[DEBATE] : (Fwd) David Moore on Zim deal bust

[Patrick Bond]

http://concernedafricascholars.org/zimbabwe-failing-better/

Zimbabwe: Failing Better?
By David Moore | 3 January 2009

The words of Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho fit Zimbabwe. If the process 
of ‘democratisation’, liberalisation, and all those other aspects of 
capitalist modernity is ‘westward,’ then Zimbabwe under a challenged 
Mugabe has been heading there in almost the worst conceivable way. But 
for the democrats struggling to enlarge their space the words of the 
ultimate tragic optimist are appropriate too. More than three decades 
(including the liberation war after the mid-seventies) under Mugabe have 
meant those attempting to widen space for their democratic desires being 
doomed to repeat Beckett’s injunction: “ever tried? Ever failed? No 
matter, try again, fail again, Fail better”.(1) It’s hard not to “throw 
up for good” in such a struggle, but they haven’t yet. The problem, 
though, is finding a way to combine parliamentary and 
extra-parliamentary roads to that end.(2)

As these words were written Zimbabwe was on the edge of another of its 
many historical precipices. Mid September’s high hopes for a 
transitional government based on the Agreement between the Zimbabwe 
African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and the Two Movement 
for Democratic Change (MDC) Formations, on Resolving the Challenges 
Facing Zimbabwe had seemed to come to naught. Yet there had been hope. 
Zimbabwe’s two main parties (and the third, a small splinter of the 
Movement for Democratic Change — MDC-M, led by once radical university 
student Arthur Mutambara) signed the settlement on September 11. A huge 
SADC procession four days later poured praise on SADC’s facilitator 
Thabo Mbeki for pulling the hare out of the hat, and appeared to add 
enough pomp and circumstance to satisfy Mugabe’s royal pretensions. Many 
thought it would mark the beginning of his end, even if it fell far 
short of registering the full extent of changes in Zimbabwe’s democratic 
contours since the MDC had been struggling for its due share of power in 
1999. To be sure, warnings ensued from the National Constitutional 
Assembly’s Lovemore Maduku that the accord was ‘more of capitulation by 
the MDC than by ZANU-PF’ that only gave ‘cosmetic executive authority’ 
for Tsvangirai(3), and the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions thought it 
wasn’t worth its paper. A hard front in the MDC led reportedly by 
Secretary-General Tendai Biti (also a former student radical) took its 
cue from civil society, opposing the parliamentarians who’d very much 
have liked to get down to work — and continue to get paid: by the end of 
October their salaries in a non-functioning parliament were only worth 
US$10 a month. Harare sources claimed that Mutambara had joined his old 
university chum to call for abandoning the deal, although his partners 
Welshman Ncube and Priscilla Misihairabwi-sMushonga, who led the 2005 
split away from Tsvangirai and later invited Mutambara back from his 
American pursuits of robotic science and historically devoted to 
parliament at any cost, would presumably be against that strategy. It 
could be that the volatile Mutambara, badly bruised by appearing to be a 
Mugabe acolyte during the pre-settlement conjuncture, was recouping his 
student-civil society credentials.(4)

The MPs were sitting on the cusp of a significant victory: Mugabe had 
unilaterally called parliament — now structured by the March 29 MDC 
victory that even the ZANU-PF biased Zimbabwe Electoral Commission could 
not fix, after five weeks of trying (5) ) — to sit in late August, 
hoping an MDC-M candidate for speaker would cause some friction on its 
August 23’s election. But some MDC-M members voted against their 
candidate, as did a few from ZANU-PF. The MDC-T’s National Chairman 
Lovemore Moyo won the speaker’s prize with 110 votes of the assembly’s 
210. Some of these votes weren’t quite private, given that many MPs 
waved their marked ballots to all and sundry (thus inciting Independent 
MP Jonathan Moyo, ZANU-PF’s former propaganda chief, to file an 
application to the High Court against it), and it has been said that a 
few were paid for by Freedom House’s Orange revolutionaries: 
nevertheless they constituted something of parliamentary coup. Democracy 
seemed to be on a roll.

Of course there was no doubt that the September 11 settlement signified 
dual power, not shared power. Sharing would be too warm and fuzzy a 
concept to describe the feelings between the MDC and ZANU-PF after an 
eight and a half year campaign in which the latter used every dirty 
trick in the book, and invented new ones when those ran out. But in 
spite of awkward notions such as giving Morgan Tsvangirai prime 
ministerial ‘executive power’ over a cabinet ‘council’ which was 
actually the same as the cabinet over which Mugabe would preside, and 
creating two deputy prime ministers from the MDCs to match Mugabe’s two 
vice-presidents, there was a decent core to the 18 or more month 
transitional scheme. The drafting of the accord was almost half and half 
MDC liberal humanism (“DETERMINED to act in a manner that demonstrates 
respect for the democratic values of justice, fairness, openness, 
tolerance, equality, respect of all persons and human rights” and “to 
build a society free of violence, fear, intimidation, hatred, patronage, 
corruption and founded on justice, fairness, openness, transparency, 
dignity and equality”) side by side with ZANU-PFist nationalism 
(“RECOGNISING and accepting that the Land Question has been at the core 
of the contestation in Zimbabwe”, noting “the present economic and 
political isolation of Zimbabwe by the United Kingdom, European Union, 
United States of America and other sections of the International 
Community” and that “the primary obligation of compensating former land 
owners for land acquired rests on the former colonial power” (6)), but a 
momentum borne by that intangible concept of political ‘will’ might have 
carried it on beyond the hackneyed past. If the MDC-T and MDC-M could 
have co-operated they’d have held a fragile one-seat majority in cabinet 
and parliament (and it was expected the ‘appointments’ to Senate and 
governorships would be even-handed). There would have been economic and 
military councils, and a widely consultative process to create a new 
constitution on which the National Constitutional Assembly, which 
started the whole process of constitutional democratisation back in 
1998, started work immediately on that score. As well, a Periodic Review 
Mechanism, consisting of two members from each party, signified equal 
weighting (although one can argue that the Mutambara faction may not 
‘really’ deserve equality at such a level, having only gained 10 seats 
and 4.83% of the March 29 vote,) on final say.

Even the naysayers seemed to think there’d be a fair sharing of 
important cabinet posts. The MDC, it was agreed — but never signed — had 
secured the departments of Home Affairs, Justice, Finance and 
Information Ministries while ZANU-PF retained Defence, Agriculture, 
Mines and Prisons. An MDC MP with a long tradition in the labour unions, 
eager to take up his new legislative seat, opined ‘we are not at war: 
Mugabe can keep the army;’ when queried on rumours that Anglo-American 
and the like had pushed hard for the deal — any deal! — in fear of 
heightened British sanctions, he joked ‘I hope they sponsor my football 
team.’ Even the caustic RW Johnson was buoyed by the prospect of 
imperial intervention: he declared that the trusty Brits would ride in 
to rectify the military.(7) The crazed Gideon Gono would be no longer 
chair of the Reserve Bank, so the donors’ “Fishmongers” plan (named 
after the Harare restaurant in which the usual suspects met to draft 
tough IMF-style shock therapy with lots of humanitarian band-aids) would 
cool an inflation rate that as of mid-October was 231,000,000%. With the 
help of a billion and a half dollars of aid, Zimbabwe would soon reach 
its (mythical) historical status of ‘breadbasket’ state. As if 
immaculately conceived, a 240 page ‘discussion document’ authored by a 
UNDP team ranging from University of Zimbabwe Management Studies 
professor Tony Hawkins on the right to former Zimbabwe Congress of Trade 
Unions (ZCTU) economist Godfrey Kanyenze on the left was unveiled, 
promising economic nirvana (if heaven was last seen in 1991) in 12 years 
if growth could average five per cent annually. The ‘manufactured in 
Zimbabwe’ Comprehensive Economic Recovery in Zimbabwe(8) struck radical 
political economist Patrick Bond as ‘neo-liberal’, perhaps because it 
said that Zimbabwe is not ready for a ‘developmental state’, while John 
Robertson, an economist of more orthodox bent, said it would only serve 
to breed bureaucrats. On signing, Tsvangirai said to the sceptical 
Sunday Independent reporter that he had to give the ‘benefit of the 
doubt’ to the man who had so often labelled him as Blair’s tea-boy and 
an ignorant ‘chematama’ (fat-face).(9)

Yet by November it looked as if none of this would come to pass. For 
some reason Tsvangirai had buckled to the SADC negotiator’s ‘don’t 
worry: crisis what crisis?’ attitude to the construction of the cabinet 
(along with just about everything else in Zimbabwe) and failed to gain 
guarantees on the distribution of posts. Thabo Mbeki, known to harbour a 
pungent dislike for Tsvangirai (“he could never lead Zimbabwe to 
liberation”, he’s reported to have said) must have foreseen his 
unceremonious sacking back home at the hands of the ANC’s Zuma gang, so 
pushed Tsvangirai to accept empty promises about that cabinet. Mugabe, 
who as ex-guerrilla leader (thrown into jail from 1977 to 1980 by Mugabe 
and Samora Machel for seeming to be a threat to the former) and now 
co-leader of the oppositional Zimbabwe Liberation Veterans’ Forum 
Wilfred Mhanda says will take the 1% of a deal that looks 99% against 
him and win, was soon to deny the MDC’s place at the table. Beholden to 
the prospects of losing control of the ZANU-PF congress in December, and 
tied to a rejectionist camp led by Emmerson Mnangagwa (infamous for his 
role as head of security in the Gukurahundi that claimed thousands of 
lives as ZANU-PF forced Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union 
to enter into a unity pact that no one wants to see repeated now: ZAPU 
was swallowed whole) he could not summon the strength to deprive any of 
his ministers of a place around the trough. Cutting a cabinet of thirty 
in half is not an easy task: nor is giving up the military or finance. 
The former keeps opposition in check and precludes justice for sins of 
the past; the latter keeps the official rate of exchange alive and thus 
the main channel of corruption (it takes about four billion Zimbabwean 
dollars to buy one American one on the parallel market, but only ten 
thousand if one has access to the official rate!). A Harare story that 
Mnangagwa pushed the unelected Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa (who 
in 2002 had, with the active encouragement of perhaps the only foreign 
policy-maker in South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, entered into heavy 
negotiations with then MDC Secretary-General Welshman Ncube, thus nicely 
the sewing lines of division in the MDC that contributed to its split in 
2005), and was severely beaten by Mugabe’s bodyguards, indicates the 
strains in the ruling party that is governing less and less every day. 
The popular exaggeration of the rumour, that had Mnangagwa pushing 
Mugabe, was squelched by one man who knows Mugabe well: if that had 
happened, he said, Mnangagwa would now be dead. Mugabe himself has 
admitted publicly that he fears rebellion from within.(10) Mugabe 
remembers the mid-1970s divisions in ZANU very well, and probably après 
moi, la deluge, not quite realising the storms have been pelting for 
nearly a decade.

Thus on October 12, a day after the three main protagonists in the 
prolonged haggling over dividing the cabinet positions agreed to call in 
Private Citizen Mbeki, in need of consultancy fees during his forced 
retirement, ZANU-PF announced the cabinet: Defence, Home Affairs, 
Justice, Media and Higher Education (those pesky students have to be 
watched) would be all for the ruling party, while the two MDCs were 
thrown the crumbs with economic reconstruction and social welfare 
functions — not good candidates for winning an election in a few years 
sans the donors pitching in for a government that is not even plus ça 
change. Finance was unresolved: perhaps that was left to the itinerant 
negotiator to assign. Tsvangirai addressed an October 12 rally saying 
that unless Home Affairs would be in his hands, the deal would be off. 
He was facing a split in his party: some said that only a demand for a 
new national election would save the MDC-T face. In the meantime, 
concerned activists were consulting the SADC (Southern African 
Development Community) and AU (African Union) diplomats persuading them 
to call an emergency summit. The Zimbabwe Liberation Veterans’ Forum, 
made up of war veterans opposed to their peers who allied with Mugabe in 
the hopes they’d get some free land, appealed to the AU and SADC to let 
go of the lame-duck mediator and get a new process rolling. The ZLVF 
wondered “what informs the position of SADC leaders by conferring 
legitimacy to a rogue president whose hands drip with the blood of his 
own people and not of his imagined enemies from the West.” (11)

As expected, the October 13-15 meetings mediated by South Africa’s past 
president resolved only that the MDC could take Finance for its 
troubles. Somewhere along the line it was proposed that Home Affairs be 
split: the MDC could take immigration functions while the guys with guns 
would be in the violent party’s hands. No deal: and Tsvangirai seemed to 
be gaining ground. Denied a passport for months (Home Affairs says there 
is no paper, but swimming star Kirsten Coventry got one in days and 
civil servants say the document is sitting in a desk) he refused to take 
emergency travel documents enabling him to attend the October 20 meeting 
of the SADC security troika+1 (Chair, South Africa; members, Angola, 
Mozambique and Swaziland) in Mbabane. And so, as the summer begins in 
southern Africa, millions of Zimbabweans are dying faster than ever 
before and the MDC ups the ante to SADC as a whole (to meet in South 
Africa in the first week of November), then the AU, and then elections 
to be monitored by the UN.

The time for such an intervention whilst thousands were beginning to 
starve as never before, would be, however, far too long. Kwashiorkor, 
Pellagra (an adult form of malnutrition leading to madness and death) 
and Marasmus stalked the land: estimates were that five million would be 
in danger of starvation by January 2009. The senior doctors are bought 
off: as Jan Raath wrote, in September the Reserve Bank bought imported 
cars for the hundred or so of them. The cost? US$5 million.(12) The 
state had no funds to run examinations for its schools; and towards the 
end of October it recalled all government vehicles from their temporary 
users.

A new election could bring hope or more despair. There are indications 
that this is what the Mnangagwa faction wants. They will take complete 
power in the December ZANU-PF congress and resort again to the 
Gukurahundi tactics that raised their head in the weeks before the June 
27 non-election to such an extent that Tsvangirai withdrew. This line of 
thought predicts that the MDC will be destroyed so they had better sign 
a deal now.

On the other hand, if the UN could rise out of its bureaucratic lethargy 
and run a real election — something that, if it had taken place more 
than half a decade ago, might have solved the problem in the making — 
the humanitarian aid would flow in. Millions of lives could be saved, 
and more than a modicum of democracy could creep in. However, the UN is 
not well-known for doing much of anything in Africa — is the Democratic 
Republic of the Congo a success story? — although, ironically, one of 
its more successful elections was managed by Zimbabwean professor of law 
Reg Austin, in Cambodia in 1992. If one writes off the UN, only the 
settlement is left. The MDC would like two years to let the Economic 
Council bring a material base back in, and the constitution could be 
debated vigorously.


Joshua Bakacheza, an MDC activist, was abducted by men in a truck on 25 
June 2008 in Msasa, Harare and shot in the head a few hours later, 
according to his colleague who survived a bullet to the head and the 
lungs in the same incident. Bakacheza’s body was discovered lying in the 
open on 5 July, after a search of ten days. This pattern of abduction 
and subsequent murder account for 45 known deaths during April-June 
2008.(13)

Could a wounded Mbeki magically wave his wand to solve all this? Could 
SADC? The AU? Resorting to fantasy in something approaching an 
‘academic’ article illustrates the surreal nature of Zimbabwe now. The 
fact that senior doctors drive around in hypocritical abuse of their 
Hippocratic Oath while grown men and women place their faith in an 
Aids-denialist brings us back to Beckett and his tradition. Such 
tragedies take us back to the world of literature, a salvation in 
Africa’s perpetual crisis. This time, a leading MDC politician still 
under treason charges invokes African writers to state his position. 
Tendai Biti, writing of the crisis in education, brings Ngugi wa 
Thiongo’s brilliant The Wizard of the Crow to his side: for him Ngugi’s 
‘Abhurian State’ “brilliantly describes” what happens to ruling classes 
and their empty ideology of nationalism.

Faced with the frustration of failing to transform the colonial state 
during the national democratic stage of the struggle, nationalism 
degenerates and decomposes into neo-patrimony, clientelism, the imperial 
presidency and patronage. In short, it converts the state into a rogue 
state where violence, corruption and personal accumulation become 
vehicles for the continued reproduction of the state.

The Abhurian State … had been fore-written by Chinua Achebe in A Man of 
the People, Sembene Ousmane in The Last of the Empire and Ayi Kwei Armah 
in The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born. At that stage, the highest level 
of decomposition, nationalism needs to be saved from itself or it will 
take the nation with it.

That is exactly where Zimbabwe is at the present moment. ZANU-PF needs 
to be saved from itself or it will annihilate the construct that 
Zimbabwe is.(14)

There is no doubt that the energies consumed in ridding Zimbabwe of 
Mugabe could be better spent elsewhere. If that one task could be 
achieved, it may not be chimerical to advance the proposition that the 
edifice he has built around himself would fall like a house of cards. 
One can only hope, with Beckett, that Zimbabwe’s next failure will be 
better than usual: the doctors’ cars remind us, though, that failure for 
some is success for others. Zimbabwe’s political economy needs drastic 
overhauling, so those making new constitutions in this interregnum — a 
space in which the wisdom of those running the financial markets of the 
world is seen to be equivalent to Robert Mugabe’s — must constitute a 
new economy too.

_________
David Moore
Anthropology and Development Studies
University of Johannesburg

1 . Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, London: John Calder, 1983. The ‘tragic 
optimist’ school of African studies is epitomised by Christopher 
Cramer’s exceptional Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for 
Violence in Developing Countries, London: Hurst & Co, 2006 (its Indiana 
University Press version is more boringly called Violence in Developing 
Countries: War, Memory, Progress).

2. David Moore and Tapera Kapuya ‘Zimbabwe’s Opposition Now: The 
Parliamentary Road or Mass Action on the Streets?’ Global Dialogue, 10, 
2 (August 2005), pp. 4-9.

3. Basildon Peta, ‘Tsvangirai confident that deal will work’, Sunday 
Independent (Johannesburg), September 14, 2008, Edn. 3.

4. By the end of October it was reported that the MDC was proposing to 
remove the rival faction from the agreement. This was after Mutambara 
had spoken in support of Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision not to attend a 
Southern African Development Community meeting in Mbabane called in the 
last week of October to settle the deal (about which more later). 
Zimbabwean politics is nothing if not volatile. Jason Moyo, ‘MDC sets 
its sights on the UN’, Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) October 
31-November 6, 2008, p. 14.

5. Susan Booyson, ‘The Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in 
Zimbabwe, March and June 2008’, Electoral Studies, 24, 4 (forthcoming 
December 2008). See also Booysen’s authored Electoral Institute of 
Southern Africa, The Zimbabwe Harmonised Elections of 29 March 2008, 
Presidential, Parliamentary and Local Government Elections with 
Postscript on the Presidential Run-off of 27 June 2008 and the 
Multi-Party Agreement of 15 September 2008, Electoral Institute of 
Southern Africa Observer Mission Report No. 28, Johannesburg, 2008.

6. The best juxtaposition was this: the accord promised to “reject any 
unlawful, violent, undemocratic and unconstitutional means of changing 
governments” and also warned that “no outsiders have a right to call or 
campaign for regime change in Zimbabwe”.

7. RW Johnson, ‘Security is first test of Zimbabwe deal’, Sunday Times 
(London), September 14, 2008.

8. United Nations Development Programme, Comprehensive Economic Recovery 
in Zimbabwe: A Discussion Document, Harare, 2008.

9. Peta, ‘Tsvangirai confident ….

10. Jason Moyo, ‘Mugabe Fears Zanu-PF Rebellion’, Mail & Guardian, 
October 31-November 6, 2008, pp. 13-4.

11. The Zimbabwe Liberation Veterans’ Forum, ‘An Appeal for the African 
Union to Intervene to Resolve the Zimbabwean Political Impasse’, Harare: 
August 26 2008.

12. Jan Raath, ‘Aid agencies: 5m face starvation in Zimbabwe: Silently, 
in rundown wards, starving children lie dying - malnutrition diseases 
are overwhelming hospitals,’ Times Online, October 14, 2008.

13. Solidarity Peace Trust, Desperately Seeking Sanity: What Prospects 
for a New Beginning in Zimbabwe? (Solidarity Peace Trust, July 2008).

14. Tendai Biti, ‘MDC: Collapse of education system an indictment of 
ZANU PF,’ MDC Press Statement, October 13, 2008. On SW Radio Africa, 
www.swradioafrica.com/pages/mdconeduc131008.htm.