The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva, Pivot
POLITICS is a dirty game — so goes the time ancient axiom. Dear Reader, this dirtiness is for you to define.
However, my submission is that the consistently politically clean must not give in to the whims of political grime/ muck/ filth. Vice-President Mohadi’s reaction and that of the ruling Zanu-PF to the social-media unsubstantiated sexual scandal peddling reflects a greater refrain from the riff-raff of the political.
As I take off my official cap to reflect on this matter, it is difficult to ignore the flamboyant conspiracies, myths, demonisation machinations and antagonistic excitements surrounding the recent events which flooded the public domain centring around the person of Vice-President Mohadi. Therefore, the main purpose of this instalment is to highlight the deeper symbolism of Vice-President Mohadi’s response to the broader proliferated attack on Zanu-PF’s existentialism.
In this respect, it is hard to ignore the centrality of ZimLive — a purely anti- Zanu-PF media house’s smear campaign role. The birth and prominence of ZimLive traces its roots back to the alleged real G40 owner (s) of the Blue Ocean Strategy Document. Observers of Zimbabwean politics will remember that the Blue Ocean Strategy Document was popularised by members of the politically deceased G40 at the climax of events that gave birth to Operation Restore Legacy in November 2017. The face of the Blue Ocean Strategy Document was none other than Professor Jonathan Moyo.
His links to the content creator at ZimLive cannot be over-emphasised. Is it not satirical that a media house closely connected to an erstwhile conspiracy architect in Zanu-PF now has a transfigured return as a credible source to disseminate the ‘‘sexual escapades’’ of a top member of the executive?
Vice-President Mohadi’s resignation epitomises astute political maturity to take responsibility for mishaps or attacks which befall the integrity of any public office. To the progressive reader of politics, the Vice-President has proved that the major occupational hazard of assuming public duty is the sobriety not to subside into the dirt of the political.
The courage to resign in this instance carries more dignity which apolitical public office bearers have failed to uphold in their various institutions. Dirt in politics is embraced by those who think that the assignment to public service (politics) is a game.
Therefore, the resignation from the government by the Vice-President epitomises his organic consistency to values of true leadership in the revolutionary sense. At the same time, his decision substantiates the commonly neo-liberal downplayed sophisticated institutional values of Zanu-PF as a party that is rooted in the anti-colonial roots of Ubuntu.
The surprise precedent here is that the dirt of the political must never be reciprocated by additional dirt. It makes more sense to reflect and conclude that Zanu-PF has effectively applied this approach since the coming of the New Dispensation.
For the first time in 2018, a commission of enquiry was instituted to investigate the facts around 1 August 2018 election violence. The 1 August Violence Commission premièred a new culture of arresting political dirt with transparency and calling political players to account for their actions.
The unbiased observer of our politics would concede that the 1 August 2018 Commission of Enquiry presented Zimbabweans with a political culture shock. Since then Zimbabwe has transitioned to reimagining politics beyond being a “dirty game’’.
In as much as ZimLive has been celebrated in the social-media streets for forcing a Vice-President into resignation, what many fail to grasp is the institutional humility of Zanu-PF — now inclined more towards clean politics — as a new normal. It is naïve to celebrate a social-media induced executive pushover while forgetting that the same executive autonomy is derived from a political party.
It is no mistake that the First citizen accepted Vice-President Mohadi’s wish to resign from the government and reserved his sacred place in the ruling Zanu-PF. This should offer a painful awakening to antagonists of Zanu-PF that before the government there was the party. In any case, since 2018 the party (Zanu-PF) has been going through reinvention to be supremacy over the government.
To fight the executive and ignore its roots in the party is the same as forgetting that the party has many with the capacity to fill in executive vacancies. Injuring a tenth of the cabinet through simplistic political smearing is not enough if the attack is not extended to the multitudes within the party structures and are always on standby to nurse wounds of cadres assigned in government by the party.
In other words, Zanu-PF as a hub of government incumbency cannot be harmed by targets on individuals within its government. The party offers that ideological rehabilitation of the wounds sustained in the battlefront of power contestations.
The perennial wisdom of a fountain called Cde Robert Mugabe — the former President speaks to this effect. In his address to the Zanu Central Committee in Chimoio, Mozambique, on August 31 1977 he said:
“Internal discipline is a state of order within a person that propels him to do the right things. It is a stage of individual development that resolves the contradictions within an individual. The pull to be selfish is counterbalanced by a greater pull to be selfless, the pull to drunkenness is countered by one to moderation, the pull to disobedience is negatived by that to obedience, the pull to sexual givenness yields to sexual restraint, deviationism is corrected by compliance and individualism by collectivism.”
In the same speech, the late African icon went on to say: ‘‘… The individual must comply with the order laid down by the group. Our group is the Party called Zanu. Zanu has an order, rules and regulations which make its system — the Zanu system of behaviour. When an individual cannot subject himself to discipline, then external discipline must apply. The Party must compel him to conform’’.
The above emphasised individual and institutional discipline,what is embodied in Vice-President Kembo Mohadi’s executive exit in exchange for fully pronounced service vice-presidency to the party. Whether he remains guilty or later becomes innocent in the court of public opinion, by resigning Vice President Mohadi has done the noble thing which Morgan Tsvangirai (the most celebrated antagonist of Zanu-PF) couldn’t do after a series of substantiated sexual scandals. Cde Mohadi’s resignation even transcends the moral credence of Pius Ncube who could not let go of priesthood after breaking his oath to sexual chastity.
Now here is a man who is alleged of unsubstantiated multi-sexual affairs by self-ordained moral prefects and without thinking twice he chooses to resign. The excitable of the simple-mind only sees weakness in such a reaction. The moral integrity (internal discipline) of such a person is downplayed for what the simple-mind perceives as humiliation. This exposes the velocity of attacks launched against the Vice President by anti-Zanu-PF media while he was in the executive office. This brings to the fore Michel Foucault’s concept of repressions of sexuality.
Foucault posits that apart from sexuality being a human element that society represses, it serves as a “conduit of power” (Foucault, 1978). In asserting this view, he articulates the hierarchies of sexuality namely the: sexuality of children, women, married couples, and the sexual “deviant.” Deploying the fourth hierarchy of sexuality, Foucault argues that sexual deviance is rooted in moral and religious constructionism.
Therefore, within the realm of the political ‘‘sexual scandals’’ are viewed as sexual deviance which attracts public punitive arbitration. This validates Foucault’s assertion that sexuality is a commodity to political legitimisation and de-legitimisation. As such, the public as a key spectator of the theatre of politics deploys moral benchmarks to police the sexualities of those in power.
It has become the common norm that the policing of the sexualities of those in power is executed without any factual basis. There is a huge discursive market for the politicisation of sexuality. Within our metropolitan terrain of the politically topical especially on social-media, it is easy to construct narratives that discredit political opponents.
One wonders if it is a coincidence that the same online media houses which threw celebratory innuendoes for the 2018 White City bombing are the ones at the forefront of Vice President Mohadi’s alleged sexual scandals. Therefore, while one is bound to fall for the superficial efficacy of the called ‘’private media’’ in exposing the scandals of those in power, the ordinary member of Zanu-PF must not forget that such media-houses thrive on demonizing the ruling party.
Their editorial lifeline is dedicated to destabilising Zanu-PF at all costs. These are the same media houses who propagated the myth of the Blue Ocean Strategy document to disgrace the then Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa for crafting conflict within Zanu-PF.
Going forward, Zanu-PF must be vigilant of the pressure of the external. Internal processes and actors within Zanu-PF must not be directed by external pressures — especially from obvious detractors. In as much as the institutional humility to accept ‘‘The voice of the people as the voice of God’’, there is an urgent need to discern whether every voice from the people is genuinely from God. To preserve incumbency, Zanu-PF cannot afford to be easily swayed to conformity by dictates of institutions with no equivalent ideological credibility to define how power should behave or not behave.
Zanu-PF has to fight for survival beyond the stigmas of the politically pedestrian to respond to its mandate. Therefore, the decision by President Mnangagwa to reassign his co-Vice- President to the party nullifies the malice which was targeting Cde Kembo Mohadi. With the 2023 harmonised elections around the corner, Zanu-PFstands to benefit more from unity and refocusing its efforts towards the policy aspirations of the people of Zimbabwe.
The calls on who will take over after Cde Kembo Mohadi — their gender, history and credentials is not the business of anyone outside Zanu-PF. Zanu-PF is even allowed to maintain the status quo of the executive. There is no reward in Zanu-PF taking instructions from the very same people who have thrown insinuations of the party’s illegitimacy at the behest of opposition propaganda and its consistent election mode politicking. This is the time for Zanu-PF to pace up towards Vision 2030.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU, MSc-UZ) is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado. Feedback: Twitter: @VaMahomva & Email [email protected]
