Zimpapers Logo

difficulty to parody – where the diktats of corporate democracy continue to throttle the will of the people, proving to be an unchallengeable pillar in political affairs.
Corporate power survives by buying influence to protect its interests, and this is precisely why Google spent over US$500 000 hiring firms and consultants to assert its political influence in 2005. They had to respond to Microsoft’s mega spending of over US$9 million on lobbying and donations to American politicians from across the divide the same year.
Many people had thought Barack Obama was going to be somewhat independent from corporate power, but it did not take long before Obama started bragging of his links to “savvy” Wall Street CEOs, the real masters that pay politicians in today’s industrialised democracy, itself a highly privatised and commercialised concept only allowing a superficial ratification of elite decisions by the masses.
What Obama has managed to do in his first three years in power is to spur resentment in people that propped him to power, and to diminish his stature among the corporate grandees who now are in no doubt the US president needs them badly. That is Obama’s double tragedy. Western capitalism has turned everything into a commodity, top on the list being Western politicians, themselves acutely aware of who owns them, and behaving accordingly as such a relationship would demand.
Barack Obama came across to impress almost everyone by his high-pressure salesmanship and eloquence, raising so much hope that someone was now going to manage things differently from the nightmare of the Bush-Cheney era. Obama was at his best during the primary elections for the Democrats, when his opponents were Bill and Hillary Clinton. He promised to end all wars in which America was involved, and to turn around the economic disasters brought about by Bush’s extravagant and reckless policies.
Corporate power’s ruinous effect on international politics can only be underestimated to the peril of humanity. Today politics has gone to the dogs in most parts of the world, and one can see that even serious political columnists have now been reduced to crowd thrillers and power pleasers, departing so sadly from the ethics of professional analysis and from the duty of informing people objectively.
When Obama started his campaign in 2007, he succeeded in pleasing a generation of young Americans across the class and race divide – with the trailing crowd fully convinced that their candidate was what it took to dismantle the turbo-charged thrust of corporate power and its adjuncts at home, and to throw the imperial juggernaut abroad into reverse.
It was like the carefree illusion that drives many of Zimbabwe’s urban youths into believing that in Tsvangirai lies a magician who can spring up jobs galore straight from thin air. The enthusiasm of the young Americans was just as infectious as is that of many of Zimbabwe’s urban youths today, except that the enthusiasm may now vapour in the wake of the scandalous sex life of Morgan Tsvangirai.
Any expression of scepticism over the Obama juggernaut was greeted with disbelief and most of the time with outright anger, and equally when one expresses reservation over the ability of Tsvangirai to lead a country; his youthful supporters react with high sounding disbelief and supremely misguided anger, even turning violent for it. Many of these youths are currently trying to wish away the embarrassing revelations of their leader’s multiple sexual relationships with a string of women.
They cannot understand how their leader can be brave, popular, but also bedhopping, insidious, and inept. The Obama supporters could not see how their candidate could be charming, calm, intelligent, eloquent, but also perfidious. The enthusiasm that comes with youth and political euphoria refuses any coupling with criticism and this is why Tsvangirai’s bluffs, errant behaviour and flip flops have not cost him his political career yet. The supporters of the MDC-T do not want to see Tsvangirai as a creature mired in the culture of treachery politics, or embattled in embarrassing issues of immorality, or as a breathtaking puppet that he sometimes is. They do not want to see him as a politician with no desire whatsoever to prise himself loose from the strings tied to his political career by the puppeteers that fund his party from Western capitals, themselves poodles of corporate power.
Those who support Morgan Tsvangirai genuinely believe that with his leadership Zimbabweans will by definition part company with poverty and unemployment. There is this portrayal of Tsvangirai as a good man in a bad world, and the man encourages the view hoping it will prop him to power.
It sometimes pains to see people engaged in this well meaning gullibility and naivety, hoping in all sincerity that machine politicians like Tsvangirai can miraculously end the miseries of life. When Tsvangirai shows his shallowness as he recently did on the question of homosexuality, some people bitterly said he was betraying their trust. But talk of betrayal is quite foolish, for nothing was betrayed by Tsvangirai except one’s own illusions. It would appear the man has his own personal miseries amounting too much to allow him to solve anyone else’s issues.
Barack Obama encouraged the hope in American youths and he rode high on the marketing slogans “Change we can believe in,” or the more vacuous “Yes We Can”. To the American youngsters these slogans translated into reality, albeit nowhere else but in their youthful heads.
Of course the prevailing and more realistic slogan now applicable to Obama is “No You Can’t,” especially that now Obama has not only kept the Iraq and Afghanistan wars raging unabated, but has also failed to close Guantanamo Bay, carried his own assault on civil liberties, imprisoned whistle blowers, introduced drone attacks in Pakistan, and above all executed the illegal war on Libya, over and above the summary execution of Osama bin Laden, not to mention the failing puppet project in Egypt, where the people are reversing the chicanery Obama thought would save Israel.
On the economic front, Obama remains a handmaid of Wall Street, even as working-class America suffers from rising levels of unemployment and deprivation. Election 2012 will not be easy for the smooth and fast talking Obama, and he is surely set to drop his slogans if he does not want to reduce himself to a perfect clown.
Zimbabwe will also have its own Election 2012, and it does not look like Obama’s favourite candidate here will have it smooth running as some among his supporters would love to think. Tsvangirai has proven to be as materialistic as any other loathed African politician, accumulating luxurious benefits the very same way he publicly vilified and derided over the years in opposition, and even suggesting that his fellow politicians in Cabinet are not accumulating enough when compared to their counterparts in corruption riddled places like Kenya.
The man is evidently failing to impress his own inner circle at party level as he clings to his kitchen cabinet that seems to specialise in nothing but conspiring against perceived and real enemies of Tsvangirai within and outside the MDC-T. The man has angered a lot of people by his public support for gay rights, even suggesting that such “rights” are to be accommodated in the country’s new constitution. This would not be as bad if Tsvangirai had not earlier on portrayed himself as a deeply cultured African man who saw no point in debating whether man should sleep with other man or marry each other, and equally so for women, dismissing the prospect of such a debate in a rare collective effort with President Mugabe.
When confronted by a BBC interviewer Tsvangirai remembered to behave like a “civilised” man quite different from the product of the conservative African culture. He decided to thrill his listeners and hosts, probably hoping the episode would vapour away before reaching the raucously anti-gay constituency back home. Or maybe Roy Bennett was right in saying Tsvangirai only remembers the present and the most immediate past, and nothing more. It also appears the man only delivers the last promise made, if the stories in the press about his recent marriage of one woman and jilting of several others are anything to go by.
This writer is currently in Zimbabwe and the public sentiment on the gay issue is unmistakably hostile, for lack of a better term. The hostility is fast translating into hostility against Morgan Tsvangirai the person, and it appears the dividing line between support for gays and disdain for them is now a matter of MDC-T and Zanu-PF, where the former party is viewed as standing on the supporting side while the later is viewed as the opposing side. The perception is not good for Tsvangirai’s electioneering politics. It cannot be.
Add to this Tsvangirai’s miscalculated attacks on the economic empowerment program, and his apparent advocacy for an economic takeover by Western capital, then you get a man who is telling a rising generation of entrepreneurs that they have no means or capacity to be what they aspire to become, reminding us all of the nobility of employment and of loyal service to those whose financial power allows them to “create jobs” for everyone else – reminding us of the goodness of the loyal African.
It appears the pro-Tsvangirai media is quite scared of the prospect of a Mugabe factor in the coming elections. They have every reason to be so. Corporate power is also scared of the man.
Mugabe is a threat in that he pushes for a people driven democracy, fighting hard to give economic power to the masses, and apparently resolute in fighting down the concept of privatised and corporate democracy – the idea of “Democracy Private Limited,” as determined by those controlling the financial muscle in the world of today.
The Mugabe factor must never be confused with Mugabe the person. Mugabe the person is a physical phenomenon whose biological time span will one day come to an end like every other makeup of all mortals.
But the Mugabe factor is a legacy, while derived from Mugabe the person, it is far larger than the personality and character of one man. So you have the MDC-T trying to fight down a popular legacy in the name of fighting Robert Mugabe. And there arises the dangerous belief that should Mugabe the person demise, the fight for political power will be over for Tsvangirai. But Tsvangirai must be alerted that the battle lines are between a legacy of people power and that of corporate power; for which Tsvangirai is a candidate.
The real fight is between “Democracy Private Limited” and “People’s Democracy,”. The Western backers of Morgan Tsvangirai are also backing the military rulership in Egypt, hoping that they can establish corporate democracy in place of the people driven democracy emanating from the revolution that toppled Western puppet Hosni Mubarak earlier this year.
They hijacked the revolution and this writer predicted through this column that Egyptians would rise again to complete their revolution; and how sweet it is to make a correct prediction. Election 2012 is going to be a matter of policy and not of personalities, and Zimbabweans are quite clear about this. The MDC will have to move away from the vacuous sloganeering about change to more pragmatic issues of what they stand for if they do not want to be disappointed come election time.
Zanu-PF cannot afford too much sloganeering simply because the party overplayed that trick a long time ago. Now they have to rely on pushing forward the economic empowerment program and the land reform program to their logical conclusions. The community share scheme is an excellent starting point.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

l Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia, but currently in Harare.