Opposition: Against the Inevitable, for the Impossible

manheru

Two popular shorthands in the current media-led national discourse are “grand coalition” and “economic deflation”. The former is supposed to describe the country’s politics, while the latter allegedly describes the country’s economic situation. And like all shorthands, they lend a tinge of righteousness and consensus to remarkable shallowness. Once you utter the shorthand “grand alliance”, you are deemed to be knowing, to have described both what is wrong with our politics and what needs to be done to suture them. Once you throw in the term “deflation”, you will have, with remarkable knowingness, summed up what Zanu-PF is not doing right, summed up the state of our economic ailment.
Accounting recovery

In respect of the latter shorthand, I read with amusement Dumisani Muleya’s “repercussions of Mugabe re-election”. As far as he is concerned, the ultimate vote and legitimation for any politicians is cast by the economy. I suppose that is why the thriving Germans have long dispensed with the superfluities of the ballot box! And why authors of ballot technology put bourses before voters. And of course buttressing the use value of the “deflation” shorthand is an accompanying self-serving amnesia: the economic decline neatly starts after July 31, with the economy reflexively rebuking Zanu-PF for its “reckless” landslide. Of course any serious financial paper knows that Biti gave us an “accounting” economic recovery, never a real one. What is more, by the time we went for those damning elections, even that “accounting” economic recovery had collapsed, which is why Biti had lost substantiveness as a finance minister. Today he plays clairvoyance through a mundane description of what he left behind in the Treasury. And a cheer comes from an undiscerning media.

What ailment does grand alliance cure?
You have another level of dishonesty. When the issue under scrutiny is the fragmenting MDC-T, a win concession is made to Zanu-PF, made unconditionally. And the reason is not too subtle to fathom. You cannot justify Biti’s renewal team without conceding poor showing and stewardship on the part of Tsvangirai and his MDC-T party. Equally, you cannot commiserate with Tsvangirai for suffering a coup without acknowledging July 31, itself the precipitate to what is happening within the MDC-T. Even more absurdly, the whole notion of a grand alliance or coalition implies an admission that July 31 saw an un-matched tussle between the strong Zanu-PF and the weak MDC-T, an un-matched tussle which can only be cured through a grand alliance within the opposition, is it not?

Morgan Tsvangirai (right) and Tendai Biti

Morgan Tsvangirai (right) and Tendai Biti

The conceptual bind is very clear: you cannot discuss the goings-on in the MDC-T, and the wishes summarised in the grand alliance,  without having to acknowledge a Zanu-PF win, indeed without having to imply that once the opposition is better organised, better led and better united, the current electoral framework can indeed deliver victory to the opposition. So what ailment does the grand coalition cure? All this makes qualifications to the Zanu-PF July 31 win not just dishonest, but also self-serving!

Defiant Zim economy
Let me dispense with the “deflation” shorthand. Firstly, it is a fallacy that economists are united that Zimbabwe has slid into deflation. On that there simply is no unanimity, and let not the media cultivate a false consensus on this matter. What is consensual is that the word “deflation” is quite a new find in many newsrooms, never mind its qualified helpfulness in describing the economic state we are in. And like all fads, we have to endure its gratuitous use from green, impressionistic minds until the excitement is over. But please, let no one assume profound grasp simply by deploying and using it in this shallow, shorthand fashion. Secondly, the Zimbabwean economy, mercurially inscrutable as ever, today balks that interpretation. And yesterday’s Business Herald had a fascinating piece on this taken-for-granted notion of “deflation”. The article by Golden Sibanda made it plain clear that economists are once more puzzled by an economy which registers an upward trend in inflation while it is supposed to be deflated, an economy which continues to defy rules, gravity and predictions. Does that not inspire greater caution in our commentators, all of them so given to gratuitous conclusions and easy judgments?

When sums don’t add up
On closer examination, it emerges much of the excitement over the economy comes from the dip in revenues, translating into an insupportable wage bill on the public sector, among other problems. To our shallow commentators, this sounds like a new and sudden development, a myth not helped by our mendacious seer, Tendai Biti. Is it not a fact that the last days of his tenure as Finance Minister saw the civil service wage bill being met from outside the fiscus?
What is new? What is sudden? Is it not also a fact that this failure has long become a norm in the private sector, the only difference being that there, weak union power rewards that failure with silent grief thereby creating a false sense of normalcy?

And why go very far, why go beyond newsrooms? How many newsrooms are paying at all, let alone on time? How many are providing medical cover, meeting statutory obligations? If the economy is rebuking Zanu-PF for winning elections, what is the same economy rebuking newsrooms for? For reporting that win, I suppose?

Let me add a bit of pepper: why is the broke MDC-T being rebuked, itself the supposedly more sinned against than sinning victim? The thesis just does not have any coherence to it. And all this to simply run away from the easy and straightforward fact of sanctions and Western destabilisation?

Double delivery
We have more puzzles coming. Agriculture is on the rebound and that is of multiple significance. It means food security inside the country, less vulnerability to our politics and assertiveness. But it also means fresh incomes into rural areas, fresh purchasing power in the countryside. Will the grand alliance checkmate this development so auspicious to Zanu-PF?

More fundamentally, it means a key import cost is gone, in the process giving some comprehensive answer to  the trade imbalance that has bedevilled the economy. Of course agro-businesses will start looking up like never before.

Politically, Zanu-PF has doubly delivered: to its rural constituency which begins to feel better buying power; to Zim-Asset whose pillar leg is food security and nutrition. Of course the tag of basket-case is set to vanish overnight, to the chagrin of our sniping enemies. Clouded in “deflation” thesis, the media is about to miss this key gain which is set to confound all shorthand “theories” and theorists.

Wishing the bad
The economy continues to register some puzzling yet interesting signs. Delta reports a profit, a handsome one at that. And goes straight into expanded capital project. Equally, Irvine’s is building a milling capacity, predictably prompted by the agricultural recovery and the outlawing of cheap, ruinous imports.
The Russians are coming, virtually imperceptibly so. The Chinese have been consolidating and a diplomatic intervention might happen before year-end. Back home, more stringent measures are being taken to tighten economic management in the country.

Of course Westerners today cheer, thinking Zanu-PF has been softened by harsh economic realities. We shall see. The key point to make relates to these key pointers to recovery to be got, but registering at glacial pace. And those given to wishing away “bad” politics by wishing in economic implosion which won’t happen, have no faculties for reading let alone reporting such imperceptible changes.

Against law, time and practice
Back to the first shorthand, grand coalition. Let us face it, an ingratiating press and a dim political leadership is bound to give any opposition a dull, uninspiring agenda that condemns it to permanent opposition.

I notice that the press and the opposition have this strange fixation with constructing the so-called grand alliance pegging its objective solely on ousting Zanu-PF. And this whole discourse creates a false psychosis of about-to-happen elections, and this a mere year into the winner’s new five-year term.

The whole country is thus thrown into a mode of permanent elections. The sheer absurdity of it all becomes more forcefully apparent when one reads this false discourse against the state of total denial that characterised the same forces in the run-up to last year’s elections.

In other words, when elections were statutorily due, combined press and opposition ardour was in denying both their likelihood and desirability. And now that those elections are come and gone, the ardour of the same forces is in asserting their urgent inevitability, all against the requirements of the law, time and practice. It is a studious swing against reality which takes curious forms: denial of the inevitable; assertion of the impossible.
Self-flagellation

I made reference to the disservice which the ingratiating media bring to the table. Here is why. You cannot make a case for, or construct, a grand alliance solely on the basis of the desire to oust Mugabe and his Zanu-PF. Zanu-PF cannot be the raison d être of sustainable opposition formations surely?

Certainly not for Zimbabweans in my view. True, some Zimbabweans would wish an opposition win, which is not quite the same as wishing an opposition founded for the sole purpose of defeating Zanu-PF. Why does the whole thing sound like an Anglo-American wish?

A wish deeper than the electoral defeat of Zanu-PF, indeed a wish for the destruction of a liberation movement? You see this in the gleeful wish by the same media for a worse decline of the economy. Why would any Zimbabwean wish for the destruction of a national economy, more so those believing the economy must cast the final vote? Why would an employer who cannot meet his staff’s wage bill wish the economy worse? Does that not suggest self-flagellation? For whose benefit?
When the evolved are the reviled

Surely an opposition is better served by a discourse which probes the values and agenda around which to build a grand alliance, around which to strengthen our democracy, rather than one focusing on this one and sole purpose of destroying Zanu-PF?

And when newsrooms join in such a mantra, it sounds like the agenda has little to do with news. Anyway, both the grand alliance and elections are not about to happen, may never happen, which is why one cannot understand this this-or-nil argument being pursued by some commentators.

What is sure to happen is greater self-destruction of the opposition, greater discrediting of opposition personalities, and what is more, more brazen interference in national opposition politics by the vile West. Whilst our press thinks the West smells blood in Zanu-PF, in reality the West smells blood in the whole national body-politic. A weak, winning ruling party, a weaker, amenable opposition. That can’t be good to any Zimbabwean with some modicum of national consciousness.

And two outcomes shall be as certain as they are unintended: the economy will recover, placing Zanu-PF in a stronger position well ahead of 2018, making Zanu-PF a defender of national institutions and processes once more; in the ensuing tussle within the MDC-T, Biti will begin to slim and pimple both from more Western embraces and intricate chess skills in a simple tussle, all against a rough-skinned Tsvangirai who shall emerge as some recast national opposition, newly alive to the notion of vile Western meddling.

Nelson Chamisa

Nelson Chamisa

As Chamisa said recently, MDC-T is set to join Zanu-PF in the anti-Western interference mantra. Tragically, the media cheered when Biti was patronised by the West through its local ambassadors here; jeered when Tsvangirai was left in the cold by the same.

For all his naturalness, it is the reviled Tsvangirai who showed some evolution vis-a-vis the national question. When will the media learn to defend national space and interest?

Icho!

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