By Dr Masimba Mavaza | On the 20th February the leader of the newly formed CCC party pronounced that him and his party did not have any ideology or any goals or objectives. They are blindly rolling riding on their popularity.
We give credit where it is due. The man is telling the truth. What has surprised many is not that he and his party are without any ideology, without any objective and without any aims; what has surprised so many is the rare pronouncement of the truth. In most cases Chamisa and the truth are never in the same sentence.
The question is : why has Mr Chamisa decided to tell the truth and agree with what many of us have been saying about him and his old party in a new name (effectively old wine in new bottles)?
People live for a principle of which many will die for. A group comes together for a purpose and any grouping with no aim is going nowhere very fast.
A person who leads a group with no aim is called a centrist he has many loves, Civility wonderful! Reason the best! Their list of peeves is equally extensive, but there’s one word that tops the list one important word that sends a shiver down their spine is Ideology. Chamisa shocked everybody when he said he has no ideology. He confirms that he is leading people nowhere and he has no ideology.
He tried to explain his party’s world view, and after an extended tribute to the efficacy of economy he inevitably start to lecture people about the pitfalls of political ideology. Chamisa tells people that what they really crave is a politics free from ideology a technocratic utopia where hysterical ideologues are pushed to the fringes, and every decision is made purely on the basis of facts and evidence.
It is funny how history is littered with examples of lack of spine, policy, idealogy of Mr Chamisa old wine in new bottles.
Look at its precedence. CCC party is the only political party which has its top leadership who have rebelled against one another for political expediency and then re-jumped into bed with one another for the same cohabitation reasons. Any principle or objective in this behaviour and setup? None. So why do they exist then.
Mr Chamisa’s followers tried to burn Madam Khuphe at the funeral of the late Morgan Tswangirayi. Did Mr Chamisa condemn this grim act. No. Any principle. None. Because he is not powered by any ideology nor principles. Mr Chamisa is the only leader whose leadership was allegedly bequeathed by his predecessors ‘s oral will. Any principle here? None. Can this be democratic no not at all.
4 What about the slavish support of crippling sanctions against our country? No principle no value instead Chamisa hopes the sanctions continue until the government is forced out.
This so-called the new (Well behold the nonsense) was not founded on any principle. It is the only political party in history born on a whim and without a constitution: without a founding document and without any founding aims and objectives. It is the only party founded without a foundation. Is it any wonder that its self-appointed leader would, under the weight of overwhelming reality, be forced to concede that it is an outfit with no wit?
It may well be that Mr Chamisa was just slavishily and wantonly immitating Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister when he stated that his party has no ideology. That is is the most concerning bit.
Chamisa shocked the people at his rally that Ideology is a distraction”, people will pontificate. He claims that he can promise people that if he is given power to rule whites will come with monies to support chamisa’s government. This echoes the words of Tendai Mbiti Biti Chamisa’s vice president who said during his campaign that there are a load of white people who are waiting to support their government with loads of money.
This clearly shows that CCC is powered by foreign powers and they only puppets waiting for instructions from their masters. Chamisa tells the people that his party will lead on facts and not on ideology. The truth is of course, a resounding no, because facts alone lead nowhere. Facts themselves give no impetus, because they describe the world as it is, not as we want it to become. Chamisa promises people nothing but facts which can not be substantiated.
But abandoning ideology to imitate Blair exposes the foolishness in Chamisa’s CCC.
Here is the context within which Mr Tony Blair appeared to renounce ideology in the mid 1980s when he was elected leader of the Labour Party while in office. At the time Labour was decidedly Marxist. In Britain a party with Marxist leanings does not win elections. Aware of this, Mr Blair pronounced himself free of ideology, so that he could get support from the right-wing media, particularly the Sun Newspaper.
So the Labour Party abandoned ideology in order to win power. Mr Blair did not stop there. He developed a mantra which went: “what matters is what works”. Tony Blair went on to build many life-changing policies on this mantra, including landmark legislation By contract, Mr Chamisa has no principle, no principle and no ideology.
The new party (the old wine in new bottles) was formed by Mr Morgan Tswangirayi and Mr Gibson Sibanda on the back of the labour movement. Chamisa is now not even pretending to be on the side of workers on whose back he and his party have been riding for so long.
So what is Mr Chamisa telling the electorate? That he has no scruples: that he has no policy: that he has no agenda other than that the Western imposed illegal sanctions must stay.
Chamisa does not understand that facts are descriptive, not normative. They tell us what is, not what should be. They tell us how to do something we want to do, but not why we want to do that thing in the first place.
The reason we can’t have politics without ideology is that politics, quite simply, is ideology. Politics, at its very heart, is about debating why we should and shouldn’t pursue certain outcomes.And that’s all ideology is. Despite its pejorative association with history’s infamous -isms, ideology is just a preference for how society ought to function; a set of principles we use to judge what is fair or unfair, just or unjust. Facts are the what and the how, ideology is the why.
Politicians, even the ones who claim to be unideological, have to use ideology, because every policy contains a value judgement — a position on what outcomes we believe are right, and what outcomes we believe are wrong. Whether we like it or not, every political decision is an ideological one, reflecting the values of the person or party who made it.
Chamisa leads a party with no aim no value his party reflects no values.
An “unideological” politician is like a professional chef who claims not to care how their food tastes, or a prosecutor that couldn’t be fussed what the jury decides either lying to you, or incompetent. So Chamisa is not only a liar but has shown that he is incompetent.
He is focused on foreign money and obviously foreign instructions. He is clearly telling the Zimbabweans that they must follow him into Canaan. But Canaan for Chamisa is to take Zimbabwe in the hands of those who will pay Chamisa. The whole CCC idea is only for money a great betrayal for Zimbabwe. Yet Chamisa dances in front of thousands of his supporters who cheered zimbabwe away and he was dancing the country into the hands of the Western governments which he Chamisa referred to as White men with money.
We should know that this, then, is the bottom line: Most voters aren’t ideologues, and even accounting for that, most ideologues aren’t particularly ideological A party without ideology is surely a mouth piece of other powers hidden somewhere. Thinking about all this mostly reminds us that zimbabwean politics has always been especially ideological and has historically ever been especially ideological. Tradition and institutional structure have given us a robust ideologies. Consequently, practical politics in Zimbabwe revolves around a competition between two political coalitions that are, of necessity, pretty slapdash and unwieldy. The primary fact about Zimbabwe’s political allegiance, under the circumstances, is the voters attitude toward those coalitions not abstract ideas about how things ought to be.
It would have been a different story if Chamisa had said
that politics should be devoid of ideology, and what he really wanted is a politics underpinned by one common ideology a unifying, universal set of principles that all politicians hold as true. But Chamisa offers no principles thus making his supporters fools.
Were there is ideology in existence, politics becomes a domain of pure facts, contracted out to technocratic bureaucrats who can decide the best way to pursue these shared goals.
This is no historical accident, nor is it something we can ever hope to overcome. Pluralism is an explicit design feature of democracy, and as long as our political institutions are shared between tens of millions of people, all from unique cultural backgrounds, it is one that can’t be done without ideology.
People, quite simply, are going to disagree, and it’s fanciful to suggest that politics will ever be more than a partisan scrap for ideological supremacy.
And that’s not a bad thing. If our values and principles are worth anything, they should be worth fighting for.
Because when our politicians claim to stand for nothing, then… well… who knows what’s on your plate.
Chamisa takes Zimbabweans for fools. He has no plan all he promises is money from the whites. Is this the Zimbabwe we want, the Zimbabwe we fought for. The country to be led by people with no purpose and no reason for existence.
Zimbabweans we have been warned CCC does not know why it is in Politics.