Association of Concerned Africa Scholars
Analysis and Action on Policies Impacting Africa

Zimbabwe: MDC Had to Get In Or Change Course

I was not surprised to see the MDC joining the Government of National Unity. In fact, I concluded so the moment that party president Morgan Tsvangirai decided to go home from Botswana earlier in the month.

When an opposition party takes the option of armed struggle off the table and vests all its energies in an internal solution after all nonviolent strategies have failed, there is indeed no choice other than to participate in the GNU or sink into oblivion.

The MDC National Council’s decision to participate in the GNU—whether an elopement with Zanu (PF) or traditional marriage where the festivities of a church ceremony are not the main issue but paying lobola—was merely a coup de grace.

My verdict is that Mugabe had already tactically and strategically outwitted the opposition, from the very moment that the MDC agreed to participate in the talks. When you plunge into a crocodile-infested pool, make sure you know how to swim.

The script had become predictable the moment the MDC signed without looking. If it had decided to reject SADC’s verdict, the MDC would have appealed to the African Union (AU). Ten months have elapsed since the March 29 plebiscite and Mugabe is almost one year into his ‘arbitrary’ term.

The AU process would have dragged on for at least one more year—or two since its membership is four times bigger than SADC. Then AU, at long last, would have referred the matter back to SADC. It reminds me of my rural childhood: you always knew that the next meal would be sadza and vegetables, no meat.

Meanwhile, the clock would be ticking, and before we knew it, five years would have passed and it would be time for another fraud of an election. We would have had even more meetings and resolutions deliberately designed to leave the MDC ‘unsatisfied’ so that another meeting would be set up about the previous meeting.

All the while, more abductions of opposition and human rights activists to feed narratives of MDC rebels training in Botswana to topple the ‘government’. The opposition would be forced on the defensive so that it loses its offensive edge as the appellant whose electoral ‘victory’ was robbed. And while at it, the regime would create new hurdles upon which to grant ‘concessions’ to the MDC at the next AU or SADC summit.

When such an indaba at last arrived, Zanu (PF) would go on the attack, its spokesmen struggling under the weight of thousands of pages, photos, and videos documenting MDC’s unholy alliance with the Batswana. This would be their new negotiating position: the MDC must first renounce violence as a condition for releasing the abductees and getting a couple of governors appointed from its ranks.

It does not need one from the former planet Pluto—now downgraded—to see that SADC was deliberately overlooking Zanu (PF)’s constantly shifting goalposts while dragooning the MDC into the GNU.

Had the MDC continued its ‘stayaway’ from the talks, it was going to still leave Zimbabweans at the mercy of a pan-continental body still struggling with understanding what Zimbabweans are fighting for. What do we do as a people when the majority of the region and the continent are not yet ready to accept our legitimate quest for democracy, one that challenges a godfather of the ‘liberation’ struggle?

It is imperative to understand that the core of the country’s problem is not just a struggle against Mugabe to reclaim individual freedoms that national freedom (from colonial rule) has taken away.

It is a struggle to redefine what true freedom really is: that a people who sacrificed their very blood and lives for genuine freedom by enabling guerrillas to fight with their guns against Rhodesian rule must now be held hostage by the very same politicians for whom the people and frontline guerrillas toiled? At what point does the rhetoric of liberation become freedom which people can live and experience in their own lifetime?

I must spend time on this issue because it is why I had my reservations about going to the AU.

At issue are two generations of struggle: the 20th century struggle of my father and mother against Rhodesian minority rule which I lived through traumatically as a child, and my own 21st century struggle for democracy that my children will live which neither their grandparents nor their parents ever tasted. Freedom that was promised in the name of black majority rule, but which has become black minority rule—our corruption-soaked politicians being what Franz Fanon called “black skin, white mask”.

Much of SADC and Africa is ruled by those who saw, endured, and overturned the 20th century oppression of the white colonialist, men who are easily roused to anger when Mugabe says the MDC has white members and sympathies. In the eyes of these Africans Zimbabweans are insane: the worst sign of this madness is the mere act of criticizing Mugabe—the guy who ‘ended white minority rule’ and ‘gave us land’. What an abomination!

Most of Africa does not see—let alone feel—Mugabe using land, pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism, and blackness as weapons of mass camouflage to create an alibi designed to turn his critics into stooges of the West. When Mugabe says that the British and Americans deliberately contaminated our water systems with cholera, he is playing to this audience, which is not just one of simpletons but also Africa’s best intellectuals—as Mahmood Mamdani’s recent article in the London Review of Books shows. Mugabe is doing something to these academics: without them knowing, they have become megaphones for the very people whose histories they write about. That is my anxiety about how Africa is being written as ‘palace narrative’.

Of course, the problem that Mugabe’s defenders will not explain off is how come Zimbabwe is ruled by an 85 year old—the only ruler the country has ever known since ‘independence’ when their own countries have seen countless, younger leaders retire gracefully.

That matters nothing to Africa; all it sees is land. The people of Zimbabwe are invisible to African leaders. They are dead to them. If given a choice between land and citizens, Africa chooses land. The people can have another life in heaven. They won’t need hell because they live it everyday; it is the renewable energy that feeds dictatorship.

Zimbabweans must understand this if they are to see their own position in the community of African nations and how the type of freedom they seek appears too utopian to deserve any attention at all from the continent.

Of course, Africa is various and these differences would have reflected upon the adjudication of the Zimbabwe issue. But the outcome was even more predictable than SADC.

There is an Africa where the old nationalist parties are still in power. They see opposition to Mugabe much like Christians would an anti-Christ or Muslims anybody who draws a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Opposition parties are seen as “reactionaries”.

There is a part of Africa which is under military rule, where somebody in uniform just wakes up, rides up to State House in tanks and armored cars, seizes the microphone and announces: ‘I am taking over as the newly elected head of state’. Call it self-election. These juntas quickly promise fresh elections which they either rig, contest as single candidates or never hold.

There are countries where tanks and AK-47 rifles are now old-fashioned ways of coups d’etat. The ballot has become the smart way of waging a coup: the pen in front, your hands around the pen barrel scribbling an X on the ballot, a cold gun barrel pressed against one’s back, reminding you that your vote is your life. It’s called ‘voting wisely’. The election is always held on time, almost to the minute. There will be only one result.

There is an Africa still ruled by kings. At least, in a continent where those elected through the ballot behave like kings, monarchs like King Mswati must be credited for their patriarchal honesty. I mean, when Mswati exercises authoritarianism, you know he is a king. That is how they must behave. The downside is not only that their majesties have no clue about the purpose, conduct or meaning of democratic elections. Whether they are held, rigged, or the results ignored, the sun still rises, shines, and sets.

There is also an Africa ruled by those whom the old nationalist parties reluctantly surrendered power to after a ballot, but who went on to become even worse dictators than the old nationalists. They know the limits and dangers of a ballot and cannot hazard encouraging opposition parties to succeed. They have ‘joined the club’.

Then, at the tail-end of many other types of African governments, there is an Africa whose leaders believe that only when rulers become accountable to their citizens—as opposed to citizens being sacrificed so that their blood nourishes their power and elevates them into gods—can Africa tap into the immense wealth of talent in the heads of their own citizens and the wealth underneath the feet. This is where one would find Ghana, Botswana, Kenya, Liberia, and (perhaps) Senegal.

The odds are that AU would have been worse than SADC. The Zimbabwean crisis is the stinking carcass in the backyard; that’s why SADC cares. The further one goes from the carrion, the less the smell; pan-Africanism becomes a more powerful force than cholera.

Zimbabwe is SADC’s dead and putrefying carcass, but there are even worse carrions for Africa. What urgency would Zimbabwe have compared to Somalia, where the Ethiopians have beaten a very hasty retreat after going in like cowhands to ‘round up the herd’ of Islamic rebels?

We are talking of 3,000 deaths from cholera, but are we going to make sense when nearly 300,000 have died in Darfur and millions in eastern DR Congo?

In Africa, while some heads of state might concede that Mugabe is not a good guy, there will be many who will see Zimbabweans as spoiled brats crying for a luxury toy called ‘democracy’ (incited by the former ‘colonial masters’), while other citizens of Sudan, Darfur, and Somalia do not even have dictatorships strong enough to keep them safe, alive, and fed.

Of course, going to the AU would probably have removed SADC’s current legitimacy to obstruct any country or ‘coalition of the willing’ from acting unilaterally to end the humanitarian catastrophe Zimbabwe has become. Such action has never required, or even asked for, the authorization of the AU or the UN, let alone regional bodies. Nigeria did that in Sierra Leone, en route to cunningly arresting Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor under the pretext of giving ‘asylum’ before handing him over to the War Crimes Tribunal. It worked: today Liberia is at peace. But that was not a big decision taken by the AU.

The latest example of such ‘horse-trading’ is Rwanda’s joint operations with DR Congo and Paul Kagame’s arrest of former rebel ally Laurent Nkunda. Before that we saw Ethiopia get into Somalia, South Africa into Lesotho, Zimbabwe into Mozambique before tag-teaming with Angola and Namibia in DR Congo. Decades earlier Tanzania had chased Idi Amin into Uganda and then to Saudi Arabian exile. All such decision were undertaken by neighbors in the proximity based on national security or economic interests.

My point is that in real terms, the UN, AU and any other bodies are completely powerless to prevent unilateral action. They will froth at the corners of the mouth and shout hoarse, but they never act.

Mugabe calculated that no such unilateral action to remove him would happen. The West is in financial crisis, America in transition and public opinion dead-set against any war no matter how noble the objective. Obama is not George Bush; he won’t ride shotgun for anybody.

Those Africans making noises for military intervention had no executive power to even swat flies. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga made some sounds, but the head of state is Mwai Kibaki, who maintained a stoic silence knowing his own circumstances. How was he to say anything without self-indictment? The rest were men of the cloth and academics who might shoot from the pulpit and laptop, but not much else.

Therefore, Mugabe was spot-on when he dared Africa to come and get him. Nobody had the stomach for it. If Africa could be so scared of Mugabe at a distance, imagine what would happen face-to-face! That or the national security imperative for member states to act against Mugabe—beyond him being an embarrassment to pan-Africanism—was absent.

To return to my opening argument, if the MDC had played hardball and decided not to ‘go in’ and form a government with Mugabe, what was Plan C besides the AU route?

Plan A was mass action. It was decisively crushed precisely because those planning it rendered it too predictable to the target of their chagrin. Amidst a blaze of publicity, the opposition would set a date for the mass action, outline the strategy completely with route plans, and set their watches. That gave ample time for the state to get ready with all its might, match the planned strategy point-for-point, and ride the storm.

The workers would go on strike Wednesday, religiously checking at their watches as the union or party leaders would have said. The clock started ticking. Friday morning, with the two-day strike over as announced, the workers would get on the road, squeeze into the kombi, Zupco commuter bus, or the back of a truck, and report to work at exactly eight o’clock. The state, quite rightly, got used to this routine.

Of course, for most Zimbabweans, only two instruments of democratic expression remained: to vote with one’s feet and to use one’s educational skills to migrate out of reach of an abusive state and a lethargic opposition. The other choice would have been to take up guns and confront their tormentor, but the MDC did not have the stomach to lead it—or, as it claims, it has always believed in a non-violent change. The litmus test on this positive and welcome philosophy will be seen in how the GNU succeeds or fails.

If we succeed, we will have shown Africa that civil wars are totally unnecessary. If that philosophy prevails and spreads, Africa is headed for a genuine renaissance.

This ‘linguistic turn’ did not happen overnight. Once the MDC took the armed option off the table, there was very little latitude to maneuver outside talks. It meant that the MDC would not do what Zapu and Zanu did after the détente talks in 1974-5.

Realizing that the stoic reluctance of Prime Minister Ian Smith to compromise on political power was a “What will you do to me if I don’t?” question, the military elements from both parties undertook to provide an answer on the battlefield. By 1979, they could answer Smith like this: “If you do not compromise we will take power militarily.”

The MDC had no such plans or capacity; in fact by Tsvangirai’s departure for Harare from Gaborone, it made the bold statement to its critics that the time to change course was before signing the September 15 agreement, not afterwards.

Under the current circumstances, the MDC only had two key instruments that substituted for guns and troops. First, they had the financial and diplomatic ear of the West, without which Mugabe could set up a government, but would never govern. From bad, things would get worse, especially as the downstream effects of the global recession kicked in. It is not wise to exaggerate this as an ace in the MDC’s pack in light of the turbulent global financial situation: how sure is the MDC that western countries will have money to spare when their own citizens and taxpayers are losing jobs?

The second weapon was that the MDC had the numbers: Zimbabweans at home and abroad are solidly behind them. Period. Deep down in their hearts, and in conversations, Zanu (PF) people will tell you that they have lost the people’s support.

Plan B—the party’s participation in the talks—was a go-for-broke strategy born out of previous mistakes whereby the MDC had stayed out and Mugabe had still finished his term. But it’s a decision that weakened, distracted and diverted the MDC from attending to the coordination of these two raw materials—the international and domestic support—into one compact network for change. All eggs, not just MDC’s but Zimbabweans’, we now in one basket: the talks.

The recent stirrings of outrage in South Africa, as well as growing consultations in the US, Canada and UK to use the 2010 soccer world cup as a pressure point to force Pretoria to act were spontaneous actions independent of the MDC. The sanctions were leaking precisely because of a failure to supply actionable information for enforcement.

This diversionary nature of dialogue suggests Zanu (PF) must declare a strategic victory: a party that lost the parliamentary and first round of the presidential election and then conned the opposition into signing a ‘sin’ of a document must surely reward anybody in its ranks who thought up the idea of talks.

Plan B was ‘sinful’ because it disarmed the broad-based civic society action and isolated power over change to a few politicians from Zanu (PF) and MDC to decide the future of 12 million souls. That is where Zanu (PF) triumphed: behind the drawn curtain, with Mbeki very partisan at that, it could command the agenda and play pacemaker to the dialogue process.

Zanu (PF) played ‘deverangwena’ (follow the crocodile into the pool) with the MDC. Knowing that its powers on land were limited, the party strategists said ‘no, let us ensnare the MDC into the deep pool, where we will use water to our advantage, knowing the adversary can’t swim. The MDC might flail and froth, but it cannot get out of the pool’.

If MDC got out of the talks, Mugabe knew the worst could not happen: MDC would never take up arms as Zanu and Zapu did. I cannot put the possibility that Botswana contemplated rear bases and training for MDC past Ian Khama. I suspect that Tsvangirai’s insistence on achieving a non-violent revolution, for reason of lack or latitude, convinced Khama to mellow his tone at the SADC meeting all of a sudden. That, or there was a secret assurance from Mugabe that this time he meant what he said.

Tsvangirai had the option to form a government in exile but opted to go and form a government at home. We will never know whether the issue came up for discussion while Tsvangirai was in Gaborone, or how far it would have helped.

Of one thing Zimbabweans can be certain. By going home, Tsvangirai laid one matter to rest: the road to a solution for him lay inside Zimbabwe, not outside going in. If the MDC avoids being swallowed and the GNU is implemented as publicized, the party will have pulled off a major shift in paradigm in Zimbabwean politics: the possibility of change without recourse to war.

We hear this talk about Tendai Biti and Morgan Tsvangirai not seeing with one eye on the way forward—which Biti dismissed. It’s okay, let him deny it. He knows where the truth lies and who was on the wrong riverbank of opinion within the National Council. If I were him I would actually publicly admit it, so that all of us confirm the MDC’s democratic culture, where it’s okay and humane to disagree and still move on. I would worry if such an important decision was unanimous; we expect leaders to exhaust all options through rational due process before committing ‘sinning’ us into the future.

Among the militant base, opposition to getting into government offered the possibility of leadership renewal and shift of strategy. That is a powder keg that won’t go away: if the GNU turns out to be a wild goose chase, this opposition, and those who opposed, will be used as a point of reference. That those who opposed the entry into the GNU did not go beyond constructive debate to split as what happened in 2005 is a sign of maturity.

Otherwise if that had happened and Zanu (PF) went on to honor its end of the bargain and the GNU succeeded, such revolt had as much potential to be “the Judas Iscariot moment” that split Zapu in 1963 and the 1974-5 détente that led to Ndabaningi Sithole’s ouster. The reverse is true; if this thing fails, those who pushed for it will be held responsible.

One warning: let’s not go into this vindictively hoping it fails. Let us give it due diligence and fair criticism.

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