We first built a state instead of a nation: Dabengwa

02 Jun, 2019 - 00:06 0 Views
We first built a state instead of a nation: Dabengwa The late Dr Dabengwa and Lt Gen Lookout Masuku

The Sunday News

Michael Mhlanga

Among many stories told and read of and about Dr Dumiso Dabengwa, some intimate interviews so profoundly rich with historical discernments, while others are political testaments of how the conversations rehabilitated them. 

With his graduation to glory, I reminisce on the public lecture he delivered in 2016 with a thesis, which looked at the Mugabe era, that argued the “We Built a State Instead of a Nation” and the poignant concepts he unpacked and savored intelligently. 

DD’s posture at that public lecture reminded me of why and how important his thesis is truthful and timeless by measure of causal effect and history in a developmental state. I had the privilege of hosting the Hero on 28 October 2016 at one of LAN’s intellectual space “Reading Pan Africanism Symposium” where as a youth led think tank, doyens of philosophy dismember myths, help the academia and its aspirants remember excerpts of thinking and funnel the generation of knowledge to young academics. DD was keen to deliver a monumental lecture despite the fact that the during  the previous week I had written an article disagreeing with him on his then political inclinations. Such are intellects, they understand points of difference and convergence. The difference between a subaltern politician and an intellect in politics, the latter possesses an engrained appreciation of the variance of space and its role in determining ideas. 

The paramountcy of his assertion is centred on him being part of the problem and exempting everyone else who looked up to him and his peers for fixing the problem in 1980. That is phenomenal I must say. Not every day do you find the elderly blaming themselves of a problem, the fault is always in the stars – the young, wild and free. Where I grew up, when the elders erred (aired) it was the child that was beaten. I still find it amusing  that happened, but it is an interesting illustration of how DD dismembers that symbolic anecdote I gave afore.  He began by saying “ We erred way back when we attained independence, none of us was interested in uniting a fragmented society emerging from war, but were concerned with taking power from our colonisers and competing for it amongst ourselves, and that is where we made the first mistake, everything bad was born from that…”. His use of collective identity to begin a complex subject of state building and nation building showed why selflessness is important when you are committed to redressing you fault. More impressing was his characterisation of state failure theory to help us first understand it so that we appreciate his proposed process.

His unpacking stretched to identify two fundamental categories of state failure: cases which do not alter the underlying willingness of the population to accept rules, decisions and measures adopted by a common government on the one hand, and cases which do alter this disposition, on the other. Through an illustrious explanation of this concept, his lecture helped us understand that; confronted with a crisis in a “failed state”, we easily cast ourselves grandly in a heroic mould, develop a deep personal and professional investment in crisis and create an image of ourselves as problem solvers and cool professional realists imbued with humanitarian motives yet we manufacture a more complex and regressive causal effect harm.

He easily brought to life Max Weber’s 1984 “Soziologische Grundbegriffe” in which the German, Weber argues that it is essential to understand that state-building is the creation of sovereign capacities of which the fundamental one is the successful and generally undisputed claim to a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”. DD explained this by giving timelines of conflict and dispute in Zimbabwe, many of which he challenged young academics to pursue in research and document. Assuredly, he told that indicators for state weakness potentially leading to state failure in Zimbabwe have disharmony between communities, inability to control borders and the entirety of the territory, a growth of criminal violence, corrupt institutions, and a decaying infrastructure. 

Like the Russian philosopher of the late 1800s Viscolli Putyenski, DD argued that we all should know that post class-conflict societies begin by building cultural, political, religious and historical consensus where nations are built, then a state, not the other way round. 

What is learnt from the illustrious submission made on October 28 2016 at Rainbow Hotel in Bulawayo is that, nation-building is the most common form of a process of collective identity formation with a view to legitimising public power within a given territory. This is an essentially indigenous process which often not only projects a meaningful future but also draws on existing traditions, institutions, and customs, redefining them as national characteristics in order to support the nation’s claim to sovereignty and uniqueness. A successful nation-building process produces a cultural projection of the nation containing a certain set of assumptions, values and beliefs which can function as the legitimising foundation of a state structure. 

So far, this has happened essentially in societies with substantial elements of “social modernity”. Among the elements which distinguish such societies from pre-modern ones, are: an open system of stratification allowing and encouraging social mobility, the state as an impersonal form of government, the pursuit of economic growth, and a cultural system establishing collective meaning and identity for all envisaged members of society. His argument should at least now be solemnly rethought in the presence of institutions that are redressing “state” misgivings such as the NPRC, clamping of corruption by ZACC, protecting the poor of the society from the punitives of neo-liberalism and consensus building around history, identity, culture and religion.

From how he had characterised his thesis by first showing us what state failure is first, the Black Russian was arguing that the aim of state-building is  the establishment of a state as a concentration and expression of collective power. In fact, DD retorted, state-building means the establishment, re-establishment, and strengthening of a public structure in a given territory capable of delivering public goods. No doubt, DD was stressing the causal effect dimension of social organisation and development, build a nation, then a state fits well. Power to Him!

Share This:

Survey


We value your opinion! Take a moment to complete our survey

This will close in 20 seconds