The History and Political Transition of Zimbabwe

From Mugabe to Mnangagwa

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Pedzisai Ruhanya, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Pedzisai Ruhanya

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030477325
• eBook ISBN: 9783030477332
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book is the first to tackle the difficult and complex politics of transition in Zimbabwe, with deep historical analysis. Its focus is on a very problematic political culture that is proving very hard to transcend. At the center of this culture is an unstable but resilient 'nationalist-military' alliance crafted during the anti-colonial liberation struggle in the 1970s. Inevitably, violence, misogyny and masculinity are constitutive of the political culture. Economically speaking, the culture is that of a bureaucratic, parasitic, primitive accumulation and corruption, which include invasion and emptying of state coffers by a self-styled 'Chimurenga aristocracy.' However, this Chimurenga aristocracy is not cohesive, as the politics that led to Robert Mugabe's ousting from power was preceded by dirty and protracted internal factionalism. At the center of the factional politics was the 'first family': Robert Mugabe and his wife, Grace Mugabe. This book offers a multidisciplinary examination of the complex contemporary politics in Zimbabwe, taking seriously such issues as gender, misogyny, militarism, violence, media, identity, modes of accumulation, the ethnicization of politics, attempts to open lines of credit and FDI, national healing, and the national question as key variables not only of a complete political culture but also of difficult transitional politics.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, P. Ruhanya (eds.)The History and Political Transition of ZimbabweAfrican Histories and Modernitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47733-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Transition in Zimbabwe: From Robert Gabriel Mugabe to Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa: A Repetition Without Change

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni¹ and Pedzisai Ruhanya²

(1)

Archie Mafeje Research Institute, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

(2)

University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

End Abstract

It would seem that the age of revolutions is over, to be succeeded by the age of transitions. These transitions were expected to be less violent than revolutions; liberal democracy was expected to enable peaceful change. Illiberal regimes are worse off. The authoritarian of Egypt, Algeria, Zimbabwe and Sudan have witnessed military interventions in transitional politics. Military forces embody violence, and their political interventions tend to block rather than enhance transitions. This book is about the problematic history of Zimbabwe and its politics of transition. At least six problematic transitions have been discernible in the country, something that led Thandika Mkandawire (2016) to write of ‘transition overload’. The first was the decolonisation transition of 1980, which was expected to deliver a sovereign Zimbabwe inhabited by free citizens who would enjoy restored land that had been stolen by white settler colonisers. The reality is that the land remained in the hands of minority white citizens, and at the end of two years’ independence (in 1983), Zimbabwe plunged into Operation Gukurahundi, which left over 20,000 mostly Ndebele-speaking people dead as a ‘party-state’ and ‘party-nation’ was constructed (Kriger 2003; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009a).

During the second transition, white dominance in the economy was dismantled. This entailed affirmative action, indigenisation and deracialisation of the economy, which took place in an environment of constraint that was based on an unwritten policy of reconciliation and the regulatory framework of the Lancaster House Constitution. For an agreed period of ten years (1980–1990), the Zimbabwean government could not amend the constitution. The third transition involved economic liberalisation. This began in 1990 in accordance with the demands and conditions of the notorious Structural Adjustment Programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Mlambo 1997). This neo-liberal transition not only destroyed the progress that had been made in the social spheres of education and health, but also provoked protests from workers and students who were hard hit by a combination of retrenchment, withdrawal of subsidies on basic commodities and privatisation.

The fourth transition was the agrarian transformation that took place under the banner of the Third Chimurenga and the radical Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, which was meant to deliver land to Zimbabwe’s landless black people. The consequence of this was the collapse of the national economy, partly because the implementation of land reform was chaotic and partly because it led to Zimbabwe being ostracised by the international community (Moyo and Yeros 2005; Alexander 2006; Sadomba 2011). The fifth transition was democratisation, which was fought for under the leadership of the labour movement (the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions), the National Constitutional Assembly and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) with the overarching themes of democracy, constitutionalism and human rights. The culmination of its partial success was the Inclusive Government of 2009–2013. The challenges of this period were highlighted in The Hard Road to Reform: The Politics of Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement by Brian Raftopolous (2013). Michael Aeby (2015) depicted this period, in which a ‘power-sharing’ government was in charge, as ‘Zimbabwe’s gruelling transition’. This was not only because of the politically complex situation that was carried over into it, but also because of the attempts being made behind the scenes by the ruling party to outmanoeuvre the opposition. Violence decreased and the economy stabilised slightly, but power did not shift from the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF). If anything, ZANU–PF used the five years of the government of national unity to recover and consolidate its power, and in the 2013 elections the party emerged stronger and in charge of government once more.

The sixth and the latest transition, at the time of writing (2020), was the so-called ‘military-assisted transition’ of November 2017, which led to the fall from power of the long-serving president Robert Gabriel Mugabe, paving the way for the rise to power of Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa (International Crisis Group 2017; Moore 2018; Rutherford 2018). Mugabe died in Singapore on 6 August 2019; he was buried at his rural home in Zvimba district of Mashonaland West province. This book is an attempt to comprehend the difficulties that surround successful political transition in Zimbabwe, with the primary focus on understanding political cultures and the role of the military in civilian politics, as well as how the Mnangagwa regime remains entangled in so-called Mugabeism. This is a term used to describe a nationalist matrix of power that is underpinned by party-state and party-nation constructions, and is held hostage by those who claim to have liberated the country from colonialism (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009b, 2012b, 2015).

It is clear that the political, economic and social quagmire in Zimbabwe since political independence was attained, which deepened in the 2000s with the long presidential incumbency of Mugabe and the ‘repetition without change’ represented by the ascendance to power by Mnangagwa on the back of a military coup, require proper framing and historical contextualisation. The situation is caused by a complex political culture, which has arisen through the entanglement of many different strands: the physical conquest of settler colonialism, the Cold War’s ideological inflexibilities, African nationalist patriarchal models of liberation (Campbell 2003), regimental/warrior traditions that lead to the prosecution of a liberation war, and the postcolonial legacy of personality cults and their gerontocratic tendencies, excluding women and young people, and indeed all those who are deemed to have not participated in the liberation struggles, from the corridors of power and ownership of strategic resources (see Hammar et al. 2003; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009a; Tendi 2010).

The concept of entanglement, as articulated by Sarah Nuttall (2009: 11), ‘is a means by which to draw into our analysis those sites in which what was thought of as separate—identities, spaces, histories—come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways’ and ‘It is an idea which signals largely unexplored terrains of mutuality, wrought from common, though often coercive and confrontational, experience.’ For Zimbabwe, Amanda Hammar and Brian Raftopolous (2003: 17) highlighted the entanglement of historicised and racialised assertions of land reclamation not only with technocratic and ahistorical liberal notions of private property protection, but also with developmentalism and notions of good governance on the one hand and emergent forms of indigenous nationalism underpinned by national sovereignty on the other.

With specific reference to current politics in Zimbabwe, one can posit a Mugabe–Mnangagwa entanglement at a basic level. The Mnangagwa regime is a direct child of Mugabeism; indeed, Mugabeism is its recurrent theme. What emerged as the ‘Second Republic’ is deeply interpellated by the immanent logics (even the poverty of logics) of Mugabeism (for details of Mugabeism see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009b, 2012a, 2015). Mnangagwa is Mugabe’s political protégé. This Mugabe–Mnangagwa entanglement is clearly manifested in the contradictory political discourses of Operation Restore Legacy, which was used to legitimise the military coup of November 2017, and the mantra of ‘Zimbabwe is Open for Business’, which purported to be setting out a new politics that was predicated on neo-liberalism and market-determined economic logic. The elephant in the room of Zimbabwe’s transitional politics is the nationalist matrix of power (otherwise known as Mugabeism) that is partly built on the colonial legacy of violence and authoritarianism and was partly invented by nationalists to safeguard postcolonial power. At least ten interrelated and overlapping coordinates for ZANU–PF’s nationalist matrix of power are discernible:

• The invention of a ‘party-state’ and a ‘party-nation’ (see Kriger 2003);
• Pedagogical ‘Chimurenga’ nationalism backed up by a constructed ‘patriotic history’(Ranger 2004);
• Reduction of elections to a mere ritual to validate legitimised power;
• Assumed warrior tradition cascading from anti-colonial liberation wars and the privileging of the gun as the guardian of attained power;
• Executive lawlessness known as ‘kutonga’ (to rule, not to govern);
• Neo-traditional patriarchal political culture of gerontocratic rule;
• Naturalised and routinised rule by violence and coercion;
• Practices of sorcery, witchcraft and poisoning of enemies and competitors;
• The fetishising of academic qualifications to reinforce the right to political office;
• Securocracy, plutocracy and predatory state politics based on primitive accumulation (see Shumba 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019).

This is the political terrain within which the Mnangagwa regime has emerged and finds itself. How do we make broader sense of it? Where does the potential for people’s freedom lie? In considering these questions, we have to reflect deeply on the legacy of the liberation struggles and their implications for freedom. The sociologist Roger Southall, in Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa (2013), posited that the liberation movements of southern Africa moved into government by embodying the hopes of those who supported them both domestically and internationally, but their performance in governmental terms was deeply disappointing. Michael Neocosmos’s Thinking Freedom in Africa: Towards a Theory of Emancipatory Politics (2016) provides the most extended critique of national liberation politics. The liberation movements were clear on what they were against (anti-racism, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism) and very unclear on what they were for. Neocosmos (2016) was very critical of the idea of attainment of freedom under the aegis of the state. This is why he concluded that the politics of the liberation movements ‘was based on a contradiction that it found impossible to overcome: the struggle for freedom was a struggle not only against the colonial state, but to a certain extent against the state itself, like all struggles for freedom; yet at the same time freedom was said to be attainable only under the aegis of an independent state, as it had been frustrated by colonial domination’ (Neocosmos 2016: 130).

Even such luminaries of the liberation movements as Joshua Nkomo, who led the Zimbabwe African People’s Union and commanded the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, expressed disappointment with the performance of liberation movements in government. ‘Freedom Lies Ahead’ is the title of the concluding chapter of Nkomo’s autobiography, Nkomo: The Story of My Life (1984). In this chapter, Nkomo, who after death was declared by ZANU-PF as the ‘Father of Zimbabwe’, reflected deeply on liberation and freedom in Zimbabwe while taking advantage of a life in exile in the United Kingdom. He posited that ‘The hardest lesson of my life has come to me late. It is that a nation can win freedom without its people becoming free’ (Nkomo 1984: 245). Most, if not all, former colonies gained ‘political independence’ one after another as the ‘physical empire’, with its direct colonial administration (direct juridical administration), was universally condemned after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The key signatures of this political independence became a new national anthem, a new flag, the faces of black/African leaders in parliament, the faces of black/African prime ministers or presidents at state house, the changing of countries’ names (with the exception of South Africa) to the vernacular and admission of the newly ‘sovereign’ states into the lowest echelons of the United Nations (Meredith 1984; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2012b).

Yes, the elites in charge of the state gained the freedom to accumulate resources ahead of everyone else, through a process known as bureaucratic state parasitism. Yes, Nkomo was correct: freedom of the state did not automatically translate into freedom for the people. What eventually happened in Zimbabwe under Mugabe is well articulated by Issa G. Shivji (2003: 15): ‘National question turns into state-building. Nation-building is substituted by party and party by leader, the founder of the nation.’ Mugabe and his wife (Grace Mugabe), as the first family, ended up being the centre of national politics. This is a bane of, if not the underside of, the decolonisation of the twentieth century.

Neo-colonialism exacerbated the lack of freedom for both the state and the people in Africa, and on another level, it gave some African leaders an excuse to blame external factors for their failure to deliver freedom. This was articulated by Kwame Nkrumah in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965):

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. […]. Neo-colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. (Nkrumah 1965: ix–xi)

Blaming and railing against imperialism became a key trope of Mugabeism. Nkomo also reflected on the problem of neo-colonialism as he meditated on questions of liberation and freedom in Zimbabwe. But his take was different from Mugabe’s:

I refuse to accept that we cannot do better than we have so far done, or to reach for the easy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Transition in Zimbabwe: From Robert Gabriel Mugabe to Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa: A Repetition Without Change
• Part I. Colonialism, Nationalism and Political Culture
• Part II. Identity, Militarisation and Transitional Politics
• Part III. Social Media, Democracy and Political Discourse
• Part IV. Post-Mugabe Economy, Gender and Operation Restore Legacy
• Back Matter