By Vivid Gwede| Debate on the recent Supreme Court Judgement and the aftermath has focused on what has been painted out as the internal power dynamics within a fractious MDC party, but there is a bigger historical frame in which the story unfolds.

The State therefore has been taking more than just a keen interest in the matter.

Flogging Dead Horse

The decisions by the Supreme Court and Parliament have been given a purely legal credence (itself a single, even contestable factor), overlooking the political absurdity of imposing a minority’s will.

Whatever temporal and out-dated leadership rights the courts thought had defaulted to Khupe in February 2018 (by accident of a death in the party) were clearly vetoed by the MDC membership, the ultimate arbiter in that institution, in the 2018 harmonised elections and the Gweru congress.

To countermand the MDC majority’s will and revive that temporal mandate for Khupe’s succour serves no present justice for the thousands of party faithful, except expired legal compliance and political imposition.

Given the obvious and foreseeable reality the case would be overtaken by events in light of the 2018 harmonised elections and the scheduled Gweru congress in October 2019, the case should have been heard urgently.

In fact, the aggrieved parties should have approached the courts as soon as they felt their rights were being violated with the appointment of the two vice-presidents, Mudzuri and Chamisa.

This would have ensured that a mass organisation was not held at ransom and inconvenienced in an attempt to secure the rights of the aggrieved individuals.

One Party State’s Ghost

The bigger frame is that the ruling Zanu-PF party has always been inconsolable about the fact that the one-party state it openly craved for post-independence has never materialised in the past 40 years.

Not only that, the trepidations that Zanu-PF always harboured about multi-party politics vis the emergence of a vibrant opposition party capable enough of up-staging it and eventually assuming power, may have been realized with the emergence of the MDC in September 1999.

In the early years of independence, Zanu-PF had worked hard to subdue PF Zapu and with the inking of the Unity Accord in December 1987, the dream “to establish one-party state in Zimbabwe” as point 6 of the Accord stated, appeared on the horizon.

But frustrated the dream was by the rise of radical student unionism, the transformation of the labour movement towards greater and critical independence, the pro-democracy skirmish of Edgar Tekere’s Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM), and the global fall of the Berlin Wall/Cold War order in 1989.

But if a de jure one-party state could not be achieved, Zanu-PF has thereafter sought to establish a de facto one-party state, though with every other election the risk remains of the opposition calling its bluff as happened in March 2008.

The Same Mouth

MDC’s founding president Morgan Tsvangirai’s death in February 2018 had thus appeared to give Zanu-PF a new opportunity of revitalising its dream by dividing the opposition, thus destroying and removing the only biggest obstacle to its power for the foreseeable future.

Yet, perhaps sensing his own clock, Tsvangirai had already set out on a plan before his death to revitalise the MDC’s democracy project through the MDC Alliance.

In 2020, Zanu-PF therefore is not anywhere nearer to achieving its objective of a supine hegemony, which has always been its dream end-state to the nationalist project.

This is because in the year 2000’s general elections a new political fact was born – unmistakably characterised by competitive politics, though on an authoritarian canvas, but a new politics, nonetheless.

To highlight this, for the past 20 years, Zanu-PF has never been the governing party across Zimbabwe’s towns, thus being forced to maintain a tenuous existence as a rural party.

This was once again confirmed in the 2018 elections.

To quote Mark Ashurst and Gugulethu Moyo in The Day After Mugabe : “Zimbabwe’s ruling elite will remain a feature of the political landscape after Mugabe, but its near-monopoly of ideas and aspiration is irretrievably gone.”

Zanu-PF may not like the MDC, but as the saying goes, the tongue and the teeth may argue but will have to stay in the same mouth.

Inexorable march of history

History is a giant that marches on despite the feeble protest of its subjects.
The present-day fighter for democracy in Zimbabwe may therefore tell his black oppressor, ironically just as liberation fighter Hebert Chitepo did to his white oppressor’s attempts to frustrate the independence movement, that, “None of these schemes and devices will turn back the clock.”

In that remarkable essay, The Passing of Tribal Man: A Rhodesian View , Chitepo proclaimed: “There is a new force at work, a new vision and a new imperative.

“The people see a new hope and a new society in front of them.
“They have embraced it and they will inexorably follow the vision to its end.”

Back then, Chitepo saw Africans embracing a new sense of nationalism.
Zimbabweans see today the new vision and imperative of the passing of the monolithic politics of the one-party state style in Africa toward the future of multi-party democracy.

That Zimbabwe is a multiparty state, in 2020, albeit a stuttering one, indeed is water under the bridge and there is no point in an “attempt, like Canute, to order back to the sea the advancing tide…,” like as now being attempted, again to quote Chitepo.

What Zimbabweans now see, of course with much resistance and difficulties, but probably inexorably, is the rather natural displacement of “the dictatorial man” as an uncontested feature of African politics, with the yet slow but sure tide of history.

Dictatorial man being those oppressive tendencies, which though temporarily impervious to reform, are slowly losing grip, expiring and receding out of fashion in the new African – indeed Zimbabwean – citizen’s political consciousness