Discussing Ideology and Mimicry in Zimbabwe (Again)

By Takura Zhangazha*

Zimbabwean political conversations over the last twenty years have generally become predictable (black or white, either-or) 

They are conversations that we have chosen and in a greater majority of cases, given.  They are also somewhat highly emotive about what should either be a political or economic way forward.

In the emotional output there is also always comparative analysis with other countries  and how ‘things’ are done there.  From our neighbour South Africa, through to the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Europe and in some cases Russia and China as models to follow or in some cases emulate.

In most conversations the big issue is usually about money, individual wealth and infrastructural development.  And these are conversations that are happening beyond physical spaces as enabled by social media and its hegemonic (cultural/perception) influence. Some of the debates also ridiculously refer back to the settler colonial era and its racist modernization programme for the then Rhodesia.

No doubt these are important conversations. Even more when they are about the immediacy of individual livelihoods and the role of the state.

A role that in the same debates is placed in electoral frameworks and language about who to vote for.  Or who we should have voted for.  While at the same time ignoring the fact of the passage of time between the same said electoral processes.  As well as coupling it with departure from the state for assumedly better state pastures that arguably meet individual livelihood needs. 

The elephant in the room however is how we view the role of the Zimbabwean state. Especially from an ideological perspective.

Given the fact that as Zimbabweans we have been classified as highly literate by not only our government but also international organizations, we tend to be highly opinionated.  Not only about various issues such as religion but more significantly our national politics.  

And at very personal or individual levels. It becomes a mere coincidence that we find ourselves flocking with like-minded individuals and create default political or social collectives. 

The question that emerges is why have we been like this in the last twenty or so odd years.  

The easy answer is the historical fact of Zanu Pf’s hegemony since independence.  It was key in shaping our contemporary national consciousness.  Its shift from socialism to neoliberalism with Economic Structural Adjustment programmes (ESAP).  

The latter introducing the country’s population to an unprecedented hedonism and consumerist culture that quite literally has broken down many of our common and progressive societal values.  Even after the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) that began in 2000.   

The FTLRP’s greatest irony is that while it was predicated on righting a colonial wrong, it appears to have created a new economic elite that have no qualms about mimicking the colonial Rhodesian state.  It is a mimicry thatģ is evidently inorganic.  It does not belong the people nor does it reflect the values of the liberation struggle.

It’s a mimicry that fits into global narratives as determined by global financialized capital.  A development that points to the fact that in Zimbabwe we no longer have our own national ideological outlook on our political and economic realities. 

We are over-emphasising our desires for recognition for  doing the right thing.  Yet we have not clear idea about what is the right thing that is being referred to.  In our economics we function like we control the Federal Reserve Bank of America. In our politics we assume electoral politics should be like those of the global north.  And in our social life we assume religion will solve everything.

Where we return to the elephant in the room, we are faced with an ideological deficit in at least two respects.

The first being an evolving detachment from the people centered values of our liberation struggle. We no longer function as a collective whole that looks out for the societal well being of the other.  And this in the name of mimicry of other societies yet we should know about where we came from and who we intrinsically are and should be. 

The second element has been a Fanonian ‘pitfall of national consciousness’.  Since the year 2000 our own narrative has been of a failed state and anticipating national failure no matter what happens. Or unless there is a change of government and subsequent recognition by the global north.  The reality  of the matter is that it does not work like that. And as Amilcar Cabral once said, “No matter how hot your water, it will not boil your rice.”

Our national dilemma is learning to believe in ourselves again.  And to do so with the people.  A matter which requires renewed ideological clarity on not only the role of the state but also what it can and should enable.  Without abstract mimicry.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)

The Political Economy of Zimbabwe's 2024 Drought

So it is now official. Zimbabwe is faced with a national state of disaster because, like a significant number of countries in Southern Africa we will have an El Nino induced drought.  The current President ED Mnangagwa made an executive announcement this week to the same effect. 

Essentially outlining that this is no small matter and assuring us of his government's commitment to enabling hunger and food shortage mitigation measures that will not only involve the state but also reach out to the private sector and international food aid donors. 

His state of the nation address may be taken lightly by some  but it is an extremely serious one. Especially for those that experienced previously devastating droughts such as the one when some of us were teenagers in 1992-93 agricultural season and we learnt one or two things about what ‘food for work’ meant in the Chishawasha valley of Mashonaland East while at boarding school. 

We did not have social media or mobile phones but the national mood was somber because it was both experienced at our young ages and also real when we had to eat what we referred to as ‘Kenya’ maize meal that we were told was donated from the Global West. 

 We were also told that it was normally fed to farm animals such as cattle and horses. 

But we were too hungry to ask too many questions about it.  We ate it in boarding school, we ate it at home (urban or rural) and other comrades ate it in supplementary charitable or state sponsored feeding schemes.  But we learnt very quickly what a national drought was. 

Now we have another major one that is correctly a major national and regional concern.  I cannot speak or write for comrades in Malawi or Zambia where national state of disasters  have already been declared. 

It is however clear that  this is a nationally important matter that must be looked at beyond what the state president has announced and what the international aid agencies or the media will argue about how to handle the emergent humanitarian climate change induced challenge that is the national drought.    

There is however a political economy to the drought. One that we cannot allow ourselves to evade.   

And it is in three parts.  The first being that of the directly political and its impact on national politics.  The sitting government and the ruling party are obliged, at least democratically, to lead the country through this national state of disaster induced by the drought.  While what remains of the national political opposition (official and unofficial) are expected to hold the latter to political account on the same important national matter. 

This means that the political dynamics of our already existent drought, as announced by the state president, are also essentially about political capital.  Which ever way you want to look at it.  They are now keenly about what in political science is referred to as ‘performance legitimacy’. That is, “Who can feed the people?’

The second element is the fact of what is also referred to as ‘disaster capitalism’.  There will be private capital players (businesses) who will deliberately seek to profit from this national drought disaster.  And there are many.  From grain millers, to what I now refer to as ‘water hawkers’ in both urban and rural areas.  Some of them linked to the state.  Others are just basically private opportunists who for example sell bread, maize and other subsistence commodities.  And they will also speculate on stock exchanges about what will happen next either with currencies or minerals because of the drought and an officially declared state of disaster.

The third and final strand is what has been referred to in the Global North as the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.  These are players that will trade on the international philanthropic sentiment to show us how bad the drought situation can become, or is.  They will raise money, purchase the relevant subsistence commodities but at the same time retain within their same said Global North capitals, the majority of the funds raised. 

In the final analysis, we are faced with a monumental task to feed the people of Zimbabwe. Indeed while it may be sensationalized on social media or alternatively fit into a given but incorrect narrative about Zimbabwe being a failed state , the drought is a serious national matter for the country. It is not abstract.  But sadly, it now means Zimbabwe’s 2024  political economy and planning around it at state, private capital and individual levels has significantly shifted.

Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com )

 

An African Understanding of the Global Dangers of a World War 3.

 By Takura Zhangazha*

In primary school we had an amazing headmistress, Ms. Thomas. This was when we were approaching our final year in that phase of our education.  She had decided for reasons of her own that we needed an impromptu lecture on the import of the Iraq-Kuwait war in 1990. 

We were in grade seven (7).  She showed us a map of Kuwait and one of Iraq.  And proceeded to explain to us the full impact of both chemical warfare and also nuclear weapons deployment. If I remember correctly at my young age then, she indicated the possibility of how after a nuclear weapon was deployed there would be some cloud that affects not only the Middle East but also drift toward Africa and eventually drift further southwards to affect us. 

We were somewhat shocked and surprised that we had to learn this. We mainly knew of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.  We never thought that a war that far away from us would affect us.

It was mainly because we did not understand at least two things at our young ages.  We did not know the global political economy.  And we did not know the global threat that is nuclear war. Nor did we have any inkling about what was then referred to as the Cold War and its eventual false end on the assumption of an ‘end of history’. 

As we grew up under neo-liberal economic policies such as the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) and its end cultural imperialistic effect of us seeking departure to the now “Global North”, we also learnt of other wars.  We learnt of the globalised war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in which we as Zimbabweans participated. There were the wars in Eastern Europe that we watched almost for entertainment on global television networks and of course there was the ‘war against terror’ in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Almost as though we were re-watching the ridiculous Rambo movies of old. 

But here we are in 2024.  And again globalised war is the main international discourse of not only global superpowers but also their proxies, surrogates or affiliates.

It may seem an abstract point, as far as we are from Global North centres and here in the opposite Global South in Africa.

But we know what happens in the same said Global north or Global east affects not only our trade, Diaspora remittances but also our local politics.

What matters more is our perception of the same.  Both historically and in the contemporary. 

As Africans we have always been involved in wars that are not ours.   Especially between the west or the east.  Be it the first World War or the second one, we ended up dying in lands/countries’ that were never going to be ours.  The only important lesson that we learnt was that we also had to fight to liberate ourselves from colonialism. 

Now we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place as Africans. We have witnessed and taken sides in wars that are not ours.  Except for the Palestinian, Western Saharawi republics we have not had a direct say in other globalised post-cold war conflicts.  Be it in Ukraine, Myanmar or closer to home in Libya, Haiti, Mali or Sudan. 

What is more apparent is that we now need to see what’s coming.  And why.  The world is faced with a colossal dangerous situation in which it is on the brink of global war. Not just globalised as I have been referring to in this article.  But global, whether we as Africans are complicit in it or not.  From Taiwan to China, Ukraine to Washington, Palestine to Israel, Syria to Yemen or in West Africa.

The global superpowers that are the United States of America, China, the European Union and Russia are at loggerheads that they make it clear are not going to be easily resolved by their own diplomacy or the internationally recognised channels of the United Nations. 

We just should not get caught up in the mix of fights that are not only not ours but those that have material (oil, gas) and racist overtones to them. 

Finally, even our great African luminary Kwame Nkrumah tried to warn us in his famous statement,

“We face neither East or West.  We face forward!” And indeed that is what we should do. Face organically forward.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)

 

 

 

 

In Solidarity with the People of #Palestine from #Zimbabwe.

By Takura Zhangazha*

There are many internal and internationalized conflicts currently going on in the world.  They are “internationalized” mainly because there are global powers interests in them.  The latter can be for historical, economic or holistic geo-political reasons.

In the last twenty years global conflicts have allegedly been linked to mineral wealth (oil, lithium, platinum, uranium, gold) of geographical locations by mainstream and alternative professional media. With accusations of sponsoring one form of terrorism or the other by global superpower nations to poor or former vassal state ones.   Easy examples of this include Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Venezuela (in part).

The key issue for me as a Zimbabwean has always been an understanding that war is always a final resort.  Especially war between countries that can be considered by any measure ‘unequal’.   

With the coming into existence of the United Nations in 1945, there was also a global general acceptance of the dictum ‘never again’ would we allow wars on as colossal a scale as the Second World war.  In subsequent years, the UN was also an important multilateral organization for the liberation of Africa from the 1950s through to 1994.  Even though it still has the outstanding matter of the freedom of the Saharawi people to continuously attend to. 

But here we are in 2024 faced with multiple global conflicts on scales that should be unimaginable.  We have a war in Gaza, Palestine. One in Sudan. Another in Ukraine. Ongoing ones in Syria, Iraq and in part Afghanistan where the Americans abruptly withdrew their formal troops.

And we also have threats of a second Cold War between the United States of America and China with added discourse around what are referred to as space and technological wars. 

As an African and in particular a Zimbabwean, there is a general assumption that first of all, I am probably not expected to have an opinion on the global state of war that we are in.  Not least because of my skin colour or my geographical placement in what is still referred to as the “third world”.  But also because of an assumed powerlessness that we as Africans are supposed to have in international relations. As derived from the colonial and imperialistic legacy of our being ‘othered’ as ‘inferior’ human beings.

There is however a particular matter that torches (not touches) my personal consciousness. This is the one of the Palestine- Israel conflict. For at least two reasons.  

The first being that I became aware of the dispossession of Palestinians of their land by way of reading on their history, interacting with both Palestinian and Israeli cdes in university and also by way of my own personal curiosity about the role of Palestine in broader struggles for African liberation.

On the latter point, it turns out that even in Zimbabwe’s own liberation struggle among other Southern African states, we either fought or were trained together with Palestine cdes about the struggle for liberation.  Both militarily and ideologically.  And that after we had already attained our own independence, the legendary Yasser Arafat was and is still revered by progressive cdes across the globe.  And the late Palestinian ambassador to Zimbabwe Ali Halimeh who regularly reminded of his peoples struggles on mainstream local media. So we have known about the people of Palestine’s struggles for liberation even before 07 October 2023.  We also know of the 1948 Nakba.

The catch however is the assumed Christian religious complexity that we as Zimbabweans have had with Israel and the biblical ‘Israelites’.  And how we have a false popular perception that Israel is some sort of religiously promised land. 

This is far from the truth.  The Israel you read in the bible is not the Israel of our contemporary reality. It is a settler state that with the help of the British government colonized land that belonged to the people of Palestine after the Balfour Declaration of 1917. 

But because most of us Zimbabweans are of the Christian religion we tend to assume our faith is the same as our realities and in the process believe every other mistruth we are told, we become political cannon fodder that regrettably ignores the rights of the people of Palestine. 

Yes we may sing songs about ‘Jerusalem being our home’ at funerals and other religious related functions but Jerusalem originally and in historical reality belongs to the people of Palestine. And we should always support their historical struggle for freedom from oppression and occupation. This will not change your faith or beliefs.   

As a final point, I have many profoundly Christian friends who will probably not be happy with this write up. As abstract as their religious views are, I have no doubt that the death toll of 30000 Palestinians since October 2023 must have a bearing on their religious Christian consciences.   

I also have a number of friends that will ask why I am arguing for the freeing of Palestine from occupation and in support of the UN backed two-state solution.  My reply is that the people of Zimbabwe will always have a symbiotic relationship with the people of Palestine.  As determined by our shared struggle history and common human equality values.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com) 

 

 

 

Remembering #Zimbabwe ’s Opposition Political Movement.

By Takura Zhangazha*

Someone accused me of betraying the mainstream opposition political movement.  I laughed out quite loudly.   I have not been involved in opposition politics for at least eight years.  I however am a founder member of at least two organizations in the mainstream civil society and opposition politics. 

The first being the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) which I left after internal disagreements about the format of changing it into a political party.  The second being the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which when we formed/formalized it in Chitungwiza in September 1999 what we considered a proper working people’s leftist movement. 

So I know most of the actors’ in the current debacle about the future of the national political opposition. Including those who have passed on and those that are alive.  I also know those that joined well after. Either in opportunistic or religious fervor.

I am also slightly tired of the tag that I could have been a better political leader in one respect or the other.

And for this reason I will explain my personal political journey in Zimbabwe’s opposition politics between 1999 and 2008. After that I have had temporary solace in working in the development NGO sector. 

As abstract as it may seem, I was involved in the formation of the original MDC at the National Working Peoples Convention in 1998 through to its launch via the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in 1999.

I was also a bit part player in the negotiations that led to the Global Political Agreement on an Inclusive Government of 2009 until 2013. As facilitated by SADC under the aegis of the legendary former South African president, Thabo Mbeki.

I never worked for the inclusive government but I understood its nuances and its mechanics. By the time the inclusive governments tenure was over, based on constitutional court cases, I also quickly realized that opposition politics in Zimbabwe had changed. 

Within the then social and civil society movements we had already done the Zimbabwe People’s Charter, one that was deemed too ‘leftist’ to receive international rightwing support.  The NCA had also decided to transform itself into a political party, a decision me and a few colleagues agonized over and eventually had to leave the organization because we saw a regrettable lack of organic political direction. An issue which still vindicates us today. 

But back to the inclusive government and the failure of the opposition to defeat the ruling Zanu PF establishment in 2013. To be honest we were shocked at our electoral loss.  We assumed it was a given that the vote would go in our oppositional favour.  We had failed to factor in the rural vote, the changes in urban settlements and also the moral questions around our then national opposition leader. 

But we lived to fight another day in one form or the other.  We were products of two processes.  The labour unions and the students unions.  The front runners were the ZCTU and for us, as leaders of students unions was the Zimbabwe National Students Unions (ZINASU).  For the latter our able leader was Hopewell Gumbo, popularly referred to as “Msavayha” because he was studying surveying and our Secretary General was Nelson Chamisa who was at that time studying marketing at the Harare Polytechnic.

There were many other comrades that helped with the expansion of opposition politics in Zimbabwe.  Suffice to say it was both the labour and student movements that formed the mainstream opposition as we know it today. 

The key point however is to explain the disastrous state of our opposition politics today.  We were originally leftist opposition comrades.  We derided ESAP and also initially argued for a land reform programme before the Chinotimba war veterans started invading farms in what they called the 3^rd Chimurenga.

We argued among ourselves about what should be the way forward and the legendary Morgan Tsvangirai accused us of being ‘nhinhi” for refusing the new constitution in 2013.  A term we accepted after the 2013 referendum ‘yes vote’ as the peoples will.

But the question remains about the state of our contemporary opposition politics.  I have not been involved in it for at least ten years.  What I know is that it has lost its organic link to the working people of Zimbabwe

It has a new mix of religion, politics and a very abstract populism.  It does not belong anymore to the people as it used to.  Never mind the vote counts.  It remains a created construct that many comrades flow toward because of materialist reasoning and inferiority complexes.

Personally, I take responsibility of the state of affairs of the opposition given my own history.  We saw what was coming.  We did not think through it.  And we are between a rock and a hard place. But we will recover.

Takura Zhangazha writes  here in his own personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)

Creation and Control of Political Narratives in Zimbabwe.

By Takura Zhangazha*

Zimbabweans are familiar with the historical question that relates to “What made us?” In most cases the historical answer is the first and second liberation struggles against colonialism. The other answer is the fact of our economic suffering after the first eight years of independence when we underwent rapid economic liberalisation at the behest of global financialised capital which we refer to as the ESAP period that took at least another ten years to take hold.

Where we take it take it a step further a number of us post ESAP children ask a key question “What made ‘me’?”, and how should we remember or reflect this question’s importance for a perceived  contemporary ‘individuality?’ As assumedly conscious adults and with the baggage of our own personal experiences as informing our attitudes to our contemporary lives and its attendant materialist, comparatively competitive demands.

This can come in many forms.  But it can be generally assumed to initially and in most cases sequentially  stem from our sense of belonging to family, cultural practices/language/religion, geographical location, history and contemporary political/economic placement in the society(ies) that we live in. 

The key point however would still remain that a majority of us assume we are somewhat societally ‘created’ to have a sense of being and belonging for some of the reasons cited above.  But even more importantly based on what we not only experience but also what we desire.   Be it in the form of recognition from family, the church you attend or in more cases now, the work and company you keep.  Or the comparative, competitive wealth that you are in adulation recognised by your immediate close and personal society to have made. 

These senses of ‘belonging’ and ‘being’ in Zimbabwe are however no longer static.  It appears that they depend on the fluidity of one’s individual economic or material circumstances.

One day you can be a firm believer in orthodox religion as it relates to your everyday work/employment or tomorrow you can wake up in an African Apostolic Faith church understanding of your existential circumstances. Or you can find yourself as a rabid or even moderate political activist on behalf of one party or the other for many years only to make an abrupt u-turn for in most cases what can be mainly a livelihood reason.  And in some rare cases, you can decide to be a neutral and cynic about many things and functioning on an abstract philosophical basis that each day brings what it will. So long you follow the money.

The essence of this argument being that however as we seek to personally identify or deem we are authentically socially created, we also have, in the contemporary, what can be considered “political personas”.  These being a combination of our personal political experiences (painful or placated), our preferred political beliefs and our more realistic material ones.

In our contemporary political elections we appear to be seeking more a reflection of ourselves and the language of what we personally consider our political and economic realities.  And this is completely understandable given the general direction our political processes are taking.  Zimbabwe is enthralled in what can be considered populist electoral politics.  Even when there is no immediate pending election which is made to seem closer than it legally is. (We are due for a constitutional one in 2028.)

And this is where the argument around ‘politically created personas’ emerges.  It is a straight-jacketed approach to our national politics based on the fact of who we think we are individually and finding others on social and other mediums like-minded persons.  Or alternatively people who believe what we  as friends believe until the next electoral defeat or the next ‘democratic angst’ at some sort of electoral defeat of the political side we chose.  As based on societal influences that either relate to our personal wealth, religious affiliation or general historical stature as sons/daughters of revered nationalists/ opposition activists or religious pastors.  In the past or in the present.

In this, we get lost to the fact that for all of our emotive conundrums and angst about what a future progressive Zimbabwe can or should look like, for the moment, it is not necessarily or progressively designed by us.  Mainly because we are all over the place ideologically, emotionally and economically. And there are many  jackals ready to take advantage to shape our thinking of the way forward.  Both in our politics and our economics'.  

We take what we are given by others and accept it into our own intrinsic cultural fabric to the point of personalised argument.  Even if we do not control the narrative. 

So those that create for us, in our own popular imaginations, those that they think  should lead us, will always have tea and a hearty laugh at the fact that they can create not only celebrity style leaders for us.  But also determine what we can consider as our political personas. Or who we can be politically. That is, who we can think we are and who we can be. As sophisticated as that may appear.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)

 

 

 

 

A Needed Criticality On Narratives on Land and its Political Economy in Zimbabwe.

 By Takura Zhangazha*

There is what should be a relatively urgent and revived “national interest” debate about land tenure/ ownership in rural, peri-urban and also former agricultural farms in Zimbabwe.  This is based on the recent central government's official policy announcing and effecting the eviction of what it considers illegal settlers on land that was allegedly distributed by village headmen with or without the approval of chiefs and rural district councils.  This also includes urban councils who have also been accused of allegedly distributing land in either wetlands or former urban farms for insidious profit or political patronage. 

In all of these there is reference to a common denominator called a ‘land baron’.  This term did not exist in ordinary Zimbabwean political parlance before the official Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000.  It also took its time to take effect in our local lingo until perhaps 2010. 

It doesn’t quite have an official definition but would be generally assumed to mean that a ‘land baron’ after the FTLRP is someone with either access to political patronage within the ruling party, access to financial capital to lease or purchase state land, can or is selling and partitioning original land acquired for different uses. As acquired from the state or former white commercial farmers who were either forced off the land or sold it for a pittance at the height of the FTLRP.

 Which in some cases relates to urban residential land use even if it is in a rural or peri-urban setting.  Hence emergent cases of forced evictions on the outskirts of Harare, Bulawayo, Masvingo, Chipinge, Mutare, Gweru and Gutu. 

The key element to bear in mind is that the centre of all these newfound evictions is based on central government proclaiming illegality of settlements after the FTLRP. Not just as a political, historical, and liberation struggle based radical nationalist policy.  But as one that relates to the political economy of land and belonging in contemporary Zimbabwe.   

This is a somewhat complicated argument to make.  The meaning of land and land ownership (especially as capital) appears to have shifted from its historical connotations that related to historical identity and arguments about dispossession.

What has been happening since the FTLRP began and was assumedly completed is that ‘land’ has become a ‘business’.  In a holistic sense.  Particularly land acquired with or without government approval after 2000 to present.

If you go to any major city or emergent town, land ownership is key to urban development.  Add to this either emergent agricultural mechanization programmes as led by government and related agricultural and mining entrepreneurship, you may come to conclude that ‘land’ in Zimbabwe is now essentially viewed as short and long term “capital”.  In a post-colonial and newer economic neo-liberal sense. 

Whereas before the FTLRP we decried white monopoly capital ownership of land, now we have a replacement but highly politicized system of ownership of the same.  Admittedly it has a sense of “black empowerment’ but one that is complicated by assumptions of mimicry of its predecessor. And again because it is mainly based on a system of capitalist accumulation, it appears to be leading toward a system of displacement coupled with an asymmetric control of the majority poor and their urbanized material desires.  Even if they are in rural areas.

That’s why when we are witnessing destruction of houses or evictions of comrades who have lived in certain areas for the last twenty years and are now being forcibly evicted for allegedly legal reasons we have to re-ask the ideological meaning of the initial FTLRP.

It would appear on the face of it that while benefitting and fulfilling a liberation struggle expectation it is now more complicated for our political economy.   This is because the ‘open for business’ policy of government has now meant that land ownership and in particular as ‘capital’ cannot be open sesame or simply related to the liberation struggle values and objectives.

The courting of mining, agricultural and ‘private city investors’ means that those that were initial beneficiaries of the FTLRP face greater insecurity of tenure on the land that they had initially assumed they ‘deserved’. Historically or by way of political or economic patronage.

Especially where and when it concerns the ‘infrastructure development’ thrust of the current government.  Even if they are war veterans or ruling party supporters or just ordinary people that really needed a place to call ‘home’. Hence the continually unfished story of Chiadzwa in Manicaland or Lupane as examples.

I will end with an anecdotal conversation I once had with my brother about the future of our rural homes in Bikita, Masvingo when we were much younger.  The issue was whether it would be preferable to ‘urbanise’ Bikita or modernize it while retaining the communal system of land tenure.  We sort of agreed on modernization while retaining traditional values and ethos of what we knew was essentially a ‘reserve area’ as the Rhodesian government deliberately designated it. Our ancestors had been displaced from the Save Valley, Chipinge and Chimanimani.  Others were eventually forcibly displaced further to Gokwe.   

In that University conversation, we argued and agreed in part that privatizing communal rural land was never going to be a good idea.  Based on the experiences of what we had read about Nigeria and Kenya after their independence and what had happened with attempts at giving title for what was originally communally owned land.  Even if it had been originally been designated by British and/or settler state governments.

In any event, as Zimbabweans must debate the full and realistic political economic meaning of what was the FTLRP.  It took away what was once private capital and nationalized it. Many celebrated this.   It is however now in a state of flux wherein the state/government is approaching it in a hybrid private/public format and outsourcing it as domestic capital for mines, carbon credits and eventual trickle down agricultural investments.   

What is increasingly self-evident is that we still do not have an organic sense of what the land we took must be used for except where and when it is part of mimicry of what we overcame/ overthrew and assume to be land use success. 

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)