Subjecting our leaders to crucible of public scrutiny!

RECENT OPINION ARTICLES

• Mbeki's deceptive foreign policy • Zimbabwe is about white supremacy • Western sanctions source of Mugabe's demise • Mugabe's enforcers building own case • If bishops were guilty of aligning with Mugabe, ICG goes to the other extreme • Full text of Tsvangirai's address to foreign correspondents • Crisis Group report pursuing neo-liberal agenda • Zimbabwe opposition running out of options • Mugabe should look at own legitimacy • Zimbabwe: a majority under pressure • Destination Zimbabwe • Martin Luther King's nightmare • Who are Zimbabwe's enemies? • Strikes a vote of no confidence in Zanu PF • Mugabe's 2010 plan may backfire • Defying Mugabe's laws a moral duty • Zimbabweans must rise above party divisions

By Joram Nyathi

http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/opinion251.16173.html

THE debate below is not for those of a nervous disposition, those allergic to the truth or those who have already chosen their future political leaders according to their immutable laws of ethnicity. If you are one of them stop reading right here.

The only Zimbabwean leaders who have ever enjoyed real popularity are the late Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe. The greatest service performed for Zimbabwe by Morgan Tsvangirai was to stop Zanu PF’s hegemonic drift towards a one-party state dictatorship. What the MDC failed to stop was the emergence of a fully-fledged tyranny. What Zimbabwe desperately needs is a leader whom the nation can trust, is committed to democratic values and rule of law, not by law.

As the political stalemate moves swiftly and inexorably towards an indeterminate self-resolution, President Mugabe still casts a long shadow over our future even as his evil rule nears its inevitable end. He is no longer the popular, gripping orator he was at Independence in 1980 and now evokes near universal revulsion by his repressive policies.

Beyond his support for police brutality against opponents, what Mugabe’s regime has managed to do is stifle and kill open debate about the country’s leadership. The result is that voters are never fully informed about the people who want to lead them. Instead Mugabe has occupied all the space for 27 years and people have by default elected the only person they know.

So far as debate about his successor goes, Mugabe has kept Zimbabwean playing the sunflower as his sun scuds across the sky. The feigned ambivalence about his preferred choice between Joice Mujuru and Emmerson Mnangagwa keeps the nation vacillating from one faction to the other.

This is astounding — that a nation which seeks a complete break with Mugabe’s violent culture should look up to him to select for it the person to lead it. How can a person who perpetuates Mugabe’s legacy give Zimbabwe a better future? Thankfully, Mugabe has refused to oblige this illogical expectation. He can’t trust anyone to guarantee his security, hence the push for life presidency.

Those in Zanu PF who want the presidency will have to step out of Mugabe’s shadow for the people to see them. Future leaders should make a clean breast of their past and tell us what they stand for. Transparency demands that leaders account for their actions. In short, a leader should justify his claim to national office by selling us realistic, measurable policies.

So far the people we have been sold by the media as potential successors to Mugabe in Zanu PF have opted to remain inscrutable. We hear the names but not who they are or their national agenda. We have been told of their links to the military and other security agencies yet the Zimbabwe we want is not a latter-day Sparta but a modern Athens. It doesn’t bode well for any nation that its political leaders are elected on the basis of speculation about who they are, what they stand for or purely for belonging to a particular party.

In addition to Mujuru and Mnangagwa, the media has given us Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono and former Finance minister Simba Makoni. Both have however been waved aside for two misconceived reasons. One is that they are not Mugabe’s clear favourites. The other is that they lack grassroots support.

I have already dismissed the first as illogical. The second reflects a failure to understand how Zimbabwean politics works, which is gravely detrimental to the national good.

Up until now, Zimbabwe’s national leaders have not been chosen by the people but by the party. People only elect them. That was the full meaning of the late Simon Muzenda’s statement when he said if Zanu PF selected a baboon as its candidate, people should vote for it. That is why Zanu PF’s presidential aspirants can’t be bothered to go public with their credentials but still expect to be elected once selected by the party.

Outside Zanu PF, it is no secret that many Zimbabweans didn’t know most of the 57 MDC MPs they voted for in 2000. They wanted change, any change, not the calibre of the people they voted for and the MDC has not moulded that protest mentality into a sustainable ideological framework. How do you sell a new constitution, free and fair elections and international observers to a hungry villager in Tsholotsho, Omay or Buhera whose wish-list is precise and concrete: food, water, shelter, medicine and roads?

The problem with this system of selecting leaders is that once they are elected, they rule in their own interest at worst or on behalf of the party at best. They are under no obligation to fulfill national pledges they never made — we are too desperate to see the back of Mugabe to care whether Zanu PF or the MDC wants us to vote for a baboon. We run the danger of moving in circles and then blaming history for repeating itself. Let’s not repeat errors of the past where the sole qualification for high political office was to have crossed the border into Mozambique before 1979.

• To respond to those who ask me how the current crisis will end, my answer is simple: I don’t know. The situation is flux. Mugabe is still holding on tenuously. Tsvangirai warned recently of a dangerous leadership vacuum because of faction fights in Zanu PF while his MDC enjoys ephemeral resurgence after attacks on its activists last week. A power vacuum must be avoided at all costs, even if it means making what the ICG calls "an alliance of convenience" with the devil, an odious phrase. It stinks of PF pre-1980.

Still, it is time we made our political leaders pass through the crucible of public scrutiny on their way to the top.