Zimbabwe political battle from colonial to independence
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...By SARAH NCUBE
Published: December 1, 2009
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By – Andrew M Manyevere
What is good today may well be outgrown by developments except it has capacity to accommodate change it either dies or is superseded. Unfortunately in Zimbabwe, while Zanu-pf today is politically dead; consider the bankrupt economy, corruption and the wild disregards of law and order; to cite but a few examples of political death among numerous, even though she still is SAD supported to survive.
The 2008 defeat to President Mugabe by Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC despite his urge to revisit the use of violence in order to proclaim himself a winner, smack of Emperor Jean Bokasa of Central Africa’s audacity in declaring himself emperor from a fake election. In such a case unless mediation other than violence is used to replace dictatorship, struggle is an endless end in itself.
It took France to intervene in Central Africa to unseat Bokasa and for a temporary transition to democracy to take place in central Africa then. Incidentally such action irrespective of its long term good for a people under siege is never considered politically correct from slave sensitive African leadership.
The same slave sensitive African leadership is not slave sensitive when it comes to suppressing her political opponents from replacing them, with few exceptions.
In Zimbabwe we made a miscalculation when we thought that one liberation struggle was good enough to remove all vestiges of dictatorship that hide under pretext of a people liberation struggle. The suffering of many of us from watching and psychologically participating if not physically, brought quick warfare fatigue mentally. From the hate of the struggle leadership cheating, the struggle’s unjust trials which based on no system but fabrication resulted in much life being lost from both sides of the aggressor and aggressed. In retrospect the liberation struggle appears irrelevant given the entrenched political decay it has managed to harvest in the time past.
There was never a people involvement on how to change leadership apart from dishonesty pretence that we understood constitutional requirements and would uphold need for leadership change through voting. That we had voted to end the war than to accept change is true when one considers the suffering the war exertion brought to bear on people generally. The stigma that would be bone to bear for blaming a liberation struggle more so when it was claimed to be the source of victory to independence would be traumatic then if not still.
So even after its role in bringing independence is perceived awesome, the niche Mugabe created for self glory and the exaggerated fatherhood for the nation; is nauseatingly amusing if not fanatically lunatic. Mugabe, it would seem, considers his personal led struggle on Zimbabwe an end to Zimbabwe suffering. The current suffering inflicted manly from his failure to accept his failure is attributed to the people’s craze objection to venerate him as ‘lord and king for bringing freedom on Zimbabwe.’ His abuse of people is necessitated, so runs the thought, by the ungrateful hearts of Zimbabweans who are western influenced puppets. The sad phenomena are when the SADC except for Botswana, stand to undermine people legitimacy in the choice of leadership in Zimbabwe by allowing Mugabe to get away with even violation on the GPA despite his having lost presidential elections for the second time as far as I can remember.
It needs no rocket science to see that Zimbabweans are tired of being treated like nothing by a party that claims having brought independence from the clutches of the British Empire. Thinking deep in retrospect one wonders if there is any merit in hastily anointing some leaders at all at the expense of others. In our case Zimbabwe had far numerous useful leaders who transformed our society and gave us right to pride as a nation. It was never a one person achievement, hence our struggle standing out as continuous-dialectical. More seriously it assumes dimensions of political process growth backed by a sad history of suffering under the hands of one of our own in unfrequented manner during Mugabe era than any other time period.
What we do today in Zimbabwe, looking at the constitution and seeing how best to safeguard people freedoms and change in leadership is what we needed to have done in 1980 in order to transition into safeguarding of democratic values. Power should have been given to the assembly of chosen aldermen to decline and overrule any tyrant who seeks to use state institutions or corrupt them for the promotion of personal and self glory. We had as a tradition, DARE RAMA DZIMAMBO-Council of chiefs, which was apolitical but had their influence and ear on the communities, which died at the inception of Zanu-pf. Physically it exists even to this day, but functionally it is no longer as autonomous from political influence as it was then.
Today the council of Chiefs is an appendage of Robert Mugabe cabinet and cannot speak against the presidential poor governance rituals. The euphoria for independence, based on historical process of decolonization which had been ongoing then, put us at a disadvantage as it does now from the SADC view point when, irrespective of Mugabe and his party’s numerous shortcomings, SADC has no objective base on which to ignore Mugabe’s intransigence on failure to fully implement GPA issues.
If our struggle had been against dictator/tyrants as an anti-democratic system and not against personality and colour, pretested as dialectics of a liberation struggle, it would not have taken us this long to identify Mugabe as a tyrant and to institute constitutional removal proceedings. The assumption of this statement would be that we would have employed the system to outperform a tyrant before he entrenched himself through a corruption of institutions process. The institutions of chiefs no more exists as it then did and has no values she subscribed to traditionally. Police and army is and has been filled up with card holding members of Zanu-pf hence the difficulties to implement the GPA since, even now, Zanu-pf tries to smuggle into civil service 1500 people militia hooligans.
Even as we proceeded on to write the Government of National Unity (GNU) and the Global Political Agreement (GPA) documents, it will be recalled that Patrick Chinamasa (Zanu-pf chief negotiator) took the liberty to change the documents which almost threw the negotiation into an impasse then.
Nine months after the signing of the GPA and the inclusive government supposedly functioning, Zanu-pf leader and his party insists that the terms of agreement on sharing and changing of certain positions in government have not been done. The disengagement of the MDC from Zanu-pf has, beyond any shadow of doubt, shown it clearly to SADC that Mr. Mugabe and his cohorts do not want to change their yesterday role in government. Struggle has become an end in itself with Zanu-pf wishing to cheat again in order to declare them winner through victimizing the opposition party. In spite of what SADC saw in 2008 June and the report they received from their teams of observers they did not denounce Mugabe nor have they done so even as he remains the trouble spot in the implementation of GPA.
Far from being over, the 1972 through 1980 liberation struggle considered then an end in itself as then hoped by Zanu-pf, only begun showing the challenge of its dialectical nature when MDC formation in the 1990s shook a complacent Zanu-pf into traumas of violence to defend her from natural process of fading away from political power through failure.
The loss of meaning to any struggle comes to its pick when those who confess pioneer ship no longer share the goals with the world and the people they confessed to represent. This results in blame for blame politics and the banishment of cooperation more so when citizens protest and betray the canning behaviour of dictatorship. The obvious distance between people and leadership is witnessed when citizens talk anti dictatorship everywhere they are in the world including pockets of peaceful protests at home which are suppressed with brutality.
These inevitably mark the signs of growing dictatorship that are never internally acknowledged except they are civil to accept defeat on the electoral polls. Zanu-pf has shown no honesty or reliability to be trusted to acknowledge electoral defeat, the example being the length it took in March 2009 to announce election results and let alone for the president to refuse conceding to defeat.
It appears the struggle for democracy in earnest has just begun as we discuss roles and responsibilities under guidance of Africa and isolate violence which is the backbone of Zanu-pf. The judicial in Zimbabwe is showing great recovery much better than the army or police who toil under duress of who pays the salary plays the tune. The parliament is making great strides to point law making towards values of the country than of the ruling political party. These dialectical processes lead to others blame the system as too slow when actually one forgets that the system never existed in the first place even though the government run.
Hopefully the conclusion to all this process will be more than just thinking of getting rid of a failure party but the process of systematic leadership change either from within a ruling party or outside from opposition political parties. Perceiving struggle as ongoing should help prepare people and political actors to accept change as a normal course in the event when progress is failing.
The current trial of Roy Bennett in Zimbabwe courts shall show the maturity of the judicial despite the wounds she recovers from executive interference in the last thirty years. Equally it will put to test the old natural culture of Zanu-pf sponsoring violence to suppress free choice among voters.
The sincerity of the world around us in being honesty to the spirit of seeding and sustaining democratic values through championing of a free and fair election will work to encourage all nations who toil under the tyranny of dictatorship. The unique and unsavoury recipe of union government for establishment of a democracy is under test and the more she succeeds the better for global peace and improvement of human and people rights world over.