Makoni, political fallacies and impressionable Zimbabweans

Submitted by Terence M Mashingaidze

In Zimbabwe’s imagined Orwellian hierarchy of political consciousness and roles, the educated, those in the diaspora and the urbanites are more perceptive about politics and governance issues compared with their supposed uneducated compatriots and rural residents.

I have heard on numerous occasions the exhortation by urbanites and those in the diaspora that folks back home and in the rural areas are not doing enough to change the nation’s political landscape and economic fortunes for the better. Purveyors of these views also argue that Zimbabweans are too literate to be led by non-graduates, and that rural residents have undermined the country’s democratic development due to their blind support for the “repressive” ruling party.

The rationality and relevance of these ideas need thorough interrogation as we approach the March 29 national elections. I critique these perspectives with particular reference to the interest attendant to the entry of Zimbabwe’s greenhorn but celebrated contender for the presidency, Simba Makoni; the place of so-called uneducated compatriots in the country’s politics; and peasants and Zimbabwe’s electoral politics.

The hullabaloo surrounding Makoni’s entry into the Zimbabwean political scene as a presidential aspirant has settled. He has declared that he is independent and seems to be uninterested in making any strong alliances with other actors in the opposition ranks. Comments and analyses following Makoni’s emergence as a visible contender for the presidency belie a significant degree of political fickleness among some of us. Some people quickly embraced Makoni and agitated Zimbabweans to rally behind him before he had even outlined his agenda for the nation.

The import of the Makoni phenomenon is that he is assumed to be the “right man” because of perception rather what he really is. Because of his dazzling academic credentials, many quickly fell for him without any clarity on his perspectives on investment, infrastructural development and rehabilitation, skills development, industrialisation, the rule of law and other national fundamentals.

Others in the civil society movement set conditionalities for accepting Makoni as a credible participant in opposition politics. He had to confess and apologise to Zimbabweans for crimes against citizens that he had purportedly committed by virtue of having been a long-serving and high-ranking member of the “rapacious”, “ineffectual” and “violent” Zanu-PF cabal. It is incumbent upon us to realise that outside the parameters of truth and reconciliation commissions, politics and confessions do not go hand in hand. Of course, it is honourable if politicians acknowledge their failures and mistakes, whether by commission or omission, but the truth is that honourable politicians are a rare breed.

Like many other Zimbabweans, what I found most puzzling was that some purportedly broad-minded people called for Morgan Tsvangirai to make room for Makoni. The essence of leading a political organisation is to compete for and ultimately assume the highest political office in the land. Tsvangirai was right in having the foresight to resist such calls. Makoni could not be made head of the opposition forces whose structures and values he is not organic to. When people are invited to join and lead political formations, often there is an unbridgeable disconnection between the invitees and the invited. The cases of Jonathan Moyo and Zanu-PF and the anti-Senate Arthur Mutambara and his pro-Senate faction are telling cases of the futility of such marriages of convenience.

Some Zimbabweans also associate educational qualifications with the capacity to lead and inspire the electorate. Astute politicians such as the late vice-president Simon Muzenda, Morgan Tsvangirai or even South Africa’s inimitable Msholozi Jacob Zuma have been dismissed in some quarters largely on the basis of limited educational attainments. The political blunders made by such politicians can be and are made by any politicians regardless of education. Our intellectual snobbery has resulted in us deifying some political actors not because they are capable organisers and administrators but simply because they are “highly educated”.

When Arthur Mutambara arrived on the political scene, some people sweepingly argued that he was the man Zimbabweans had been waiting for. He had so-called intellectual gravitas buttressed by a history of jambanja (violence) as a former belligerent student leader who contributed to the opening up of the country’s floodgates of democracy in 1989. Thus he was the appropriate candidate for squaring up to the task of challenging the highly educated, articulate and militant Robert Mugabe.

In the same vein, Tsvangirai had failed to measure up to this task because he was an “intellectual midget”. As they say, the rest is history. Mutambara is just an ordinary political actor with a somewhat overblown sense of entitlement. The case of Simon Muzenda also showed his uncanny capacity for staying power especially in circumstances where his much better educated competitors fell by the wayside.

I am also convinced that if Muzenda or Tsvangirai engaged in Mugabe’s favourite political pastime of rubbishing political adversaries as “puppets”, “small men”, “tea boys”, “prostitutes” and “frogs”, some of us would quickly say it is because of these two gentlemen’s limited education. For educated Mugabe such crude language against opponents is nothing but a sign of intolerance and, unfortunately, much of the time we laugh it off.

Related to the above point is the perception that rural Zimbabweans are naive political participants who have undermined sophisticated urbanites’ democratic struggles by “aligning” themselves to the ruling party. This is a big fallacy based on the assumption that people in the rural areas are either ignorant or immune to the main issues: the effects of Zanu-PF’s bad governance and ideas about democracy, human rights and rule of law. Nothing could be far from the truth than this. Rural people, like any other Zimbabweans, are calculating political actors whose political behavioural patterns are shaped by the dictates of their immediate environment.

What people need to understand is that Zanu-PF abuses rural structures and institutions such as schools, the Grain Marketing Board and councils to maintain its stranglehold in the rural communities, where headmasters and district administrators are considered ex-officio Zanu-PF functionaries and schools are quasi-party institutions where business at times has to come to a standstill whenever the “chefs” are campaigning in the vicinity. In such cases, hapless school kids are forced to provide entertainment in the form of dances and music at ruling-party-connected gatherings. Most of these pupils do not vote due to being underage, so their co-option at political rallies is for their symbolic power as captive spectators that conveniently inflate audience numbers.

At times citizens are denied access to food distributed through ruling-party structures because of purported wrong political affiliations. Considering limited markets for grain and other commodities in rural areas, we need to appreciate why people in rural areas seem to vote the way they do. Notwithstanding violence, rigging and crass ruling-party propaganda, rural Zimbabweans weigh their options and possibilities and vote according to well-reasoned considerations. The main challenge for those interested in entangling Zanu-PF’s political grip in rural areas should be how to formulate robust strategies creatively that reduce people’s dependence on the ruling party’s sectarian structures and tactics.

Terence M Mashingaidze teaches in the department of history and development studies at Midlands State University in Zimbabwe and can be contacted at [email protected]. He is a peasant farmer aspiring to be a big landowner but not through the largesse of the powers that be in Zimbabwe. He is fed up with narrow-minded Zimbabwean politics and wishes to see another Polokwane revolution between the Limpopo and the Zambezi soon.