Where do we go from here?
Even when the GNU was inked in 2008, progressive, cerebral and visceral analysts – and even pseudo-intellectuals – greeted the marriage of inconvenience with the same cynicism that Zanu PF game planners are considering the outcome of what many see as this rushed election.
Reasonable men and women wondered how Zanu PF- a nationalist and rightwing party – could capitulate to any demands placed on the table by the MDC, and this based on previous pronouncements that they did not see any reason why in their opinion people with no liberation war credentials could be allowed to rule the country. And now we have Khaya Moyo and Chihuri speaking the language of Chinotimba we pretend to be surprised, only because another election is looming despite popular opinion that this will be the death of us as the conditions for a credible elections are palpably absent.
In this newest discourse on the future of the country, the issue then becomes what has to be done to have a consensus that the country can go head and have elections, not to mention the referendum. Based on what we already know about the Zanu PF collective and the congenital and abysmal attitude to democracy and the people’s right too choose a government of their own, it would be safe to say that what has been missing in this crisis is outside leverage to make Mugabe bend. Yet we also already know Mugabe’s attitude toward outsiders “interfering” in the internal affairs of “his” country.
What choices then do Zimbabweans have on the face of these apparently intractable contradictions as defined for the whole nation by Mugabe and Zanu PF? You get Jonathan Moyo saying the MDC will never win an election, and you have to ask what informs such careless statements: who is voting, the people of Zimbabwe or Zanu PF? Obviously Zanu PF will never vote for the MDC, and in an election where only Zanu PF elements vote, you can guarantee an MDT thrashing – much like the June presidential run-off farce – but for God’s sake it does not work that way and you somewhat understand why Zanu PF would insist on having these elections, because they figure there wont be any MDC supporters to vote thanks to the patriotic efforts of Jabulani Sibanda and Chinotimba!
But then it has to be asked for how long Mugabe and Zanu PF are going to ride roughshod over the wishes not only of Zimbabweans but standards set by the international community which has – albeit feebly – tried to steer this country to placid waters? Imagine the progeny of Zanu PF hawks embracing the same militancy half a century after Zimbabwe’s independence and telling us that no one without liberation war credentials is fit to rule! You then understand the belligerency Africa has seen in its many troubled spots where obdurate nationalists and despots are responded to by matching militancy from frustrated opponents who decided the ballot was just but a fart in the wind as far as the nationalist despots were concerned.
Another thing that has brought the rather unnecessary stretching of this crisis, some contend, is the mediation by SADC and how useless the whole exercise has been since the Mbeki years. International relations and diplomacy efforts only work when local parties involved in negotiations see themselves as equals, after all this is what has brought to an end some of the continent’s most atrocious human crises. Zimbabwe however offers an example that negotiations can drag for centuries as long as one party to the negotiations obsesses about entitlement to political power despite the good intentions of mediators to make repair the limping country.
Meanwhile, with this insistence on elections by Zanu PF, we do not have to brace ourselves that the victory Zanu PF is already claiming will be disputed: we already know that the mediators will persuade the MDC to accept a Zanu PF victory while those who voted for change and the international community who question the outcome will be told once again to go to hell. And where does that leave the ordinary man, woman and child? Well, just blame the MDC for not being tough enough on Mugabe and Zanu PF, yet you still have to empathise with those so-called MDC hardliners who were – and still are – against this marriage that has inconvenienced us all when we could be using our brains to understand better things other than how Zanu PF the party Simon Khaya Moyo so much extols lost the bush war plot, how this neo-patrimonialism crap came to make supposedly good man bad.
I saw and wept the other day at the response to Gabon’s run-off election where results were torn in front of television cameras by an official from the party that was sensing sure defeat, and you understand Zanu PF’s thesis that they will never accept an electoral outcome that does not favour them as a culture from the Dark Ages where the rule and the will of the people has no place in their definition of self-rule and self-determination. The question obviously becomes, why hold elections if you are not going to accept the results? Chinotimba answered that already in a Newsday interview:
That’s how we do things in Zanu PF!