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Aldo Dell’Ariccia

Nathaniel Manheru The Other Side
In  the second part of Shakespeare’s history play, Henry IV, is an emotionally riveting great rejection scene. King Henry V, all along the playful Prince Hal, gets crowned following the death of his tainted father, King Henry IV. Tainted because he literally wades through blood to reach the throne. Before Hal’s ascension, the player prince keeps dissolute company whose riotous ways are typified by the grossly built, base but ebullient clown, Falstaff. Falstaff is blamed for misleading the prince, for drawing him away from his responsibilities as a regent. The prince patronises all sorts of unseemly places, brothels included, cutting a controversial character to a society overly concerned about worthy, orderly monarchical succession. Unbeknown to that society, Hal’s apparent descent into this murky world of play, crime and passion is a learning odyssey: he wants real contact with the various shades that make whole gamut of the society he shall govern one day, meaningful contact as would get him to be a well-rooted king. And of course that means diving into the world of dirt, hopefully without suffering any grime, itself a delicate calculation which none of his depraved associates ever gets to know. That included Falstaff who mistook himself for Hal’s closest, everlasting friend.

When laws were at his command
When Falstaff gets to know that Hal’s fortunes have hit the zenith, landing him kingship, he gets ecstatic, convincing himself that his own fortunes would rise in sympathy. He already feigns himself important, adding: “I know the young king is sick for me/ Let us take any man’s horses; the laws of England are at my commandment.” Visualising an era of unhindered licentiousness as before, he starts promoting his fellow friends, en-route to the palace where his newly crowned friend regally sits, encircled by a throng of officials of the monarch. Little did it occur to him that these men amounted to a formidable fosse between him and the new king, as also did his friend’s enthronement. Tragically, he not only hoped to cross this fosse; he expected a warm, clamping regal embrace at the end of it all, after which it would be happy ever after.

I know thee not
By the way by that time Falstaff has already knighted himself, even upgrading to higher station his fellow dissolute friends like Shallow and Pistol, two of his most trustworthy companions on this odyssey to new-found greatness. Once in sight and within earshot, Falstaff, suitably backed by dutiful and expectant Pistol, chants: “God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!” And adds with a stronger air of playful bonhomie he is wont to: “God save thee, my sweet boy!” Burly, always riotous and playful, King Henry V quickly picks his old “friend” who does not seem to realise things have changed, new times calling for refined, decorous behaviour, in place of brothel lingo. After vainly seeking the restraining intervention of the Lord Chief Justice, the new King decides to deal with the matter by himself. He says: “I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;/How ill white hairs become fool and jester!/ I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,/ So surfeit swell’d, so old and so profane;/ But, being awaked, I do despise my dream,/ Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape/ For thee thrice wider than for other men./ Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:/ Presume not that I am the thing I was;/ For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,/ That I have turn’d away my former self;/ So will I those that kept me company.” The writhing Falstaff is banished from the King’s sight by a ten-mile radius. It is the most painful rejection in dramaturgy.

One Crisis In Zimbabwe Coalition
The Crisis Coalition in Zimbabwe calls itself a broad-based civil society network and was founded in August 2001. Those with a good sense of history will locate this creature within the escalating backlash politics following Zimbabwe’s dramatic land repossessions which began in 2000. Then on, the country witnessed consecutive measures by the western world meant to punish the country for ever daring on such a radical course of social policy action. The most visible of these measures was ZDERA, the punitive sanctions legislation passed by the US legislature against a faraway, independent African country which the US, through its president’s first executive order on the matter, accused of “constituting an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States”. Of course the EU took similar but less obtrusive measures, all to shared goals and outcomes.

George Soros

The Soros largesse
These backlash politics also took the form of organising the country’s politics to build a broad opposition against the ruling Zanu-PF government, in the hope of effecting some “regime change”. To the extent that these backlash politics needed structures, the strategy became that of creating political NGOs, more accurately, AGOs (Against Government Organisations) which fed into opposition politics conceptually, financially and organizationally. It is significant that Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition gets formed in the same month that the US Senate passes ZDERA. Far from coincidence, this was causal, clearly indicating the US had shifted gear towards building institutions for long-term opposition to the Zanu-PF government, and in any case eyeing the impending 2002 Presidential elections. Crisis Coalition in Zimbabwe which recently convened the so-called think-tank discussion on the economy should be viewed against this background. An additional piece of significant detail is its South African footing by way of a “desk” or regional office it established in that country in 2004, largely  on the funding of George Soros’ Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, OSISA. This link with American diasporic venture capital should not be missed.

The day Dell’Ariccia lost friends
Having established Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition as the habitat of the June 17 discussions on the economy, we move hastily to the actual content of the discussion, paying particular attention to relational factors which form the basis of this instalment. While many presentations and views were made and expressed respectively, the media zeroed in on the EU ambassador, Dell’Ariccia, Godfrey Kanyenze, Ibbotson Mandaza and to a small extent, Moses Chundu, ex-Prime Minister’s Office, ex-RBZ. The in-betweens were the Dewa Mavhingas, the Mfundo Mlilos, the Chirimambowas and the Muzondidyas of this world. Patrick Zhuwawo espoused a view close to the ruling party while Mudzuri spoke for something oppositional (it is very difficult to situate views given the fragmentation in the MDC!). Dell’Ariccia made two key contributions: he asserted a leadership presence in Zimbabwe, much to the chagrin of the political NGOs and other oppositional figures represented at that meeting. Secondly, he berated the same NGOs for remaining stuck in an oppositional past, all against the ever evolving relationships between and among players. He did not court friendship. The days that followed saw his views being set up for round denunciation by the very sector he had urged to evolve. For me this was the key relationship emerging from the gathering.

Ibbo Mandaza

Beneath constitutionalism
Another important relationship related to the so-called Zimbabwe scholars and the situation obtaining in the country presently, principally boiling down to their appreciation of the state we are in and how they apportion and distribute blame as they see fit. I will start with this easy relationship and then deal with a more complex one related to political NGOs and the donor community represented by the EU Resident Representative. All the scholars there, typified by Mandaza and Kanyenze, placed the blame firmly on failed leadership, with Mandaza militantly suggesting a change of government. Quite how and barely a year after one such change, one is not too sure, although it should be fairly obvious that this increasingly irascible political scientist might not have been thinking about the ballot and all that paraphernalia of constitutionalism. If he was, he would have had no point to make at all, all against July 31. His role in Mavambo and his homeless dissent post-Mavambo, could provide clue to the fact that he spoke less as an intellectual, more as an embittered politician of beaten failed politics.

A beguiling argument
The Kanyenze contribution sounded at once thoughtful and flippant. Thoughtful to the extent that he blamed the economic challenges the country faces to a selfish capture of national resources, typified by land and precious minerals, by the ruling elite. That avers an attempt at a class reading of our social situation. How successful one gets by classifying Zanu-PF as a class, one is not quite sure, with one hoping that a less angry, more thinking Mandaza would have helped matters so helplessly cluttered. Or how far one goes by hiding behind the productivity and food security argument when it comes to the agrarian question in Zimbabwe, one is also not too sure. You have to be very daft or wilfully deluding not to see that these two seemingly emotive factors in the land debate have been inserted by white interests to delegitimise the racial class crisis tackled by land reforms. Flippant in that his “manzondora” (chicken feet) analogy on dwindling export capacity seemed aimed at grabbing easy bites than contributing to any meaningful elucidation of our situation here. For someone associated with labour politics, one would have expected a more profound analysis on the export crisis as it afflicts African and Third World economies, in this era of globalised manufacturing. Of course that would have got him well away from the local blame-game he craved for.

A sod that’s still stuck
Situating these two intellectuals, it is very easy to see what is wrong with us. Whether one is talking about Mandaza, Kanyenze or Chundu, one is looking at intellectuals who have abortively gone into politics, who have fatally sold their interpretive soul to the gods of elusive power, emerging therefrom badly mauled and bleeding, and also too bitter to make sensible points that benefit anyone, least of all themselves. Here are men who would be leaders, now sore and sour from rejection. Their attack on current leadership stems from their failure to dislodge it, rather than from a dispassionate analysis of its shortcomings. The tag of intellectuals is an attempt to cleanse this gnawing electoral defeat; the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition itself the makeshift bathroom for that ablution exercise. The water has run out when a sod is still stuck. It is not a secret that all the three played advisory to Morgan Tsvangirai, in the process backing a wrong horse. Their critique of leadership is thus less than honest, which is why the tags of think-tank must not be allowed to mislead the unsuspecting. The Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition is trying for calmer pastures, from where to remake new oppositional politics against defeat and fragmentation of formal opposition, indeed against political donor fatigue characterized by a frantic search for rapprochement. That takes me to the key relational factor.

Falstaffian rejection
Give it to Crisis, it gave exposure to a new relationship between donors and political NGOs. All along viewed as founded on fatigue, the seminar showed matters had escalate quite a little, with donors showing open anger and exasperation with their erstwhile pawns. And this is not light anger. It is deep anger contrastively founded on donor resignation to regime retention versus political NGOs’ bigoted search for regime change. It is deep anger founded on a donor desire to engage on any terms, in this case around Zim-Asset, versus political NGOs’ reflexive desire to unthinkingly rubbish anything coming from the ruling party. The EU envoy went a bit further: not only did he accuse these political NGOs of failing to evolve, he also accused them of conceptually failing to distinguish between a national blueprint which is what Zim-Asset is, and a strategy for funding and implementing it on the ground, which is where the debate should focus on. He made these political NGOs and their pseudo-thinkers appear like child-men conceptually, possibly implying they are the reason the opposition lurched into deep crisis. With the MDC abandoned, its political NGOs and thinkers condemned and rejected Falstaff-like, it is clear the way is open for new relationships, well away from the regime-change mantra, the crisis mantra, on which these NGOs had fed fat all along.

Zeal of smiting the wicked
Of course there is residual support for them from the Americans, the British, the Australians and the Canadians, but clearly there has been a shift which only Zanu-PF can either spoil or throw away. Whichever way, Dell’Ariccia had added a new term to the country’s political nomenclature: AGO or Anti-Government Organisations. My apologies Cde Professor Mutambara. The acronym is too handy to be abandoned for courtesies. Which takes us to the key question: with their gods demolished, with their gods not even featuring in codices, to what god are our politically involved intellectuals and NGOs offering blood to? Their gods have failed and they themselves are no longer in those gods’ good graces. Meanwhile by their own actions, they have repudiated their magisterial or privileged role in society. Far from posing as interpreters, today their visions stand rejected by the very poor in whose name they spoke. So what next? End of road? Could that then explain why instead of producing knowledge, they are producing cynicism, turning to dead intellectualism at this time of need for fresh ideas? Which reminds me of Thomas Sowell: “Few things blind human beings to the actual consequences of what they are doing like a heady feeling of self-righteousness during a crusade to smite the wicked and rescue the downtrodden.”

Icho!

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