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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 Feb. - 1 March 2000 Issue No. 470 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 Feb. - 1 March 2000 Issue No. 470
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Heritage Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters To have and to have not
By Gamal Nkrumah
While authoritarian one-party rule still smoulders on, multi-party democracy is erupting on every side of the post-colonial African state. The central flame of highly personalised rule, which only a few years ago threatened to consume most parts of the continent, now appears to be dying out.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Zimbabwe. For years, the Western media portrayed President Robert Mugabe as a veritable menace to African civilisation. Yet last week's referendum results fly in the face of the constant allegations that the hero of independence had turned the country into a totalitarian state. Not that that could stop the stale old analysis from flowing. "Zimbabwe is poised on the brink of an abyss; it's make or break time," warned British Foreign Office Minister Peter Hains. "The politics that are being pursued [in Zimbabwe] are economically innumerate and politically illiterate," he went on to explain, for the benefit of any Zimbabweans who might still be listening.
Western governments have never made a secret of their distaste for Mugabe. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and many individual nations have long withdrawn financial support and development aid in protest at what they see as Mugabe's autocratic rule. They were equally outraged by his armed intervention in the Congo, which critics say has cost the country an estimated $200 million of military equipment. Some 11,000 troops, a third of Zimbabwe's army, are still bogged down there, defending the regime of President Laurent Kabila.
For me, the present situation in Zimbabwe has an eerie familiarity, as if I were witnessing a replay of history. In 1960, my father Kwame Nkrumah announced that he intended to hold a referendum on a new constitution. Nkrumah, like Mugabe, was involved militarily at the time in the Congo, where his troops were supporting the legendary premier Patrice Lumumba. In Nkrumah's Ghana, opposition leaders were allowed to publish and hold rallies, just as in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Yet the turn-out in both leaders' referenda was exceptionally low.
This month, a total of 697,754 people, or 54.6 per cent of those voting, cast their vote against the proposed new Zimbabwean constitution, while some 578,210 voted in favour. In total, around five million citizens were eligible to vote, but even including spoilt ballots, only 1,312,738 votes were cast -- a very poor turnout indeed. Was this because, for most ordinary Zimbabweans, the issues at stake seemed irrelevant? The true explanation may be more pragmatic than political: according to the United Nations, a quarter of the country's registered voters are actually dead, while a further two million have moved from one constituency to another since the roll was established.
Yet despite certain similarities, the situation in Zimbabwe today is not quite déjà vu. Nkrumah, like Mugabe, was much maligned in the Western media: yet he won his referendum, changing Ghana's constitution and strengthening his own presidential powers in the process. Mugabe, on the other hand, has just failed in his ambitions. Yet despite this striking difference between Ghana 1960 and Zimbabwe 2000, in the background there loomed then, just as there looms now, a far more potent form of control over society and the economy than any mere constitution: I mean, the financial clout and political capacity which enables the Western nations to cripple Third World economies at will, manipulate opposition leaders and generally ensure the continuity of the neo-colonial status quo.
Despite this defeat at the polls, however, it would be a mistake to write off Mugabe's ruling Zimbabwean African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) as a spent force. The party may not have done as well as it had hoped. Yet its singular lack of success had nothing to do with any dilution of its political message. "We left the entire [referendum] programme to the Constitutional Commission, indeed such was our abdication of responsibility that the party didn't have any advertising or promotional material to indicate the party's position on the draft constitution," Mugabe explained, almost apologetically, in a televised interview shortly after the referendum results were announced.
Critics claim that the proposed new constitution would have provided the basis for a would-be totalitarian state, with Mugabe firmly enthroned at its centre, not only as head of state and chief executive, but as de facto prime minister as well. Perhaps more to the point, the government would have been empowered to seize white-owned farms for redistribution to black peasants without payment of compensation -- a measure which would directly contravene the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, under which white Rhodesians surrendered power to the country's black majority.
Despite the referendum debacle, Mugabe remains a formidable presence on the political scene; nor does he appear to be particularly perturbed by his government's failure. Yet the result is doubtless sending shivers down the spines of many in his party. After all, Mugabe's position as president is safe whatever the outcome of the parliamentary elections set for next month, but theirs is not. As their day of reckoning looms, the president's right-hand men are doing their best to put a brave face on affairs.
Home Affairs Minister Dumiso Dabengwa described the result as a temporary setback. "Neo-colonial forces" were at work, explained Interior Minister Chen Chimutengwende. Meanwhile, debate within the ruling party is tentatively turning to ways of accommodating the opposition within the system. "[The] government accepts the result and respects the will of the people," said Mugabe, who turned 76 on 21 February. "What this means in legal and practical terms is that government business and national processes will continue to be conducted under the Lancaster House Constitution."
Despite the air of enforced calm, a special crisis cabinet meeting was called. "We meet today to discuss these flights of fancy, and more importantly to put in place an action programme for the [upcoming parliamentary] elections," Mugabe told the people soon afterwards. And the results of those elections may yet be kind to the men who bungled the referendum: ZANU-PF, after all, is still the only reasonably coherent party with an organisation operating on the national level.
Most of Zimbabwe's 120 constituencies are rural, and rural Zimbabweans constitute over 70 per cent of the 12.5 million population. ZANU-PF is firmly-rooted in the land and the peasants that farm it. But recently, the urban poor have emerged as the deciding factor in the swing towards the opposition parties. With inflation teetering around 70 per cent, and unemployment rates running at an estimated 60 per cent, the urban poor have seen an unprecedented fall in living standards. As a belated act of contrition, Mugabe publicly acknowledged the magnitude of the socio-economic crisis. "Time may have come for us to consider dependable measures of price control for commodities in protection of the people," he conceded.
Contrary to what Mugabe's critics would have us believe, Zimbabwe is no Soviet-style state, run on principles of "democratic centralism". The party does not control the economy, though it does exercise a monopoly over the mass media. The churches, the judiciary and the universities, though threatened at times, are all independent. Distribution remains in private -- and mainly white -- hands. The civil service, modelled on the British system, maintains an aloof detachment from the ruling party and the government. There are no penal laws against civil liberties. And indeed, the fact that the electorate rejected a new constitution which critics claimed would have strengthened Mugabe's hold on power, is itself eloquent testimony to the country's thriving democratic process.
"You can describe this as the start of a Chimurenga," said Lovemore Madhuku, deputy chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA). It was the Chimurenga war of national liberation that brought Mugabe to power soon after independence in 1980. "The referendum was about what the people of Zimbabwe want in a constitution, what they deserve. The constitution should be something they make themselves, something they can be proud of," Madhuku explained.
The profusion of names for the Zimbabwean opposition parties suggests a political and ideological complexity that is not borne out in reality. The labour-backed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is led by two charismatic trade unionists, Morgan Tsvangirai, an ethnic Shona, and Gibson Sibanda, an Ndebele. "Our goal is to remove Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF government by democratic means," Tsvangirai has publicly declared. Yet he has not been thrown into jail, or even threatened for this bold statement. "People stood up and said no to what is happening in this country," he later explained, commenting on the referendum result.
Having survived an attack on his offices at the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions headquarters, which he describes as an assassination attempt, Tsvangirai may yet join the growing list of democratically-elected African presidents with a trade union background if his party manages to edge ZANU-PF at the polls in 2002. Neighbouring Zambia's current President Frederick Chiluba was a union leader who, like Tsvangirai today, received considerable financial and moral backing from the West. Yet Chiluba's government has proved to be no less corrupt than that of his predecessor, Kenneth Kaunda. Many argue that if elected to power, Tsvangirai will only follow in Chiluba's footsteps and, once saddled with the burdens and compromises of government, will be only too glad to join in the merry-go-round of democratically-elected thieves who thrive all across the continent.
Though a common fate may await them all, it is getting harder in Zimbabwe to draw the line between the respectable opposition and the irresponsible movements. Many parties are only too eager to cash in on the resentment felt by Zimbabwe's black majority, including the disenchanted professional classes. The country's doctors went on strike last year. Farm incomes have plummeted even as commercial farmers' incomes have risen sharply. Half of the country's workforce is now unemployed. Above all, the glaring disparities that still divide black and white cannot mask the growing division of the blacks themselves, into "haves" and "have nots". For those who have not, change may be coming; but it is proving painfully slow.
