Could There Be An End To The Zimbabwean Crisis?
By: ALEXACTUS T KAURE
OUR ship of state is today sinking! A few are manipulating the system to their advantage, but our intellectuals, our women, our youth, the masses are being flushed down the drain. All our systems, educational, economic, health, are in shambles. Yet we persist in our national obtuseness … Nigerians must think deeply.
We must shun the simplistic solutions now being proffered. Ken Saro-Wiwa
President Mugabe came, attended the SADC meetings and told his apprehensive colleagues and the rest of the audience his usual sermon – the West is the main cause of Zimbabwe’s problems. And I’m sure some people were clapping and nodding in agreement. He has been a master at that since the crisis began in his country. And that crisis began around 2000 with the rejection of the constitutional referendum that Mugabe wanted to bulldoze through and the subsequent violent invasion of mainly white commercial farms.
Thus no one is denying the existence of the Zimbabwean crisis. Otherwise we wouldn’t have so many Zimbabwean refugees scattered all over the world from Australia to South Africa and from Botswana to the UK. A broader section of the Zimbabwean population as well as interested observers agrees that there is a social, economic and political crisis presently besetting the country – dubbed problems of governance in the disingenuous language of new-speak.
Afro-pessimists, realists and optimists all recognise the existence of such a crisis but see it from different perspectives and ideological lenses. And they therefore have different views and expectations of its outcome and eventual resolution.
Now to see the crisis solely from one perspective as President Mugabe and others do is to privilege the external over the domestic causes of the problem or what Professor Mwesiga Baregu, my former colleague at SAPES Trust in Harare, would term ‘high international politics as opposed to low domestic politics’. Yes, the broader regional and global dimensions are important. But that’s not the whole story.
Because to do so is to absolve the Zimbabwean ruling elite and Mugabe himself of its singular responsibility – that of ensuring the well-being of its citizens and by extension the consolidation of African independence however limited this is at the present conjecture. Thus we have to make sure that the pendulum of explanation doesn’t tilt too much in one direction thus ending up with one-dimensional view of reality. So a number of factors are usually proffered to explain this crisis: governance and citizenship, democracy and civil society, land, regional and international dimensions and even the state itself has become part of the problem.
But some of these factors should by now have become irrelevant after a good 30 years of the country’s independence. In my view the problem of state, citizenship and lack of democratic politics are the ones at the centre of the Zimbabwean crisis. I think the grand unifying moment began to melt down immediately after country’s independence in the early 1980s with the issue of Matabeleland when Mugabe sent in his Korean-trained Fifth Brigade into Bulawayo to quell an uprising there – to flush them out (that was the language used). And he then went on to consolidate his one-party dominant system, of course, using state resources (as they do in other countries in the region including Namibia) without any regard for the SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections.
We are thus dealing with a whole host of inter-related and interlinking issues of citizenship, governance, politicisation of society, exclusion, militarisation and hegemonic discourse to legitimise Zanu (PF) policies and programmes. In a nutshell we are dealing with a crisis of the state and its various institutional failings which don’t provide for the necessary political space for citizens to speak, write, move and assemble freely in their own country. Thus the challenges for Zimbabwe are formidable but not insurmountable.
Thus all those concerned with the future of Zimbabwe must take the admonition of Ken Saro-Wiwa, cited above, seriously by thinking about an alternative state-building agenda, not only for Zimbabwe but the rest of Africa. Although this was written in the context of Nigerian problems it can as well equally applies to the rest of the continent.
The question of how to ensure that the country develops more durable democratic and sustainable state structures is one of the great political challenges facing Zimbabwe. In addition SADC has to address the question of Zimbabwe non-compliance with the successive rulings of the SADC Tribunal which are being totally ignored by Mugabe. Or is socio-economic devastation and state-sponsored violence by Zanu (PF) government all that it will give its citizens? And the rest of us have to simply sit by idly while another African country is going to the dogs!