mohadi, who has murder allegations hanging over his head, is no doubt benefiting from his powerful position in Zanu and government. In between, powerful names are implicated in various 'political' murders. And in between, many, great and small, within and without Zanu, have been victims of suspected 'hits'.
But 'political' murder in Zanu is not even a secret. In Zanu, it is a collective badge of honour. Quite openly, Zanu has always said in Shona, Zanu ndeyeropa. Literally, it translates to: Zanu is bloody. But its meaning is: Zanu kills. By it Zanu got into power and through it Zanu has maintained itself in power.
Here then is the greatest worry.
If Zanu and MDC-T are two sides of the same coin, as they clearly seem to be, are we as a country sleep-walking into another political nightmare we will not want to awaken from, in the form of an MDC-T government? Are we not ignoring the tell-tale signs we should not be ignoring, for a second time?
Far from it, this is no endorsement of Zanu. It is a call to all of us to start asking hard questions about those who want to govern us, to rule us.
Zanu announced its arrival in 1963 with violence. For all but a few, it did not matter because the violence was targeted at the 'enemy' (into 'enemy' read anyone). Zanu has never looked back since. In his book, The Great Betrayal, Smith remarks that the Zanu delegation (in contrast to the Zapu delegation) to the Geneva Conference in 1976 looked the thugs they were. Many of us would have killed Smith then for saying so. Today, we have all lived through what Smith saw then.
For a long time people have been speaking about the violence of MDC-T.
Have we learnt nothing from the past to want to repeat the same mistakes in 2011 or 2012?
At the moment Zanu has the lion's share of violence than MDC-T. But that is not the real point. The real point is why?
The only reason is that at present Zanu controls the institution of the State, unlike MDC-T. Switch, and imagine MDC-T now controlling the power of the State, with MDC-T's history of intolerance, name-calling and enemy-building?
The spectre of an MDC-T government is something we can no longer endorse with the reckless euphoria that greeted Zanu's shock rule in 1980. By now it must be assumed that we have learnt the hard way, that we have become wiser. Yet, on the present evidence that does not appear to be so.
And with all these rabble-rousers within their ranks, we can be sure that very little will be subjected to time-wasting and energy-sapping rationalisation in an MDC-T government either. Like by Zanu, you will be condemned by an
MDC-T State by repetition and volume, and 'punished'. You will be taught a lesson. Once again exile will become an alternative when post-Zanu exile should have been completely eradicated.
There is another worrying dimension about MDC-T. For some reason, MDC-T also seems to attract 'thugs' and thuggery to its ranks, of all shapes and form. They are the ones responsible for MDC-T violence.
Imagine when these get control of the institution of the State!
If programmatically MDC-T, like Zanu, is empty what else is to be expected of it when it forms a government and controls the institution of the State (God forbid) other than, like Zanu, establish a State that is angry, punitive and phishing for enemies?
Zanu knows all too well what being without ideology means. It means opportunity, in politics commonly called opportunism. Opportunism has no lines that cannot be crossed. It's an open-ended expanse. It's not about principle, but what 'deal' is offered. Zanu knows too well how cold and laconic those who offer the 'deal' can be to get what they want. If you are ideologically fenced, or principled, they move on to the next offeree.
Back-stabbing Zapu at the eleventh hour in 1979, Zanu got its hands on the coveted price. It has never looked back.
Is Zanu's stiff resistance to MDC-T rule informed by this fact, this inside knowledge? Put the stakes so high that the 'deal' is offered to you again, seems to be the strategy Zanu has deployed successfully.
But to many, Zanu is equally guilty of what it accuses MDC-T of. To many, Zanu is itself an 'appointed' regime, appointed in 1980 to look after external interests? That is why those that 'appointed' it could look the other way while Zanu removed, on their behalf, the remaining threat to their interests in Zimbabwe through Gukurahundi.
A ragtag outfit up to 1979, Zanu was catapulted into something at the stroke of independence, very late in late 1979. In fact, Zanu was nothing until the 1980 shock results. Like Zanu, MDC (now MDC-T) suddenly became something in time for the 2000 elections.
We need to look closely here.
Is it not now obvious that Zanu gravitates towards the Conservatives (publicly expressed by President Mugabe) and MDC-T towards Labour? And does it surprise anyone that Zapu and MDC-N are virtually ignored in the corridors of power in Britain? There are distant and recent historical lessons here. Are Zapu and MDC-N playing the wrong politics today?
Is Zimbabwe's politics not 'cooked' elsewhere anyway?
Should it surprise anyone, then, that MDC-T and Zanu, both ideologically formless, are the most 'successful' political parties of post-independence Zimbabwe? That both are politically malleable and ductile, changeable to instruction, almost? That both do violence on the people they purport to represent with this almost assured impunity?
Imagine if it was Zapu or MDC-N doing violence!
But are we beginning to see a shift, yet again, this time from the failed 'regime change' agenda represented by MDC-T, back to Zanu's steady ship? There is even talk of Mugabe going to London to meet British Prime Minister David Cameron. The Zanu/Conservative and MDC-T/Labour scenario comes rushing back. With the end of Labour government rule in Britain and the ascendancy of a Conservative government (euphemistically referred to as the Conservative-led coalition), is it game over for MDC-T?
Meantime, where principle and ideology have no place and opportunism holds sway, let's brace ourselves for more rabble-rousing and violence. With Zanu now in ascendency, hold on tight the ride is about to get even rougher.
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The author can be contacted on vuli.moyo@gmx.com
