To hear Nelson Chamisa tell it, Zimbabwe under his administration will be a technological nirvana that will make Wakanda look like a Stone Age wasteland, with supernovic bullet trains and aerodromes connecting rural farmers to world markets.
His futuristic fleet was, last week, deflated by Stephen Sackur’s typically agonistic line of questioning in a BBC HARDtalk interview that caught the young and charismatic MDC Alliance leader hardly prepared.
Whereas Britain’s legacy press, from Financial Times to The Economist, has granted Chamisa’s rival, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, an optimistic hearing, Chamisa found himself the pariah in the room on his first outing as MDC-T president.
Both candidates’ media fortunes in London have been seen as a miniature of their diplomatic standing with the former coloniser, key because Britain remains the default authority on Zimbabwe in geopolitical whisper networks where the latter is not represented.
The defining question of 2018 elections is legitimacy, and the two presidential frontrunners are understandably invested in reaching out to Britain which, for better or worse, will be chalking away on the scoreboard of Zimbabwe’s game of thrones.
Own Goals
Chamisa stood by his high-tech vision for Zimbabwe during the HARDtalk interview but was forced to disown his erroneous pronouncement that U.S president Donald Trump promised his party $15 billion to revive the economy, and recent threats to march the Chinese back home for creaming off Zimbabwe.
Both statements, made to naive applause at MDC Alliance rallies, are captured in video. Having entered the BBC newsroom with dirty hands, the young politician was never going to have it easy.
Sloganeering on a TV interview about being the change that delivers when he could have shored up his profile with policy takeaways did not salvage the interview.
Sackur rightly told Chamisa to strike a balance between populism and credibility.
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A remarkable aspect of the interview, though, is how BBC, a core implement of British soft power, basically outdid ZBC in championing Mnangagwa during that HARDtalk session.
Sackur claimed out of thin air that Mnangagwa is the favourite to win the presidential election, which at this point in the race sounds more like agenda-setting than journalistically verified.
Media echo chambers, all on their own, have the singular power to come up with declarations that in time become fervently circulated facts, the way Fox bootstraps its own news, manufacturing agendas out of that magic phrase “some people say.”
If, for the benefit of doubt, Sackur spoke on some privileged authority, it is still telling that he thought it necessary to add that Mnangagwa is the “mature, wise and responsible leadership” that “Zimbabwe needs.”
Quite a brave thing to declare, seeing as such advice blurs the line between journalistic grilling and partisan interest.
Sackur also exhibited an impressive store of hectoring vocabulary, the sort that would turn a Zimbabwean grandmother’s blood to water, calling the MDC Alliance candidate’s ideas “silly,” “beyond silly” and “nonsense” in turn, even before granting him an audience.
Here BBC HARDtalk’s journalistic format, if that is what it is, produces more heat than light.
Chamisa must be commended for maintaining his cool in the face of determined hectoring that some senior journalists in Zimbabwe have persuasively described as bordering on racist condescension.
Sackur also drew assertions from a Chronicle op-ed, giving it a geographic prefix for effect and conveniently overlooking that the state-run daily, along with few other newspapers and virtually all the broadcast media, is firmly in the illiberal chokehold of Mnangagwa.
To back up his view that Chamisa, unlike the “mature, wise and responsible” Mnangagwa, is hardly the face of stability, Sackur took a side in MDC’s tiff with Zanu-PF over the authenticity of ballot papers and accused Chamisa and Biti of raising the temperature despite strong indications of security-assisted Zanu-PF rigging in past elections.
Sackur also spoke on Mnangagwa pre-empting MDC-T’s soundbites, although corruption, indications of nepotism in the presidium, a worsening liquidity crisis, absence of media reforms, electoral opacity, militarisation of state institutions, dismissal and intimidation of civil servants for bargaining for better conditions of service, and partisan appropriation of the police service under the Mnangagwa adminstration are already making Mugabe look like a saint in papal white.
Cold Calculus
Zimbabwean political pundits like Hopewell Chin’ono and David Hofisi have seized on the HARDtalk as confirmation of Britain’s unholy bedfellowship with Mnangagwa. Historian Blessing Miles-Tendi has previously pointed out that Mnangagwa is Britain’s horse in the race.
A connection is not hard to make, if one thinks of BBC as the jewel in the crown of British soft power and considers Sackur’s equal parts overt and subliminal endorsement of Mnangagwa.
But a long-run perspective is also necessary.
Diplomatic whisper networks in Harare have been reportedly awash with eager anticipation of a Mnangagwa presidency long before Mugabe’s right-hand man of five decades came to power in a coup last year.
The late MDC-T president Morgan Tsvangirai and NDP leader Tendai Biti in 2016 complained about the democratic struggle weaned off the queen’s baby sling as the former coloniser sought comfort within Zanu-PF.
Britain’s cold calculus reportedly determined that what Zimbabwe needs, as far as its own interests are concerned, is not so much a return to democracy but a return to stability and an accommodative climate for business.
As such, Mnangagwa, perceived as pragmatist and business-minded, emerged as a desirable shortcut for the former coloniser to resume business with Zimbabwe after the debilitating two-decade standoff with Robert Mugabe, a prefect of global elites compared to Rwanda’s Paul Kagame.
Miles-Tendi observed, in an otherwise miscalculated forecast penned after Mnangagwa’s expulsion from Government last year, that Britain’s association with Mnangagwa “would provoke heated domestic opposition because the controversial Mnangagwa has a long history of human rights abuses and violence.”
“As Minister of State Security in the Prime Minister’s Office, he played a leading role in massacres committed by the state in southern Zimbabwe in the 1980s. Mnangagwa was instrumental in the violence around the June 2008 presidential runoff, a strategy of force which eventually led the opposition’s Morgan Tsvangirai to withdraw from the vote. And according to a UN-commissioned report, Mnangagwa was also involved in the massive illegal exploitation of natural resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo war (1998-2003),” the African History professor wrote in African Arguments.
Mistakes of History
If history is the great teacher, then Britain could be the serial college dropout.
Much has been said about Britain how saw no evil and heard no evil while the Zanu government was butchering thousands of civilians in Matebeleland and Midlands between 1983 and 1987.
Apparently, as long as Mugabe remained a model neo-liberal vassal of the British Commonwealth, everything he stepped on was negligible and disposable. His most inhuman crimes could be usefully swept under the red carpet.
The imperialist-capitalist axis has long revolved around this calculus: Put your money on the man who guarantees your business interests and only remember to use citizens as human shields when your prefect turns rogue on you.
Britain reliably found her moral voice against Mugabe’s humanitarian abuses when he threatened their money by initiating the land reform at the turn of the millennium, more than a decade after he had broken every human right in the book.
It is necessary to revisit this history because Britain risks repeating in 2018 the mistake it made it 1980. The mistake of ignoring human rights abuses and undemocratic overreaches, however isolated, just to push blanket narratives.
What Mugabe got away with in 1980, under a blanket narrative the blanket narrative of the popularity he genuinely enjoyed at the time and Britain’s bigger concerns, he perfected in 1983 and lived by right up to his shameful exit.
In 1980, Mugabe appeared to be the popular candidate but also used violence and tribally cordoned Zapu leader Nkomo off campaigning in Masvingo and Manicaland, suggesting that the Zapu leader should confine his political ambitions to “Nkomo-country”.
In their 1981 biography titled Mugabe, David Smith, Colin Simpson and Ian Davies tell the lesser known story of how military tactics were smuggled from the liberation war into independent Zimbabwe, setting the stage for the problems of the day.
The trio writes that a Zapu candidate and his aides were allegedly abducted by Zanu-linked gunmen in Chivi and paraded before villagers who were told to shun Zapu. Zanu had equipment to detect how people voted, the villagers were told, and Zapu sympathisers would be beheaded. Mugabe, in turn, argued that Nkomo’s failure to campaign went down to Zanu’s vaster operational footprint in the provinces during the war.
In retrospect, it is Britain and international monitors’ failure to highlight and condemn these seemingly small malfeasances that encouraged the all-out massacres of Gukurahundi few later that the former coloniser again ignored in favour of a blanket narrative.
Habits of History
Britain and the international community enthusiastically stamped a clean bill of political health for the 1980 elections in the face of Mugabe’s earliest illiberal tendencies possibly because of three broader assumptions.
First, Mugabe was headed for a landslide. Second, Mugabe who was innocuously harping reconciliation over resource nationalism at the time was the man who fit the bill. Third, it was time to put the Zimbabwe’s long-drawn-out conflict to rest and move on.
Mnangagwa’s benign optics on the international scene today are also shrouding seemingly inconsequential and isolated irregularities that Britain seems ready to overlook for the three reasons again.
First, the assumption, which the BBC interview is helping to establish, that Mnangagwa is bound to win the election. Second, Mnangagwa has presented himself as a neoliberal prefect of global capital and is to Britain in 2018 what Mugabe was in 1980, with additional advantages as a stabilising, disciplinarian, pragmatic, business-minded prefect of capital in the mould of Paul Kagame. Third, Britain desperation to get over the past and turn a corner for the two-decade diplomatic stalemate. Harare lawyer David Hofisi extracted the third reading from the recent HARDTalk.
In 2018, as in 1980, there are similar reports of ruling party activists and traditional leaders telling villagers that they can determine from their voter registration slips how they voted.
Previous elections have been sites of inhumanity, with members of the opposition being killed, maimed, displaced, dispossessed and exiled, which atrocities Mnangagwa coolly denied to The Economist, arguing that there are no police records to that effect.
There are also isolated reports of political violence this year, particularly MDC-T Gutu North parliamentary hopeful Stanley Manguma’s alleged beating by soldiers, throttling of civic space in state-run media, partisan participation of police in Zanu-PF primaries, slanted media coverage and opacity around key electoral processes such as the procurement and storage of ballot paper.
But if Britain has already picked a side in the cold nights following Brexit, it will probably confirm for the third time that, beneath autotune rhetoric, its political investment in Zimbabwe goes as far as market space and property rights rather than human rights, democracy, labour concerns or minority rights.
All Mnangagwa needs is to churn out neoliberal shibboleths to international forums and media echo chambers to be anointed on BBC as the wise and responsible that Zimbabwe needs.
Home Turf
Back home, Nelson Chamisa resumes his nationwide presidential rallies to a warmer reception. Having made a beeline to sell his adminstration to global elites, Mnangagwa is also hitting the campaign circuit in earnest to square off with Chamisa, Nkosana Moyo, Thokozani Khupe, Joyce Mujuru, Ambrose Mtinhiri and others.
His most significant challenger, so far as politics is a game of numbers, will be Chamisa who is staging a series of impressive across the country as well as diplomatic offensives of mixed blessings outside the country.
It is important that these candidates take the electorate as seriously as they want the international community to take them.
Mnangagwa needs to resist the temptation of one thing and doing another, particularly the unfulfilled promise to fight corruption.
He has already taken this fight, if it was ever that, decades back by presiding over tenders of questionable probity, swarming himself with ministers whose claim to fame is self-interested meddling in state enterprises like Obert Mpofu, Super Mandiwanzira and David Parirenyatwa, and fielding parliamentary candidates with post-Mugabe records of financial wrongdoing like Elias Musakwa.
He needs understand that Zimbabweans, who have lived for decades as subjects in their own country, expect of him not just economic recovery but the open up of the civic space.
The muzzling and bullying of civil servants for demanding better conditions of service may be what impresses neo-liberal puppet-masters but his first obligation is to Zimbabweans whose dignity and agency he must uphold.
The militarisation, mystification and monopolisation of state institutions in the service of the ruling party make a mockery of the already corny “new dispensation” buzzword.
Chamisa, for his part, must resist be caught up in the moment and make naïve or untruthful statements that live to haunt him beyond the ephemeral applause at rallies.
He carries the democratic, liberal, civic and economic promise, which Mnangagwa has largely betrayed but can only live up to it if he makes his party a model of what Zimbabwe can be and if he is accountable for everything he says.
MDC Alliance needs to organically evolve beyond a storefront of Western interests and be responsive to the emerging needs and failed promises of Zimbabwe’s second republic. Local development, social services and civic space got better promise under MDC and will benefit from grassroots semiotics, something Zanu-PF has long trumped MDC on.
For all his fresh charisma and success with crowds, Chamisa comes across more like the man of the moment rather than the man of ideas, a far cry from history’s young shape-shifters like Thomas Sankara, John F. Kennedy or the younger Robert Mugabe.
Because he is captive to the moment, people remember the hyperboles, sloganeering and jokes after the ephemeral applause and he does not get enough credit for the progressive sector-by-sector reforms he is advocating for.
During Tsvangirai’s tenure, MDC-T’s lawyerly and culturally rootless semiotics allowed critics to erroneously claim that all MDC-T had to offer was the “Mugabe must go” soundbite, ignoring the party’s broader democratisation, economic transformation and international reengagement concerns.
Under Chamisa’s leadership, critics are able to crop out timely policy propositions like devolution, local development and civic liberties, and claim that he is all about the “bullet trains, spaghetti roads and Murehwa airports” clickbait.
The ideologically rootless, historically faceless, post-Mugabe Zanu-PF, standing on little else outside state power and the courtship of global capital, could be easy come-up in the battle for Zimbabwean hearts and minds if Chamisa listens less to unquestioning and fawning hangers-on, and attends carefully to the demanding homework before him.
