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Macho does not prove mucho, Mutambara
By Gugulethu Moyo
AM I the only person who read ‘Setting the Zimbabwean Agenda for 2007: Reflections from the Opposition’ by Authur G.O Mutambara and wondered what a ‘signature process’ is? Or puzzled over whether the ‘inside out [sic] approach’ is a patented business model?
I searched all week - in Google, in Wikipedia, in The Economist’s archives and in the online International Dictionary of Neologisms - and I still do not know what ‘signature process’ means.
For those who are not among the 15 million or so people on the planet who have bought – and perhaps read – the best-selling self-help book, ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, the ‘inside-out approach’ is a term coined by the author of this book, Stephen Covey.
Covey adopted the term to express the familiar adage ‘change starts with oneself’. In his 1989 book Covey writes ‘The 'Inside-Out' approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self’; in his Agenda for 2007 paper, Mutambara uses the term ‘inside-out approach’ in parentheses, presumably because he thinks that the meaning of the words ‘we should learn from ourselves’ is not plain enough.
Indeed, Mutambara’s writing – in his Agenda paper, at least – displays a tendency to complicate. Confounding his audience seems to be his number one agenda item. Try making sense of his section titled Economic Agenda, for instance. Here is what he says:
‘We need to develop and own our economic models. The starting point is learning from those countries that have successfully transformed their economies such as Mauritius, Ghana, Singapore, Malaysia, India and China. We must also consider the traditionally strong economies of the US, Western Europe, and Japan. In these case studies we need to focus on the interplay between politics and economics in identifying lessons for high economic growth.
More significantly, we should learn from ourselves (inside out approach); our local business experience, entrepreneurial instincts, work ethic, institutional memory, values, culture, wisdom, and indigenous knowledge systems. We need to understand and leverage our strengths: excellent human capital, strong natural resource base, and robust physical infrastructure. In this way, we can establish our own unique economic signature processes and institutions.
Countries adopt industry best practice to stay competitive, but high-performing economies do more. They embrace unique signature processes that reflect their values and strengths. While adoption of global best-practice provides a level playing field, it is necessary but not sufficient. Signature processes, are idiosyncratic, part of national and local institutional culture & heritage; hence very difficult to replicate. A combination of signature processes and global industrial best practice enhances competitiveness and economic performance of a nation.’
‘Signature process’ is used four times in this paragraph, but he does not care to enlighten his readers of its meaning. What is the signature process that the USA is famous for? What is Ghana’s signature process? I can guarantee you that there aren’t a lot of people in the world – let alone in Zimbabwe, where Mutambara’s constituency is – who know what this term means. Perhaps Mutambara will educate us.
Elsewhere, Mutambara tells us that ‘there is a need to find the brand-building triggers, and make these happen’. How do you make a trigger happen?
And: ‘The stage is set for country’s [sic] branding on a global scale is already well laid out with the large number of successful Zimbabwean professional and business people in significant and strategic locations across the globe. These are the vehicles for marketing a branded global Zimbabwe.’ What on this globe is a global Zimbabwe?
There are more of these sorts of nonsensical statements where I found these examples; and there is no shortage of foggy metaphors either: ‘In 2007 we must think outside the box. In fact, we must think as if there is no box!’ Mutambara urges.
And: ‘[the people of Zimbabwe] must not accept a dysfunctional opposition that seizes defeat from the jaws of victory.’
Read the document; and perhaps, like me, you will feel offended. You might feel offended because Mutambara shows little respect for his audience. Democracy – a thing that is so desperately needed in Zimbabwe – depends on common understanding. This requires political leaders who address national issues with clarity. Deliberate ambiguities and obscure, incomprehensible or meaningless words and phrases, such as those in liberal use in Mutambara’s Agenda Paper, poison the democratic process by leaving people less able to make informed or rational decisions about important political matters; they make intelligent discourse on which democracy depends, impossible. How does Mutambara expect Zimbabweans to judge whether or not he has answers to Zimbabwe’s tough problems when only he, and possibly a few people who completed McKinsey’s 30-day Mini-MBA course, understand what he means?
Reading through Mutambara’s paper, I was reminded of the words of the British novelist George Orwell, who in a 1946 essay usually cited as the ‘classic-statement-about-the-abuse-of-language-by-politicians’, wrote:
‘This mixture of sheer incompetence is the marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.’
Perhaps Mutambara will derive comfort in the knowledge that his language problems are not unique among politicians; or indeed in non- political life. In more recent times, other analysts have gone further than Orwell, arguing that it is a defining feature of contemporary culture that there is so much about of what is said to be ‘bullshit’. A seminal work on this subject is an essay by Princeton University emeritus philosophy professor, Harry Frankfurt, entitled ‘On Bullshit’, which develops a theoretical understanding of what bullshit is and attempts to define it. Frankfurt’s analysis, first published in 1986 and re- published as a book in 2005, describes the problem as follows:
‘When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statement is false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the truth nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of an honest man and of the liar are, except in so far as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.’
According to Frankfurt, ‘the realms of and advertising of public relations, and nowadays the closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.’
Indeed, Mutambara’s write-up is a prime example of the takeover of political language by ‘marketing speak’.
But whatever comfort can be drawn from knowing that Mutambara’s mumbo-jumbo is business as usual, and despite Mutambara’s glib claim that this year ‘it can not be business as usual’, there is one statement in Mr Mutambara’s document for which I could find no comfort, and that is the following:
‘We should never allow the people’s revolution to depend on those Zanu PF cowards who are, for all intents and purposes, Mugabe’s wives.’
Now, I do not know exactly what Mutambara means by calling his political enemies ‘Mugabe’s wives’, but it is clear that he intends this to be an insult. The worst kind of insult.
I can only imagine the set of oppositions in Mutambara’s mind that informed this statement: husbands are strong, wives are weak; husbands are dominant, wives are submissive; husbands are decisive, wives pussy-foot; husbands are men, wives are women; men are fully paid-up members of the human race, women are a sub-species…courageous men are real men, cowardly men are women…all informed by a male-serving intellectual paradigm that devalues the status of women in our society.
Or perhaps Mutambara meant something else. Perhaps his statement is not simply, as I think, sexist and misogynistic; perhaps it is homophobic, also. He means that the ZANU (PF) cowards are gay. And of course Zimbabweans know from Mr Mugabe’s infamous homophobic soundbites, that this would mean that they are ‘worse than pigs and dogs’. Boy, is that a MAN insult!
The sad thing is that this fatuous statement, like most of what is said in Mutambara’s document, is not original. The first reported usage of this crude provocation was in 1998, credited to the politician, Margaret Dongo. The fact that Dongo happens to be a woman did not make her statement any less offensive. When, during a parliamentary debate, she described Zanu PF parliamentarians as ‘Mugabe’s wives’ it is reported that Solomon Mujuru stood up and ‘charged’ towards Dongo, threatening to assault her. Fortunately, he was restrained by fellow legislators.
Dongo had to be escorted home by security aides after Mujuru threatened to ‘sort her out’ once the parliamentary proceedings were over. I assume that the source of Mujuru’s outrage was the high esteem in which he holds his own wife, Joice Mujuru, now Robert Mugabe’s deputy. Presumably, as he contemplated his deep love for his wife, he could not stop himself from responding with violence to the shocking suggestion that to be someone’s wife, Robert Mugabe’s wife in this case, might be one of the worst things possible. Or was he offended because his masculinity had been challenged?
There is some irony in Mutambara’s choice of insult: firstly, because over the years, a folklore has developed about the influence on Mugabe of his real wife, Grace. In the popular imagination she towers above all other figures as the most influential person in his life. And in our political culture her ascendancy is illustrated by the prominence she is given as the so-called ‘First Lady’. Secondly, while Mutambara probably means, by this insult, to oppose all that is associated with Mugabe, he is, in fact, mimicking the chauvinistic, hateful politics of which Mugabe is a past master. Is it not Robert Mugabe who repeatedly asserts that what is needed to run Zimbabwe in the Wild-West fashion that he and his cabinet do is , in his own words, ‘amadoda sibili’ (real men)?
This is the politics that millions of long-suffering Zimbabweans are struggling to put behind them. Does Mutambara think they really want more of the same? Does Mutambara think that women voters, who make up almost half of the Zimbabwe electorate, will be encouraged to support him if he is sets himself up as heir to Mugabe’s discredited gender ideology?
As a final caution against mindless political posturing, I leave here a borrowed line (it was first expressed by the Hungarian-American actress Zsa Zsa Gabor) for Mutambara to use as he chooses next time he’s one short of a tested retort to bad politics: ‘Macho does not prove mucho.’
Gugulethu Moyo is a Zimbabwean lawyer who works for the International Bar Association. The views expressed in the article are those of the writer.
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