It has been a hectic last two months for Zanu Pf elites. At
least by way of media reports, social media accounts, party conference politicking
and reported break-ins into an acting presidents offices. Needless to say the accusations of factionalism and political conspiracies that keep
emerging all center around the issue of succession in the ruling party.
Ambitious party apparatchiks have therefore been falling over themselves to give, mainly
through the media, an impression of having their finger on the control button
of leadership succession.
The end effect has been a contrived national debate about
the ruling party, its president’s health, the safety of one of its vice presidents
and the political prospects of its former vice president. It all makes for exciting conspiracy reading
and occupation of conversation time for the political elite in Zimbabwean society.
It also makes for patronage driven political activity for grassroots supporters of
various factions within the ruling party.
It keeps the latter conspiratorially active and able to manipulate the
various interests of their benefactors
in favour of their own. These grassroots
supporters, comprised of the war veterans, new farmers, new urban stand owners,
youth formations and informal traders, all cutting across various age groups
have no big problem with these power games. It suits them, as would an electoral
campaign, in their endeavours to make as much as they can out of it. The
housing stands, reconfigured farm allocations, tender deals, veteran pensions
and more recently access to drought
relief is something that will come with their active participation in whatever faction
they chose to side with. Even if interchangeably so.
So the succession battles being played out at various levels
are not an indication of a fundamental shift in Zanu Pf internal politics and
culture. Far from it. They may indicate
a potential change of influential personalities as was the case when Joice
Mujuru was unceremoniously bundled out of the party.
So there is method to the politicking around succession. The paramount rule is not to throw out the
baby with the bathwater. Hence the
evidently procedural annual party conference last December. The slinging
matches on Twitter, in the mainstream media and even in criminal defamation court,
with hindsight had limited impact on the same.
What has since emerged is an intention to control media
content in light of the factional fights in relation to the military, the vice presidents and the first family. This is less an act of desperation than it is
intended to indicate a new era of controlling media content to suit the broader
agenda of the ruling party as given through other examples of benevolent dictatorships.
Hence the increased noise around the ambiguous terms of ‘national security’ and ‘national
interest’.
The end effect of Zanu Pf’s succession battles are therefore
largely threefold. The first of which is
the pre-occupation of the national political discourse with the same subject
matter beyond the point of saturation. This is not only via various mainstream
and social media platforms but also party meetings that are clandestine or in
the open. In the process ruling party succession
becomes the main political game in town to the extent of even potentially
co-opting variegated opposition political party interests. Questions that arise
are more of who is with whom and for what reasons.
As a result the elephant in the
room of succession politicking remains that of what I have previously referred
to as ‘crouching ethnicity and hidden tribalism’ being used as a faction mobilization
method.
Because of the clouding of the national discourse through an
over saturated succession discourse, national attention to structural economic challenges
the country is faced will remain peripheral at best. Where they are raised, it will be within the
ambit of a politicization of food aid, distribution of political patronage
through new farms, residential stands, vending stalls and state tenders to
private businesses. In the process new
nodes of political control via factions emerge, even if they remain ephemeral,
with the prize being the king’s crown, not necessarily the demise of the ruling
party’s’ hold on political power.
The final and most ignored element of the Zanu Pf succession
debacle is its papering over the cracks political character of a state that is
morphing into a neo-liberal one. Whereas
the public would, in between elections, discuss key policy issues affecting their
livelihoods, succession has drowned this out.
Even in the case of national emergencies such as the self-evident
drought the country is faced with. The catch is that this is not by
default. There is a deliberate movement
toward pushing free market economies to unprecedented levels that will make the
economic policy failure that was economic structural adjustment look rosier.
And this is a
commonly held perspective between the ruling party factions and all have
referred with relative ease and agreement on the necessity of the ‘ease of
doing business’ as the sine qua non of their economic policies. All within a nationalist ambit that will
entail creating what will in effect be a comprador bourgeoisie that will be
sharing the spoils of an accelerated privatization of electricity, water,
education, health and transport via what the South Africans have popularly
referred to as ‘tenderpreneurship’.
So there is ‘method’ to Zanu Pf factionalism. And it is not by default. There are ground rules to it. These
include keeping the national discourse pre-occupied with it and crowding out official
opposition voices, not upsetting the apple cart that is the hold on power of
the ruling party and lastly, using it as a ruse to reconfigure the national economy
to suit a free-market economic template. All of this, while we are pre-occupied with 'crocodiles' and 'G-40s'.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com
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