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SHOKO HEYA

NO sane politician worth the name would ever pledge to cut ties with the electorate after winning an election. It is politics 101. If you spend time, money and effort ingratiating yourself with a constituency the last thing you would want is to alienate the same constituency, unless you are like this writer’s former MP, one Heya Shoko who by the grace of economic desperation on the part of the electorate once made it to Zimbabwe’s parliament, carrying with himself there his monumental load of village ignorance.

This writer’s brother vows that if him and his drinking friends were to be paraded alongside Heya Shoko and the people of Bikita West were asked to identify the man they know most, Shoko would no doubt get the least number of acknowledgements, and the young Wafawarova reckons he would stand a good chance of coming up tops, thanks to his notorious presence at Nyika Growth Point where he has made a name for himself and inadvertently for the family, doing what merrymaking patrons do best at water holes.

Young Shoko and other debutant MDC MPs that won the right to represent various constituencies in 2008 failed the test of ingratiating themselves with their constituencies, mainly because they really never invested anything into the electorate anyway – just reaping handsomely on the protest vote that was targeted at the disunited Zanu-PF of 2008.

When the anger disappeared with time, Paul Temba Nyathi confessed that voters from his constituency were so unimpressed with him that they could not look him in the eye.

To date the MDC-T still has to learn the art of ingratiating with the electorate, and even Tsvangirai can only hope for yet another protest vote against Zanu-PF since he has no clue on how best electioneering really works.

This explains this treacherous celebration of a perceived economic decline by some MDC-T politicians, and the insidious salivating for poverty related disasters and afflictions under this Zanu-PF government.

Zanu-PF largely won election 2013 because of its internal political dynamics where competition for parliamentary seats and other party positions is so stiff that the party has permanently transformed itself into an electioneering party, with its incumbent and aspiring MPs always going around their respective constituencies, sadly not for the best of reasons in some cases.

Zanu-PF is a party with the capacity to keep Zimbabwe in an election mode for five years without breathing, as the party is currently doing by nationalising its internal elections for provincial office holders, an event that would not attract any media attention in any other democracy where only national elections to choose a government matter, as should be the case.

For the veteran Zanu-PF politician constituency work entails attending funerals, visiting the bereaved, unveiling plaques, gatecrashing people’s weddings in the constituency, patronising the village heads, presiding over donor handouts, stump speeches to mesmerised villagers, and constituency schmoozing of any kind – when the politician is not plotting against his rivals.

One Cabinet Minister stated upon taking his oath that he felt like “hitting the ground running,” and we all hoped that this statement was a measure of the commitment ahead in terms of Government’s resolve to fixing the country’s battered and over-exposed economy. Even the sceptics were somewhat convinced that the familiar lot in the 2013 Cabinet were this time around bound to be committed to five years of unadulterated delivery.

Apart from the notorious sideshow of Zanu-PF’s provincial elections, the only other notable activity from this Spartan, outcome focused Cabinet is the super-sounding Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-Asset) – a program The Herald reports “may fall short of targets because of inadequate funding.”

The sum ambition behind this nice sounding idea with an equally fabulous acronym is to achieve “food security and nutrition, social services and poverty reduction, infrastructure and utilities; and value addition and beneficiation” by 2018.

If this were to become a reality we expect our Cabinet Ministers to concentrate completely, to the exclusion of all other works, on the national responsibilities of their portfolios; not to gather our journalists for briefings over the little dramas of no benefit that happen during routine Zanu-PF leadership meetings.

We cannot take seriously people who elevate private internal politics of their party to matters of national significance.
This is not election time, and no one is in the least interested in knowing who next wants President Robert Mugabe’s job, or who else wants to stop such people in their ambitions.

Zanu-PF was voted in to deliver on its election promises, and not too many voters are really worried on who next Zanu-PF will deliver as its election candidates in 2018, and any attempt by the party’s politicians to create such a concern is essentially misplaced.

Attempts to reduce the revolutionary party to an electioneering outfit that strives to keep the electorate in a perpetual election modecan only lead to one thing – failure to deliver on what matters most.

We are now too used to this minister holding a press conference to explain this and that, to outline lofty plans and gruesome constraints, this other Minister visiting a dilapidated utility there, another visiting dying animals somewhere in one corner of the country, and another reminding us how much agricultural inputs our farmers need, yet another telling us to be very afraid of our all-hurting external enemies.

Busybody politicians are not this writer’s idea of achievers.

The people can narrate better the problems bedevilling their communities than any politician can ever do, and the only expectation our people have from our leaders is solutions to their problems, not plans, not platitudinous policy papers, or sweet reminders of past glories. It is not war with the enemy but friendly fire that the Zanu-PF politician of today fears most.

The fear of internal enemies sustains this crazy system of dolling out imaginary patronages, and this is why factional politics have dons owning other individuals within the party.

Electioneering has become everyone’s passion, and if you do not do it you suffer what Heya Shoko suffered in Bikita West on July 31, 2013.  But we cannot be electioneered at the expense of our own livelihoods, and soon people will notice that there is very little difference between an electioneering politician and an absentee one. Both are useless and worth of condemnation.

In Zimbabwe the addiction to the vote is, if nothing else, out in the open. The substance around it has been legalised and the industry with which it is carried out has assumed an air of respectability, and that is why those presiding over the reportedly chaotic Zanu-PF internal elections are convinced the nation deserves their attention.

To some politicians we are all voters and our role is to occupy ourselves with voting matters as we ratify resolutions from political elites who are more than convinced that they are the custodians of the country’s public opinion. Our people do not eat accessibility, responsiveness or even empathy. They need solutions to bread and butter matters pertaining their lives.

Our people see in Zanu-PF the best among the available alternatives, and that is why the party was entrusted with the vote in 2013. But the party has a mandate to reciprocate the favour.

Our ordinary politicians’ idea of electorate responsibilities is quite astounding at times.

They drive themselves to self-inflicted breaking point working tirelessly hard on what does not matter to anybody else but themselves, even seeking divine intervention over it all. Some of our politicians hardly sleep gallivanting across constituencies in this perpetual electioneering that has become the bane of national development.  But where does all this hard work go? What do the 210 MPs for Zimbabwe actually achieve for their constituencies?

How worse off would the people of Bikita West be if the Masvingo politicians spared them the hassle of vote soliciting in between real elections, or if these politicians stopped making endless meaningless trips to their vllages?

Indeed many politicians would be coy about the quid pro quo of electioneering politics, and they would rather masquerade as genuine moral agents, as revolutionaries even. That is understandable.

However we have a reality around us – to our politicians our votes are more important than our needs, and as such vote security matters more than people welfare.

After all is it not easier to secure our vote than it is to secure our collective material needs?

Such is the norm in Western liberal democracies, but surely it should not be the case where a self-declared revolutionary party is governing.

In the West an MP retains their seat for kissing babies, sitting in a shopping mall with rolled up sleeves, attending dinners, or frequently walking past beach goers on the ocean shores.

Understandable this may be for countries with flourishing economies, but for sure an imitation of this inglorious behaviour in a country facing mass starvation is unbelievably diabolical.

Zanu-PF must appraise its MPs accordingly if the party is to deliver even half of its election promise – a feat that would be good enough for everyone’s needs, given the amount of promises the party freely dished out in order to outdo its otherwise clueless competitors in the run up to the election. If you deliver half of an over-promise you probably will get it right anyway.

The party cannot leave electoral work to be an arbitrary and discretionary matter on the party of its politicians. Constituency work cannot be some rough and ready convention where the only appraisal available is the next election.

Defeating one’s political opponents at the ballot box is not in itself an end, and many politicians seem to think otherwise.  We must make it clear that Zimbabweans cannot eat Tsvangirai’s electoral defeat, sweet as it maybe to others. Neither can anyone eat Mugabe’s victory, heroic or otherwise.

Zanu-PF must do the honourable thing and start to embark on a meaningful implementation of its election promises, even in line with this much-hyped Zim Asset. Instead of preparing for Election 2018 and trying to keep the nation in a perpetual election mood, it is important that Zanu-PF finds solutions to problems related to the country’s economy. Moral declarations are not good enough; only workable alternatives will bring the country to terms with sustainable economic growth. The morality of land redistribution in Zimbabwe has no meaning in the absence of its economic success, and that is why implementation is the key challenge to Zanu-PF’s otherwise well formulated policies.

We cannot run the indigenisation programme just purely and solely on the policy’s moral basis.
There are other factors in global factors that will need to be addressed as we seek to realise the moral obligations in the ownership of the country’s resources.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome!! It is homeland or death.

• Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.