/ 9 June 2008

Negotiating out of the maze

On hearing that Kenneth Kaunda had lost to Frederick Chiluba in Zambia’s 1991 presidential election, Zaire’s strongman, Mobutu Sese Seko, is reported to have remarked: ”Lose an election? How? — That’s stupid!”

But Kaunda demonstrated that it is possible for the founding father of a nation to concede defeat in an electoral process, even after 27 years in office. Today he remains an elder statesman in Africa. By contrast, Mobutu had to flee the country he abused for almost four decades.

Is it too late for Robert Mugabe to follow Kaunda’s example? This is the main question if the proposed run-off in Zimbabwe does not help effect a peaceful transition .

Writing on the ANC’s website, Cabinet minister Pallo Jordan laments the problem of transition in Zimbabwe, calling on Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party to ”surrender power” to Morgan Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). ”The questions we should be asking are: What has gone so radically wrong that the movement and the leaders who brought democracy to Zimbabwe today appear to be its ferocious violators? What has gone so wrong that they appear to be most fearful of it?”

The answers are to be found largely in the failure of bourgeois democracy to take hold in post-independence Africa. The reasons for this failure are, in the main, twofold.

First, the absence of a national bourgeoisie that would act as a socio-economic and political anchor, and around which the complex institutional framework (Parliament, the judiciary, the media, and so on) that defines democratic discourse can develop an existence autonomous of the ruling party or the leader in power. Without such institutions, democracy is reduced to the right to participate in elections every few years.

Second, the absence of the anchor class also means that state actors are totally dependent on the state for their very livelihood and for the primitive accumulation associated with patronage. Few of these could survive after Mugabe. It is more (class) self-interest than commitment to an ideology (now vacuous anyway) that drives the party zealots.

It is understandable that Zanu-PF is shaken by its defeat at the polls. No political party in post-independence Africa has survived the loss of state power. This shock, and fear of the future, explains the current wave of violence across the country since the election. Many of us have seen evidence of all this — relatives or friends killed; others with frightening injuries.

The calculation by the ruling cabal in Zanu-PF is that such violence would punish those who had voted against their party and warn the rest of the rural population against voting for the opposition, come the run-off. It would appear that a decision was made, in the days following the election, to deploy a military-style operation across parts of the country, in a manner designed to re-enact that of the war of liberation, including the deployment of some former commanders of the 1970s. It is not far-fetched to call this a civil war in the making.

This is a terrible indictment of our nation. Zimbabwe must exorcise the legacy of violence that has long underpinned the quest for power and its retention. This has to start now, in the identification of those directing this kind of violence, and in the establishment of national institutions that will make it unnecessary for anyone to believe that violence can be a viable tool.

Surely, it is an ambitious venture, by any stretch of the imagination, to expect that the population, the majority of whom (55% at least, according to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission’s own figures) declared their opposition to Mugabe on March 29, to suddenly be swayed to vote for him on June 27. More than 50% of the rural population voted against Mugabe. Assuming the urban voter turnout alone increases from 35% in March to 60% in June, Tsvangirai will romp to victory.

But that is not the point. Even with a comfortable win Tsvangirai and the MDC might find themselves saddled with the same problem: a delay in the announcement of the result, possibly a rigged election in which Mugabe claims victory or, more likely, Mugabe’s refusal to concede defeat. The violent and indefinite stand-off that faces us now will persist.

It would be naive to expect the kind of transition usual in a bourgeois democracy. If it is true that the MDC has been cheated for the fourth time in as many elections since 2000, the opposition should realise that ending Mugabe’s 28-year rule might need more than just electoral victory.

There is a way forward, provided Tsvangirai can take the initiative leading to a negotiated settlement of the current crisis. He will find many who could assist in that journey, in Zimbabwe itself, in the sub-region, in Africa as a whole, and in the international community. This is being discussed within and between various regional and global organisations now seized with the Zimbabwe crisis. The hope is that the proposed round-table conference can be held soon, involving all the political parties, and that a solution can be achieved.

Dr Ibbo Mandaza is executive director of SAPES Trust