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Chofamba

November 28, 2007

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Ian Smith denied our African humanity

BORN at the height of the national liberation struggle in the late 1970s, I grew up in post-independence Zimbabwe. Save for hazy memories, I cannot claim to possess a concrete self-consciousness of life under Ian Douglas Smith’s white supremacist Rhodesian Front government. However, having been born to young and unemployed school-leavers of peasant background, my life as a toddler was to be circumscribed in a brutally physical way by the paranoid security policies of Smith’s government.

I spent my early childhood in one of Smith’s concentration camps in a small village called Chibuwe in Chipinge district, on the country’s eastern border with Mozambique. This was a major operational zone for the nationalist guerillas fighting for black self-determination. In order to cut off the guerillas from accessing logistical and political support from the masses, Smith’s government herded African villagers living within such areas into concentration camps, which they euphemistically called ‘protec…

MDC-T counts cost of downgrading diaspora party structures

Foresight is a great thing for policymakers to possess. Whilst ensconced in the luxury of the Inclusive Government, the MDC-T thought it best to downgrade all its foreign assemblies from the status of constituent provinces into associate assemblies.

Predictably, the move caused no small disquiet among the party faithful in the diaspora, not least because of their sustained material contribution to the party during the struggle years. This came on the heels of the then newly installed Prime Minister's unpopular call for a reverse exodus to the mother country when he addressed Zimbabweans at London's Southwark Cathedral on his maiden trip to the UK after assuming the role in 2009. He was roundly booed, thereafter deciding to turn his back on what he deemed a prodigal flock.

Fast forward a short five years later, and the party is not only out of the comfort of both the inclusive government and the self-assuredness of imminent exclusive control of the Zimbabwean state and its res…

On 'doing God' in Zimbabwean politics

On the matter of how political community must be organised and run, I believe in a secular rational-legal order. I do not want to live in a theocracy such as we have in some Muslim countries where religion is the organising factor of society and subsumes all life, with religious edicts and commandments forming the basis of law.

In many such countries we see clashes between fundamentalists and moderates over the interpretation of religious dogma, with claims and counter-claims of each group being closer to the mind of God than the other, and a massive denial of freedom to certain groups, such as women, on the basis of scriptural interpretation.

I want to live in a liberal democratic order where civil rights must be allowed that, among other things, enable members to pursue their religious freedoms. I want politics to be a rational exercise where decisions and choices are based on reason and policy making responds to the rule of cause and effect.

That is why I am very uncomfortable - e…

Will Joice Mujuru survive, or is this the end for her?

In my view, it isn't just about Joice Mujuru, but her whole camp. Technically they're in a commanding position and I think this over the top intimidation tactic being used by the other side is the only way they can achieve their ambitions.

They can't out-vote Joice's camp and they don't have the numbers to carry through all those amendments to the party constitution that they propose to do. On those amendments too, it should trouble anyone in Zanu that they're really seeking to create a highly centralised power structure in which the leader effectively becomes the party, just as Zvobgo's problematic amendments to the national constitution concentrated executive powers in the office of the president.

These enormous powers are in effect not really meant for Mugabe, but for the one who will soon take over from him. And the question is, why would they bend over backwards, cede their power to block this, and allow the Mnangagwa faction to reshape the party stru…

Angola: A changing of the guards?

Southern Africa’s longest-ruling leader Jose Eduardo Dos Santos of Angola is a man whose 32 years in office belies the security of his hold on the oil rich country. Ushered to the fore of national life when the country’s founding President Agostinho Neto died of cancer in office in 1979, Dos Santos is moving to ensure that his departure from power is as gradual and planned as his assumption of it was fortuitous and sudden.

In the opaque internal workings of the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which is one of the region’s most hardened liberation movements-turned-governments, it has not often been easy to decipher the party’s plans on the hitherto taboo question of succession. However, in early September the Angolan Novo Jornal newspaper set the country abuzz when it reported that the 69 year-old son of immigrants from Sao Tome and Principe was to stand down as president before or after next year’s elections.
Quoting unnamed MPLA sources, the weekly claimed …

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