Of spiritual Revelations and
Opinion Surveys
On the 3rd of May
Afro-barometer released a survey titled ‘Which Direction is Zimbabwe Headed?
The Economy, Poverty and Trust in Leaders’. The survey has some intriguing
conclusions which must be taken seriously especially in the context of the NERA
campaign and the attempt to build a coalition of opposition parties. The last
time Afro-barometer released its survey before the 2013 general elections it
caused an uproar within the opposition formations in Zimbabwe. That particular
survey was dismissed as an attempt to ‘sanitize’ a process of stealing the election
and some went as far as providing prophetic statements that they had received
visions of Morgan Tsvangirai’s win over his longtime rival Robert Mugabe. In
the 2013 elections the MDC-T decided to ignore surveys and intellectuals, but
they paid dearly. We have travelled the route before of dismissing national
poll surveys. The recent survey has already had very variegated responses from
the opposition formations and some have dismissed the survey results as
understating the influence of the ‘margin of terror’. However, there have been
some sober voices who are saying ‘let’s pay attention to the data’ as outright
dismissal does not translate into a political strategy that will mitigate the
same ‘margin of terror’ to transfer from the poll survey to the polling station.
One of the things we have been trying to do at Gravitas is to really look
closely at Zimbabwe’s political economy and reveal how the party-state has
developed a complex set of instruments which entrenches its hegemony and the
results of the survey point to some important contestations which must be paid
attention to.
Understanding
the Data: Why Afro-Barometer Surveys Matter
The publication of the survey caused
quiet an intense debate; from the very banal which wanted to focus on the
methodology and methods used, through the more nuanced which sought to unpack
the data and ultimately also stirred some very robust debates. Takura Zhangazha
in his blog (11.05.2017) has argued that the survey must jolt those in the
opposition into action and this must be based on the ‘bread and butter’ issues
that dominated the survey results. Some
have even pointed that the Afrobarometer/MPOI survey might have been
‘state-funded’ and developed some very puzzling theories to support such a very
far-fetched unintellectual position. Yours truly, Co-Editors of Gravitas, attended
one of the Afrobarometer/MPOI dissemination seminar and the presentation kicked
up a storm of lively debates and it was interesting to note that the opposition
was very represented.
Fig
1.0 Takura Zhangazha: Opposition Must Pay Attention to Poll Results
We are not going to labor on the
questions of methodology but we are interested here in some very instructive
statistics and how they may be useful to the pro-democracy movement. For
instance, the survey revealed that over 64% of the population agreed that the
country was going in the wrong direction; secondly, 78% revealed that they were
not free to criticize the seating president and the same survey revealed that
64% trust President Mugabe while 36% distrust the opposition, thus causing
critiques within the pro-democracy movement to dismiss them. Some of the
arguments advanced to dismiss the statistics stem from the fact that if the majority
believe that the country is going in a wrong direction, then it follows that a
similar or closer margin should not trust the president. Whilst such arguments
may appeal to common sense they fail to grasp the complexities of social or
political phenomena. It may happen that the trust may stem from that they
attribute the bad performance of government to other factors or it could be an
issue of the effectiveness of propaganda. The contradictory nature of the
results may speak to the duality of African society or bifurcated nature as
advanced by Mamdani, Ekeh and Gumede. The scholars argue about the existence of
two publics or societies in one geographic polity yet is laden with
contradictory political and economic behaviour. Therefore, it may mean understanding
these survey needs to dig deeper at the structural nature of the society to
connect the dots and make sense of the surveys. The non-linearity or
non-teleological determinism of the statistics does not dismiss the validity of
the surveys but is a call for attentive listening to the pro-democracy
movement.
Grand-coalitions
Beyond the Memorandum of Understandings
Zimbabwe’s opposition political
formations have begun to build a grand-coalition in order to build a nationally
present political force which can effectively mobilize to dislodge ZANU PF from
state-power. The ruling elites on their
end have taken this ‘threat’ seriously and have constantly denounced the
coalition in the party-state controlled newspapers and state institutions
especially the security apparatus have been very busy throwing all sort of
spanners in the political terrain. As this process goes on there seems to be limited
attention being paid to a deliberate process of expanding the coalition to
reach out to non-traditional demographics by building a national policy agenda
as a platform for political mobilization and expanding the structural reach of
the opposition movement. Margaret Dongo has been scathing on the process
arguing that ‘It is not a coalition emanating from the grassroots, but an idea
of people who want to maintain power and are a busy trading persons, that’s
their supporters, in an envelope (sic). We need a coalition initiated by the
people on the ground, the voters themselves. A coalition should not be viewed as
a hiding nest for the corrupt and looters. In fact, Zimbabweans are not clear
yet about a coalition’ (Newsday, May 10 2017).
Fig
1.1 Will the Coalition Expand Beyond the Political Elites?
Some that are close to the opposition
have been very critical of any debates that point to the weaknesses of the
coalition especially its lack of a national policy agenda. However, there are
some heartening voices in the opposition gauging by the SAPES public debate
where PDP’s Jacob Mafume cautioned against treating the idea of a coalition as
a high school re-union or MDC-T’s Nelson Chamisa strong arguments for a
convergence of the various social classes (old and new) found in Zimbabwe’s
polity rather than a gathering of political parties only and the call to bring
back the ideas of the republic to inform our politics.
Fig
1.2 MDC-T Vice President calling for a broader coalition
Generally, the argument was that a
coalition has to go beyond trade in personality cults but to ideas coalescing
around addressing the different social discontent found in Zimbabwe’s political
economy. The faster this message rings and takes root in all opposition
formations, the faster that idea of grand coalition will gain traction and
prospects of success.
In the Herald of the 9th of
May 2017 an article written by Dr Toendepi Shonhe was regurgitated and an
infantile attempt was made to spin the analysis towards validating the
entrenchment of a ZANU PF party-state hegemony. The articles that we publish
through Gravitas as a briefing of the Institute of Public Affairs in Zimbabwe
(IPAZIM) have a deliberate political economy analysis which digs into the
structural questions which influence not only the electoral process but also
the economic transformation of the country and or lack of it. Dr Toendepi
Shonhe’s article was focused on structural questions of how Zimbabwe’s
political economy and especially agrarian changes are driving some income
accumulation and distribution questions, hence flagging these issues as
homework for the pro-democratic movement rather than the Herald’s imagined
soothsaying victory for ZANU PF. The propagandist’s wish! In the 1980s and
stretching into the 1990s there was a ‘cohort’ of Zimbabwean intellectuals like
Professor Masipula Sithole, Professor John Makumbe, Shadreck Gutto, Ibbo
Mandaza, Brian Raftopoulos, Professor Sachikonye, Professor Rudo Gaidzanwa, Dr
Godfrey Kanyenze, Professor Patricia Macfadden and the bombastic Kempton
Makamure who provided very welcome analyses of the actually existing political
economy and this is the tradition that informs Gravitas. We are alive to the
fact that building a broad political movement which can challenge nationalist
authoritarianism must be informed both by real political organization and that
political mobilization has to be strategically anchored in very clear
narratives and ideas. Historically it was very clear that colonialism,
settlerism and apartheid were very oppressive social/economic systems yet the
mobilization against such was esteemed in what was called the National
Democratic Revolution. Effectively this meant that the battleground was both
sustained by and through militancy which was itself immersed in a set of ideas
that had a very clear analysis of the actually existing political economy and
also presented a set of principles upon which future de-colonized societies
would be built.
Reconfigured
Political Economy & A National Agenda
One of the driving questions at Gravitas
is how do we deliberately expose the structural questions of Zimbabwe’s
political economy so as to inform, deliberately and strategically, the
contestations for a more democratic Zimbabwe. Around 2000
two major processes came to a head in Zimbabwe’s political landscape: on one
hand was the formation of the MDC whose handmaiden was the National Working
People’s Convention, on the other hand was the sharpening of civil society
mobilization via the National Constitutional Assembly. What is immediately
important here is to point out that the civil society mobilization of the 1990s
and spilling into the early 2000s provided a political terrain which was very
fertile for the MDC to build deep and legitimate political power.
Fig 1.3 Powerful Unions Meant a
Mobilised Social Base for the Opposition
It
is nearly 20 years since this process effectively transformed Zimbabwe’s
political terrain and over that period ZANU PF has marshalled the party
machinery and wielded the state apparatus to its agenda producing what has been
called the ‘party-state’. We are interested here in expanding the debate on
both the present state of Zimbabwe’s ‘civil society’ and partly that of the MDC
primarily because when one looks at these historical process; it emerges that
the MDC developed significant political and social power in a national context
in which civil society was nationally
popular. It was popular in the sense that the actually existing civil
society was grounded in everyday realities but most importantly there was a
very grounded connection between the civil society platforms and the
constituency they represented. This
connect between civil society institutions and the constituencies they represented
produced a structural relationship in which social discontent was articulated
in direct relationship with the actual constituency. The result was real social
political power which tilted the balance of forces in favor of the
pro-democracy movement, this balance of forces was only partially tilted back
to the party-state through a complex process of violence and nationalist
authoritarianism.
Complexities of Coalitions, Networks
& Civil Society Contestations
In
the twilight of the 1990s and the early 2000s it was very evident that civil
society could not be ignored by ZANU PF and the party-state started several
‘counter-intelligence’ projects of disinformation and where this failed they
interfered directly. The ZCTU was faced with a new ‘trade union’ called ZFTU,
the NCA was faced with the NDA; the ZINASU was faced by ZICOSU and the
repression and suppression of democratic space was carried out from; arrests,
torture, detentions and the threat of ‘de-registration’. The NCA could amass
thousands for a ‘peace protest’; the ZCTU was the key anchor of the national
social base where all other social classes came to coalesce; and residents’
organizations were organically organized. But here is what was peculiar about
the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s the organisations which constituted
themselves into the NCA for example and eventually the Crisis Coalition had a
real ‘rubber to the ground’ relationship with their constituencies. As a result,
it was common for the NCA activists, for ZINASU students and even MDC activists
to be actively involved in organizing a stayaway called by the ZCTU. Student
leaders participated in ‘Labour Forums’ and the NCA had a Taskforce which was
initially nationally organized but eventually had regional presence and also
even presence in 120 constituencies. These networks of civil society within
residents organisations; student organisations; women’s organisations and human
rights organisations meant there was an active social base which could be
relied on to challenge the state. Initially the party-state dismissed the NCA
as a ‘few people under a tree’ yet when the referendum was held and ZANU PF
lost it became very clear that the social base had shifted and social and
political power was now resting outside the party-state. The point here is that the rise and rise of
the MDC from 1999 to its peak during the GNU cannot be explained outside the
context of how an active civil society with an actual base was mobilized. The ‘No Vote’ was won by actual work on the
ground; women produced the Women’s Charter; the ZCTU structures mobilized workers;
the students mobilized students and residents organisations did the same: what
was very evident here is the referendum managed to build some sort of
confluence of disparate social and political forces into a national avalanche
of social discontent.
Making Authoritarianism Costly:
Expanding the Battle-lines Broadly
Ultimately,
we are arguing that while the primary responsibility of wrestling power from
ZANU PF lies in the hands of the Democratic Opposition (MDC-T and its cousins,
the NPP and perhaps the ‘coalition’) this is only possible in a terrain in
which civil society is very active and intensively nationally mobilized. The Democratic
Opposition can function more powerfully in a political economy in which there
is and it is linked to a very organized, very organic, very broad and very
popular civil society. Mobilized civil society and a well mobilized agenda
driven coalition will ensure a steady erosion of nationalist authoritarianism; in
the words of democratization theorist, Alfred Stephan, authoritarianism must be costly and the only
way to do it is to expand battle-lines and make sure the following happens: 1) resisting
integration into the regime; 2) guarding zones of autonomy against it; 3)
disputing its legitimacy; 4) raising the costs of authoritarian role; and 5)
creating a credible democratic alternative.
*Gravitas Co-Editors.
For any feedback please email: gravitas@ipazim.com.
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