Last week on November 24 Emmerson Mnangagwa was in
Murombedzi — former president Robert Mugabe’s village backyard in Mashonaland
West — to commemorate his chequered one year in office following his
controversial installation as president on November 24, 2017 after the army
unconstitutionally ousted Mugabe. The Murombedzi commemoration, also attended
by (Retired) General Constantino Chiwenga, who led the November 2017 military
coup, was understandably disguised as Mnangagwa’s “thank you rally” for his
disputed election on July 30, 2018, which has left him paralysed by a crisis of
legitimacy.
By Jonathan N Moyo
This is because the military coup, which just about
everyone now says was unconstitutional, has become a dirty word among a growing
number of Zimbabweans whose livelihoods have been dramatically eroded over the
last 12 months, and are worse off today than they were before the coup as a
crippling economic meltdown becomes the order of the day.
It is, thus, no wonder that loud official silence over the
momentous events of November 2017 characterises the disposition of Zanu PF, the
army and government towards the first anniversary of the military coup.
Mnangagwa’s initial buzzwords that were used as the currency of the coup — such
as “the new dispensation”, “Zimbabwe is open for business” and “the voice of
the people is the voice of God” — have fallen into disuse due to their
irrelevance.
Even the so-called Second Republic, much touted during and
immediately after the poisonous 2018 election campaign, is fizzling away as
most Zimbabweans take it to mean that Mnangagwa is just a second-hand
officeholder in the same troubled republic that Mugabe served as its
first-hand.
When the currently indisposed foreign minister, General
Sibusiso Moyo, announced the coup on television in the wee hours of November
15, 2017 as a “military intervention targeting criminals around President
Mugabe”, he memorably declared that the political situation in the country had
“moved to another level”. The “new level” was ostensibly from Mugabe’s “ruinous
rule” to a “new and prosperous dispensation” led by Mnangagwa and underwritten
by the military.
But 12 months later, the consensus in and outside Zimbabwe
is that the situation in the country has, at best, remained stuck at the level
it was before the November 2017 coup; and that, at worst, it has rapidly sunk
back to the 2008 level of a post-election legitimacy crisis underpinned by a
collapsing economy with social and financial ruin on the horizon.
The writing is on the wall that the “transition from the
old order to a new dispensation”, which Mnangagwa promised at his hyped
inauguration on November 24, 2017, was stillborn. The new and harsh reality is
Finance minister Mthuli Ncube’s oxymoronic promise of “austerity for posterity”
in an economy that is deep in the doldrums. What has happened and why?
A cursory review of public discourse in Zimbabwe will
readily show that the questions of the “what” and “why” of politics in the
country are hardly, if ever, asked, let alone answered. This is because they
invariably require the identification of “who” has done “what”, “how”, “where”
and “when”. That identification requires truth-telling which always attracts
ghastly consequences on the truth-teller.
It is against this backdrop that the challenge for the
media and academia in Zimbabwe, and indeed for ordinary Zimbabweans, is that
they are not able to freely and meaningfully discuss and debate things to tell
the truth about things that have been done or are being done by the country’s
leadership. A major reason why the claim of a new dispensation after the
military coup has proven to be false is that the non-discussabiity of things
that have happened, or are happening, has remained to be the scourge of
politics in Zimbabwe since 1980. Nothing has changed.
In her critically acclaimed treatise, the Human Condition,
Hannah Arendt decries as a “failure of speech” where human beings find
themselves unable to discuss, or to reflect on, things that are nevertheless
done in their society. Such a condition is totalitarian because “speech” is a
sine qua non of human existence. It is in this connection that freedom of
expression is both a natural and constitutional right, because speech is an
innate human quality that gives rise to an inalienable right. The populist
historian, Yuval Harari, catalogues in his book — Sapiens — how “speech” has
superbly distinguished human beings from other species by enabling them to
cooperate flexibly in large numbers to accomplish complex tasks to benefit
humanity.
The essence of human freedom is thus the discussion of
human action, namely, truth-telling. A society that does not discuss what is
happening or has happened within its borders is uncivilised, undemocratic,
primitive and doomed. Yet this is where Zimbabwe finds itself, one year after
the military coup that Zimbabweans from across the political divide at home and
in the Diaspora celebrated in their numbers as a “liberation moment” on
November 18, 2017.
There are four defining features of the last 12 months in
the post-coup era, which have gone undiscussed. These include the erosion of
people’s livelihoods; the breakdown and selective application of the rule of
law enabled by the judiciary; policy paralysis in government occasioned by
tribalisation; and the lack of confidence in Mnangagwa dramatised by the fact
that he won only in 129, while his Zanu PF won in 145 constituencies (unlike
Nelson Chamisa who won in 81 where his party won 63 constituencies); coupled
with the fact that he was rejected by half of the voters in all the three
conflicting and disputed results declared by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission
(Zec).
Since the coup, Mnangagwa has projected himself through
slogans like “Zimbabwe is open for business”; a mystical scarf whose
all-weather use, everywhere and every time, has set tongues wagging with
suggestions that he is using it for juju purposes; and personalised leadership
models around the styles of Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, China’s Deng Xiaoping and
Britain’s Margaret Thatcher that have no connection with Mnangagwa’s everyday
reality.
Before the coup, the army generals who had settled on
Mnangagwa as the face of their putsch, peddled propaganda that he was the most
suitable successor to Mugabe supposedly because he was like China’s “Deng” and
that, in any event, Zimbabwe needed a Deng to lead a revolutionary transition
from Mugabe to a new dispensation. In this “Deng” fantasy, the generals saw the
Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) playing in Zimbabwe, through Zanu PF, the role
that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) plays in the Communist Party and in China.
But the Deng proposition fell away after Mnangagwa’s
November 24, 2017 inauguration, when the Misheck Sibanda-led Office of the
President and Cabinet (OPC) took charge of branding its new boss away from the
army, in a vain hope to cure the coup. To give Mnangagwa African roots, and
hopefully exonerate the Chinese from complicity in the coup, OPC branded
Mnangagwa as a “Kagame”. Under OPC auspices, the chief executive of the Rwanda
Development Board, Clare Akamanzi, who is a governance expert, came to Zimbabwe
in April 2018 to address Cabinet ministers, Zanu PF politburo members, senior
government officials and even private sector “juntarites”. Mnangagwa played
along by declaring that he was “charmed by the efficient governance system in
Rwanda”.
The Kagame tag sought by OPC collapsed after the July 30
general election, before it produced a Kagame-like vision for Mnangagwa. The
appointment of Mthuli Ncube as Finance minister in September opened a door for
Petina Gappah, who operates from the indisposed General Moyo’s office, to
astonishingly claim Margaret Thatcher as Mnangagwa’s new leadership model. The
presumption is that Ncube’s “austerity for posterity” slogan might win favours
in Britain’s conservative party because an “austerity” orientation resonates
with Thatcher’s policies.
But the prospect of the “austerity for posterity” slogan to
make Mnangagwa a Thatcherite is between slim and none. First, Zanu PF bigwigs —
like Obert Mpofu and Patrick Chinamasa — who were dropped from Cabinet, despite
having been the party’s leading coup lights, don’t want to hear much about
“austerity for posterity” from Ncube, whom they say is adopting and announcing
policies without consulting them when the Zanu PF new mantra is that the party
is supreme to the government. Mnangagwa himself, whose ghost writers want to
turn him into a Thatcherite, has publicly said the new post-coup position is
that the party runs the government through its full-time secretaries whose
terms and conditions of service are at par with, if not better than, Cabinet
perks. And so Mnangagwa is a Thatcherite only in the pages of the Financial
Times through articles written for him by ghost writers who know between little
and nothing about Zanu PF’s machinations.
In the end, the last 12 months have seen a Mnangagwa whose
jittery handlers have alternately sought to present as a Deng, a Kagame and a
Thatcher with the result that he has not risen to be any of these in any way.
This accounts for much of Mnangagwa’s leadership failure. One cannot aspire for
what they never become and hope to be a successful leader.
In the middle of these failed attempts to mould him as a
Deng, a Kagame and a Thatcher, Mnangagwa has quietly emerged over the last 12
months as his own kind of leader: a clansman or a tribesman only at ease with
his homeboys. This is conspicuously clear through some key appointments that he
has made across the board. A brief illustration will suffice.
Sibanda is Mnangagwa’s cousin and from Midlands. The
chairperson of the Civil Service Commission, Vincent Hungwe, is a clansman from
Masvingo; as is the secretary to the Services Commission, Jonathan Wutawunashe.
The principal director, who is his Personal Assistant, is
William Gwatiringa, a clansman from Midlands; as is his principal director for
State Residences (effectively the State House principal director), Coxwell
Chigwana, who recently replaced another Midlander, Douglas Tapfuma, who is now
principal director for Monitoring and Evaluation in the OPC. In the all too
powerful President’s Department, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO),
which works closely with the OPC, the Minister of State — Owen Mudha Ncube — is
also from Midlands as is Isaac Moyo, the Department’s director-general.
It should be said without prejudice to the incumbents in
question that this brazen tribalisation, clanisation and regionalisation is
unprecedented. OPC, the Civil Service Commission, the Services Commission,
State House and the President’s Department are all headed by Mnangagwa’s
clansmen or tribesmen from his home province or region. All this has happened
in 12 short months since the November 2017 military coup.
Is this what the coup was about?
The Office of the President, State House and the
President’s Department are everyone’s offices. They are national offices for
all Zimbabweans regardless of clan, tribe, province or region.
What makes this bad situation worse is that, under the veil
of fighting corruption for which he has rightly declared zero tolerance,
Mnangagwa has set up an Anti-Corruption Prosecuting Unit in the OPC, which
directly reports to him. The unit is handling the so-called high-profile cases,
a euphemism for Mnangagwa’s real or perceived detractors or political
opponents. It is common cause that there has been massive looting and
corruption for personal gain under command agriculture, for example, running
into billions of United States dollars. But there’s been no investigation or
prosecution of any kind there because the programme was led by Mnangagwa
himself. All hell would have broken loose had anyone else associated with the
so-called G40 had led command agriculture. The same would have happened had the
Ministry of Transport that oversees Zinara not been under Joram Gumbo, one of
Mnangagwa’s trusted clansman and tribesman.
Since its formation, serious questions have been raised
about the constitutionality of the Anti-Corruption Prosecuting Unit in
Mnangagwa’s office, given the clear provisions of the new Constitution adopted
in 2013, which assign the prosecution power to the National Prosecuting
Authority (NPA) in terms of s258 of the constitution. The NPA is required under
the constitution to be independent and not to be subject to the direction or
control of anyone. Unlike the terms and conditions of services and allowances
of the NPA that are set under an Act of Parliament, those of the Unit’s
officers are set by the OPC run by Mnangagwa’s homeboys. How can the officers
be independent and not be subject to the direction of the president or the OPC
who are the paymasters?
There’s one other aspect about the Unit, which is
particularly insidious. It’s officers are Thabani Mpofu, Brian Vito, Tapiwa
Godzi, Mike Chakandida, Zivanai Macharaga and Vernanda Munyoro. Thabani Mpofu,
the unit’s head, is Mnangagwa’s clansman from Mberengwa and the others are from
Midlands or Masvingo. How can this inspire national confidence or promote the
interests of justice and the rule of law to give prospective investors, let
alone accused persons, a reasonable degree of comfort that the country respects
the rule of law as a constitutional democracy? Why is this being tolerated and
why is there no public discussion — truth-telling — on this outrageous tribal
opprobrium in the OPC?
One does not need to be a lawyer to realise that Mnangagwa
is in gross violation of the equality and non-discrimination clause in s56(1)
of the constitution. He is also in wilful breach of s97(1) of the constitution.
The violations are unprecedented, as is the silence from or acquiescence by the
bench and the bar.
In the circumstances, it is no wonder that the civil
service has over the last 12 months become a homeboy turf for two provinces, to
the detriment of national capacity and service delivery, while the cabinet has
become a chamber of frightened and paralysed men and women who can’t make
decisions or contribute robustly, as they are afraid of being accused of abuse
of office by the President’s prosecutorial clansmen and tribesmen who have
become a law unto themselves with impunity.
It’s clear that the new Constitution is the enemy of the
new dispensation. Not only was the November 2017 coup itself unconstitutional,
but first Judge President George Chiweshe and later Chief Justice Malaba
sanitised the coup when the new Constitution is clear that former president
Mugabe did not deploy the army on November 15, 2017 and that the army cannot
under any circumstance deploy itself. A story yet to be told is the personal
and political association between Mnangagwa and Chief Justice Malaba dating
back to their Kwekwe days when Mnangagwa was the town’s strongman and Malaba
its magistrate. Before Malaba was appointed Chief Justice, there was widespread
but false media speculation that Mnangagwa favoured Justice Chiweshe against
Justice Rita Makarau when in fact Mnangagwa’s choice was Malaba against
Chiweshe who was Chiwenga’s choice. The rest is history.
What emerges from the foregoing is that while there was a
documented coup strategy, called “Blue Ocean” to grab power, there was no
post-coup vision upon which to run the country after the coup for the country
to benefit the people. Over the last 12 months, Mnangagwa has not had one big
idea for the country. Not one. Yes, there have been slogans about “the voice of
the people is the voice of God”; or “Zimbabwe is open for Zimbabwe” and now
“austerity for posterity” but these slogans are not visionary nor big ideas for
the people.
Empirically, the people’s consensus is that they are worse
off today than they were 12 months ago when the US$/RTGS exchange rate was
1:1.8 or 80%; when the price of bread was $0,90 a loaf; when there was no
punitive 2% transactional tax; when ordinary people who earn $300 or less a
month did not fear a traffic fine of $700, or fear that the government would
reject its own bond note or RTGS currency, which Mnangagwa says is 1:1 to the
US$; nor did ordinary people imagine that they would be required to pay duty in
United States for items sent to them by relatives in the Diaspora or risk being
jailed for 10 years for buying the forex for duty in the parallel market.
The bottom line is that 12 months after the coup, people’s
confidence in Mnangagwa has dramatically fallen, hopes have been shattered and
livelihoods have been eroded back to 2008 levels or altogether destroyed.
It is now wonder that the new battle cry is for “Operation
Restore People’s Livelihoods”. Standard
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