The notion of an extended GNU had many silent proponents inside Zanu-PF

A good friend recently made a cynical point about the admirably dogged way in which whites pursue their own interests.

With a sore heart, I weighed in to add that this doggedness followed clarity on what those interests are, and of course how to pursue them, something black Zimbabweans are still to learn and attain, if ever at all.

The basis of that cynical exchange was the recently released Deloitte 2014 Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Survey for Zimbabwe. The report quotes Zimbabwe's Chief Financial Officers as identifying the political landscape obtaining in the country as the single largest risk to business performance.

Quoting South Africa Deloitte Partner, one Roy Campbell, an article on the report said: "This could be linked to the ongoing nationalisation debate in Zimbabwe. Following President Robert Mugabe's victory in the national election in July last year, one of the election promises was a stepped up debate and implementation of local ownership through indigenisation programme".

Same conclusion, different reasoning

I have not the slightest doubt in my mind that if the same survey was conducted on the broad Zimbabwean citizenry, conducted at this moment in time, the same answer could very well have been elicited.

There is a way in which the West's political sanctions on the Zimbabwean economy have remained the single largest threat to public weal since 2000. There is also a way in which the local political landscape, one largely defined by the ruling Zanu-PF politics, has foregrounded itself as a prime vector and cynosure, and often in ways expectedly unsettling to the average citizen.

From independence, Zanu-PF has openly contested opponents who are outward, who are from across the political divide, while it dealt quietly with many of its own internal contradictions, dealt with them in ways both unnoticed and decidedly dignified. We saw lots of that in the vehicle purchase scandal of the late 1980s, and even in the 2008 electoral crisis.

Intra-party tensions ripening to open, weeping sores have not been a feature known to most Zimbabweans. Those who know this dimension of party politics have been around enough, committed enough, to have participated in liberation politics, whether in their "zhii" township phase, or in their armed form.

Zanu-PF has gone through phases of serious internecine conflict, largely in the 1960s when the party, then reckoned as Zapu, split, and then again in the early, mid and late 1970s, when bloody conflicts broke out in Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique. Except in all these, time or place exiled such bloody moments well away from reckoned experience.

What subsists in living memory are nuisance conflicts between little, squabbling officials fighting for this or that position or influence.

Evolution we wish, change we need

Equally, Zimbabweans have known only one leader from Independence, which is why perceptions of a challenge to him would presage anxieties that attach to any sense of unregulated change, itself always feared, perceived and experienced as vertiginous.

Accepting that change is the only permanence in life is not quite the same as embracing that change, inevitable though it might be. We cling to what we know, what is familiar, for as long as we can, until change happens in spite of us, hurtling us forward, often headlong, to an unfamiliar, unwanted or feared new.

I am not assessing the quality of change, any change for that matter. I am simply recording human response to the fact of change.

The basic human wish has always been to stop the hand of time, both in bodily life and in material and political circumstances. We prefer evolution to change, although we sometimes need change to evolution.

Thank God, life places us on different and even conflicting social plinths, which is why embedded in illusory permanence is the germ of change, always. That fact makes life dynamic, which does not diminish my point about human fear of change.

The status quo they loved to defend

Turning to real political circumstances, need we wonder that the so-called lead change-agents - the opposition - always end up being the same shadow of the ruling ethos, however much they seek or "effect" change?

In the case of Zimbabwean politics, this notion of change in continuity, or continuity in change, took many contorted forms, including the Minotaur of an MDC with a Zanu-PF face.

Lots of such configurations were teased out for us by many western governments and think tanks, although none came to pass. The MDC torso stood for the change desired, while the Zanu-PF head stood for assurances of legitimate continuity required.

Equally, the joke in Matabeleland has been on whether one is ZAPU-Zanu or ZAPU-Mdc. And once we went into the Inclusive Government, we saw how the MDC formations gradually mutated, dissolving into the tempting Zanu-PF ethos.

I am sure Chamisa's we-have-joined-government-in-order-to-take-it self-edifying propaganda today hangs ridiculously loose upon his lips like a giant lie on a petit mouth!

What was closer the truth was Tsvangirai's notion of apprenticeship, but one which the MDC formations failed dismally.

There is a way in which the MDC formations where apprenticed to a Zanu-PF status quo, in the process losing their elective identity.

And once the Inclusive Government became the new status quo, we had in Zanu-PF persons and cliques who wanted this new status quo retained and made permanent through an unconstitutionally extended tenure.

The notion of an extended GNU had many silent proponents inside Zanu-PF. This, in part, is what accounts for the present conflict in Zanu-PF.

The victory they never knew or made

If truth be told, very few leaders in Zanu-PF are able to explain how the 2013 elections happened, how the landslide victory came about. Equally, very few in Zanu-PF can legitimately claim that victory, much as it benefited them.

Zanu-PF won elections from the centre, never from the margins which in turn then built the centre, as happens normally. Indeed this is why 2008 could never have been repeated in 2013.

The drive and impetus came from the centre, which is why party primaries changed faces in Zanu-PF, indeed marked the beginning of some of the changes now underway.

The centre connected with the ordinary membership to devalue the role of lesser officials so given to manipulating processes for patronage and succession Some day when I get too happy, ndafarisa, I shall let you in.

But the key point to note is that the President owes precious little to individual candidates who won in constituencies. They, not he, owe him too much for their "victory". This is why he is able today to restructure his party in this un-ruffling way, but without risking a membership crisis as witnessed in MDC-T.

This is why the ongoing struggle within Zanu-PF mobilises its constituency, and not demobilise it as is the case with MDC-T. It is that direct connection between the centre and grassroots players which the so-called rebels overlooked with fatal consequences.

Such a reality places the people at the beck and call of the Party, and not of individual leaders, leaders below the President that is. This is why this whole talk about a Zanu-PF split is as mistaken as it is childish. In place of a split, there is an ongoing dramatic spitting of bad leaders in ways that effects a seismic shift in the Zanu-PF body, but while retaining the stability that comes with the familiar by way of the same face at the top.

After all this, Zimbabweans shall have a changed Zanu-PF, but a Zanu-PF all the same, one much stronger. I wondered off too much.

I am saying it is most probable that most Zimbabweans would identify the same threat as that spelt out by the CFOs, which would seem to suggest the CFOs are in sync with the national mood, or more accurately, in tune with the national angst.

One sickening irony

Yet not quite, in fact quite different. For here is one shared state arising from polar opposite sentiments and reasoning.

If nationalisation is conceived of as a policy seeking to repose the means of national production and national wealth in the citizenry of that nation, the sickening dimension of the findings of the survey becomes apparent.

How possibly can a policy that seeks to bring the means of production of a people to that people become a single largest threat to business interests OF that country? That can't be. What can be is that such a policy could very well threaten some business interests IN that country. And that should be a straightforward distinction.

What would not be straightforward is why CFOs who deserve the epithet "Zimbabwean" should be associated with anxieties of businesses that are in Zimbabwe, not of Zimbabwe, to the point of relating wistfully to a policy that seeks to empower their people, themselves included, arguably included foremost.

I am assuming we are all familiar with Chambers' notion of the elites as the most well positioned to intercept and capture any benefits that emanate from the State, and which seek to trickle down from the centre.

Corporate rejection of results?

What would be so unprecedented is openly coupling this CFO fear to a landslide electoral outcome of July 31, 2013, as if to register and wish for a different electoral eventuality, or a variation to that outcome.

Short of wishing and hoping that the 2013 electoral outcome be a short-lived inconvenience, one soon to make way to a more permanent political settlement which is above and beyond the ballot, and that happening before long, what would be the value of that whole analysis and finding?
That yearn after the hard electoral fact? A finding that implies the Zimbabwean voter gave business a faulty result.

A finding that implies an overturning of that result by whatever means is desirable, in the absence of the winner wilfully jettisoning and abjuring the winning ideas.

Shorn of all linguistic niceties, here is one report whose lamentations hover between sanctioning an unconstitutional, non-democratic act, and instigating a wholesale betrayal of voter aspirations as implied through the landslide result. Let's detour the argument a bit.

The real political odd Zimbabwe fears

I said Zimbabweans would arrive at the same verdict. But for different reasons. They would wistfully follow Zanu-PF succession politics vis-a-vis the gains they have made over the past 34 years, especially the last 14 years.

They have won stability; they have won the land, and would want to profit from it.

That means hoping for a leadership and policies that secure stability and secures land reforms, that equip the new black landowners with the means of making the newly gotten land productive. Far from fearing ownership of resources, they want that deepened to ensure the flow of resources towards their agrarian gains.

They want the ownership ethic entrenched and globalised to ensure its irreversibility as an operating ethic.

After all, it was the pursuit of their land-based interests which motivated Zanu-PF, yielding the manifesto which won the electoral day. They don't see July 31 as a Zanu-PF victory; they see it as their victory using the instrumentality of Zanu-PF.

They being of this soil, they cannot fear to own it, and all that is found on, above and beneath it.

Above all, a company like SA Deloitte and a person like the South African Roy Campbell, would not speak for them. Their fears would not be the 2013 electoral result, would not be a deepening wish to nationalise.

Their real fear would be safeguarding the 2013 electoral outcome against Zanu-PF's fickle succession politics, thereby derailing the broadening of the empowerment ethic.

They fear a sellout leadership that feels spoken for by the likes of the CFOs and Roy Campbell.

Uncertain but liked, un-liked but certain

We thus have before us two visions of Zimbabwe. But one more point before visions. It is interesting that until now the CFO Survey repeatedly foundered on account of a frigidly non-responsive managerial class. The difference this time is that the response was good enough to yield a representative outcome.

Why? Previously, yearly attempts happened under the GNU and ahead of elections whose possible outcomes was a matter of sectoral conjecture.
Clearly, the CFOs did not want to be read, much like a clever hunter who delays thanksgiving to the spirits until a dead bird is in the hand.

The pre-2013 stance of business in the country was a matter of speculation, except of course for those with better apparatus for reading the times.

Those privileged ones knew business was on the side of MDC-T, even against ever rising odds. They did not like the Zanu-PF manifesto, but would not dare say so publicly. It was this state of being uncertain of what was liked, and having a deep foreboding of what was not liked, which helped Zanu-PF strategists read the times and predict an overwhelming outcome.

So many questions

The next question is why soon after elections business did not voice its concern there and then.

Attached to that is an auxiliary question on why, when they finally did, these CFOs chose to do so via a survey they would not support in the past, but which they now did in the full knowledge that its actors were an internationally reputed firm, one extra-territorially located. Was this a search for an aura, reach and overwhelming weighting?

An act in persuasion? A selling of a post-electoral vision founded on a rejection of an electoral result? An indication that the new tact of worried businesses in Zimbabwe is to broaden the agenda against empowerment by making it trans-river, trans-Limpopo?

. . . and still more questions

It is curious that the result gets completed and released at the height of Zanu-PF succession. Coincidence or causality? One would be forgiven for thinking that the year and time of release is meant to bear down on goings-on in the ruling party. Did business see in the ruling party's contending politics the possibility of dealing with an unwanted electoral result and vision?

Has that possibility been snuffed out? Or is it threatened by the direction of succession politics? Or to be more drastic, was this an alternative manifesto for a faction? One now being released in the vain hope of swaying fortunes ahead of Congress?

With the new found stridency in Rugare Gumbo, it will not be too long before that final node couples the whole train.

Going back South

I don't like this South African connection, principally what it does to the national psyche. Take the case of the Mail and Guardian, the MDC-T, and now the so-called CFOs. The Mail and Guardian launches a legal challenge in South Africa for the release of the 2002 Presidential Election result in Zimbabwe. That challenge finally triumphs some week or so ago, a good six years after the initial challenge, a good 12 years after the challenged poll.

The result is not just academic; it is stale, made staler by the numerous other elections to have happened ever since, made stalest by a new constitution and the recovery of an old governing party so firmly ensconced. But there is this expectation that South Africa must be both the actor and locale on matters Zimbabwean.

And our foolish politician from MDC-T dares convene a press conference at which he berates Thabo Mbeki, a man long removed from South African presidency. To what end? And berates him in the name of "the Zimbabwean people" who will not make him king electorally? Alongside this inane action is also a parallel effort to get the South African authorities to investigate alleged atrocities said to have been committed in other recent elections.

South African authorities investigating Zimbabwe, Zimbabweans? Even the litigation on the ill-fated Sadc Tribunal took place in South Africa. Is it because South Africa is more democratic, or perceived as a weaker State vis-a-vis the affirmation of African rights, African agenda? Or a fear that a combination of South Africa and Zimbabwe against neo-liberal rights in the region would be unstoppable? Which is which?

When Albion deserted a home

I said this is not good for the national psyche. It is not. Why this surrogate status on South Africa? This implication that Zimbabwe is or should be a ward of South Africa, itself still battling to overturn the white apartheid legacy?

And where does that leave Zimbabweans as authors of their politics, as actors in their political clime? It is exactly the same thinking which got the MDC to look outward, to look to the West, for sanctions in order to tackle Zanu-PF. It is a poor view of ourselves, one suggesting we are derived actors who are never primers.

Hark, why is the British Embassy empty, deserted? The sons of Albion are daily crossing the Zambezi. To where? Zambia, beware! A precedent of a Zambian who happens to be white, viewed by Albion as a Briton who arrived in Zambia, to succeed the throne albeit temporarily, but presiding over, and delivering a clean electoral process and result, will be such a cleansing act for Albion with her battered image in the Southern African region.

Fortunately both the acting President and the people are Zambian enough, too Zambian to be used to make a false statement.

Icho!

nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw,