The deepening all-round crisis in Zimbabwe is having a devastating impact on the lives of millions of Zimbabwean workers, peasants, the youth and middle strata professionals of all kinds. The crisis has also spilled over into our country, with an estimated three million Zimbabwean economic refugees now living in South Africa.
Faced with this crisis, it should be admitted that we in the African National Congress-led alliance have not always found it easy to position ourselves. Of course, Zimbabweans must find their own solutions, but no one doubts that South Africans also have an important role to play.
From an alliance perspective, Zanu-PF presents a complex challenge. On the one hand, we in the South African liberation movement have a long, common history with the ruling party. Zimbabweans paid a high price for their principled position in the fight against apartheid, and this history should never be forgotten.
It should also be remembered that, in the immediate post-independence period, the Zimbabwean liberation movement led the country on a significant social redistribution programme, with notable gains in education and health-care.
However, it is also incontrovertible that much of the present crisis is centred on Zanu-PF itself, including internal stagnation, social distance from its historic mass base, factionalism and serious policy mistakes.
The complexities have not been helped by a wider domestic setting in which certain opposition parties (notably the Democratic Alliance) have run a thinly disguised racist campaign. They have sought to use the Zimbabwean crisis as an example of what happens when they (a black majority) take over.
At a popular level within our country and movement, there has often been a knee-jerk backlash against these currents: if Tony Leon insults Robert Mugabe, then Mugabe must be a super-hero. All of this has muddied the waters in South Africa.
It is against this general background that the heavy-handed expulsion of a Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) fact-finding delegation to Zimbabwe occurred. The expulsion, defying a court order, resulted in various reverberations back in South Africa — once more underlining the need for our alliance to discuss and harmonise perspectives on Zimbabwe.
The South African Communist Party agrees with the South African government that the primary blockage in Zimbabwe is of a political nature, and that free-and-fair elections — with an outcome that will be accepted by both the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and Zanu-PF — represent the best chance of resolving the impasse.
We believe that all progressive South African formations, especially our alliance forces, should be firm, constructive and focused in its support of attempts to realise the process of negotiation between the parties and the phased implementation of pre-election conditions agreed by the parties. This includes constitutional amendments and other confidence-building steps.
While the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) principles and guidelines governing democratic elections are a welcome step, they represent a minimum standard, and do not render unnecessary these country-specific pre-electoral agreements and measures.
The launch of the MDC in 2000 — to contest (successfully) a constitutional referendum, and then (nearly successfully) parliamentary elections in 2000 and subsequent presidential elections in 2002 — has resulted in a political reality that is very focused on elections.
On the MDC’s side the rapid rise to electoral prominence has meant that social movement, trade union and other energies have been focused on winning elections; on contesting the results in court; and on preparing the ground for different elections. In a sense, the strategy has been regime change through the ballot box.
On Zanu-PF’s side, the electoral rise of the MDC has led to an ever-narrowing laager mentality. Conspiracies are seen (or constructed) everywhere. The hastily launched land reform programme was less about land reform, and more about seeking to consolidate the Zanu-PF apparatus and its electoral base. The unleashing of youth militias and other violence has had a similar basis, with heightened violence around by-elections. Other anti-democratic steps — tightening up on media laws, outlawing newspapers, the prosecution of the MDC leadership — are also driven essentially by electoral calculations.
Zanu-PF is becoming less and less of a liberation movement confidently fostering a progressive hegemony and more and more a repressive machine focused on holding on to power.
For all of these reasons the SACP believes that, while pushing firmly for democratic elections in Zimbabwe, we must be sober in our expectations. There is very little to suggest that Zanu-PF, in particular, is seriously and confidently preparing to lay the foundations for a democratic process. Almost all of the indicators (including the expulsion of Cosatu) are pointing in the opposite direction for now.
Under these conditions, the worst possible option we, the alliance in South Africa, could take would be a ”pragmatic” acceptance of Zanu-PF’s March 2005 election date and ”pragmatically” make the most of a bad deal in the hope that, after a flawed election, a victorious Zanu-PF would be more magnanimous and a reduced MDC would be more realistic.
In a way, this would be to replay the illusions of the 2002 presidential election. Such an election would not lay the basis for any sustainable resolution of the crisis. It would nullify the progress made within SADC on principles of democratisation and it would also contribute to the stagnation of progressive analysis and debate on Zimbabwe in our own country.
The SACP believes that the crisis in Zimbabwe is rooted in the social reality of the class force dominant in Zanu-PF’s leadership. This is a bureaucratic, capitalist class reliant on its monopoly of state machinery for its social reproduction. It is unable to provide a coherent and hegemonic strategic leadership that is capable of beginning to address the country’s political, moral, and economic.
There are, from time to time, signs that there are more far-sighted groupings within Zanu-PF leadership, who are prepared, for instance, to explore the possibility of some kind of patriotic power-sharing deal with the MDC. But, at least for the moment, these elements are outflanked within the dynamics of the ruling party.
Having said this, the SACP believes that there is no solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, at least within any foreseeable future, without Zanu-PF. This means that there needs to be ongoing, honest, robust engagement between the ruling party and South Africa.
Progressive South African formations need to premise their engagement on the basic principle that Zimbabweans are responsible for finding their own solutions. However, we do still have a responsibility to Zimbabwe as well as to our own national democratic struggle.
Our solidarity needs to be multi-pronged. Government-to-government, party-to-party, and people-to-people engagements are all required.
In developing our solidarity, we must guard against expecting our government to behave like a trade union movement — or Cosatu to behave like a government. We must also ensure that we do not allow tactical differences within our alliance to confuse us and to become the main issue, to the detriment of pursuing a converging strategic objective in Zimbabwe.
The crisis is not a difference in tactics in our alliance. The crisis is in Zimbabwe.
Blade Nzimande is the general secretary of the SACP