Mugabe's hollow Africanism

Mugabe's hollow Africanism

Chido Makunike argued that Zimbabweans have been "wallowing in stagnation or regression under Mugabe, while some people cheer him on for his impoverishing, hypocritical rhetorical heroism." Innocent Chofamba Sithole writes in support

By Innocent Chofamba Sithole

MY problem with Mugabe's brand of Pan-Africanism is that it is locked in the descriptive mode and thus represents no forward-movement since it harps on about what such earlier and eminent Pan Africanists and students of neo-colonialism as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere observed and eloquently described at the very dawn of African independence in the 1960s

In that sense, the Pan Africanism being championed by Mugabe brings upon itself the criticism of lethargy and ineptitude. Its emphasis on the sentimental or emotional bequeaths us no intellectual tools with which to confront our present and future challenges and forge a grand strategy for our political and economic emancipation as black people.

Granted, slavery and colonization remain the most cataclysmic episodes in the history of African civilization. And from that experience flow the generic western excesses that we, along with the rest of the peoples of the Third World, have had to contend with to this day. But, having established these episodes and their collective impact on our past, present and future, I believe the next challenge for Pan-Africanists is certainly beyond the mere description of 'what is', for that is already clearly known. But Mugabe's brand of Pan Africanism has feasted on narratives of slavery and colonialism precisely to evoke the inevitable sentimental responses connected to these dark chapters in our collective black history as a way of deriving political capital for a purely hegemonic domestic political programme.

Whereas the earlier Pan Africanists at the helm of the newly independent African states were analyzing a novel reality in the form of the paternalistic ties that bound the former colony to the metropolitan capital, their successors who have zealously focused on the same have not necessarily done so in order to produce any new theoretical conceptions of neocolonialism. Rather, they have done so in order to obfuscate the critical realities obtaining on the domestic front and at which even the first-generation African leaders also failed to acquit themselves favourably.

"The primary purpose of Zanu PF's 'Third Chimurenga' fell outside of any emancipatory agenda, whether economic or political"

INNOCENT CHOFAMBA SITHOLE

For instance, suspected CIA connivance notwithstanding, the military coup that brought down the erstwhile visionary Nkrumah was greeted with popular support on the streets of Accra. This development is emblematic of the political crises that have plagued Africa since independence and which derive from the yawning democratic deficit that African rulers have allowed to fester at the expense of their people. This stifled internal liberation has been maintained decades into post-independence and has come to intersect, at the global level, with the rise of the discourse of universal human rights. Naturally, this has been championed mainly by western liberal democracies and, for that reason, has been thoroughly resisted by African elites who have suspected this new discourse to be the west's new agency for regime change.

Thabo Mbeki has argued as much in his party's online newsletter in defence of SADC's support for Zimbabwe's readmission into the Commonwealth at the Abuja 2003 summit. But the striking paradox here is that while African rulers have unequivocally resisted any talk of universal human rights on the basis of their threat to 'national sovereignty', African people themselves have broadly seen the universal human rights dispensation as holding out hope for their emancipation from restrictive domestic political systems. They have voiced their concern over nefarious security laws that bar free movement and association, the muzzling of free speech through tight media laws and so on. The rulers have tried to justify their suppression of their people's political rights arguing that what is more pertinent in Africa is the promotion of second generation rights such as the right to health, housing, education, etc. And yet what people have been insisting on since independence has been the right to express themselves precisely over issues of access to health, housing, education and so on! It appears, therefore, that the suppression of political rights is not because they are naturally antithetical to the delivery of second-generation rights; rather, it is functional only in the context of a sitting regime's political survival prospects for it effectively undermines the organization of any meaningful political opposition to it.

Homing in on Mugabe's Pan Africanism more specifically, he would love to point to land reform as his practical response to the challenges of neo-colonialism and his economic empowerment of the long-suffering majority, but that is a ruse that hardly fools anyone. The primary purpose of Zanu PF's 'Third Chimurenga' fell outside of any emancipatory agenda, whether economic or political. One needs to recall here how the real spontaneous land demonstrations around 1997/1998 in communal areas like Svosve and Nyamandlovu were met with the full wrath of Mugabe's security apparatus. Anti-riot police armed to the teeth were sent in to forcibly remove the hapless but daring villagers from the farms. Of course, the constitutional referendum of February 2000 was to serve as a timely reminder of the deep-seated need for land redistribution and Mugabe's party conveniently remembered the salvoes fired by the Svosve people and at once deployed an army of both real and bogus war vets to 'spontaneously' occupy farms!

To further expose this ruse for what it was, an ironical corollary to the land invasions was the internal monopolisation of political space by the state and its virtual suspension of civil liberties in the manner of the colonial government. Ian Smith's Law and Order (Maintenance) Act was dusted up by then-Home Affairs Minister Dumiso Dabengwa and expeditiously passed as the now infamous POSA.

The government, through the agency of mainly Patrick Chinamasa and Jonathan Moyo, embarked on a concerted move to break the back of the judiciary, ejecting several long-serving judges in the process and replacing them with those sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the 'Third Chimurenga'. Moyo's diabolic media revolution has since become the stuff of legend. The President has also branded his own compatriots in the towns and cities as 'traitors' simply because they vote for the opposition, which, truth be told, is a legitimate participant in an electoral process that is provided for by the country's constitution. His political introspection has never led him to speculate on why he has fallen foul of the most educated and skilled component of his country's population. This great Pan Africanist's conclusion is that there must be something wrong with them and whatever their concerns are, they are sooner subversive and neo-colonialistic than legitimate.

"The government, through the agency of mainly Patrick Chinamasa and Jonathan Moyo, embarked on a concerted move to break the back of the judiciary"

INNOCENT CHOFAMBA SITHOLE

Finally, let's look at Mugabe's Pan Africanism and how it has handled its obligations to Africans of other nationalities within Zimbabwe. The basis for this assessment is that Pan-Africanism embraces all identities beyond those particularistic national identities as defined in the narrow sense of ethnicities that are indigenous to the borders of the sovereign state. The reason for this is because the sovereign state itself is not an indigenous form of political community but merely the product of the very colonialism that Pan Africanism is a response to. But how has Mugabe treated the hundreds of thousands of Malawian, Mozambican and other African families that have for generations resided in Zimbabwe and for generations contributed to the economic development of the country through their supply of cheap labour to the commercial agricultural sector?

The Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe holds startling statistics on farm-worker communities - totaling well over 10 percent of our national population - that were internally displaced by the land resettlement programme. Following the efforts of such NGOs as FCTZ itself and some UN agencies among others who highlighted the plight of these people, the government only reluctantly started paying occasional attention to them. This proves that these foreign farm-workers, who are in reality now naturalized Zimbabweans, have been treated as a mere footnote in the entire land redistribution scheme.

Mugabe himself has previously branded them as 'totemless' as if to renounce the Zimbabwean state's obligations to anyone who does not primarily originate from the country founded by the chief colonialist Cecil John Rhodes.

Mugabe's Pan Africanism conveniently forgets that the same 'accident' of colonisation that has led to the Manyika and the Karanga, the Zezuru and the Ndebele being citizens of one country at one point brought every present day Zambian, Malawian and Zimbabwean into the embrace of one sovereign entity, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland!

Mugabe's Pan Africanism therefore begs for very strict qualifications.
CONTACT INNOCENT: chofamba@yahoo.co.uk
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