By Reason Wafawarova April 1, 2008

The March 29 election result for Zimbabwe might still be pending announcement at the time of the writing piece but all indications are that the people of Zimbabwe have decided to have a change of government. It would take a complete miracle to have the incumbent ZANU PF government retained, at least from the figures so far released.

The fact that a small African country of 14 million people held an election may not sound like an item likely to make worldwide headlines but there are so many international players currently involved in Zimbabwean politics – that including the mighty US and Zimbabwe’s former colonial master, Britain. It is because of these players, whose vested interests are at play, that there is so much international attention on the politics of Zimbabwe.

The election itself has been a two-force race between ZANU PF, in government since independence in 1980, and the opposition MDC, formed in 1999 just before the repossession of white occupied land by the government – a repossession that sought to redress colonial imbalances according to the ZANU PF government and cynically seen as nothing but a populist move to woo peasant voters by the opposition MDC.

There is no doubt that had it not been for the land issue, the MDC stood every chance to win the 2000 general election – an election they narrowly lost by just four parliamentary seats. The land issue was packaged with the ideological warfare articulated through the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial rhetoric – all centred on the nationalistic doctrine and the principle of sovereignty.

The MDC refused to compete with ZANU PF on its anti-West and anti-imperialism path and rather chose to be what they called “partners” with the Western ruling elite and for the past nine years the two parties have been on an ideological and political warpath where ZANU PF boasted of Eastern friends from places like Malaysia, China and India as well as from most African states, and the MDC enjoyed backing from the West and Zimbabwe’s Diaspora, mainly residing in Western countries like Britain, Australia, the US, Canada and many other places.

The Presidential election of 2002 was largely fought on the same policies as in 2000 and Morgan Tsvangirai lost by about 400 000 in a hotly disputed result where there were accusations of an uneven political playing field, fraud and intimidation. Election 2005 came at a time when there were schisms and fighting in the opposition and the MDC managed only 41 out of 120 seats.

However, the economy of Zimbabwe has been on a sharp decline since the late nineties and the situation acutely deteriorated in 2007 and during election campaigning inflation shot from an official rate of 24 000% to 100 000%. This, coupled and exacerbated by a whole lot of other economic challenges like food shortages, high unemployment, power and water shortages, seems to be the major reason why the people of Zimbabwe have decided to rest ZANU PF in favour of the neo-liberal opposition MDC.

Morgan Tsvangirai admitted during election campaigns that there was a large chunk of a protest vote that was going to send their message to ZANU PF through voting for the opposition and the results pattern does show a significant surge by the MDC into former ZANU PF strongholds, especially the rural areas.

It is important that analyses is taken on the domestic players in Zimbabwean politics and that will be done later in this piece but for now there is need to look at ZANU PF and Robert Mugabe. It appears like ZANU PF will be the third liberation movement to be removed from power in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a bloc of 14 countries in the Southern part of Africa. The first was Malawi’s Hastings Kamuzu Banda government followed by Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda government in the early nineties.

Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Swaziland, and the rest of Sadc, other than the Democratic Republic of Congo which is a special case – are all still under the rule of the liberation movements that brought independence from colonial rule.

ZANU PF was formed in 1963 and fought the liberation war from the rear bases in neighbouring Mozambique, with the backing of socialist Eastern Europe and China. At independence in 1980, the party adopted a socialist ideology that resulted in impressive achievements in free education and free health care. There was a health centre within every ten kilometres in the country and the literacy rate rose to 93% a figure only second to Kenya’s 94%, if one were to look at the entire African continent.

By the late 1980s the ZANU PF government was moving to the right and relations with the West were increasing each day, a development largely attributed to the colonial legacy that was deeply entrenched in both the leadership of the country and the people. It is this time that Robert Mugabe was awarded the Knighthood by the Queen of England.

Towards the end of the Cold War, the ZANU PF government renounced socialism and they said they were adopting what Robert Mugabe called “scientific socialism”.
By 1991 they did away with the “Leadership Code” which limited wealth accumulation by government leadership and they adopted the Washington Consensus plan – that programme called Economic Structural Adjustment Programme. Starting 1992 ESAP was implemented and as everywhere else it came with privatisation of essential services like transport, education, power supplies, communication and social services.

Government expenditure was reduced through massive retrenchments in the public service and private companies were advised to downsize in line with the neo-liberal advice that sought to realign the “socialist economy” with the neo-liberal forces – sold to the public as market forces.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) whose Secretary General was Morgan Tsvangirai was on a war path with the government for the loss of so many jobs and the suffering that came with it.
The Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU) fought running battles with the police as there were countrywide protests against privatisation of education.
By 1995, the suffering brought about by ESAP was now unbearable for many and the government still pursued the IMF policies although they officially announced that they had abandoned ESAP. At the end of 1997, the ZCTU organised nation wide demonstrations against a development levy that had been mutated from an AIDS levy and the protests resulted in massive food riots with a lot of shops and private property destroyed by rioting workers and jobless youths.

The same year the National Constitutional Assembly was formed and they started to exert a lot of pressure on the government, as they demanded a new constitution and an abandonment of the Lancaster House constitution agreed upon between Britain and Zimbabwe at independence.

In 1998, the veterans of the liberation war embarked on nationwide demonstrations demanding compensation for their efforts during the war and they were awarded Z$50 000 each, a figure then too high to be sustained. The result was a fall of the Zimbabwean dollar from Z$3 to Z$11 for the US dollar. The high expenditure for the military intervention in Congo did not make matters any better economically.

By 1999, there were so many problems affecting all sectors of the population and many people called on the ZCTU to transform into a political party.

The MDC

The MDC was then born out of the workers union with Morgan Tsvangirai taking over the reigns as its president and many players from the student union, civil society and the workers union came in as part of the leadership. The movement was so powerful that it blocked a government effort to address part of the problems by embarking on a draft constitutional proposal for a new body of the supreme law. The MDC, together with the NCA campaigned successfully for a “NO” vote and the draft was thwarted.

It is this draft that brought in the element of Britain and the US. The government had put in a close that white owned farmlands would be compulsorily acquired and redistributed among landless peasants. This close send shock waves to the settler white farmers and they invested heavily in the NCA and MDC and video footage of the fundraising campaigns were widely shown on television, mainly through the BBC.

The Westminster Foundation for Democracy also came in and they had incriminating evidence of their funding of the MDC on their website, which they later removed after the ZANU PF government capitalised on it to denounce the MDC.

In short the MDC shifted from a workers party fighting the neo-liberal IMF policies adopted by the ZANU PF government to a neo-liberal project meant to wrestle power from the ZANU PF.

Sensing danger, ZANU PF proceeded with land acquisition through a forceful occupation of white owned land by war veterans and peasants.
Needless to say, the Blair government could not stomach this and Britain mobilised the Commonwealth, the EU and the US to isolate Zimbabwe.

The diplomatic war between London and Harare has always been central to the politics of Zimbabwe since the land reforms began in 2000.

ZANU PF labelled the opposition MDC regime change agents and puppets and the MDC labelled ZANU PF a dictatorship with no respect for human rights and the rule of law.

There was marked polarity in Zimbabwe for the past eight years and it will take some time for the relations between Zimbabweans of different political persuasions to heal.

The peasants have been supporting ZANU PF for its liberation war legacy and its rhetoric on sovereignty and anti-imperialism, not least for the land many of them were allocated. However, the gap between rhetoric and reality has been widening with the effect of the sanctions biting so hard on the ordinary person. It seems many people chose election 2008 to vote for relief from the pain of the faltering economy ahead of nationalistic values packaged in the doctrine of sovereignty and self-determination.
In a sense its like another Chile of a kind, save that there was no violent conflict in the deposing of the ZANU PF government.

The Dilemma of the Left

It has always been difficult for a Marxist or a leftist to adopt a position on the Zimbabwe issue. There are those like the activists in the Pan Africanist Liberation Organisation (PALO) and many leftist academics in Africa who have taken the view that Robert Mugabe and his ZANU PF government are just mere victims of the neo-liberal imperialist agenda at the mercy of the unthinking bully the US has become. To these Mugabe is a valiant revolutionary and a well-meaning Marxist soldier of ideas.

Then there are others like Stephen Zunes, Chair of the board of academic advisors to the US ruling class’s International Centre for Non-violent Conflict and Patrick Bond, director of the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa – writers who feature a lot in many leftist media.

Some of the writings of these two on governments pursuing the traditional leftist agenda in South America, Africa and elsewhere can be counted upon by such media as New York Times or the Washington Post, even by the US’s State Department and by the White House.

Like the White House and the State Department, some of these writers celebrate civil society and the US’s idea of spreading human rights and democracy. Bond called the Zimbabwe civil society “the main wellspring of hope for a Zimbabwean recovery” – that despite the well known funding of the same civil society by the rich imperialist ruling elite.

It would appear like there are certain rules that now guide some of the analyses by formulaic leftists when it comes to governments that have disrupted property relations that once existed and favoured Western investors, banks and corporations.
Are African and South American civil societies a main wellspring of hope for democracy or a main wellspring of hope for a return to colonialism, albeit in a refined form?

Stephen Gowans, a Canadian socialist writer asserts that there are rules, now used by leftists, mainly in the West, to make analyses of what is happening in less industrialised countries, particularly those countries following the anti-imperialist route.

The first of these rules is that all governments pursuing traditional leftist agendas of placing control of a country’s resources and productive property in the hands of the public, the government and the domestic business class are inherently bad. The leaders of such governments are often accused of empty rhetoric, of talking left while walking right and they are seen as employing leftist rhetoric to hang on to power – something that may be true in some cases but not always. These governments are often seen as enjoying enormous privileges secured and defended by corruption and abuse of authority – something that had become visibly apparent with the ZANU PF government in the past eight years.

Then there is this hope that civil societies are the answer to a bright future and there are leftist academics and activists who conveniently chose to believe that these societies remain independent even if they are funded by the US Congress’s National Endowment for Democracy, by the US State Department’s USAID, by Britain’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy, by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation or Australia’s AUSAID.

The National Endowment for Democracy, for example funds the opposition in Venezuela and they have been funding the NCA and the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights but still there are people from the left who will maintain that such organizations are a wellspring of hope.

Gowans also talks of another rule where analyses are made on the theory that decentralised, participatory democracy is all good and an absolute good. Any deviation from this type of democracy is seen as evil and an absolute evil.

Then there is this belief that the process is more important than the outcome. This is why the issue of Zimbabweans being the owners of their own land has been seen as less important than upholding the British parliamentary tradition in Zimbabwe. This is why this land issue is less important than the US’s idea of freedom and democracy and that is why the issue is many times less important than a realisation of the importance of civil society and their funded gospel of freedom and human rights.

This is the attitude that created the economic warfare that has brought ZANU PF down in the just ended election. This is the attitude that has resulted in threats of military intervention and the actual acts of military aggression in any parts of this world so far invaded by the US-led imperialist alliance.

Gowans talks of another rule where governments that call themselves anti-imperialists or socialist or both are seen as neither of these and are said to be just as deplorable as the imperialists and the neo-liberals. In all this civil society and Western funded political parties are still seen as the wellspring of hope despite their source of funding. The contradictions have to be adapted to and one has to live with them if they are to make it in this neo-liberal world order.

Then there is the rule of public opinion where reports and utterings of politicians in the Western media are seen as the truth just because it was on CNN or BBC.
In this sense the narratives of the US State Department, CNN news and such mouthpieces are used as the yardstick to analyse leftist governments across the world.

The there is this other rule of appealing to authority. People simply say “listen to me because I have passed through Zimbabwe or because I live near there, henceforth I am an authority.” Some have used documentaries to claim absolute authority over issues to do with countries that are thousands of miles away and there are tens and tens of such documentaries outlining the politics of Zimbabwe, especially when it comes to the land issue.

Lastly there is the use of definitive statements; where it is very simple to just stand up and say “Mugabe is a dictator” or “Morgan Tsvangirai is a puppet”. These definitive statements have shaped public opinion in Zimbabwe and it also created the polarisation that has deeply divided the people on political grounds.

After this phase in Zimbabwe, history will judge Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF and as an era is closed Mugabe will have to stand the trial of time and history as either a true Marxist revolutionary that gave back land to the rightful owners or a dictator who used leftist rhetoric to hang on to power. Will Mugabe be absolved by history? Will he be condemned by history? Is he going to be one of those historical figures always dividing the opinion of people – people like Enersto Che Guevara, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara and Fidel Castro.

People of Zimbabwe will be celebrating their new path and all hope is that their expectations will be met but this writer will quickly remind all that Daniel Ortega is back in Nicaragua because neo-liberal promise of a happy life ever after were never fulfilled. Ortega was an anti-imperialist leader who was ousted by Washington for his efforts but not after biting sanctions similar to those Zimbabwe has suffered for the past eight years and also a protracted sponsored war involving the US trained and armed contras.

History will tell us about Mugabe and the future will tell Zimbabweans about Morgan Tsvangirai. For now it is the end of an era and the beginning of another era.