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

Zimbabwe: What does the GNU hold for the MDC?

(Preface: Mavhunga wrote the piece (below) for The Zimbabwe Times on the eve of the Movement for Democratic Change’s National Council decision to participate in the Government of National Unity (GNU) on Friday 30th January. Since then, the MDC council has endorsed party president Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision to participate in the GNU. The author wishes to maintain his main argument-that when an opposition party takes the option of armed struggle off the table and vests all its energies in an internal solution, there is indeed no choice other than to participate in the GNU or sink into oblivion. He argues that Mugabe has 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.)

There was no surprise from the SADC meeting, as Zimbabwe’s public had predicted. It was the same old song: the complainant appeals to a judge, who turns out to be the accused.

We know where the script is heading: from SADC, the MDC is expected to appeal to the African Union. Are you aware that one year is almost gone and March 29 is almost upon us? Happy anniversary Zimbabwe. Read that as one year into Mugabe’s term. The AU process will probably take one more year—or two since its membership four times bigger than SADC. Then AU may, at long last, refer the matter back to SADC. This is, after all, an ‘African problem’ requiring an ‘African solution’ (There is no hurry in Africa, remember?). It’s not proper to take it to the United Nations, now is it?

Another predictable menu.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and before we know it, five years have passed and it is another election. We shall have more meetings and resolutions deliberately designed to leave the MDC ‘unsatisfied’ so that we can set up another meeting about the previous meeting. In the interim, kidnap some opposition and human rights activists and create stories about the MDC trying to invade Zimbabwe. Put the opposition on the defensive so that it loses its offensive edge as the appellant whose electoral ‘victory’ was robbed. And while at it, create new hurdles so that you can have something to give concessions on at the next SADC summit.

The meeting arrives. Strategy? Dig your heels in on these new accusations about MDC banditry in Botswana, bring a thick dossier to accuse both Khama and Tsvangirai and dare them to take the case further. Then afterwards, make mild compromises, not on the original MDC grievances, but on your latest atrocities. That way, you obfuscate the original demands and change the subject—as well as luring SADC to your side by your ‘concessions’. You become the voice of reason; they become the voice of violent banditry and regime change.

Enough!

SADC cannot tell Zimbabweans that it is not seeing that Mugabe is shifting goal posts like this. SADC is aiding and abating Mugabe.

That’s not all.

The regional body is also bullying the MDC into a coalition government. Hear Kgalema Motlanthe’s bold declaration: “Yes, of course [MDC] will ensure that the Amendment 19 is enacted and will present themselves on the said date for the swearing-in ceremony.” That’s right—“present themselves”!

Or else?

The biggest problem for Zimbabweans is this: What do they do as a people when the majority of the region and the continent is not yet ready to accept their legitimate quest for democracy, one that challenges a godfather of the ‘liberation’ struggle?

I ask because 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 must now be held hostage by the very same politicians for whom the people and frontline guerrillas toiled? At which point does the rhetoric of liberation become freedom which people are told exists, but never experience?

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 knowing that neither their grandparents nor their parents ever tasted it. Freedom that was promised in the name of black majority rule, but which has become black minority rule.

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 symptoms are the mere act of criticizing Mugabe. For how does one criticize a man who fought colonialism with the fiercest of rhetoric and seized white land and redistributed it (never mind to his party faithful and bigwigs with “degrees in violence)?” It is an abomination.

Indeed, land, pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism, and blackness have become the weapons of mass camouflage the regime wears to destroy not only the opposition or country, but—through cholera contagion arising out of obsession with political power—the entire region as well. The problem is not Zanu (PF) in toto; as one journalist friend suggested to me recently, how come Mugabe has been in power for 29 years if the issue is land? Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came. They went. Next John Major and George Bush the father came. They went. So too did Mandela. He came, he rocked, he went. Next Tony Blair and Bill Clinton came. They went. So too did George Bush the son and Thabo Mbeki. They came, they went. Is it to say then that Zanu (PF) was so short of leadership material that the party could not dig from its own humus to find a tenderer worm to catch the public imagination and hunger for change?

But of course, all that Africa 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.

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 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 scribbling an X on the ballot, a cold 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.

Point? So that we don’t expect miracles when the Zimbabwe issue goes before the AU. The Zimbabwean crisis is the stinking carcass in the backyard; that’s why SADC cares. We are cholera on two legs as well as the incubator of bugs and refugees. The further one goes from the decomposing carcass, the less the smell. Pan-Africanism—as intangible as it may sound to SADC citizens who must deal with floods of Zimbabwean refugees on a minute-by-minute basis—becomes a more powerful force than cholera. 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 3000 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 take Zimbabweans as children who cry for an electronic toy when he already has a plastic one, even as others have not even food in the stomach.

There is only one hope if the issue goes to Africa as a whole: it recuses SADC from preventing unilateral, small-group or individual action by any country from acting in any decisive form 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 giving the Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor ‘asylum’ and bodyguards, which turned out to be house arrest. Taylor was then handed over to the War Crimes Tribunal, and today Liberia is the first country to have a woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

The latest example of such ‘horse-trading’ is Rwanda’s joint operations with DR Congo and the arrest of former rebel Laurent Nkunda. Before that we had seen Ethiopia get into Somalia, South Africa into Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia into DR Congo, and Tanzania into Uganda.

In real terms, the UN, AU and any other bodies are completely powerless to prevent unilateral action. They will forth at the corners of the mouth and shout hoarse, but they never act.

At this moment, I do not see it coming. I won’t encourage false optimism. The west is neck-deep with the financial crisis. It’s too early to tell what exactly Obama will do differently, even though his overtures towards the Sino-Soviet and African ‘allies’ Mugabe used to spite the West with might actually work effectively to isolate Mugabe.

At the moment, I do not see any decibels raised for direct intervention achieving anything—most of African rulers acquired political power through spilling blood, not preventing its spillage. We have heard Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga saying some choice things about an African force intervening. However, the head of state in Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, has not said so: he sits comfortably in the club of African rulers who came to power by defeating the old nationalist party before behaving like them.

Mugabe was spot-on when he dared Africa to come and get him. Nobody had the stomach for it. So much then for African solutions for African problems.

The question is also that, in the even that the MDC plays hardball and decides not to ‘go in’ and form a government with Mugabe, what is Plan C?

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 the tormentor, but the MDC did not have the stomach to lead it—or, as it claims, it believes in a non-violent change.

It is a position that Tsvangirai himself enunciated recently in response to the state’s allegations that the MDC is training ‘terrorists’ in Botswana. In saying so, he set a definitive bar beyond which the quest for democracy in Zimbabwe would not go under his leadership.

Once you do that, there is very little latitude to maneuver outside talks. It means that the MDC will 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 has no such plans or capacity

Under the current circumstances, the MDC only has two key instruments that have substituted for having an army of their own. First, they have the financial and diplomatic ear of the West, without which Mugabe may set up a government, but will never govern. From bad, things will get worse, especially as the downstream effects of the global recession kick in. The second weapon is that the MDC has the people of Zimbabwe—at home and abroad—solidly behind them.

What has been missing is to connect these two elements to finish off the regime. I suggest that Plan B—the party’s participation in the talks—has distracted and diverted the MDC from attending to the coordination of these two raw materials for change. Such a diversion would suggest that 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 mortgaged an entire country to the whims of politicians, lifting the energy from an all-inclusive coalition of civic society that had started building up and investing the 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 advising here and there, 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 (elections) were limited, the party strategists said ‘no, let us ensnare the MDC into the deep pool (SADC), 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 (talks)’.

If it gets out of the talks, Mugabe knows the worst cannot happen: MDC will not do what Zanu and Zapu did—to take up arms. Possibly realizing how hopeless the party is, Botswana is now seemingly recanting on its earlier robust stance. An analytic reading of its combative positive in the last couple of months suggests that it was waiting for the MDC to propose stronger cough medicine to the Zimbabwean cold. It did not, so Ian Khama could say: “If you can’t change course, and you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you must accept the status quo of the pool where the crocodiles swim’.

It does not seem to me that Khama had any bases set up, nor was he seriously contemplating taking on Zimbabwe for the sake of the MDC or to push back the wave of refugees flocking into his country. Rather, I think he was waiting for direction from the MDC on how it wished to proceed. One option—which Tsvangirai completely eliminated by going home—was a government in exile. We will never know whether it 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 lies inside Zimbabwe, not inside coming in.

Politics is a very crazy thing. We sit here as ordinary Jim and Jack while the politicians do deals, and then voila! A deal is announced.

Inevitably, the aura of a patriarch who listens to the majority view of his peers in SADC, and, like a true patriarch, completely ignores the opinions and decisions of his own children will raise emotions inside and outside the opposition’s top echelons alike.

For this reason, it is without surprise that there may be disagreements within the MDC over whether they will join in (un)holy matrimony with Mugabe or become runaway brides. Zimbabweans care about the reported and purported disagreements within the MDC because most (by their March 29 vote) identify themselves among the bride’s relatives (hama dzemukadzi).

This anxiety is the price people pay for their over-reliance on the MDC: a split in its ranks has collateral damage. It will defeat the will of the people and play straight into the Zanu (PF) strategy of ensnaring MDC into talks. The whole purpose is to encourage dissension and then cut a deal with one faction (Mutambara’s) and the one (who will be called a ‘sellout’) from MDC-Tsvangirai that enters the talks. The dissenter (who will be called a ‘warmonger’) can rot in jail for what it’s worth. This name-calling is a part of one overall ‘leaching strategy’: to strength Zanu (PF) through talking, time management, and defections. It is a strategy that has been well-thought, which demands careful response.

We hear this talk about Tendai Biti and Morgan Tsvangirai not seeing with one eye on the way forward. Among the militant base opposition to getting into government offers the possibility of leadership renewal and shift of strategy. Yet it has as much potential to be “the Judas Iscariot moment” that split Zapu in 1963 and led to Ndabaningi Sithole’s ostracization. It is also coin-tossing the fate of 12 million lives—tails you win heads you lose.

Since runaway brides often do so because they fear commitment and might in fact run away to another man to escape the would-be groom, those in MDC who do not want to get into the government must tell us exactly what alternative they see outside matrimony. Otherwise if they want to continue to flail and gasp for air in the pool (talks) until they get a solution, we are headed for a predictable AU process.

Some runaway brides flee a potential ‘horror marriage’, bide their time and eventually find ‘Mr. Right’ to come up, and find happiness. Others will run away and scuttle what could have been a ‘paradise marriage’. Still, the decision to go in or stay out should not be a blind one or secretive like the first decision to engage, lest the bride marries a philanderer and an abusive husband. If the decision is to go in, it has to be strategic beyond personal office, otherwise people will very quickly turn against those who took it and give support to those who opposed.

If the MDC decides to go in, it must not do so blindfolded, otherwise it will seal its own fate. If it stays out, it must change course.

Clapperton Mavhunga, a Zimbabwean national, is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Society (STS) at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology.