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Reason Wafawarova
The side shows of the euphoria of winning elections, as well as the bitterness smiting the polarised loser of July 31 have done their time in our politics and it is time we focus on how best to take the country forward, putting aside the pettiness of blame politics and obsessive resentment.
There was a lot of talk about the need for Zimbabweans to “find each other” after the 2008 elections, and a whole national healing ministry was set during the tenure of the three-party inclusive Government between 2009 and July 2013, as well as the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (Jomic) — all efforts targeted at refocusing the Zimbabwean politician away from polarised politics.

That semblance of coming and working together immensely neutralised the notorious reign of protest politics, in the process diminishing significantly the numerical value of the protest vote.

The MDC-T in particular needed to switch its politics to find alternative ways of attracting the vote — especially when it became apparent that incumbency had branded the MDC-T top leadership more as colleagues of their counterparts in Zanu-PF than foes.

It made no sense for the erstwhile protest voter to keep protesting on behalf of a Tsvangirai who was now closely working with President Mugabe — meeting every Monday in meetings that most of the times seemed amicable and progressive.

To many it was a question of why keep protesting against Mugabe when the man who founded and fronted that protest seemed overly impressed with working hand in hand with the veteran politician.

Belated attempts to revive the protest mood made Morgan Tsvangirai look ludicrous in the least, and efforts to renew protest memories by displaying worthless inflation-era Zim dollars at political rallies were less than effective, especially when those dollars were being displayed by a man who had just spent two and half years lavishly enjoying the trappings of power — only to vehemently switch into loud objections once calls for an election to end the honeymoon began reaching his ears, even daring to internationalise his objections by clinging on to one pretext or the other.

The dramatic protests against the call for elections spoke to high heavens of how trapped Morgan Tsvangirai and his colleagues had become to the sweetness of power.

To the global public it was quite ironic to hear President Mugabe and his Zanu-PF pushing for an election while Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC colleagues from across the factions were digging in for a longer stay in the inclusive Government, even advocating indefinite benchmarks.

It was just a marvel to watch the democracy luminaries fighting for dear lives by clinging to political power and putting up a spirited fight to keep elections away.

The MDC-T that participated in the 2008 harmonised elections went into the election protesting alongside a significant part of the masses against the biting economic hardships of the time, and the election result sharply reflected this political climate.

The MDC-T that participated in the July 2013 general election was pretending to be protesting against people perceived by the public to be their colleagues, and with no compelling economic circumstances to protest against, the voter simply decided not be in any protest mood.
That completely pushed the MDC-T election campaign off the rails, and the rest has become part of our cherished history.

We have seen a completely bamboozled lot in the MDC-T leadership, and it is touching to see how some of the leading politicians are trying to come to terms with their misery.

Now it is time for Team Zanu-PF to be reminded that winning elections does not in itself constitute political victory.
Elections are won so that those who win can get a chance to showcase the victories associated their brand of politics.

We cannot underestimate the challenge of being Zanu-PF in today’s world, the challenge of people-oriented nationalist policies in an era of capitalist global dominance.

The challenge is wonderful and quite exciting, whether it is about land redistribution in Zimbabwe or the nationalisation of resources in South Africa.

There is no greater challenge Zimbabwe could ever have than to be nationalistic and implement economic independence.
There is no greater testament to our heroism than to overcome the problems that face us today in the wake of capitalist expansionism.
There is no greater opportunity we can ever have to transform ourselves; and also the sub-region and the entire continent of Africa.
There are compelling pressures for us to wish to escape the challenges that come with indigenisation and the land reform policy.

But this is a challenge we must never wish to abandon.
It is too wonderful and too magnificent when one thinks of the future of Zimbabwe and that of the African continent.
We are coming from a history that we should never wish to go back to, and no amount of international relations pressures must take us back to coloniality or to the era of black labour as a mere input to the thriving businesses of foreign corporations, themselves thriving on the rich resources of our continent.

We need to know ourselves at this point in time. Colonialism took away much of our identity because its masterminds knew that by not knowing ourselves we become a puzzle to ourselves, and that other people also become a puzzle to us. The idea was for us to assume the wrong identity and to identify ourselves with our enemies — even elevating our oppressors to pure saviours. Some of our politicians still believe our ex-colonisers can be our saviours.

If we do not know who we are then we are whomever somebody else tells we are.
Democratisation as led by the United States today is merely the imposition of Western values on nationalities smitten by the confusion of post-coloniality.

In Zimbabwe we were taken advantage of through the MDC-T project, so strong that at one time it stood a realistic chance of giving us a puppet government. It took radical popular policies like the land reform policy and the indigenisation policy to recapture the voters’ interest in pursuing liberation politics.

Those chosen in President Robert Mugabe’s Cabinet must be reminded from the onset that not a single one of them is appointed because of their own personal achievement.

They are there because people who did not contest the elections put their bodies and their lives on the line to see that they got there — and Zanu-PF owes these people something for that.

In fact, each Cabinet minister owes these people something for what they did to make it possible for Zanu-PF to be back in Government all by itself.

It is very easy to forget history and claim that politicians owe these people nothing when one makes a little fortune or fame here and there.
By forgetting the people behind one’s history, the tendency is always to forget those people that will come after you, the future.

We must be wary of politicians who act like the revolution is a seasonal matter — a temporary phenomenon that is not permanent.
The revolution is permanent! You forget your history and forget who you are and lose your obligation to the past, to those who made your success possible, and you then do not fulfil your obligations for those yet to come — your children and their children to come after them.

There is this social amnesia that comes with global liberalism — this obsession with abstractions that are glorified as liberties and freedoms, the kind the Benghazi Western-armed rebels dreamt of achieving in Libya, or the kind the US-backed Syrian rebels claim they will introduce if they succeed in toppling their own government.

This is the amnesia that makes people vaingloriously say “I am not black, I am not African, I am not an Arab; I am a human being. I am a global citizen.”

It is a sterile, abstract, meaningless identity.
The closer we get to this kind of identity the less we see of it, and the more we realise it has no meaning.
This is precisely why the Libyans now realise the meaninglessness of what they thought they were fighting for.

It is precisely why the human rights mantra totally disappeared with the inclusion of the MDC formations in the inclusive Government, as did the preached evilness of President Robert Mugabe.

People who identify themselves with these abstractions lead and experience empty lives as people with no feelings. When imperialism makes us identify with these abstractions the idea is to make us escape our own feelings.

When our politicians escape from our collective national feeling they find it attractive to escape their responsibilities, and to escape the pain and struggle that comes with national aspiration.

It is well and good to talk of the age factor in the composition of Zimbabwe’s latest Cabinet line-up, as it is good to talk about impetus and political will in regards to the personalities chosen.

However, the overriding guiding factor must be the choice of people who can read well the national feeling, people who will respond well to the compelling need to make our nation economically empowered. We want development by ourselves and prosperity in our own hands; and this is the call to which our Cabinet has been summoned.

The Community Share Schemes and the Employee Shares Scheme as set up through the indigenous policy are in themselves vehicles of relaying the collective feeling of communities and workers. But it takes a great deal of political responsibility to stay the course and selfishly pursue these programmes to their logical ends without succumbing to the overwhelming temptation of self-aggrandisement.
Harmony, transparency, purposefulness and accountability are major challenges facing Minister Francis Nhema as he takes over the indigenisation portfolio. It is important that the vociferous media rhetoric about mushrooming CSCs and ESCs be backed by detail in transparency and accountability — not the hazy statistics that often come out of the mouths of politicians at Press conferences or at political rallies.

Minister Walter Chidhakwa must be aware of the challenges ahead at the Mines Ministry. He must be aware of the history of mining in Zimbabwe, from which we need to make a new dimension for the future.

History is a grid, a set of co-ordinates that permit the individual to locate himself in reference to other points in the world, and that is how we must place ourselves relative to the history of mining in Zimbabwe. The precedent set by history in our mining sector is not sustainable, and every future investor must be made aware that we have evolved from the yesteryear oppression of corporate investment.

We must transform our mining sector in line with the future we want to create for future Zimbabweans — our own children and their children, not in line with the diktats of IMF staffers that keep pretending to have economic solutions for poor developing nations.

There is a signed document between the IMF and the last government, and that was done just before the July elections. That agreement will preach the usual gospel of austerity and investor security. It will be dead silent on the need of the indigenous Zimbabwean. The IMF does not usually talk about the needs of the masses, and surely they will not begin with Zimbabwe.

Minister Chinamasa will have to be at his best to bring the best for Zimbabweans from any IMF engagement we may see in the aftermath of the July election.

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

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.