The Sunday News
Richard Runyararo Mahomva
In one of his philosophical admiration of the late Founding Father of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Cde Robert Mugabe, Dr Mahoso once wrote:
“Mugabe is now every African who is opposed to the British and North American plunder and exploitation . . . So, old Mugabe here is not the person of Robert Mugabe. Rather it is that powerful, elemental African memory going back to the first Nehanda and even to the ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians who are now reclaiming Africa in history as the cradle of humankind . . . The Zimbabwe opposition and their British, European and North American sponsors have exposed themselves as forces opposed to Mugabe as Pan-African memory, Mugabe as the reclaimer of African space, Mugabe as the African power of remembering the African legacy and African heritage which slavery, apartheid and imperialism thought they had dismembered for good . . . It is not accidental that both the opposition to Mugabe and its sponsors sought to denigrate African liberation history as outmoded and undemocratic traditions.”
The credentials of struggle attributed to Cde Mugabe remain indelible. Even as we navigate the future his memory is that of a giant defender of core values of resisting imperialism at all costs. He remains an epitome of the intergenerational values of struggle. Mahoso’s ability to unpack Mugabe’s personality within the realm of pan-African aspirations represents the missing anti-colonial thought positionality of the post-colony.
To this end, elsewhere Mahoso argues:
“The fact that current African leaders are still debating whether or not to pull out of the so-called International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague is a clear demonstration that Africa has neglected the software, the driving ethos for liberation it inherited from the primary defence and resistance movements of our ancestors against imperialism, colonisation and settlerism.”
This desperation for imperialist endorsement and the affinity to belong to colonial institutions is not only cancer corroding the African political space, but it’s a crisis inhibiting the African mind from being free. The naivety of priding ourselves in being extractive economies has also conceived the constant trend of inter-state competition to be given preferential imperialist treatment in trade. The reality of our underdevelopment as a result of multi-layered forces — including the many centuries of colonialism cannot be ignored. However, it becomes disturbing when our politics plays into the dictates of imperialists simple because we want to be accepted into imperialist clubs and associations.
Without a doubt, Zimbabwe is a post-colony, but it is many miles ahead of many African countries. We have demonstrated that in many instances even through the Government of National Unity (GNU). Courtesy of the Global Political Agreement (GPA), this coalition government was formally established in February 2009 after a series of dialogue stirred by the ex-President of South-Africa, Thabo Mbeki and the key actors of the 2008 harmonised elections.
Thabo Mbeki personified the pan-Africanist dimension to negotiation which was opposed to the neo-colonial post land reform call for political reform by the West. The coalition government consisted of Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) led by President Robert Mugabe and the two Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) political parties, MDC-T led by Morgan Tsvangirai and MDC-M led by Arthur Mutambara Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC T, shunned the presidential re-run on complaints and allegations of widespread persecution of his supporters. The political crisis heavily hammered the functionality of the economy which was under siege since Economic Structural Adjustment Programme and global capital’s attacks on Zimbabwe following the land reform programme.
With all its success in ensuring a reasonable transitional negotiation, the GNU suffered contestations between the removal of sanctions versus political reform, state power consolidation versus constitutionalism, human-rights versus security sector reforms, and media reforms versus state hegemony remain central in defining the successes and failures of the GNU. In characterising the negotiated constructs of the GNU, Raftopolous (2013: xi) states that “At almost every stage of the mediation from 2007 and the implementation of the GPA from February 2009, intense conflicts over the interpretation of the accord have left their debris on the political terrain. At the heart of this contestation has been the struggle over the meaning of ‘sovereignty’.”
Mazarire (2013) argues that the idea of a GNU has always been a part of Zimbabwe’s mechanisms of political negotiation dating back to 2002. This was after the Commonwealth was pushing for dialogue between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai talking. This resulted in a summit on Zimbabwe which was held in Abuja, Nigeria. The summit was a culmination from the contested 2002 presidential election, the series of violence alleged to have been perpetrated by Zanu-PF across the entire country. The similarities of the 2002 and 2008 contexts range from the external mediation which saw South-Africa taking the leading front in the negotiation. This demonstrates the sustained turn to local solutions to our local problems in tandem with the anti-colonial mechanical memory discussed by Mahoso.
However, Mazarire (2013)’s characterisation of 2002 and 2008 determinants to political negotiation and his overall critique misses one major issue. In 2002, the political situation in Zimbabwe was much tenser to allow what happened in 2008. The emotive bearings of the land reform programme were still pronounced. The role of the Heads of Common Wealth in the Abuja Summit of 2002 was only inclined to pushing for Mugabe’s exit from power.
Therefore, as a policy position, the Mugabe administration adopted a defiant stand with regards to the 2002 negotiation. The emotive effect of the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe was still eminent. However, what distinguished the two negotiation platforms is that the GNU resonated with Zanu-PF’s inclination of dismissing the West’s interests in Zimbabwe under the former President, Robert Mugabe. On the part of the radicalised position of the Government, all negotiation was anchored on protecting Zimbabwe’s sovereignty from colonial domination and preserving the cardinal values of the liberation struggle.
The role of Thabo Mbeki in the quest to resolve Zimbabwe’s political stalemate shows the pro-African driven approach to political negotiation in Zimbabwe. The turn to Mbeki for mediation represented an unanticipated turn as a Western alternative was preferred by many. Having Mbeki as the GNU broker emphasised the existing anti-West policy of the Mugabe foreign policy style. Beyond that Mbeki epitomised the pan-African panacea to the Zimbabwean political tension. This was historically situated in Mbeki’s role in the foundation of Afro-centred institutions such as the African Union (AU); the New Partnership for Development of Africa (Nepad) and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM).
To this end, Mbeki was and still is a respectable figure in the continent. Mbeki is also perceived to represent an anti-colonial personality anchored on “African Solutions for African Problems” in his entire political mediation career. To this end, the road to the GNU and its aftermath became an empirical trial run for Sadc’s emerging multilateral approach to dealing with a real African situation.
The association of the MDC formations in the GNU with imperialist Europe antagonised its possibilities of gaining regional sympathies. As indicated here, from the MDC engineered Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (Zidera) and the European Union sanctions, MDC’s proxy status to the West remains unquestionable.
Mugabe (2001) continuously linked the opposition’s function with imperialist machinations which had to be debunked in the region — save to say Mugabe remained a revered pan-Africanist figure. Therefore, his claim to victimhood in the hands of the regime-change agenda was synonymous with the victimisation of pan-Africanism. This might have contributed to the deaf ear which MDC formations received from the entire Sadc which to this day is dominated by Former Liberation Movements (Mpofu 2020). The reality of MDC’s imperialist DNA even furthered Zanu-PF’s resolve to maintain hostility towards the West. This substantiates how political negotiation in Zimbabwe has continued to be entangled between contentious forces of coloniality and pan-Africanism. This ontological binary of power has since become the defining characteristic of the compromise phase experienced in Zimbabwe between 2008 and 2013.
In response, Western powers and their international institutions including their Civil Society Organisations proxies continuously subjected Zimbabwe to economic sanctions on the justification of a long list of requests for political reforms underpinned in the neo-liberal democracy and human rights fundamentalism. The notion of democracy and human rights has been the agitating agent for regime change in Zimbabwe.
The making of foreign policy maintained the view that the West must be disengaged due to its supremacy and recolonisation agendas. While Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe’s administration, in particular, remained isolated by the West there was an increased ideological propensity towards African solidarities rather than looking up to the West as a partner. This position dovetailed the ethos of national sovereignty which is widely embraced across the Sadc region and Africa at large. Mugabe’s strategic turn to lobby Sadc solidarities was underpinned in the region’s long endured experience of settler domination. After all, Sadc was the last region in Africa to be free from settler control after Zimbabwe and South-Africa attained independence in 1980 and 1994 respectively.
Consequentially, Zimbabwe’s foreign policy reinforced the idea of economic democratisation more than anything else. This philosophy resonated with the cardinal sovereignty creed shared across Sadc countries which was born out of the region’s liberation struggles.
Zimbabwe’s foreign policy ushered in a new ideological wave towards reversing colonial injustices and paving the way for a new struggle for economic liberation worth the emulation of African countries and Sadc at large (Mugabe 2001; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Mahomva 2014; Mpofu 2020). Technically, this made the case of the opposition in Zimbabwe not to gain even the most minimal of supports in the region.
The rhetoric of democracy, good governance and human rights became an equivalent of concealed neo-imperialism.
Mahoso’s theorising of Mugabe as a decolonial figure and the practical attributes of Zimbabwe’s foreign policy in combating the vestiges of imperialism is yet another call for African solutions for African Problems.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva 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: [email protected]
