THE PARADOX OF COUPS’

Greetings once again. I am sure I find you as you were last week, in fine fettle. We have come to the end of another eventful week.

Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Environment, Concillia Chinanzvavana [MDC], was on Wednesday voted out of her position by Zanu PF members during a post-budget meeting. ZANU PF has reportedly set in motion plans to purge MDC chairpersons of parliamentary portfolio committees using its majority in the august House.

After her ouster from the chair of her committee, Concilia Chinanzvavana commented that her ouster had been unconstitutional, not procedural and contrary to Parliament’s Standing Rules and Orders.It turns out she was correct.
Section 139 of the Constitution states that parliamentary proceedings must be regulated by Standing Rules and Orders, which are drawn up by the Houses on the recommendations of the Parliamentary Committee on Standing Rules and Orders (CSRO).

According to the National Assembly’s Standing Rules and Orders, the chairpersons of all portfolio committees must be appointed by the CSRO – Standing Order 18. The chairing and composition of committees must take into account the number of MPs from each party in Parliament and also gender representation.

It follows that only the appointing authority (the CSRO) may remove a chairperson from office, whether temporarily or permanently.
ZanuPf legislators purport this is in retaliation to MDC legislators not recognising Mnangagwa as the president.A more plausible argument is the Zimbabwe Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee hearing into Command Agriculture and Sakunda.
The Committee and was expected to question Sakunda boss Kuda Tagwireyi over his company’s role in the Command Agriculture, a program which has been used as a vehicle for siphoning public funds to corrupt individuals.

Much whirl was made of the wizardly re-emergence from deaths gallows of coup plotter in chief Constantino Guveya Dominic Nyikadzino Chiwenga.With a spring in his step, disembarking a Chinese jet and welcomed by the Chinese ambassador to Zimbabwe[yes you read that right],one was left to marvel at the extent of Chinese ingenuity ,at the same time sceptical if this was a clone or the real thing.Like all Chinese products , they do not last. Let’s ‘’hope’’ this is the exception to the rule.

Zimbabweans have been such a tormented ,abused lot , bereft of hope,that they celebrated the return of the ‘’Ambi one’’,regardless of the glaring fact that he is the central figure in the palace putsch that has left us in such a labyrinth.

COUP TO CURE A COUP?
To a general with a hammer, everything will tend to look like a nail. Officers will view the task of reforming the state as being susceptible to the tools in which they have greatest expertise. Force is then not used only as a means of defeating those taking up arms against the coup, but also to eliminate those with ideological inclinations or political affiliations that don’t match the blueprint followed by the army.
Military power has an affinity with domination that makes it uniquely unsuited to securing people from the face of oppression.

In fact, across the spectrum of cases that are most likely to need urgent, remedial action, the military will often have a very close affinity with precisely those evils that need remedy. If violent oppression is the evil, it is most likely already being perpetrated by means of the armed forces. If so, it seems naive to imagine the army itself as a natural saviour of the people. If the disease is corruption, it is also corruption that frequently motivates plotters in the first place – as Edward Luttwak remarks, corrupt states offer great material rewards to successful plotters – in other states, coups just aren’t worth the personal risk. Likewise, if rebellion is justified against tyrannical, authoritarian rule, then placing hopes in senior figures from what is traditionally the most consistently authoritarian social institution seems misguided.
It’s not just that the cure is worse than the disease; the cure typically is itself an offshoot of the disease. When you start a cure with the wrong diagnosis, there is little chance you will succeed.

WASTED OPPORTUNITY.

Mnangagwa has missed opportunities to “cure the coup”, particularly the failure to create stable transitional mechanisms. Mnangagwa and his co-conspirators unwittingly attempted to “cure” the coup through a manipulated “election” and this strategy has backfired and the sooner they come to terms with this reality the better. Unbeknown to Mnangagwa was that the ball was in his court and he had many options to redeem himself as a unifying leader. However, his lack of vision has exposed him as an unglued kleptomaniac with no strategy of moving Zimbabwe forward.

One of the more obvious options available to him at the time was calling for a genuine national dialogue of all stakeholders, not for the purposes of power-sharing but rather to carve the way forward for Zimbabwe towards political and economic reforms to address the 37-year rot created by him and Mugabe. This kind of dialogue would have come out with clear timelines on fundamental reforms at the same time as one of the main steps in curing the coup. It would have also helped to cool down the political temperatures and depolarise our politics.

However, that did not happen, as Mnangagwa became consumed and intoxicated by power, allegedly building his power around a partisan and parochial tribal agenda. Mnangagwa has been busy focussing on consolidating his power at the expense of building a nation, renaming roads after himself instead of repairing decrepit ones, let alone construct new ones. Bequeathing himself with unconscionable degrees, with Harvey Weinstein perks to boot.

LESSONS FROM ‘’KUITISWA’’

Letting military elites’ interference in the political process go unchecked ultimately undermines norms of civilian control of the military that are a prerequisite for stable, democratic rule. It encourages military officers to see themselves as above the law. Hence, when civilian elites invite military officers to weigh in on politics, it is difficult to get them to stop.

Faith in the military to restore democracy is misplaced. There is, in fact, scant evidence that coups and other forms of military intervention result in more democratic rule. Notwithstanding the recent uptick in the number of “good coups,” coups still more often than not simply replace one dictator with another.
Just as importantly, those military interventions that are followed by elections rarely bring about lasting change. In Egypt, for instance, human rights organizations documented mass, arbitrary arrests, the detention of protesters and human rights workers, new restrictions on nongovernmental organizations and repression of political opposition. The same misplaced optimism followed the 2006 coup in Thailand.

CONCLUSION
Research by the African Development Bank, among other institutions, shows that there have been more than 200 coups in Africa since the post-independence era of the 1960s, with 45% of them being successful and resulting in the displacement of the head of state and government officials, and/or the dissolution of previously existing constitutional structures.

The emergence of a growing culture of the rule of law, constitutionalism and the democratic dispensation has largely taken away the appetite for coups.

With several countries reaping the “democratic dividend”, those that want to disrupt their country’s growth trajectory through coups and acts of bad governance will not only find themselves out of fashion but also risk a revolt from their own people, who are witnessing what political stability and respect for the rule of law have achieved elsewhere on the continent and would similarly want to benefit from them.
So to Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa and your coterie of democracy controverts, political reforms are essentially the only roadmap to curing your coup and any temptation to a short cut will have unimaginable consequences.

Have a wonderful weekend.

By Tim Mutsekwa: Political Science and International Relations [University of Greenwich]