Palookas have been cautious about the decision by feuding political protagonists ‘agreeing’ to forge a Government of National Unity (GNU) which came into force on the 11th of September 2008. From the onset, the devil’s advocates were insisting that the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) should not have signed the Global Political Agreement (GPA) without the resolving the contentious issues ranging from the fate of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor, the Attorney General, the governorship, ambassadorial postings to the permanent secretaries.
The decision by the MDC’s national council meeting held on the 17th of May 2009 to refer the ‘outstanding issues’ to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU) has proved the suspicious and cautious voices correct that the GNU is really going nowhere slowly, irrespective of the fact that at the time of signing the agreement it was seen as the only way out of the socio-political and economic abyss.
The stalemate is a clarion call to the people of Zimbabwe that, the ‘agreement’ is infested by machinations within Zanu PF that do not want the government to work smoothly. For Zanu PF, every day which lapses is a day closer to the election and imperatively, the successes of the government will send a message of confidence to the electorate crediting the MDC leadership for managing to address a decade of economic, social and political dry spell. Knowing Zanu PF the way every Zimbabwe understands it, it will not sit at its laurels as the electoral boulders of defeat are heading towards its door steps. As a matter of fact no party would be that naïve to smoothly open its own exit package, especially when power and the obsession of primitive accumulation and plunder of national resourses are at the core of its value system.
That is why on the 19th of May 2009, one of Zanu PF’s negotiators Nicolas Goche who is also the Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Development was quick to comment in The Herald that the decision by the MDC National Council was ‘pre-mature’. To the demagogy establishment, Goche and his principals are seemingly living in no man’s land; one wonders what the Russian train Minister implies when he argues that the principals have not reached a stalemate when two of the three principals are insisting that the remaining party has taken the GPA for an errant’s ride. The statement in itself shows that Zanu PF remains defiant to the call to change its behavior and refuses to whole heartedly implement the dictates of the GPA.
Zanu PF will therefore continue with its wayward behavior of bestowing itself the imperial powers to allocate what it deems irrelevant to its follies and holding back the carrot to ensure that the bigger picture of the next election remains in the hands of the very same centre which led the flowed electoral processes for the better part of the post independence period. The utterances by Goche are a clear statement of intent aimed at delaying the matter from going to SADC with its best bet being that of ensuring that the tenure of the newly elected president of the Republic of South Africa Jacob Zuma, as the chairperson of SADC comes to an end in August before gaining leverage on the region’s problem child.
Similarly, there are no guarantees that the Zanu PF sympathizers in SADC will change their behavior when approaching the arbitration of their creation. The ball will still remain in the hands of the SADC Executive Secretary Toamaz Salamao to continue managing the politics of brotherhood amongst the revolutionary movements in the region and sidelining those perceived to be threatening the extinction of the same movements.
The SADC leaders will definitely confess ignorance of the Attorney General Johannes Tomana’s over night spreading wings of tormenting the 18 abductees without arresting the abductors. Inimically, the AG went on to arrest of Vincent Kahiya and Constantine Chimakure who are the Editor and News Editor of The Zimbabwe Independent respectively on the 12th of May 2009 for rightfully publicizing what Tomana had revealed into the public domain that he knew the abductors but was reluctant to prosecute. They will bury their heads in sand and wish the missing political prisoners away and hear no evil as the harassment of journalists continues with impunity.
If the MDC is to come out of the SADC meeting ‘aggrieved again’ then the next step will be going to the AU. The ball game has changed; statesmen like Jakaya Kikwete are no-longer at the helm of the organization which had made strides towards making rationale decisions during his tenure. This time it will be a marathon race all the way to Tripoli, Libya. This is an empire of Colonel Maummer Gadhafi, a man who does not believe in elections previously quoted in the quarters of the media arguing that one cannot put revolutionaries under the test of a democratic barometer called an election. The same is true with the majority of the nations sitting in the grouping which President Mugabe once threatened that he was prepared to see a leader who would lift a finger about the blood bath of the June 27 election – as predicted no single leaders quizzed the octogenarian leader who had ‘won’ an election which even the AU observers had dismissed. The end will be tragic.
The danger lies in the two double edged swords namely, time and promises. As the three political formations remain entangled in the ‘outstanding’ issues, time will be passing and the populace will become increasingly hungry and angry since the promises will be pushed to the better end of the pipe dream. Such a calamity only but helps Zanu PF as it is bequeathed with an arsenic election message that the MDC had been making noise on the side lines when they joined the government they failed to deliver the manifesto promises.
In such a process the MDC is confronted with the quadruple quagmire of ensuring the government works, which is to a larger extend impossible under the current conditions, to repair broken relations with its friends of yester year who are increasingly raising their voices over some of the initiatives by the Zanu PF-MDC government, sustaining the political activity of the party which is fast being sidelined in favour of the government and ensuring that it structures the attainment of the end result, which is a victory in the election.
It is therefore advisable that the party re-engineers and rejuvenates its structures and intensifies the lifeline of the party which seems to have been forgotten in the hype of the so called ‘inclusivity’. From the onset there lied a danger of parachuting the majority of the senior leadership into the government leaving the party with little scope from an outsider’s perspective. Literally, the human resource mobility into the government left voids in the party, which if the party is going to be serious about the attainment of the above listed demands should address.
The paradox is that the top party leadership hierarchy, the president, vice-president, secretary general, treasurer, deputy treasurer, organizing secretary are in government, the national chairman is the speaker of parliament, leaving the deputy secretary general as the lone soul to fully commit to the party’s structures.
If the MDC is to become deeply endowed in the government’s business to the extent that the party issues an ultimatum on the outstanding issue at the same time withdrawing the pressure point of the ultimatum that the GNU should finalize the grey areas and insisting that it will not pull out from the government one will be led to the conclusion that the centre which is the party is marginally being weakened and really need to start self assessment.
The MDC’s brief from the people of Zimbabwe on the 29 of March was to lead the country however out of the supervening impossibility of the attainment of such, the party was send on a clear mandate to ensure that it opens democratic space and deliver on the social, humanitarian, political and economic morass which had pressed Zimbabwe’s auto-pilot baton to a precipice.
Very soon the people who entrusted the leadership to steer the wheels of change will start to gradually lose confidence depending on the actions of those in power. When the government was established, there was euphoria and crisis of expectations which the leadership failed to manage. All of a sudden, the messages coming from the leadership is “give us more time”, but as stated earlier on, time and promises are a very dangerous element, one leads into another.
The duck and diving by the ruling parties is drawing the country back to the drawing board of negotiations when the country is crying loud for the captains of the titanic to retain the highest statement of purpose and clarity of sight in the quest to address the plight of the people of Zimbabwe.
The public service which is still trading on the lines of allowances will soon start demanding its rightful status of professionals rewarded with salaries. The students who have been charged absurd fees will soon start asking hard questions through different avenues. The media which has been yearning for a reprieve from the suffocating arm of statutory regulation will start to ask the questions which will be embarrassing to answer and the rural peasants who have been waiting for the better part of the rain season to access fertilizer and seed to invest in the soils for survival will start questioning why its not happening?
As in the Nigerian idiom, you can never measure the length of the frog until its dead, but ours need to be measured when it is alive to console those lying in shallow graves after the June 27 violence orchestra master minded by Zanu PF and to bequeath the people of Zimbabwe with the right to dream again. Zimbabwe cannot afford another loss of productive time on the issues which are clearly outline in the GPA – please show the people of Zimbabwe leadership.
Tabani Moyo is a journalist based in Gokwe. He can be contacted on rebeljournalist@yahoo.com
