Business Day

Mugabe not solely to blame
David Monyae and Godfrey Chesang
Posted to the web on: 18 April 2005

MUCH of the debate in the media about the Zimbabwe elections has focused on whether they were free and fair. This debate reflects a broader predisposition to framing debates on Zimbabwe in normative terms. The result has been to pass a vindictive judgment on President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu (PF) as the cause of all the problems in Zimbabwe.

It is hard to defend a dissenting view without creating unforgiving enemies, or at the very least being labelled a Mugabe apologist. This is not our intention. There is no denying that there is a crisis in Zimbabwe. Our intention here is to show that the crisis is not one that can be entirely framed in terms of wrong and right; rather, that a very important aspect of this crisis is a profound political paralysis in the country resulting from Mugabe's authoritarian tendencies, as well as the opposition's strategic ineptitude.

First, there is a succession vacuum in the country. To remove Mugabe through a democratic election, you would need a candidate who could beat him at the elections using the rules of the game that have already been set by Mugabe. You would need a resourceful, charismatic and untainted leader to beat him at his own game.

Since he came to power in 1980, Mugabe has demonstrated a chilling Machiavellian ruthlessness in co-opting and/or neutralising potential and actual opponents within his party and outside.

Today, there is an acute lack of serious replacements for Mugabe, except for the rather uninspiring and boring Morgan Tsvangirai. What is tragic is that whatever hopes he offered, Tsvangirai is no longer a worthy horse to bet on. The man appears effectively checkmated so that even his continued leadership of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) might be at stake. If Mugabe resigned today, there is not a leader who could smoothly assume his mantle.

Second, it is worth looking at the strategies of the key players in Zimbabwe's politics - the ability of political players to articulate a vision sufficiently aspirational to evoke popular support.

Part of the problem is ideological. Whereas there is no clear ideological polarisation in SA, buzzwords such as black empowerment, African renaissance, rainbow nation, Batho Pele, human rights and racial equality (or racism) have been instrumentally used by political players to evoke ideological and identity sympathies among different constituencies. In contrast, political players in Zimbabwe are not showing any creativity in this direction.

Instead, Mugabe seems to have successfully deployed a (literal) black and white divide. In Mugabe's rhetorical world, the contest is between black Zimbabweans and white Anglo-Saxons. The former are the good guys and the latter the bad guys. He leads the good guys and British Prime Minister Tony Blair leads the bad guys. Tsvangirai and the MDC gain relevance in this scheme only as Blair's foot soldiers. In this context, such "trivialities", in Mugabe's world, as human rights and famine are necessary evils to achieve the greater good.

For its part, the MDC has failed to respond to this distortion effectively. It has focused on harping on the wrongs of Zanu (PF). This is as pointless as it is counterproductive. First, no one needs to be convinced that Mugabe's is not a democratic regime. The media is doing a better job at this than the MDC.

Second, by focusing on the wrongs of Zanu (PF), the MDC allows the party to hog media coverage. In politics, any publicity is good publicity. Most disturbing is that by focusing on the sins of the Mugabe regime, in the same language as the international media, the MDC vindicates Mugabe's contention that it is a puppet of an external enemy. It is unclear how the
price of potatoes will change were Tsvangirai and the MDC to assume power today. The MDC has failed to articulate a clear alternative vision for the country.

Third, the playing field in Zimbabwe today is extremely uneven.

The constitution gives the president so much power that in any political contest he has a head start. For example, the constitution allows the president to nominate 30 out of 150 MPs to the national assembly. This means that there are only 120 seats to be contested through elections. If the president's party won 46 seats, and the opposition won the remaining 74 seats, by nominating 30 of his cronies, the president's party would still have a majority of 76.

When opposing a regime that has few qualms about using strong-arm tactics to get its way, it was stupendously naive for the MDC to expect electoral victory. In such circumstances, the clever thing to do is to try to change the rules of the game, or entirely refuse to play. And here lies the chicken-and-egg impasse. To change the constitution, the MDC needs to control a majority in parliament; to get a majority in parliament, the constitution has to be changed.

Zimbabwe's constitution - authored at Lancaster House and amended by Mugabe - is inherently dictatorial and can never be compatible with the envisioned democratic norms and values for the southern African subregion.

What other options did the MDC have? Let us focus on the safest and most plausible, civil disobedience. For civil disobedience to work, it should be well organised, overwhelming and cataclysmic enough to bring the functioning of government to a standstill.

The MDC leadership, however, does not come out as radical and bold enough to plan for, and accept responsibility for, ugly outcomes such as violence and dead people. It is striking that after its electoral loss in 2002, Tsvangirai actually accepted being bogged down in drawn-out court battles. This not only sapped the MDC's energy and resources, but exposed its
weakness. If it had had the wherewithal, the MDC could have easily prevailed on its leader to ignore court summons, and used his arrest to precipitate civil disobedience.

Unfortunately for the MDC, Zanu (PF) was already leading a bizarre form of state-sponsored civil disobedience in the form of farm invasions. Importantly, it unabashedly employed all available political resources, including state-sanctioned violence. The police, the National Youth Services and "war veterans" in their teens were used to unleash wholesale violence in the country. The genius of Zanu (PF)'s strategy was in harnessing latent desperation among Zimbabwe's population, and whipping it up to nationalistic fervour. Besides, this violence was rewarded, thereby attaching a political economy to it.

The MDC chose to play the nice guy. This was, of course, a clever strategy. It gave the MDC the moral high ground among international constituencies. But, along the way, the MDC seemed to have lost the plot. It seemed to have taken the strategy for the truth, a highly amorphous thing in high-octane politics. The next thing was that the MDC lost political initiative and
became captured by external actors with interests in Zimbabwe.

Is it a surprise that even Zimbabweans who think that the Zanu (PF) is the worst thing after the slave trade doubt the MDC's credibility, let alone its desirability?

It would seem that a bright future for Zimbabwe can be born only out of an implosion of Zanu (PF) as factions become enveloped in a succession battle. Maybe the edifice is already decaying.

Monyae teaches international relations at Wits; Chesang is a PhD fellow at the Centre on Africa's International Relations at Wits.