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African Histories and Modernities Series Editors
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The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX, USA
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This book series serves as a scholarly forum on African contributions to and negotiations of diverse modernities over time and space, with a particular emphasis on historical developments. Specifcally, it aims to refute the hegemonic conception of a singular modernity, Western in origin, spreading out to encompass the globe over the last several decades. Indeed, rather than reinforcing conceptual boundaries or parameters, the series instead looks to receive and respond to changing perspectives on an important but inherently nebulous idea, deliberately creating a space in which multiple modernities can interact, overlap, and confict. While privileging works that emphasize historical change over time, the series will also feature scholarship that blurs the lines between the historical and the contemporary, recognizing the ways in which our changing understandings of modernity in the present have the capacity to affect the way we think about African and global histories.
Akintunde Akinyemi, Literature, University of Florida, Gainesville
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Editors
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Archie Mafeje Research Institute
University of South Africa
Pretoria, South Africa
Pedzisai Ruhanya
University of Johannesburg
Johannesburg, South Africa
African Histories and Modernities
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Zimbabwe’s sole political leader since independence in 1980, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, lost power after a military coup in 2017. For a fortnight in November 2017, the coup was, for some observers in the academy and media and for many Zimbabwean citizens, indeterminate and imbued with potential for the emergence of a political leadership that would reform the authoritarian and divisive nationalist politics that had come to defne the Zimbabwean state. Zimbabwe’s once effcient public service provision, effective state bureaucracies and large formal sector had disintegrated signifcantly in the two decades preceding the coup. This decline was a consequence of marked economic regression and rising state corruption. For many, the 2017 coup opened up possibilities for economic turnaround and regeneration of state institutions.
This insightful edited volume by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Pedzisai Ruhanya comes three years after the coup. It assesses the degree to which the various openings that the coup created were indeed opportunities for real political and economic reforms. Are the politics and governance of the post-coup ZANU PF administration, led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, radically different from that of the ZANU PF government that Mugabe headed? Have the values and practices of what Ndlovu-Gatsheni has elsewhere referred to as ‘Mugabeism’ atrophied? Why is Zimbabwean politics locked in interminable transitions? These are only a few of the critical questions this book addresses.
Linda Thomas-Greenfeld and Bruce Wharton’s “Zimbabwe’s Coup: Net Gain or No Gain?” (2019) has endeavoured to evaluate the fate of the
reform agenda following the 2017 coup. In the broader literature, Clayton Thyne and Jonathan Powell’s “Coup d’État or Coup d’Autocracy: How Coups Impact Democratization, 1950–2008” (2016), Ozan Varol’s The Democratic Coup d’État (2017), Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans’ “Coups and Democracy” (2014) and Paul Collier’s “In Praise of the Coup” (2009), among others, debate and reach some varying conclusions about the impact of coups on political processes such as democratisation. For example, whereas Collier is in praise of the coup for being a means of liberating an oppressed people from dictatorship, Thyne and Powell warn that in fact, personal dictatorships and misrule have often been post-coup outcomes.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ruhanya’s book adds to the aforementioned literature. Like Thyne and Powell’s work, Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ruhanya’s study is not in praise of the coup, and, similar to Thomas-Greenfeld and Wharton, they strike a pessimistic tone with regard to the extent of political reform since the 2017 coup. However, two crucial points distinguish Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ruhanya’s study from competing works focusing on Zimbabwe’s post-coup politics. The frst is that it surpasses other studies in terms of scope. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Ruhanya have assembled an ambitious book, which examines how post-coup national politics interacts with, and is shaped by, themes such as nationalism, political economy and gender. The result is a rich appraisal of politics after the coup that is usefully historicised, incorporates political economy and pays notable attention to gender, which so inscribed politics before and during the coup. The 2017 coup represents a departure from some of the politics of old because it was Zimbabwe’s inaugural coup, impacting civil–military relations for years to come, but a signifcant part of subsequent politics has deep historical roots that this book enables the reader to grasp. A second point that distinguishes Gatsheni and Ruhanya’s book is that it foregrounds arguments by young and older Zimbabwean scholars about their distressed country’s politics.
In recent years, academic interest in coups and military rule has declined in African Studies, owing to the marked reduction in the frequency of coups and also because intellectual fashions come and go. Nonetheless, coups continue to occur and, as the recent case of Zimbabwe shows, their incidence is not the preserve of countries with a history of successful coups. The study of coup motivations, dynamics and consequences
remains an important and productive intellectual pursuit, even if it has gone out of fashion for some scholars. This book, with its focus on postcoup politics, substantiates my point through its remarkable range of insightful contributions.
St Antony’s College, Oxford Blessing-Miles Tendi
This book is founded upon the collective efforts of its editors and contributors. As editors, we appreciate the commitment and cooperation of all contributors to this project, and therefore take this opportunity to thank them most sincerely. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni would like to thank Professor Tshilidzi Marwala (Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg) for facilitating his 2019 Visiting Professorship at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study (JIAS) and Dr Bongani Ngqulunga (Director of JIAS) for accepting him as Visiting Professor at the institute, which enabled completion of this book project. NdlovuGatsheni also extends thanks to Professor Mandla Makhanya (Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of South Africa), under whom he works, for giving him time off to work on this book project. The editors also extend their thanks to Professor Blessing-Miles Tendi (University of Oxford) and Mr Siphosami Malunga (Executive Director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa) for contributing foreword and postscript respectively.
Tinashe C. Chigwata is a senior researcher at the Dullah Omar Institute for Constitutional Law, Governance and Human Rights at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. He obtained a PhD in Public Law from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. His other qualifcations are an MPhil in Local Government Law (University of the Western Cape) and a BSc (Honours) in Administration (University of Zimbabwe). His current research interests are in the areas of local government law, decentralisation and constitutional law. Dr Chigwata has extensive experience working in both the public and private sectors in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Wellington Gadzikwa is a lecturer in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Zimbabwe. He has been a senior lecturer at Harare Polytechnic Division of Mass Communication (thirteen years), Information Offcer-Ministry of Information (six years). He is a media analyst and consultant, and had published four books on the media as well as various articles in academic journals and chapters in books. He completed his PhD at UNISA in 2018.
Rudo Gaidzanwa is Professor of Sociology at the University of Zimbabwe. She specialises in social policy, land and gender studies and has published on gender and land, extractivism and social policy. She is also a gender and human rights activist. Her publications include Images of Women in Zimbabwean Literature (1985), Speaking for Ourselves: Masculinities and Femininities amongst University of Zimbabwe Students
(ed., 2001) and A Beautiful Strength: A Journal of Eighty Years of Women’s Rights, Movements and Activism in Zimbabwe since 1936 (co-edited with I. Matambanadzo, 2017). She is former Dean of the Faculty of Social Studies at University of Zimbabwe (2008–2012) and a former Dean of the College of Social Sciences at Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences. She served on the Presidential Land Committee in Zimbabwe in 2003 and as the Coordinator of Affrmative Action Programme at the University of Zimbabwe, as well as lead researcher for the WoMIN and Centre for Natural Resource Governance Study on Gendered Extractive Activities in Zimbabwe, 2017.
Bekezela Gumbo is currently a DPhil student at the Centre for Africa Studies at the University of the Free State. His research interests include politics of transition, political institutional engineering for sustainable political stability and socioeconomic and human development in Southern Africa. He serves as a principal researcher at Zimbabwe Democracy Institute, an independent research institute in Zimbabwe. As an undergraduate, he studied political science, and his Master’s degree is in International Relations from the University of Zimbabwe.
Samukele Hadebe is a senior researcher at Chris Hani Institute, Johannesburg. He holds a doctorate in Linguistics awarded jointly by the University of Zimbabwe and the University of Oslo. He was the chief editor of the Ndebele dictionary Isichazamazwi SesiNdebele (2001). The subjects of his publications include language planning, translation, literature, nationalism and labour issues. He has worked as a university lecturer, a senior civil servant and in civil society organizations.
Siphosami Malunga is the Executive Director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) and a human rights lawyer with extensive experience in justice and governance in Africa. He took the helm at OSISA in August 2013; having previously worked with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as the senior governance advisor and regional programme manager in the Regional Bureau for Africa. He managed UNDP’s democratic governance programme for Africa, providing policy analysis and intellectual leadership to governance advisors in UNDP’s Africa offces. Malunga joined the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in the UN’s Transitional Administration in East Timor in 2000 as an advisor to the transitional minister of justice, and later as senior defence trial attorney with the UN Serious
Crimes Tribunal. Between 2003 and 2006 he worked with the UN in Afghanistan to rebuild the justice sector, before moving to UNDP’s Governance Centre in Oslo, where he led UNDP’s effort to integrate confict prevention in democratic governance policy and programming. In 2008, he moved to Johannesburg to work in UNDP’s East and Southern Africa offce until 2011. Malunga earned his LLB at the University of Zimbabwe in 1994 and a Master’s in International Law (Cum Laude) from the University of Oslo, Norway, in 2007. He is a regular contributor, writer, commentator and contributor to leading continental and global publications on political, social and economic issues in Africa.
Sylvester Marumahoko is a Global Excellence and Stature Scholar with the School of Post Graduate Studies (Research and Innovation) at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He obtained a PhD in Public Law from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. His other qualifcations are MPhil in Local Government Law (University of the Western Cape), MSc in Rural and Urban Planning (University of Zimbabwe), MPA (University of Zimbabwe) and BSc (Honours) in Politics and Administration (University of Zimbabwe). His current research interests are in the areas of electoral reform in Southern Africa (with a special focus on Zimbabwe), constitutional law, the civil society–state relationship and intergovernmental relations. Dr Marumahoko has extensive experience working in both the public and private sectors in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Trust Matsilele recently completed his PhD at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Johannesburg. He studied Zimbabwe’s social media dissidence with an interdisciplinary approach that encompassed media, anthropology and history. Matsilele’s research interests include the use of social media by voices on the margins, the use of artifcial intelligence and big data in contemporary newsrooms and whistleblower citizen journalism.
Zenzo Moyo is a South Africa-based Zimbabwean researcher, who has practised both as a school teacher and as a university lecturer. Dr Moyo completed his MA (2013) and PhD (2018) in Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg. His PhD thesis was on state–civil society relations, and how these have moderated processes of democratisation in Zimbabwe. One of his recent publications is a 2018 article titled ‘“What
Rural Intellectuals in the State and NGOs in Zimbabwe’s Crisis-Ridden Countryside”, which is based on his MA research and was published by the Critical Sociology Journal. Currently, Dr Moyo works as a researcher at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Refection in Johannesburg. His research interests are in civil society, social movements, democracy, African and opposition politics, human rights and the links between education and development.
Shepherd Mpofu holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies at the University of Limpopo. He is a former Global Excellence Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg. His research and teaching interests are in media and identity, politics, digital media, citizen journalism and comparative media systems. He is currently working on two books, on social media and identity in South Africa and diasporic media and identity in Zimbabwe.
Lyton Ncube is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Communication Studies Department, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He holds a PhD in Cultural and Media Studies from the Centre for Communication Media and Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal (2015). Lyton Ncube’s Doctoral thesis shows the nexus of football, power, identity and development discourses in modern Zimbabwe. Using Zimbabwe’s two prominent football clubs, Dynamos FC and Highlanders FC, the study demonstrates how football is intricately intertwined with the daily exigencies of existence of the people of Zimbabwe. His research interests are in the political economy of the media, critical theory, cultural studies and the sociology of sport, particularly the nexus of football, nationalism and social identities.
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Research Professor and Director of Scholarship in the Department of Leadership and Transformation in the Principal and Vice-Chancellor’s Offce at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and is also the 2019 Visiting Professor at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Johannesburg. He holds a DPhil in Historical Studies from the University of Zimbabwe. He has taught at the University of Zimbabwe, Midlands State University, Monash University (South Africa/Australia), the Open University (United Kingdom, UK) and the University of South Africa. He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, a Fellow of the Centre of African Studies in the Netherlands and a Research Associate
of the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at the Open University; he is also highly rated as a social scientist by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. He has published over 100 academic works, including seven sole-authored books, and seven edited volumes. His latest major publications are books entitled Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (2018) and Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over a New Leaf (2020, forthcoming).
Philip Pasirayi is a Zimbabwean human rights activist and researcher. He holds a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford (UK). His research interests are in media, democracy, governance and human rights. He is currently working as Executive Director of a local Zimbabwean NGO, the Centre for Community Development in Zimbabwe, based in Harare.
Pedzisai Ruhanya is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the University of Johannesburg’s School of Communication, Faculty of Humanities. He is the director of the Zimbabwe Democracy Institute (ZDI). He studied journalism, sociology, human rights and media and democracy at the Universities of Zimbabwe, Essex (UK) and Westminster (UK).
Toendepi Shonhe is a political economist and Research Fellow at Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, University of South Africa. He holds a Master’s in public policy management from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and PhD in Development Studies— Agrarian Relations from the University of KwaZulu Natal. His research interest is in agrarian change and economic development. He recently published a book on reconfgured agrarian relations in Zimbabwe. His current research work focuses on the agrarian transition in Zimbabwe as well as land reform, food security and capital accumulation in Africa.
Mkhululi Sibindi is a doctoral student in International Business, Economics and Trade at the University of South Africa. He completed his MBA at Zimbabwe Open University. His academic and professional engagements have included appointments at Richfeld Graduate Institute (South Africa) Trust Academy (Bulawayo). He currently serves as Senior Lecturer at Richfeld Graduate Institute of Technology in Pretoria. He is a specialist in international capital fows, expansion strategies and multinational frms’ heterogeneity. His research interests focus on developing markets, with specifc emphasis on Africa. He is expert in advanced econometrics and quantitative research.
Stanley Tsarwe is a senior lecturer in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Zimbabwe. He holds a PhD in Journalism and Media Studies from Rhodes University, South Africa. He also holds an MA in Journalism and Media Studies from the same institution. He has research interests in media and democracy; African radio and democratisation; and media, confict and peace in Africa.
12.4 Interconnectedness of Africa’s Regional Economic Blocks. Notes (Abbreviations): AMU, Arab Maghreb Union; CEMAC, Central African Economic and Monetary Community; CMA, Common Monetary Area; CEN-SAD, Community of Sahelo-Saharan States; CEPGL, Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries; IOC, Indian Ocean Commission; IGAD, Intergovernmental Authority on Development; MRU, Mano River Union; SACU, Southern African Customs Union; WAEMU, West African Economic and Monetary Union; WAMZ, West African Monetary Zone.
* Members of CEN-SAD. (Source: Ncube and Mokoti (2019), fgure updated from UNESC (2009), Economic Development in Africa 2009: Strengthening Regional Economic Integration for Development. United Nations publication.
gathered outside State House after the long march to and from the Highfelds suburb. (Source: Author)
It would seem that the age of revolutions is over, to be succeeded by the age of transitions. These transitions were expected to be less violent than revolutions; liberal democracy was expected to enable peaceful change. Illiberal regimes are worse off. The authoritarian of Egypt, Algeria, Zimbabwe and Sudan have witnessed military interventions in transitional politics. Military forces embody violence, and their political interventions tend to block rather than enhance transitions. This book is about the problematic history of Zimbabwe and its politics of transition. At least six problematic transitions have been discernible in the country, something
S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (*)
Archie Mafeje Research Institute, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
P. Ruhanya
University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
© The Author(s) 2020
S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, P. Ruhanya (eds.), The History and Political Transition of Zimbabwe, African Histories and Modernities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47733-2_1
1
that led Thandika Mkandawire (2016) to write of ‘transition overload’. The frst was the decolonisation transition of 1980, which was expected to deliver a sovereign Zimbabwe inhabited by free citizens who would enjoy restored land that had been stolen by white settler colonisers. The reality is that the land remained in the hands of minority white citizens, and at the end of two years’ independence (in 1983), Zimbabwe plunged into Operation Gukurahundi, which left over 20,000 mostly Ndebele-speaking people dead as a ‘party-state’ and ‘party-nation’ was constructed (Kriger 2003; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009a).
During the second transition, white dominance in the economy was dismantled. This entailed affrmative action, indigenisation and deracialisation of the economy, which took place in an environment of constraint that was based on an unwritten policy of reconciliation and the regulatory framework of the Lancaster House Constitution. For an agreed period of ten years (1980–1990), the Zimbabwean government could not amend the constitution. The third transition involved economic liberalisation. This began in 1990 in accordance with the demands and conditions of the notorious Structural Adjustment Programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Mlambo 1997). This neo-liberal transition not only destroyed the progress that had been made in the social spheres of education and health, but also provoked protests from workers and students who were hard hit by a combination of retrenchment, withdrawal of subsidies on basic commodities and privatisation.
The fourth transition was the agrarian transformation that took place under the banner of the Third Chimurenga and the radical Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, which was meant to deliver land to Zimbabwe’s landless black people. The consequence of this was the collapse of the national economy, partly because the implementation of land reform was chaotic and partly because it led to Zimbabwe being ostracised by the international community (Moyo and Yeros 2005; Alexander 2006; Sadomba 2011). The ffth transition was democratisation, which was fought for under the leadership of the labour movement (the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions), the National Constitutional Assembly and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) with the overarching themes of democracy, constitutionalism and human rights. The culmination of its partial success was the Inclusive Government of 2009–2013. The challenges of this period were highlighted in The Hard Road to Reform: The Politics of Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement by Brian Raftopolous (2013). Michael Aeby (2015) depicted this period, in which a ‘power-sharing’
government was in charge, as ‘Zimbabwe’s gruelling transition’. This was not only because of the politically complex situation that was carried over into it, but also because of the attempts being made behind the scenes by the ruling party to outmanoeuvre the opposition. Violence decreased and the economy stabilised slightly, but power did not shift from the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF). If anything, ZANU–PF used the fve years of the government of national unity to recover and consolidate its power, and in the 2013 elections the party emerged stronger and in charge of government once more.
The sixth and the latest transition, at the time of writing (2020), was the so-called ‘military-assisted transition’ of November 2017, which led to the fall from power of the long-serving president Robert Gabriel Mugabe, paving the way for the rise to power of Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa (International Crisis Group 2017; Moore 2018; Rutherford 2018). Mugabe died in Singapore on 6 August 2019; he was buried at his rural home in Zvimba district of Mashonaland West province. This book is an attempt to comprehend the diffculties that surround successful political transition in Zimbabwe, with the primary focus on understanding political cultures and the role of the military in civilian politics, as well as how the Mnangagwa regime remains entangled in so-called Mugabeism. This is a term used to describe a nationalist matrix of power that is underpinned by party-state and party-nation constructions, and is held hostage by those who claim to have liberated the country from colonialism (see NdlovuGatsheni 2009b, 2012b, 2015).
It is clear that the political, economic and social quagmire in Zimbabwe since political independence was attained, which deepened in the 2000s with the long presidential incumbency of Mugabe and the ‘repetition without change’ represented by the ascendance to power by Mnangagwa on the back of a military coup, require proper framing and historical contextualisation. The situation is caused by a complex political culture, which has arisen through the entanglement of many different strands: the physical conquest of settler colonialism, the Cold War’s ideological infexibilities, African nationalist patriarchal models of liberation (Campbell 2003), regimental/warrior traditions that lead to the prosecution of a liberation war, and the postcolonial legacy of personality cults and their gerontocratic tendencies, excluding women and young people, and indeed all those who are deemed to have not participated in the liberation struggles, from the corridors of power and ownership of strategic resources (see Hammar et al. 2003; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009a; Tendi 2010).
The concept of entanglement, as articulated by Sarah Nuttall (2009: 11), ‘is a means by which to draw into our analysis those sites in which what was thought of as separate—identities, spaces, histories—come together or fnd points of intersection in unexpected ways’ and ‘It is an idea which signals largely unexplored terrains of mutuality, wrought from common, though often coercive and confrontational, experience.’ For Zimbabwe, Amanda Hammar and Brian Raftopolous (2003: 17) highlighted the entanglement of historicised and racialised assertions of land reclamation not only with technocratic and ahistorical liberal notions of private property protection, but also with developmentalism and notions of good governance on the one hand and emergent forms of indigenous nationalism underpinned by national sovereignty on the other.
With specifc reference to current politics in Zimbabwe, one can posit a Mugabe–Mnangagwa entanglement at a basic level. The Mnangagwa regime is a direct child of Mugabeism; indeed, Mugabeism is its recurrent theme. What emerged as the ‘Second Republic’ is deeply interpellated by the immanent logics (even the poverty of logics) of Mugabeism (for details of Mugabeism see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009b, 2012a, 2015). Mnangagwa is Mugabe’s political protégé. This Mugabe–Mnangagwa entanglement is clearly manifested in the contradictory political discourses of Operation Restore Legacy, which was used to legitimise the military coup of November 2017, and the mantra of ‘Zimbabwe is Open for Business’, which purported to be setting out a new politics that was predicated on neo-liberalism and market-determined economic logic. The elephant in the room of Zimbabwe’s transitional politics is the nationalist matrix of power (otherwise known as Mugabeism) that is partly built on the colonial legacy of violence and authoritarianism and was partly invented by nationalists to safeguard postcolonial power. At least ten interrelated and overlapping coordinates for ZANU–PF’s nationalist matrix of power are discernible:
• The invention of a ‘party-state’ and a ‘party-nation’ (see Kriger 2003);
• Pedagogical ‘Chimurenga’ nationalism backed up by a constructed ‘patriotic history’(Ranger 2004);
• Reduction of elections to a mere ritual to validate legitimised power;
• Assumed warrior tradition cascading from anti-colonial liberation wars and the privileging of the gun as the guardian of attained power;
• Executive lawlessness known as ‘kutonga’ (to rule, not to govern);
• Neo-traditional patriarchal political culture of gerontocratic rule;
• Naturalised and routinised rule by violence and coercion;
• Practices of sorcery, witchcraft and poisoning of enemies and competitors;
• The fetishising of academic qualifcations to reinforce the right to political offce;
• Securocracy, plutocracy and predatory state politics based on primitive accumulation (see Shumba 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019).
This is the political terrain within which the Mnangagwa regime has emerged and fnds itself. How do we make broader sense of it? Where does the potential for people’s freedom lie? In considering these questions, we have to refect deeply on the legacy of the liberation struggles and their implications for freedom. The sociologist Roger Southall, in Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa (2013), posited that the liberation movements of southern Africa moved into government by embodying the hopes of those who supported them both domestically and internationally, but their performance in governmental terms was deeply disappointing. Michael Neocosmos’s Thinking Freedom in Africa: Towards a Theory of Emancipatory Politics (2016) provides the most extended critique of national liberation politics. The liberation movements were clear on what they were against (anti-racism, anticolonialism and anti-imperialism) and very unclear on what they were for. Neocosmos (2016) was very critical of the idea of attainment of freedom under the aegis of the state. This is why he concluded that the politics of the liberation movements ‘was based on a contradiction that it found impossible to overcome: the struggle for freedom was a struggle not only against the colonial state, but to a certain extent against the state itself, like all struggles for freedom; yet at the same time freedom was said to be attainable only under the aegis of an independent state, as it had been frustrated by colonial domination’ (Neocosmos 2016: 130).
Even such luminaries of the liberation movements as Joshua Nkomo, who led the Zimbabwe African People’s Union and commanded the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, expressed disappointment with the performance of liberation movements in government. ‘Freedom Lies Ahead’ is the title of the concluding chapter of Nkomo’s autobiography, Nkomo: The Story of My Life (1984). In this chapter, Nkomo, who after death was declared by ZANU-PF as the ‘Father of Zimbabwe’, refected deeply on liberation and freedom in Zimbabwe while taking advantage of a life in exile in the United Kingdom. He posited that ‘The hardest lesson
of my life has come to me late. It is that a nation can win freedom without its people becoming free’ (Nkomo 1984: 245). Most, if not all, former colonies gained ‘political independence’ one after another as the ‘physical empire’, with its direct colonial administration (direct juridical administration), was universally condemned after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The key signatures of this political independence became a new national anthem, a new fag, the faces of black/African leaders in parliament, the faces of black/African prime ministers or presidents at state house, the changing of countries’ names (with the exception of South Africa) to the vernacular and admission of the newly ‘sovereign’ states into the lowest echelons of the United Nations (Meredith 1984; NdlovuGatsheni 2012b).
Yes, the elites in charge of the state gained the freedom to accumulate resources ahead of everyone else, through a process known as bureaucratic state parasitism. Yes, Nkomo was correct: freedom of the state did not automatically translate into freedom for the people. What eventually happened in Zimbabwe under Mugabe is well articulated by Issa G. Shivji (2003: 15): ‘National question turns into state-building. Nation-building is substituted by party and party by leader, the founder of the nation.’ Mugabe and his wife (Grace Mugabe), as the frst family, ended up being the centre of national politics. This is a bane of, if not the underside of, the decolonisation of the twentieth century.
Neo-colonialism exacerbated the lack of freedom for both the state and the people in Africa, and on another level, it gave some African leaders an excuse to blame external factors for their failure to deliver freedom. This was articulated by Kwame Nkrumah in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965):
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. […]. Neo-colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. (Nkrumah 1965: ix–xi)
Blaming and railing against imperialism became a key trope of Mugabeism. Nkomo also refected on the problem of neo-colonialism as
he meditated on questions of liberation and freedom in Zimbabwe. But his take was different from Mugabe’s:
I refuse to accept that we cannot do better than we have so far done, or to reach for the easy excuse that all our mistakes are simply a colonial inheritance that can conveniently be blamed on the invaders. Of course our history has made us what we are, and the recent period of that history was distorted frst by the infuence of remote empires, then for ninety years by direct colonial rule. It is up to us to do better now. (Nkomo 1984: 245)
Like the Mugabe regime, the Mnangagwa regime is using the discourse of sanctions to justify all its limitations. Indeed, sanctions must be removed because they always hurt the poor and they also give failing regimes a convenient excuse to blame external factors. It would seem Nkomo again had a different take: he strongly believed that African leaders were duty bound to deliver freedom to the people even within the constraining environment of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism. Nkomo rejected easy excuses for the non-delivery of freedom and services to the people. He suggested that ‘African leaders must improve their record of human rights, and African peoples too must have greater regard to their responsibilities’ (Nkomo 1984: 247). Nkomo (1984: 252) concluded his autobiography with a positive note: ‘It is not too late to change all that, to muster the collective energy of our people and build the new Zimbabwe we promised through all those long years of suffering and struggle.’
Perhaps Nkomo was able to refect on liberation and freedom in Zimbabwe in these terms because he was not in power! But his meditations indicated the strong potential for reconstituting the political and transcending the scourge of Mugabeism. Mugabeism itself failed to rise above intolerant and repressive political cultures of Rhodesian settler colonialism. Instead of breaking with colonial settler traditions of brutality and repressive political practices, Mugabeism innovated and ‘improved’ on the Rhodesian settler colonial Leviathan, adding the logic of governance by military operations, with devastating implications for democracy, human rights and people’s freedoms (see Rupiya 2005). To racism and patriarchy, Mugabe added tribalism. What emerged was a complex ‘securocratic state’ with a party, military and parasitic business complex at its helm (a Chimurenga aristocracy in power) (see Shumba 2018). The ‘right of conquest’ that was used by Rhodesian settler colonialists was succeeded by
Mugabeism’s mantra of ‘I died for you’ (by ‘right of liberating you’), which became the main basis of his claim for leadership of Zimbabwe.
Mugabeism’s political longevity was predicated on the strong nationalist–military alliance that was forged during the anti-colonial armed liberation struggle (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2006). In fact, Mugabe was installed at the helm of ZANU–PF by the military during the course of the liberation struggle (Sadomba 2011). However, as noted by Norma Kriger (2003), the nationalist–military alliance was always unstable and tensionridden, with those in uniform and those who were demobilised (the war veterans) making continuous demands on the civilians in power. Throughout the postcolonial period, the guerrilla veterans and ZANU–PF colluded with and manipulated each other to build power and privilege in the army, police and bureaucracy, and among workers (Kriger 2003).
Liberation war discourse united the civilian leadership and the guerrilla veterans, although ‘war credentials’ became a site of contestation—being bestowed and taken away depending on one’s fall from political grace with ZANU–PF. The paradigmatic case was that of Joice Mujuru, who rose to the level of vice-president of the country on the basis of strong liberation credentials and being a woman. In 2014, Joice Mujuru was politically disparaged and removed from power and the party in a whirlwind of political events, with Grace Mugabe accusing her of plotting to unseat Robert Mugabe. Joice Mujuru’s liberation credentials were questioned and rubbished as she was thrown into political oblivion. This sheds light on the political context of the military coup that culminated in the fall of Mugabe and the rise of Mnangagwa to power in 2017.
By the time of the military coup, Mnangagwa had been enduring verbal assaults from Grace Mugabe for some time. He had survived poisoning; he had been expelled from the government; his long political career was hanging by a thread. By the time the coup took place, Mnangagwa was in exile in South Africa. From there, he gave Mugabe a warning, indicating that something was being organised:
I will go nowhere. I will fght tooth and nail against those making mockery against ZANU-PF founding principles. You and your cohorts will instead leave ZANU-PF by the will of the people and this we will do in the coming weeks. (Mnangagwa 2017)
In an ironic political twist, the veteran leader of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, who had been in power since 1980, was removed from offce by his own military. For over thirty-seven years, Mugabe had ruled Zimbabwe in alliance with the military, but he fnally became the victim of what he had created. The coup was distinctive because of the political discourse of its organisers and practitioners, who were at pains to make the military takeover constitutional. For example, on 13 November 2017, when the Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, Constantine Chiwenga, called for a press statement surrounded by ninety senior military and security offcers, following the expulsion of Mnangagwa from government and party, the Zimbabwean constitution was quoted widely. Section 212 in particular was used to explain the intervention of the military in civilian politics. Secondly, and ironically, those who were staging the military coup continued to express their loyalty to Mugabe. Thirdly, participants harked back to the anti-colonial liberation history, and defned military intervention in politics as part of a patriotic duty to protect this history’s legacy (Chiwenga 2017; Raftopolous 2019).
While the broader context of the military intervention was the liberation struggle and postcolonial history, the immediate terrain was factionalism and ructions within ZANU–PF, pitting the Lacoste faction against the G40 faction.1 Mnangagwa’s liberation war credentials were useful in attracting the army and war veterans to his camp. The G40 became ‘criminals around the president’, who were blamed for the deteriorating security situation as well as the social and economic meltdown by those who had staged the military coup. In announcing the military coup, Major General Sibusiso Moyo carefully crafted his language to speak of calming a degenerating political, social and economic situation, as well as propping up the authority of the president and buttressing his constitutional roles (Raftopolous 2019).
1 The Lacoste faction supported Emerson Mnangagwa. It wanted Mugabe to be succeeded by Mnangagwa who was one of the two deputy presidents of Zimbabwe. It was not clear who the G40 supported as successor to Mugabe. It was composed of what could be termed the ‘Young Turks’ within ZANU-PF. These were a younger generation of politicians without liberation credentials. But they had managed to form a close circle around Mugabe and Grace Mugabe. Its most vociferous member was Professor Jonathan Moyo who was opposed to Mnangagwa succeeding Mugabe. Grace Mugabe openly sided with the G40. Immediately before the military coup of November 2017, Professor Moyo openly put forward the name of Sydney Sekeramayi as the senior ZANU-PF politician to succeed Mugabe. But Sekeramayi never rose to the occasion.
Brian Raftopolous (2019) summarised the three-pronged strategy that aimed to fnish off what the military coup had set in motion, removing Mugabe and putting Mnangagwa in power. The frst element entailed avoiding any reference to a military coup, maintaining that Mugabe remained the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, and seeking the High Court to constitutionalise the takeover. The second involved mobilisation of the civilian population by war veterans to give the takeover popular support. The third was to give a constitutional veneer to the military intervention through the use of ZANU–PF party processes and procedures. This entailed convening a ZANU–PF Central Committee meeting on 13 November 2017, at which the military were thanked for bringing stability to the party and to government. As noted by Raftopolous (2019: 7), the Central Committee took several decisions, including the formal expulsion of twenty members of the G40 faction from the party, removing Mugabe from the position of president and frst secretary of the party and recommending his resignation as state president, relieving Grace Mugabe of her post of secretary for the Women’s League, removing Phelekezela Mphoko from his position of vice-president, bringing back into the party all those who had been pushed out by the G40 and, fnally, electing Mnangagwa as new interim president of ZANU–PF and nominating him as candidate to fll the vacancy of state president.
At parliamentary level, the ZANU–PF Parliamentary Caucus began to move the process of impeachment of Mugabe on 20 November 2017, and the process was put in motion in parliament the next day. Mugabe was left with no option but to write a letter of resignation on 21 November. This paved the way for the inauguration of Mnangagwa as new state president on 24 November.
The mNaNgagwa regime: seCoNd republiC or repeTiTioN wiThouT ChaNge?
For a Zimbabwean people who had endured Mugabeism for over thirtyseven years, the military coup and the ascendance to power of Mnangagwa brought hope that life would be different; and inevitably, Mnangagwa tried to position his regime as a force for change. In his frst presidential address, Mnangagwa made a number of pledges. The frst was that he would put Zimbabwe on a path to economic recovery by promoting a market economy that was predicated on attracting foreign investment and ensuring its safety. Indeed, changes were made to the indigenisation legislation. The second was to compensate white farmers who had lost land
under the radical land reform programme. The third was to return Zimbabwe to the ambit of international community (re-engagement). The fourth was to be a president of all Zimbabweans (nation-building and national healing). The ffth was to deal decisively with corruption (see Raftopolous 2019).
The main hurdle for Mnangagwa was to gain full legitimacy as the state president of Zimbabwe. This meant he had to call for national elections. His advantage was that the opposition was in disarray, rocked by factionalism following the death of Morgan Tsvangirai on 14 February 2018. The key disadvantage was that ZANU–PF was also in disarray. But Mnangagwa had no option but to organise elections if he was to ‘move beyond the shadow of the coup and seek a new legitimacy through an election that was perceived to be peaceful and credible’ (Raftopolous 2019: 18). The elections were held in July 2018, with Mnangagwa facing the youthful Nelson Chamisa of the MDC Alliance in the presidential contest. Mnangagwa emerged the winner with 50.6 per cent, while Chamisa had 44.3 per cent. While the campaign period was very peaceful, on 1 August 2018, the military shot and killed six protesters in Harare who were protesting over the delayed announcement of presidential results. Secondly, Chamisa and his party disputed the results of the presidential elections and built a case that was heard at the Constitutional Court. The court upheld Mnangagwa as the winner, but Chamisa’s challenge raised the long-standing question of political legitimacy that has been haunting Zimbabwe since 2000.
But what really dented the image of the Mnangagwa regime, which was desperate for international engagement, was the killing of civilians by the army in Harare. This meant that the ‘second republic’ was born with what could be termed a very bad birthmark. What made matters even more complicated was that it was not clear who deployed and ordered the military to intervene in civilian political protest. Was the ‘second republic’ a military junta, where political disputes would always be resolved through violent military intervention? Mnangagwa was forced to institute a Commission of Inquiry into the disturbances of 1 August in order to deal with the regime’s image, but like all government instituted commissions its outcomes were disappointing, and its value was not clear. It was purely and simply a public relations exercise.
As the Mugabe regime was, Mnangagwa’s regime is besieged by numerous challenges. The pledge to put Zimbabwe on an economic recovery and growth path predicated on a neo-liberal framework has provoked social turmoil, which manifested itself in a second round of public protest in 2019. Once again, the army had to intervene with its usual violence
following an increase in the price of petrol. The health sector is characterised by strikes. The regime’s monetary policy and overall macroeconomic turnaround strategy, predicated on notions of ‘austerity for prosperity’, appear to be the previous regime’s structural adjustment programme, and its problems, in another guise. The second challenge is the long-standing one of national healing and national unity. The consequences of Operation Gukurahundi are haunting the Mnangagwa regime, and the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission has not resolved anything, while Mnangagwa dithered when given an opportunity to apologise for the Gukurahundi atrocities. He seems to be fast losing the opportunities that were offered him by popular antipathy towards Mugabe.
The third serious challenge cascades from the regime’s failure to successfully return Zimbabwe to the ambit of the international community. Violence and intolerance of political dissent has escalated since Mnangagwa came to power, and democratic reforms are nowhere to be seen. The fourth challenge is the continuing tensions within ZANU–PF, emanating from the factional conficts that rocked the Mugabe regime. What is particularly dangerous is that since the removal of Mugabe the security sector has not been free of tensions and the ripple effects of factionalism (see Raftopolous 2019). It would seem that Mnangagwa is busy consolidating his personal power and has not committed himself to any reform agenda, including what he promised in his frst presidential national address. Zimbabwe is not yet beyond Mugabeism; indeed, Mnangagwa seems to be a poor copy of Mugabe. By bringing the military directly into civilian political structures, Mnangagwa has not demilitarised the state; instead he has deepened militarisation. The military is now offcially part of political culture. This book grapples with the question of political culture(s), the so-called national question, the consequences of a militarised politics, patriarchal and sexist tendencies, gridlocked and blocked democratic transitions, challenges of economic recovery and growth, and many other problems, all of which rocked Mugabeism and are being repeated under the Mnangagwa regime.
The chapters in this book are grouped in four sections: Part 1, Colonialism, Nationalism and Political Culture; Part 2, Identity, Militarisation and Transitional Politics; Part 3, Social Media, Democracy and Political Discourse,’ and Part 4, Post-Mugabe Economy, Gender and Operation Restore Legacy. Together they constitute a transdisciplinary academic study of the gridlocked and problematic transition from Mugabe to Mnangagwa, which has turned out to be nothing but repetition without