By Tinashe L. Chimedza & Tamuka C. Chirimambowa** (Guest Bloggers) response to Blessing Vava
Factional Theatrics and Elite Contests
Factional Theatrics and Elite Contests
From time to time, Zimbabwe's political landscape is
gripped by mass hysteria when the elites in charge of the state spar amongst
each other. In fits of excitement and volumes of amnesia, the citizen suddenly
becomes ahistorical. The ruling factions within ZANU PF are treated as
'foundational'. Meaning that varied and convoluted interpretations are drawn
about the tantrums emanating from the ruling class. Conclusions are drawn up
quickly, infantilism writ large, that the ruling party is fissuring, that the
kudu horn must be oiled and sounded and gather the village crier for the burial.
That these intra-party infractions are so fundamental that they can shift the
way Zimbabwe is governed. At the peak of this hysteria, mistaken as a matter of
structure, some rush to say perhaps the elites are now tearing each other up
and that perchance, not political will, the ruling class will smoulder without
organised resistance. But it was Dr Alex Magaisa who summed the ruling class in
Zimbabwe as a ‘mafioso’ and elaborated how the ruling structure is a copy and
paste extractive class centred on violence and networks of patronage and paying
tributary. But consult history, the ruling class is a stubborn collection of
power and exploitation. Down in South Africa, the architects of apartheid are
gathering force apace and denying apartheid is a crime against humanity - and
poor Thabo Mbeki muddled a response.
For now, we turn to an interesting article, written by Blessing Vava, who paused whether these latest factions are a prelude to
another 'putsch'. In the article, he concluded that if the President 'buried
his head in the sand' then 'the devastating actions by cartels and corrupt businesspeople
will only serve to threaten to further destabilise Zimbabwe’ and that the
President might not finish his term of office. Others, before him, had already
jumped into the vortex, with prophecies of ‘November in February’. That was
Professor Jonathan Moyo, who has been furiously grinding his axe, getting
millstones ready and roped, salivating and ready to guillotine the architects
of the 2017 November Putsch. Blessing Vava broached the question of how
factional battles are now raging within the ruling strata in Zimbabwe but as
subsequent events showed the youth league has kissed and hugged with the party commissar
and accepted ‘party discipline’. The article was timely in the context of two
major contests. Firstly, the ruling party seems to have been gripped by
heightened instability that culminated in a series of press conferences by some
members of the youth league. Secondly, for some time now, within and outside
the ruling party there has been widespread discontent over what has been called
'state capture' and 'cartels'. People like former Minister of Finance Tendai Biti,
journalist Hopewell Chin'ono, Eddie Cross and a few others, have demonstrated
the extent to which key state institutions have been paralysed for private
gain.
While the article identified how these factions are
playing out it seems the analysis was not carried to its more logical
conclusion so that we have a robust grasp of what these factional theatrics
portend. In this article, we want to stretch the debate further and start from
where he ended chiefly because the article parlayed with the forces in play but
ended prematurely without hammering the nail. Firstly, the ‘state capture’ in
Zimbabwe is a noticeable variation that can be distinguished from the South
African case and this is significant. In South Africa what was called state
capture was in dribs and patches meaning that there were some elements of the
state, like parts of the intelligence, the police, the military and the
judiciary, that remained outside the orbit of state capture. Secondly, in
Zimbabwe state capture turns out to be such that of a general and systematic
character that state institutions have been subdued, in whole, to the whims of
private gain with the collusion of the President and his inner circle. The President
has been at the centre of the people who are accused of state capture meaning
that for the first-time state institutions, especially the treasury and the
central bank, are now under the unfettered control of the President and his
network of patronage. What has been called 'cartels' are in fact and practice
the different tributaries that the President and his inner circle have subdued
to empty the national coffers This is why any fight against cartels is an
implicit attack on the President and his backers.
Factions and Elite Fissures in historical view
While the ZANU PF party motto is ‘peace, unity and
development’ this is far from the ruling party in practice, the party in power
has displayed arrogance of power. The party slogan might well be ‘unity’ in
grand-looting and underdevelopment, and this is because the party is unified in
looting national resources and especially the treasury. These factions will
crop up from time to time but make no mistake, like Dr Magaisa, said in one
article this is a mafia structure which allows and sometimes deliberately
allows factions to emerge as long as the tributary flows to the ‘don’. To have
a firm grasp of how the politics of factions has served the ‘emperor’ in power
we must turn to Africa’s tyrants like Robert Mugabe and Kenya’s recently
departed, Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi. When in power tyrants actively provoke,
organise, promote and use carrots and sticks to make sure there are factions
raging at each other so that they appear as the neutral ‘arbiter’. In Kenya,
for example, President Moi was known to agree to two contradicting advisory
notes and let the people with those notes run around believing they had his
ear, only to be struck down mercilessly. Confusion within the party ranks is
often a creation of the puppet master at work. Bidding time, Machiavelli way. The
master of this game was Stalin and he ruled for long, isolating once good
friends, former allies, striking them down when it suited him and in that game,
he was unforgiving. Trotsky was isolated gently, deliberately and first he
found himself exiled and when he blinked, he ended with an ice pick in his
brain. Tyrants and tyranny are patient.
Mugabe authored and fed fat different factions
depending on the balance of forces within the ruling party. It was a deadly
game, when Solomon Mujuru blinked, he was burnt to death. A reading of
Blessing-Miles Tendi’s book The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe: Mujuru, the
liberation fighter and King Maker (2020), reveals how the former army
commander was dispatched when the factional wars demanded that his power be
liquidated. At one point it was Edgar Tekere who looked powerful and he was
checkmated; at another point, it was Dr Simba Makoni who seemed to gain
traction and he was forced out. The game started again, and this time Joyce
Mujuru was pitted against Emerson Mnangagwa, and eventually, the emperor showed
his hand early and was too thinly spread to swim out of the crocodile's lair -
violence. The key characteristic here was that Mugabe always successfully, using
party structures, patronage and intelligence service, resolved the factions
peacefully. When one faction appeared weak, he urged it on and when the other
faction appeared powerful, he struck them down mercilessly and pushed them out
of the party. Mugabe was able to play this game until the fateful putsch of November
2017 which carted him off and ended these long-running shenanigans. This time
when he struck down the 'Lacoste faction' he exposed his hand thinly and
underestimated the way the Vice President had marshalled the gun and tanks to
his aid. For the first time in ZANU PF’s post-colonial game plays, the army was
mobilised to rescue a specific faction within the ruling party. The precedent
has now been set, that anyone who feels aggrieved in the party and can marshal
the barracks can walk into Number 1 Chancellor Avenue and announce his or her
arrival.
Armed factions, Youthful Opposition and a National
revolt
So, what does this portend for Zimbabwe’s unstable
political future? As Blessing Vava,
pointed to, the attempt to cool down political contests through POLAD has
dismally failed. The failure of POLAD became obvious when President Thabo Mbeki
came to Zimbabwe. In a few words, POLAD has been ‘weaponised’ for three
purposes. One is to buy time within the party and state, increase authority and
allow breathing space for the President to assert his hegemony. Secondly, POLAD
is aimed at pre-emptying genuine political dialogue by ‘running’ to SADC and AU
and say ‘here we are talking’ so that Pan-African institutions are demobilised.
Thirdly, more dangerously when the broad dialogue commences POLAD members will
be so compromised, such that they will be used to ‘soil the soup’ – they will
be a choir of court camarillas doing the bidding for the paying puppet master.
This is why anyone who follows the POLAD meetings the government has been very
generous with hotels and a budget for 'anti-sanctions' is on the offer. This is
the price that tyranny is willing to pay so that when the broad dialogue
process commences there will be so much confusion in the process and tyranny
will stake its claims against the forces of progress and democracy. Apartheid
played the same game, so did white-settlerism at Lancaster, so did Mugabe in
2008.
The President is going to work very hard to provoke
factions within the party so that he emerges as the central point or arbiter of
these factions. Put simply, the President is trying hard to be puppet master
within the party and if this happens then the President will rule unperturbed.
This scenario is unlikely because the President, as Professor Mutambara is fond
of saying, he is a 'man of minimum ability'. Within one week the youth league
went from 'radical' press conferences, well-paid banners at the media centre,
getting 'fired' from the Politburo, getting suspended from the party, trying to
organise a 'youth rally or movement', refusing to go to the party
re-habilitation school of ideology which doesn't exist and finally capitulated
when they recanted their misbehaviour and hugged the ruling league Political
Commissar. And here is what they said to the Political Commissar, 'from the
word go we have emphasised we belong to the party. And we have said we take
direction from the party' and they have finally agreed to the 'Political
Commissar counselling and he will help to correct us'. This is why any analysis
of the factions within the ruling party has to penetrate the structure of power
and how this is articulated through society, to ignore the structure of power
and its class content is to climb a greased pole of prophecy and that arena is
a death of bed on many.
The barracks have tasted political power and the
the undisturbed sweetness of the national treasury. Slowly and solidly military
women and men have seeped into civilian state institutions where they now hold
powerful positions. And they do not hold this power for nothing; the military
is a highly regimented structure with a command and control element meaning at
any point they can be activated into operational duties. In the present set up
of ‘military-nationalists’ this has effectively subverted the constitutional
fabric in which the military is subservient to the people via elected
representatives. From the diamond fields of the Congo; the open field looting
in Marange and the repression; the billions siphoned through the Command
Agriculture grand looting scheme; the distribution and re-distribution of gold
claims; the militias used for mining and to feed the lines of patronage; the
deliberate controlling of the foreign currency market and running opaque
preference allocation system for cronies; the comrades of Mgagao are
back in full force and for the first time since the 1970s they have under them
an unprecedented amount of state, party power and money. Here is how they can be summed up:
The Zimbabwean economy looks to many like it’s
being run by people who have no idea what they are doing. One would be forgiven
for thinking it’s run by clowns who keep making economic blunder after blunder.
But it is not. Our economy is run by top-grade criminals. Geniuses who have
mastered the art of looting and disguising it as ignorance. The biggest
beneficiaries of Zimbabwe’s economic woes is Zimbabwe’s ruling elite
(Thandekile Moyo, Daily Maverick, 18 January 2020).
There are three major ‘Harmattan winds’ bearing down
on the national political landscape. Unlike the West African winds that are dry
and dusty, these political tempests will re-configure the post-colonial
considerably. On one front is the determined marshalling of opposition politics
by a powerful youthful opposition leader under what has been called the 'five
fights'; on another front, a dangerously collapsing political and social life
stalked by a drought, and then a ruling party under the grip of factions with
access to the national armoury. This is an explosive hotchpotch of forces and
the grass is already very dry. In Tunisia, the self-immolation of a student
torched a popular revolt. In Algeria self-immolations quickly set off the dispatching of a tyrant. Zimbabwe is back
into the vice-grip of the military shenanigans of the liberation days in the
1960s and 1970s; the Mgagao contests, the Badza-Nhari rebellion and what
Professor Masipula Sithole called Struggles
within a struggle'. But now, unlike then, the military-nationalists have
access, not to guerrilla arms caches, but the national armoury and if 'putsch
generals' gather outside the command structure the stage will be set for that
infamous 'tide of men' that often come in floods to seal fortunes.
With the failure of 'elite' pacts: the 'unity government'
of 1987; the global political agreement of 2008; the Constitutional reform
process of 2013; and the putsch of 2017 it is becoming clearer that the pernicious
road to a national popular revolt is slowly being paved. Zimbabwe’s pro-democracy
forces will have to think of a broad political process, to organise and
mobilise around a project that will unite urban, rural and especially the
disaffected to reclaim the republic from the usurpers of the 'November Days'.
Here is Alex Magaisa on ZANU PF:
In dealing with Zanu PF, as in dealing with the Mafia, it is
necessary to appreciate that one is not dealing with a mere organisation.
Rather, one is dealing with a way of life; the Zanu PF way of life; a
circumstance that makes the task a lot harder and also calls for entirely
different approaches to the challenges posed (Alex Magaisa, April 2017)
The social, political and intellectual structural
process that morphed into the National People’s Convention in the late 1990s
and eventually, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) provides many lessons
to students of revolt and social change. Considering the generalised character
of militarism, of grand-corruption, of systemic state capture and arrogance of
power, the road to a national popular revolt has been slowly cooking. It is a
national popular revolt that can sweep the ruling elites off quickly, just like
it was in Sudan. Only then can a process of re-subduing state institutions to
the democratic constitutional fabric begin in earnest- then, and then, the
people will govern.
TLChimedza and TC Chirimambowa
are Co-Editors of Gravitas.
