Zimpapers Logo

Joram Nyathi Group Political Editor
THE internal convulsions of the past few months in Zanu-PF, described variously either as factionalism or succession politics, portray a party at a major crossroads with serious implications for the nation of Zimbabwe to the extent that Zanu-PF is not only the ruling party but that for the past 34 years it has been the only political party which has been able to formulate and articulate a coherent national policy and vision firmly anchored in the desire to give concrete expression to the meaning of political independence in an African nation in fulfillment of the values and objectives of the liberation struggle.

Given this history and the heavy burden of a yet to be fulfilled broad agenda of indigenisation and black economic empowerment, these convulsions are very important. They highlight the need for a form of ideological self-examination and cleansing for the party as well as acknowledging a material reality that the man who has been at the helm of this nation and the ruling party will one day depart from us; that he has created a legacy, and that those who will immediately assume the leadership of both the party and government thereafter appreciate the imperative to define in both literal and metaphorical senses what is otherwise flippantly bandied about as a post-Mugabe era.

It is a history and a legacy which are full of controversy. Locals, but moreso, those who have and are still fighting Mugabe and view him as an obstacle to their agendas, have of late been working out these post-Mugabe scenarios. Those scenarios are based on their perceptions of the person or faction which wins the succession battles between the so-called hawks or hardliners and the doves or moderates.

That is how they want to project the future relations of their nations with Zimbabwe, and how they measure the security or threats to their vested interests in the country.

The relevant question is: moderate to who? On what issues? Hawks to who? On what issues? For at the end of the day, when all is said and done, the fights within Zanu-PF, beyond the immediate desire for political power, at the core fight is a legacy issue and who defines it. What does Mugabe stand for? How many in his party are prepared to burn at the stake to defend the radical policies he has championed since the enactment of the Land Acquisition Act in 1992?

It is up to Zimbabweans to collaborate with those outsiders who want us to see ourselves and President Mugabe through their own eyes and national priorities, or to see ourselves through our own eyes and where we want to be as a sovereign state. That task cannot be outsourced to those for whom Africa is only a source of raw materials and a huge and expanding supermarket for their finished products, for whom control of the economy is reduced to our managing foreign interests and holding token shares in foreign-own companies.

It was time Zanu-PF itself mustered the mettle internally to confront and pronounce itself on those scenarios. It is in this light that the December elective congress has become such a salutary event.

It is the leadership which emerges victorious from these internal ideological contradictions which will determine whether President Mugabe gets the honour he has earned defending the poor across the developing world and fighting rampaging imperialism or he is vilified for upsetting the post-colonial race-based property relations in Zimbabwe by executing the land reform programme to empower black indigenous people, thus forfeiting the global accolades which come with being portrayed in the Western media as a “democrat” and a defender of human rights and the rule of law.

This is critical to the extent that the axiom is accepted that history is written by the victors.

However, for some of us, it would be immeasurably regrettable if Zanu-PF’s internal fight turned into a terminal affair. This is a legacy fight which the comrades should be able to resolve with honour and dignity so that they live to fight together the bigger war against the forces of imperialism. The war President Mugabe is fighting against these forces of darkness will not end with his passing on, that is why that is also a legacy war.

We should never lose sight of the bigger picture, the bigger resource war already being fought in other parts of the globe under the rubric of “war on terror”, democracy, human rights, free markets and global security, and is creeping in a sinister fashion closer to home in the name of Ebola. Africom is real.

I referred earlier to the cathartic effect of these internal fights as a form of ideological self-cleansing. There was a time when the effect of sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe took their toll. There was momentary disorientation when everyone felt they were standing on their own. People graduated from universities but there were no jobs. Money lost all value. Shop shelves were empty.

There was no food.

The book of wisdom will show in Exodus 16 v 1-3 what happened in the Wilderness of Sin after the children of God left Egypt. After months of travel and hardship in the wilderness they lost all hope, were in deep despair about the promised “land of milk and honey”, Canaan. The congregation complained to Moses and Aaron his assistant; “Oh, that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full. For you have brought us out to this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

We have been through that. Those Zimbabweans who could, skipped the border crying murder. It was Wole Soyinka’s season of anomie. Simbene Ousmane says a hungry man will forget the way to the synagogue. So it was with a number of comrades, not always a case of simple venality. Such stressful times create immense opportunities for those wily fellows always diligently searching for chinks in the Zanu-PF ideological armour to thrust the fatal blow.

Beware in this war to congress that comrades don’t cast as flotsam ideological bedfellows who might in despair be turned into deadly ammunition in the bigger war ahead. The MDC-T has imploded and collapsed into a little lump. They would just love something that pumps into them fresh blood from people who have liberation war credentials. We are not out of the woods yet, people are still disoriented. The journey of visionary leadership often tends to be a lonesome one, filled with deadly quicksands.