INSINCERITY, PRETENCE, ENTITLEMENT AND HEARTLESS ETHICS

REASON WAFAWAROVA ON SATURDAY | As we battle to recover from two decades of international isolation and economic decline, we face a seemingly insurmountable economic warfront, and it appears we can only fight megaphone wars against a culture of endemic corruption.

We seem to have a policy deficit financially, developmentally and in terms of institutional accountability; and most certainly we seem to have a capacity deficit in terms of leadership at all levels.

Consultations involving the clergy, PAC, and POLAD are at best PR gimmicks designed to give a façade of seriousness in governance, and at worst a vainglorious political stance to contrive inclusivity for its own sake.

Our leadership comprises largely of people over 50, and they were born colonised, and many, if not most of them were cultured in a colonial setup and mindset, including this writer.

Colonial possessions were ruled with authoritarian methods, and when we became independent we retained the coercive colonial institutions intact. We inherited the limits between private business and public administration, which were blurred because of the exclusively extractive nature of the colonial state.

So the Belgian colonial state was very similar to the Congo of Mobutu, just like Ian’s Smith’s colonial state was very similar to the Zimbabwe of Robert Mugabe in the 80s.

Central Government protected the extraction of revenue for a restricted group of privileged individuals. Both the colonial state and the post-colonial state employed the use of divide and rule tactics, purposely neglecting the improvement of the local workforce, although in exceptional cases like Zimbabwe, skills development and education were quite impressively carried out soon after independence.

The post colonial state has brought about increased inequality than there was during the colonial state, creating a small-sized westernised local elite whose wealth disparity with their fellow countrymen is breathtakingly alarming.

Elites:

Our liberation movement was spearheaded by a small group of educated blacks, who felt at the time that they had been kept away from good jobs and political power by the racist bias of the colonial state.

The majority of Africans were subsistence farmers, and were not initially involved in urban protest nationalism that got many of the African educated elites incarcerated or imprisoned in detention centres for charges ranging from civil disobedience to treason.

It was only after the educated elites decided on waging an armed conflict that the rural masses were mobilised to join in the armed fight for independence.

Clearly there was no unified independence movement as seen by various African elites who formed and led different “independence political parties,” and even different “military wings” of independence freedom fighters.

The liberation movement was an alliance of interests involving those Africans that had been educated and propped up by the colonisers. This is reflected by the social origin of most founding fathers of independent African countries, leaders like Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Leon M’Ba of Gabon, Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

There are exceptions like Samora Machel of Mozambique and Aghostino Neto of Angola of course.

These people had been nurtured by the political culture of the colonial state and had been used to identifying the state as the only purveyor of financial resources and favours.

They also saw it as an instrument of domination that did not require the consent of those subject to it (Bandoura, 1995). Moreover, the African society had not yet developed a middle class that would be able to hold the new political elites accountable.

The small number of members of these elites maintained themselves within a very close knit, cohesive group (Bayart, 1993). For example, the future Democratic Republic of Congo could gather no more than a few tens of university graduates, while the Nigerian Army initially counted no more than one hundred and fifty African officers.

So, at the end of the colonial domination, one had, on one hand, an oppressive and unjust state and, on the other hand, an unaccountable elite, lacking legitimacy and founding its strength on the basis of being the only class with the necessary expertise to staff the administration. In the few years following independence, this class would be the one to capture the state and use it for its own private ends, especially in West Africa (Bandoura, 1995).

Herein lies our problem in Zimbabwe. We had one President who for 37 long years prided himself as the only one with the expertise to run our country, and alongside him we have had an overstayed bureaucracy that equally monopolises assumed expertise. This includes permanent secretaries, Cabinet Ministers, Senior Government officials like the Presidential spokesperson, and at one time the long serving Registrar General.

When the late founding president played with the idea of grooming his youthful wife to take over from him, he was brought down by the very culture of entitlement that he himself created and nurtured for close to four decades. His own spokesperson spied on him, and switched sides to back a group of status quo aspirants who hailed from the hailed history of the liberation legacy, at whose core were ambitious military elites.

Robert Mugabe was then toppled with the assistance of the military in November 2017, and his successor Emmerson D Mnangagwa was immediately surrounded by elitist gate keepers from the old establishment, well marshalled by Mugabe’s long time spokesperson and Information Permanent Secretary, who was tactically promoted to a Deputy Chief Secretary in the new setup.

The net effect of this arrangement is a continuation of monopolisation of senior government positions, monopolisation of expertise, entitlement, nepotism, corruption, and the capturing of the state for use to attain private ends.

Elites in Power: The African Experience.

On the face of it independence winners were the black majorities winning back their stolen countries, and the losers were white colonisers in their shameless minorities. However, independence had its real winners and losers.

The winners were the urban based African elites, many of whom boasted of having been jailed or tortured by the colonisers. These became winners in that soon after independence they entitled themselves to political power and economic wealth.

The losers were the non-westernised traditional rural folks who had been mobilised to do the dirty work of blood shedding in the war process to defeat the white colonisers.

For these peasantry and subsistence farming continued after independence, and the only time their voice mattered was once in every five years when the elites would visit amid sloganeering, song and dance to mobilise the ritual ratification vote for another five years of privilege for the talented and intelligent deserving elites, affectionately called Chefs in the ZANU-PF political lexicon.

In Mali, the elites veneered their agenda under socialism and literally eliminated rival traditional land owners so they could end up with the land themselves.

We know who benefited the most with our own land reform program, don’t we?

Thank Heavens the sitting President is making good use of the farm he acquired, as evidenced by the recent tour of the farm by a group of cross party politicians.

Overall, inequality increased after independence, as the gains of the export of agricultural products were pocketed by a restricted group of people, while farmers were progressively pauperised by increasing fiscal impositions by the central government.

This is also what happened in Tanzania, where the state came to tax up to 84 % of its farmers’ revenues, again under the veneer of Ujamaa, or socialism.

At the same time, governments began to strangle private economic initiatives. One case is the one of Cote d’Ivoire, where Hophouet-Boigny countered the emergence of a local business class. He did not want the rise of new social elites, who were private entrepreneurs and could compete against his personal monopoly on the national economy.

In general, the restricted group of people who had led the independence movements used their newly found power to increase their wealth and social standing, resulting in catastrophic consequences for their states.

In Zimbabwe this culture continues. Divorce cases of high profile politicians have revealed obscene amounts of illicit wealth and assets, including a trending case still pending in the courts.

But we continue to be captives of this restricted group of elites whose entitlement to political power derives from their participation in the liberation struggle, but is entirely driven by selfish private material needs, as well as the protection of privilege and wealth, largely acquired unfairly, unjustly and outside democratic means.

This has happened for various reasons. First of all, the state inherited by its African leaders was the exclusive holder of financial wealth, in countries that had not yet developed a social class of private entrepreneurs.

Secondly, like during colonisation, they had promoted a conception of political power according to which the access to state resources and personal enrichment went hand-in-hand.

At the same time, the newly independent African state lacked legitimacy, as its monopoly had been by force, without the consent of the people subject to it. Moreover, those from below, for the first time, were pressurising and objecting these states because independence had raised great expectations for the improvement of life conditions (Chazan et al, 1999).

In order to keep their hold on power, African leaders have always devised two different solutions. The first is an increased centralisation of administrative apparatus, or the creation of a centralised bureaucratic polity.

Indeed, from 1960, the majority of African leaders banned political competition and instituted one-party regimes under which an ever-expanding bureaucracy was used to distribute resources to political allies, often under the form of membership in administrative positions.

Robert Mugabe started preaching the one party state soon after winning the 1980 General election, and was only stopped in his strides by his ally and best friend Edgar Tekere, who thankfully saw things differently, and had to leave ZANU-PF and form an opposition party to allow continued multi-party democracy.

Every African country that got independent expanded its bureaucracy so much that by 1970, over 60% of Africa’s salaried men worked for the Government. Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta just kept employing just about every Kukuyu man that bothered to join government.

For all the years we have been independent Government has always been the biggest employer and continues to be, much as most of the people employed by the Government do next to nothing in terms of contributing to the wellbeing of the state.

We have a seen a plurality of government boards, ministries, police forces, armies, and advisory committees being created, each characterised as a means of patronage, and that includes Commissions like ZACC and others.

It all started with countries like Zambia under Kaunda, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

We continue to see the trend of spoil politics, by which the President and his close entourage bypass state bureaucracies and head private networks of patronage, like the OPC directing who gets tenders worth millions of dollars from Government coffers.

The system is characterised by corruption, the deterioration of the public administration system, and endemic instability. While we have had a clear state breakdown, we have seen priorities for the welfare of elites being funded handsomely ahead of critical services like hospitals.

In an act of political appeasement, the former First Lady had a plane chartered for her to fly from Asia to Zimbabwe because her mother had passed on, and she had the luxury of explaining the luxuries of the chartered aircraft to a starving nation. There are numerous more such skewed priorities that will show us that the rest of the people are only entitled to crumbs from the table of elites that rule our African countries.

Mobutu annually used 20% of Congo’s budget for his personal needs and luxuries, and frankly he was proud of it.

We have this tragedy that allows the leader and his entourage to use state resources at their own discretion.

We vest political power in the figure of the President, and ZANU-PF under Mugabe centralised power to the point that they allowed him to elect and appoint everyone in ZANU-PF leadership as he so wished, and to hire and fire as he wished.
Emmerson Mnangagwa’s rear guard boys hanker to do the same, and obviously for selfish reasons.

In conclusion I have outlined two major causes in the failure of post-independent African states.

First is the colonial predatory state structures that have been inherited and left unaltered by the African Governments, and second are the unaccountable African elites who have succeeded the European administrators after independence.

It is the accustomed culture of an unfair system of rule, as well as the idea of being confronted by the attractive possibilities of private accumulation offered by the state.

Our rulers have not resisted the temptation, and they will not be doing so anytime soon. This tradition of plunder and injustice perpetuates itself unabated, and we need a revolution to root out the ruinous culture and introduce strong accountability institutions with power, independence and authority to arrest the menace of corruption and entitlement.

Indeed external relations of dependency and neo-colonialism have aggravated our situation, but they are by far not the main causes of our predicament.

Not even economic sanctions by the West are the main cause of the demise of our economy.

It is our elites, our leaders, our freedom fighters, our liberators, our nationalists, our own fathers, our kith and kin!

Zimbabwe we are one and TOGETHER WE WILL OVERCOME. IT IS HOMELAND OR DEATH!