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Who are Zimbabwe's enemies?
By
Terence
M Mashingaidze
SINCE the attainment
of independence in 1980 the country’s ruling elite have systematically
resorted to violence, retributive justice and racist rhetoric to counter
citizens who contest their self serving and corrupt governance.
Now, twenty seven years down the line nothing has changed, the political road remains hazardous for those law abiding citizens who rightfully challenge Zanu PF’s bandwagon philosophies and shady administration. Due to a penchant for political witch hunting the ruling elite define legitimate contenders for power as enemies of the state.
What is more troubling about the ruling elite’s desires for political uniformity among citizens is that they have racialized democratic discourse by reducing political competitors to stooges for white interests. All those who question the ruling elite’s administration have to be white and if they are black they have white handlers, strategists and backers. According to this thinking the Movement for Democratic Change, civil society and the privately owned media are nothing but fronts and purveyors of white interests.
Diaspora Africans and organisations like the USA-based Federation of Black Trade Unions and even South Africa’s COSATU and the South African Communist Party (SACP), who condemn Zimbabwe’s bad governance, are simply echoing white imperial voices. The ruling elite is more comfortable with sycophantic diaspora organizations such as the shadowy and populist Harlem based December 12 Movement who unquestionably consider them torchbearers of authentic African liberation.
The ruling elite’s exclusionary nationalistic rhetoric is painful and insulting to self-respecting black Zimbabweans, Pan Africanists and Afrocentric thinkers and activists because it implies that blacks are not capable of multiple definitions and interpretations of reality. They can not read through Zanu PF’s intolerant and corrupt style of national administration. Right now, due to corruption, 80% of every Zimbabwean dollar (Z$) paid by the tax payer can not be accounted for, and we are still expected to support this regime’s suffocating governance. We must all parrot and sing in unison, Pambili leZanu PF, Pamberi neZanu PF, Forward with Zanu PF. Is this the price of patriotism?
In the 1980s Zanu PF postured as a paramilitary and all embracing revolutionary party and expected citizens to subscribe to its ill conceived socialist orientation. Those who questioned this posturing became anti-revolutionary saboteurs who deserved nothing less than physical annihilation. The worst expression of this style of state management was the Gukurahundi tragedy, whereby the state embarked on a scorched earth policy against citizens in the Midlands and Matabeleland provinces. All those perceived to be PF Zapu cadres and sympathisers faced either death or brutal treatment at the hands of security forces or other state supported militias. At least twenty thousand citizens perished and the world looked aside when this low intensity and undeclared war against citizens was going on.
In typical anti-democratic fashion the state ignored the judicial rulings in its quest to punish and ensure imposed political pliability and uniformity among Zimbabweans. Several men and women were arrested on spurious allegations of treasonous activities. The country’s courts of law invariably called for the release of these people due to lack of evidence against them. The state on the other acted with impunity and ignored these rulings. General Lookout Mafela Masuku and some PF Zapu cadres endured prison life in the 1980s in spite of the courts’ calls for their release.
Morgan Tsvangirai stayed in detention from October 6 to November 11, 1989, on trumped up charges of being an agent for apartheid South Africa. However, his real crime was that he had supported University of Zimbabwe students’ 1989 democratic and anti-corruption struggles and condemned the police’s brutal treatment of the demonstrators. The Association of University Teachers also condemned the police’s violent treatment of the students and the ultimate closure of the university. Again state functionaries accused the AUT of being led by unrepentant and unpatriotic white Rhodesians. Authorities came up with these cranky accusations in spite of the fact that the government’s most visible and articulate critics were the University of Zimbabwe’s black scholar-activists like the late Kempton Makamure and the now South African based Shadreck B O Gutto.
This escapist and reductive discourse of defining all those who contest the leadership’s shoddy administration as unpatriotic and antinationalist intensified from 2000 onwards. The MDC, civil society, the privately owned media and the international community at large all became intruders on the country’s political space, “a coalition of evil” against revolutionary Zimbabwe. Besides exclusionary rhetoric and crass propaganda, the government used violence and restrictive laws such as AIPPA and POSA to curtail citizens’ rights and freedoms to assembly, association and expression. The state forced private media alternatives such as The Daily News, The Weekly Times and the Tribune to close shop.
The state also began to criminalize citizens calling for the broadening of democratic space and resolutions to pertinent national questions. A few weeks ago, in 2006, law enforcement agencies brutalized the Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) activists for demonstrating and calling for more food on the table from their leadership. The WOZA debacle’s major irony is that the state is responding in an illegitimate and violent manner to citizens’ legitimate questions and concerns. Therefore, whose and what mandate does our leadership now constitute and represent? Are these women who demonstrate in broad daylight in the streets with babies strapped on their backs enemies of the state bent on destabilizing law and order?
Most people in the country’s power establishment have been associated with or are alleged to have misappropriated public resources either on the farms, at the Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company (ZISCO), the Harare City Council, and the Reserve Bank’s loan and forex allocation schemes to name but a few of the cases. The country’s leadership has elevated disorder and chaos into a national management system, for obvious self-enrichment purposes. A few months back people of various kinds descended on Marange district’s Chiadzwa area to scout for diamonds. Anyone with nerve and energy became either a miner or a diamond dealer with the complicity of some government functionaries. This happened in violation of the country’s statutory mining regulations and policies. The constituting of a cabinet initiated task force put the chaos to some check.
However, it is everyone’s guess that some powerful people had already made good money out of the Chiadzwa “El dorado”. Now we gather that tractors recently imported under the Reserve Bank’s auspices were stripped of their parts before they had reached intended beneficiaries, the new farmers. In typical corruption lingo commentators say “the tractors are being cannibalised.” But one is forced to ask whether it is only these few tractors that are being “cannibalized” or it’s the whole country.
It appears the territorial integrity and national sovereignty discourses that our leadership loves so much serves to blur and disguise corruption, brutal modes of preserving power, and shady governance. We need to remind each other that Zimbabwe is not just some empty physical space, but a geopolitical construct with people who deserve decent and dignified livelihoods. There is no integrity in poverty, food shortages, the highest inflation record in the world and the lowest life expectancy on the globe. National sovereignty is not about threatening fellow citizens and ranting against the nation’s imagined and invented enemies but effective management of Zimbabwean political and economic affairs.
Finally, if Zimbabwe has enemies to its integrity and sovereignty they are some of the men and women who shout most about patriotism. They are vain, violent, manipulative, contemptuous, and corrupt. The comrades in power should own up to their failures, stop being defensive and get to the drawing table to formulate and execute sober solutions for Zimbabwe, a country they claim to have exclusive rights to defend, and even loot! Failure to do this means that more citizens will sink deeper into deprivation and poverty. Educated and skilled citizens will continue moving in droves out of the country to secure decent livelihoods in well managed destinations near and far from home. This is not what Zimbabweans want, they deserve better from their leadership.
Terry M Mashingaidze is an historian and can be contacted at Mashingaidze2000@yahoo.com
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