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After all, apart from paying taxes to Caesar, and apart from dying — itself the ultimate tithe payable by all to the Almighty — the only other thing so certain in our modern democratic lives is the ballot, with its often gory rituals. But here in our small corner of the world, matters are a bit different. Even a sun that dares peep from the East, dares dive into the westerly Earth to die for the night, can become a talking point.

When the age of innocence ended
Between 2000 and now, we have had more elections than we have had in the past 20 years of our Independence, more elections than are justified by any sensible segmentation of time or bundle of governing activities. Elections have fractured time and practice, fractured the rhyme of normal governance, apparently without bringing us any real solutions.

Hostile outsiders want to believe the trouble is with us Zimbabweans, not with the Western concept of electoral democracy.
I am too young to know and will only listen as elders parley on this one. But our electoral experience has been incremental, both in numerical terms, and by way of sheer intractability. Time was when we used to have local government elections, parliamentary elections and Presidential elections, each anticipating the other, each neatly organised around definite time frames: five-year and six-year terms.

Clean start, clean closure. Real halcyon electoral days!
When we used to rest ourselves.
We knew when this season of electoral madness would fall due.
We knew when sanity would return to the whole village.

Then a long, tranquil respite would return, often lasting five long years, during which ruptured souls would be sutured, during which all would heal, most would forgive and forget until another era of angry tongues, of borrowed, formulaic anger, would arrive yet again.

There was a time to bicker and to batter.

There was a time to banter, a time of loud laughter sure to ring across villages, across parties even.
Everything fell in place neatly.
And we were mature enough to know that the national body politic could only take so many blows, so much pain at any one time, any one season, which is why we calibrated the assault on it, to allow it time enough to breathe, to heal. Parliamentary elections this year, presidential elections next year, and so on and so on. Matters glided and, hey, it was an exquisitely civilised era.

Democracy fatigue
But what came is what came!
One season, all that vanished, leaving our body politic with multiple holes, all crying to be plugged, and then sutured. And in typical Zimbabwean impatience, we went for one hefty effort. We called that Herculean effort Harmonised Elections, by which we attacked all holes: local government, parliamentary, senatorial and Presidential all rolled in one. At the end of this multiple democracy, we all slumped back, dead tired but with no harmony.

Not a single hole had been sealed and the body politic bled furiously, with it our collective welfare. By July 2008, we all looked remarkably fatigued by this thing called democracy. Everyone panted from it, bore its ugly scars, this avowed source and fount of good governance! The whole nation took the shape of a curled dog, that curl of a badly mauled dog intruding from another village, all to reach a bitch in heat.
Vicious rivals then fall upon it, leaving it badly bitten, badly beaten and struggling to reach its weeping thighs for a bit of saliva balm, for a bit of relief.

We needed time to coil in order to reach and to lick our bleeding hinds. That excruciating interlude, we grandly called the Global Political Agreement, GPA for short. Need we then wonder that a Zimbabwean will jump erect and pull a revolver at the mere mention of the word “election”?

Time as a figure of speech
But even in that pain and fatigue, we still retained our characteristic impatience and made sure that this respite would only last two short, frenetic years. We reasoned those two years would be long enough for us to catch a breath, to heal and be composed enough for another haul. Or did we think time would stand by, walk slovenly, wait or even suspend itself for us to recover?

We the sons and daughters of Munhumutapa!
Judging by the noises I hear now, noises suggesting elections are coming too soon, voices which in other words think the designated two years came too soon, it is clear our two years were never a numerical magnitude, merely a figure of speech for time indeterminate, time circular, never time linear.

African time, in other words which moves to collective leisure and convenience. The calendar two years have come and gone and we mighty Zimbabweans think the good Lord is to blame for speedy time.
For how else could two years have passed while we still remained fatigued, not fully rested? Still I hear time’s tyrannical bark, ordering an election in 2011.
Yet another election. We will go the polls.

Negative consensus
Let us help each other understand the electoral process, and from our reaction of it, understand our collective folly and absurdity.

Here are the facts.
None of the three political parties can singly cause an election.
None!
Equally, none of the three parties can singly stop an election.

None!
In the same way, none of the three parties can singly end the inclusive Government.
Or sustain it, clearly a stupid point to make given that one party cannot make an inclusive summer!

Somewhere in the GPA must surely lie a clause which allows any party to pull out of the inclusive Government, but without denying the rest the right to remain in it, with it.
This could be the small clause which the MDC-T may have forgotten to read when it thought a political boycott was such a wonderful, crippling tool of protest in the inclusive Government.
I am sure they are now a lot wiser, and do now know that a boycott merely allows the remaining two political parties to forge ahead, with less distraction.
The clause was meant to pre-empt deadlocks.

Looking at the constitution of the players in this Government, clearly this was a stroke of genius by our drafters.

A fairy tale called GPA
The GPA recognises that the President wields the constitutional tools for causing and declaring elections, but predicates the exercise of this power — awesome to some — on a political consensus forged by the three principals. It says the three principals must agree to go to the polls, setting a date for it.

Clear, very clear! To optimistic minds this clarity translates to simplicity of process: that the principals will simply sit under a muwonde tree, ask each other how the night before had been, before getting down to the business of quickly agreeing to go to elections; and on such and such a day.

But all this happens in the never-never land of changelings, a fairy land where a god miraculously emerges from a machine to deal with any complications as might visit human affairs.
I last visited that land when I was reading Greek drama in college. None of us inhabits that happy world, however hard we may yearn for it.
We survive on terra firma, on this land of hard rock and thistles, the land where disagreements and grief often stalk the affairs of man and woman.

Read against this hard reality, the GPA amounts to an enormous leap of faith in the goodness of politicians.

Firstly, it has a presumption of selflessness which is so hard to grasp.
It thinks contracting politicians will one day wake up selflessly wanting to end their new found “love” while it still lasts, a love which the GPA hopes will not solidify into a real marriage.
In our real world, power seeks persistence, seeks its own perpetuation by whatever pretext, decent or obscene.

GPA says the men governing will be the men to meet to end their own marriage!

When whole Government is all parties
I thought I saw a letter in one of our papers calling on the Government to resign, arguing the whole Government has failed the nation during the two-year interregnum.

Bemused I wondered if the writer understood himself/herself. Yes, the accent is on the “whole” Government. When a “whole” Government fails in a political arrangement where “whole” means “all parties”, who asks who to resign? Standing on what platform?
What is worse, who replaces that “whole” Government which happens to have been constituted from Zimbabwe’s “whole” parties, at least as we had them then?

Such calls clearly show how little we have understood the political state we are in. Inclusive politics has meant all ruling, none opposing, indeed an era of democratic, consensual mis-governance. Did I hear Mutambara ask rhetorically who would be foolish enough to want to end the inclusive Government, with it the gliding Mercs? That is real power for you.

Sending a child with hot coal
Secondly, the GPA hopes that amidst known differences, and likely conflicts between contracting parties, politicians will still be composed and commonsensical enough to want to meet, discuss and agree on an electoral timetable. Was it Jonathan Swift who said “expect no more from man than he is capable of”?

I am still trying the grasp the human model the GPA worked with at the time of its birth. But then Jonathan Swift was British, more accurately Irish. He could not have been referring to an African man, I hear you saying. Fine. Chinua Achebe, the sage from big brother country, Nigeria: An injured community agrees to send a deputation to the offending village a few strides, a few rivers, a morning walk away.

Strangely and against advice from its ashen-haired elders, the aggrieved community sends its most warlike citizens as emissaries to seek and bring peace. Expectedly, they come back with a hot war, bagging hate and boiling emotion. It turns out they had asked peace while shaking assegais for emphasis. Umuofia is puzzled by the response to its search and sue for peace. Whereupon one of the village elder reminds Umuofia: you do not place a parcel of live coal in tender hands of a child and exhort him to speedily deliver it to your neighbour with utmost care!

Now see with what care the child has delivered the parcel, the old man said, looking away in disgust. He even spat a dark gob, from poorly pounded tobacco.

Masimukatienzane
The imagery comes from the African village and its meaning is hard to miss. What may be easy to miss is its application in our daily lives, as indeed we seem to have missed its relevance when we sealed the GPA. Tsvangirai is angry that Mugabe did not stroke his ego as he made personnel decisions in Government. Mugabe maintains — with good legal reason — that Tsvangirai is needlessly fretful. After all, he is not the much awaited guest.

What has he to do with that chicken cooking in the pot, meant for the visitor? He must wait for an invitation, or for that day he will be the eagerly awaited guest, or an obliging host. Mutambara feels slighted by the personnel movements, but does not think the slight is serious enough to force him to stand Mugabe up, toe-to-toe, knee-to-knee, chest-to-chest, head-to-head, to gauge who is taller (masimukatienzane!).

Tsvangirai has become the proverbial child carrying live coal. There is no dialogue, if by that we refer to a sit-together-and-let’s-agree arrangement. Whereto the GPA? That takes me to a crucial point which has been missed by many.

Choppy waters
In politics there is away of agreeing through vehement disagreements. The GPA does not seem to know that. As things stand, the decision to go to the polls could very well be reached through a negative consensus. And the makings of one such are all but in place. Mugabe wants elections at most six months after the referendum. Tsvangirai does not want elections, but could never possibly say so. He speaks in tongues, or through some other people’s tongues.

His real wish comes to the public as advice, as exhortations from cautious interest groups seemingly outside the party he leads. He thus must appear to want them, regardless. But we know better. And his impulsiveness over a small matter, has now taken him beyond the edge, leaving him insecurely docked in choppy waters, drifting towards the unintended. Mutambara and Welshman do not want elections now or anytime before 2013, but can only raise technicalities, apart from moulding an ogre out of a likely Zanu-PF victory.

It is as if this is a new prospect, as if Zanu-PF is winning elections for the first time. If Welshman and Arthur are tired of shadow boxing, the one matter which will allow either of them to catch a breath and take a sip of water, it is this one matter to do with not having elections now. These are the hard temperaments, the hard realities we have on the ground, not the goodly politician GPA visualises.

Negative capabilities
What we have before us is a perfect situation where none of the parties is able to cause or stop elections, but one where by wanting or not wanting elections, all parties are then causing them. As a matter of inadvertence for the two, and as a matter of calculated negative persuasion for the one. Spare me a moment and let me explain myself. The net result of the three conflicting positions is to bring about dysfunctionality in the inclusive Government, a dysfunctionality whose only panacea is seeking a fresh verdict and mandate from the people.

Is that not the prophylaxis for all politics-related pathogens? So what begins as disagreement over elections in fact creates conditions for the justification of those very elections. The universal practice is that failed power-sharing agreements or arrangements are resolved and healed by fresh elections. It is no sense acknowledging differences in the power-sharing deal while decrying the prospect of elections.

And this is one simple lesson our cheering NGOs and private media did not grasp early enough before their damaging cheer. A peacock that pecks on the rest up to Christmas time turns itself into a strong candidate for a deadly Xmas cheer. By instigating conflicts within the inclusive Government, wishing and cheering them even, NGOs and the private media were in fact calling for early elections.

Chimakure does not seem to realise this.
And today, by urging Zuma to intervene — whether diplomatically or with a heavy hand (whatever that means) — they are poorly hiding their fear of polls they have already instigated and justified.

Yesterday’s cheer, today’s jeer
After all, when we went to Namibia for the Sadc Summit, the reading was that Zuma will push for early elections and that was made to read like a whiplash to Zanu-PF. What has gone so wrong to make yesterday’s cheer today’s jeer? So it is not about Zanu-PF’s calculations; it is not about Zimbabwe’s prospects for a free and fair elections. It is about what we have implied and asked for through our management of the body politic under conditions of inclusivity. It is about what we have alleged regarding the desirability of the inclusive Government as a lasting formulae.

The GPA has not been fully implemented. Conditions on the ground are not suitable for free and fair elections. How can they be when we still have sanctions and brazen foreign interference in our political processes? How can they be when only one side is allowed space on SWRadio and Studio 7? How can they be when one party is weighed down by sanctions?

And all these negative factors are not likely to go away, judging by the West’s reluctance to engage, the MDC-T’s wish for more sanctions. Clearly the issue of an uneven playing field cannot be a sound argument against elections, less so when being made by architects of that unevenness.

Solving unevenness
Society cannot recoil from consequences of its actions and disposition. And those consequences have to be lived with, hopefully lived through. Maybe the issue of unevenness is post-electoral, not a precondition for elections, to allow whoever wins to then deal effectively with the outstanding issues which happen to be on the Zanu-PF side. If the vote goes to Zanu-PF, then that party has to devise ways of dealing with sanctions effectively.

And we need to disabuse ourselves from the myth that sanctions will be removed as a gift from the West. They could have long gone, if that was possible. Sanctions can only be defeated and Zanu-PF now has means for doing that. If the vote goes to any of the MDC formations, it will be up to them to deal with sanctions as best they see how. After all MDC-T says it is now deferring the issue of a new constitution until after it has won elections. Why not the same for outstanding issues, all of which happen to relate to Zanu-PF?

Pips in Parliament
Let me retire one other matter linked to this one. This week Members of Parliament from all parties, and led by Honourable Paddy Zhanda of Zanu-PF, raised a petition to the State President virtually challenging the idea of going for a fresh poll. Of course they were not foolish enough to say, “Mr President, you cannot take us to another election.” Instead they sought to dissuade the President by raising fictitious costs likely to be incurred by such a decision.

MPs, alongside civil servants (you can see the mischief), should have salaries matching those given to their peers in the region.   They pegged it at US$2 000 per MP, and backdated to the beginnings of their present tenure. They also want a monetised compensation equivalent to the years by which their tenure will have been abridged, should we go for an early election.

They go further. Their vehicles were destroyed during Copac. They want new ones which presumably they will take away at the end of their term whenever that will be. Work out the sum and read everything against nhava yenyika izere mhepo and you appreciate what the MPs are conveying to the President, beyond genuine issues of welfare.

What fear did not see
Except they have not been detained by two elementary points. Firstly, they do not seem familiar with the Constitution they swear to die for: the powers it grants the President on elections. Secondly, they forgot they passed Amendment 19 with much aplomb. It is that Amendment that gave GPA a two-year life span, admittedly with the discretion to negotiate for its possible extension. And the word is “discretion” which GPA solely reposed in the principals of their respective political parties.

One could add a third point which has to do with their powers under the Appropriation Act by which Government budget is passed. They can easily withhold their consent, causing a constitutional crisis which makes certain their own dissolution, followed by a swift election they do not want. So, far from communicating a real threat, they have merely communicated a fear arising from their shaky foothold on voters, a crumbling foothold which seems sure to underwrite their oblivion.

Interestingly, while uniting in composing this petition to the President, they have not been able to strike the same all-parties unity in their own work as Parliamentarians. Victoria Falls tested this miasmic unity which collapsed so spectacularly over the issue of sanctions as it relates to the budget. Again this week, we had an MDC-T Member of Parliament asking not just for the retention of existing sanctions, but actually calling for more sanctions, a call made clearly against the dictates of the GPA.

The lady who bared her lingerie
It is a call that found an echo in Australia where Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to that country, one Zwambila, not only called for the same, but actually inflicted her message on her rebellious staff through indecent exposure. So awestruck was the staff that to the man, none remembers the colour of Her Excellency’s lingerie, or how clean it was on that fateful day!

Much worse, the staff forgot nowadays cellphones are equipped with cameras which favour such situations. I would have snapped her insides from all angles, like a policeman covering a crime scene.
Which it could have been, with a better response! Then you have the disruptions in the Senate. All these actions summed together, vindicate the call for an early election, do they not?
The Parliamentarians are writing what their behaviours decry.

The myth of new constitution
Then we have a second myth which has been so carefully nurtured. It relates to what we have been doing through Copac. The pot-boiler has been to say Zimbabweans are working towards a “new” constitution which must be in place before the next elections. Really? I look so hard in the GPA to find which portion says so.

What I easily find in the GPA is the desire to find out from Zimbabweans what constitution they want for themselves. In that sense, Copac was a process of consulting the people, which is why I find the phrase “a people-driven constitution” too presumptuous and too judgemental. Equally, the drafting phase of this consultation does not produce a people’s constitution. It produces an interpretation of the consultative process which does not equate to the people’s views. This is why there is a referendum standing in between consultations and the final outcome, whatever it shall be.

It is a way of testing that draft in relation to what the people want constitutionally. And the referendum is not uni-directionally meant to yield “a new” constitution. For all we know, it could yield a rejection of a new constitution. But whichever way the referendum goes, its conclusion will necessitate an election soon after. Nowhere in the GPA does it say an election shall be consequent upon the completion of “a new constitution” for the country. Nowhere.

We will have elections, please. And the President is right to indicate we can only delay by six months, themselves already provided for in the Constitution.
We have used this flexibility once.

Looking for a decent pretext
But the preceding assumes all things are equal, which they rarely are, less so in our situation.
As things stand, MDC-T has already indicated it has withdrawn its support for the constitutional process, the only outstanding issue being how to formalise that withdrawal without losing face.
I see them getting that opportunity during the drafting process where disagreements are inevitable. If they were unavoidable in the 2000 draft which was more or less dominated by Zanu-PF, what more in the present process where dissimilarities are so glaring and so yoked together? And the motives for going through the process in the first place were as diverse as there were players.

MDC-M, the smaller brother of the threesome, wanted to use the process to get a decent reprieve that would elongate its otherwise short lifespan. There is a way in which both the inclusive Government and the constitutional process gave MDC-M a larger-than-itself role which it so relishes to this day. MDC-T was not looking for a timeless document we call a constitution. Far, far from it. It was looking for a legal enabler to winning the next poll and ensuring the irreversibility of that win once it came.

It sought to ensure that Zanu-PF was sufficiently too hamstrung to be able to extort any poll advantages ahead of it, while ensuring a combination of security sector reforms and multiple observer missions or even a peace-keeping force was in place to play bodyguard to its win and the resultant government it saw itself forming.

For it, therefore, this tactical position used the everyday parlance of “new constitution” to legitimise its short-term bid for power. It sought a legal architecture democratically skewed enough against Zanu-PF to assure it of a win. This is what collapsed during Copac, and with it MDC-T’s appetite for the constitutional exercise.

Zanu-PF’s quest
Zanu-PF on the other hand sought to ensure its core values and core gains in the past 30 years were safeguarded and would carry it through the next poll. Apart from enshrining the gaols of its second and third Chimurenga, Zanu-PF used the Copac process to test its structures for the looming poll. Zanu-PF’s strategy was thus both medium-term in the sense of consolidation, and tactical in the sense of mounting a dry-run for the next poll.

Strictly speaking, none of the parties looked for a new constitution. None is anxious for one and yes, Lovemore Madhuku is right in that respect. But all are anxious to win the next poll and this is the defining dynamic. We will have elections, I say.

Then comes the real imbroglio…
That creates a very interestingly scenario. Whose baby will the post-drafting product be, ahead of the referendum? Who will push for its adoption? Who will oppose it? If MDC-T opposes it, who takes it for a referendum?

And when whoever takes it for a referendum wins, how does it pass Parliamentary processes to become the country’s supreme law? Will parties and MPs again become GPA’s goodly politicians who will unite and agree, against themselves? We are set for elections, I say. Expect no more from man than he is capable of. Jonathan Swift is right.
Icho!