Current Matabeleland politics and forthcoming elections

By SABELO GATSHENI--- Current Matabeleland politics and forthcoming elections Currently Matabeleland is showing increasingly ethnic and regional dynamics with ZAPU having been revived and positioning itself to claim its Matebeleland and Midlands support-base from both MDC political formations. At another level, ZAPU under the veteran nationalist Dumiso Dabengwa is trying to claim its pre-1963 national political resonance while at the same time trying to regain its Matebeleland constituency. ZAPU’s publicity secretary Methuseli Moyo has been dishing out mixed signals-at one level articulating purely Matebeleland regional issues and on the other projecting ZAPU as an authentic liberation movement with strong national credentials poised to replace ZANU-PF from power.[53] The Matebeleland region is currently issuing mixed and complex political signals. These range from a new repertoire of secessionist and irredentist politics, to electoral unpredictability. The revival of ZAPU and re-organisation of the MDC under the leadership of Professor Welshman Ncube who, unlike Arthur Mutambara, is considered a politician from the Matebeleland and Midlands regions, have the potential to contribute to the intensification of electoral competition come new elections. There is even possibility of a new regional coalition being formed including ZAPU and MDC aimed at maximizing electoral success in Matabeleland and the Midlands regions. Already, some ZAPU officials have begun imploring the officials of the smaller faction of the Movement for Democratic Change to ‘surrender the cross’ and join ZAPU before the forthcoming elections.[54] Some civil society groups have also implored the two parties to unite so that they could enter the elections as a strong regional force. There is an incipient ‘political scramble’ for Matebeleland from different political gladiators with MDC-T fighting to retain its electoral dominance that it has enjoyed since the split of 2005. Some ZANU PF party heavyweights from the Matabeleland region whose political grip has waned over the years, have also made known their intentions to contest and recapture parliamentary seats in the region in the forthcoming elections. More than any region in the country, this has raised the spectre of bruising plebiscitary battles. But there are some young Ndebele-speaking political activists who lump MDC-T together with ZANU-PF as political formations representing those regions inhabited by dominant Shona-speaking people rather than Matebeleland. To these young activists, the people of Matebeleland are just being used to propel MDC-T into power and once that is done Matabeleland would be forgotten and its marginalization will continue.[55] But ZANU-PF too has not given up on making inroads into Matebeleland using those former ZAPU members who decided to remain in ZANU-PF at the time Dabengwa revived ZAPU. The politics that has developed around the statue of Nkomo is revealing. It is also widely believed that the recent Nkomo statue debacle is part of the continuum of the efforts to recapture Matebeleland using Nkomo’s legacy and through the symbolism of Nkomo as a form of appeasement. The statue project was however hit by bad political weather taking the form of opposition from the surviving Nkomo family members and other members of the Matebeleland region tired of being recipients of ideas imposed from Harare. Beginning with the refusal by Welshman Mabhena to be buried at the Heroes Acre, there is increasing snubbing of directives from ZANU-PF and Harare. When the other veteran nationalist Thenjiwe Lesabe died, ZANU-PF avoided another snub by not considering her for heroine status, with Didymus Mutasa of ZANU-PF saying ‘we could not confer on her the national heroine, which was rightful status, because she was not consistent when she joined ZAPU led by Dabengwa.’[56] Lesabe had made it clear before her death that she did not want to be buried at Heroes Acre. But a third ‘snub’ came soon after. Cornius Nhloko hailing from Silobela in the Midlands and a former Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) intelligence chief died at the age of 63 during the same week of Lesabe’s death. ZANU-PF conferred him a national hero status but his family indicated that Nhloko had made it clear that he did not want to be buried at Heroes Acre. These ‘snubs’ reinforce the widespread criticism that National Heroes Acre has essentially become a ZANU-PF burial ground rather than a national shrine.[57] The popular view is that the much talked about ‘forthcoming elections’ that President Mugabe said will be held in 2011, will be the possible decider of the decade-long presidential challenge between Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and President Robert Mugabe. The Matabeleland strand clearly promises to be brewing an election within an election. It could as well be the deciding region, either through its use as a decoy by some parties and/or the division of votes among multiple parties scrambling for regional support. Matebeleland dynamics are as equally important to watch as the national focus on the Mugabe-Tsvangirai duet. The Matebeleland question has continued to be felt throughout all aspects of national politics, and opposition parties like MDC and Mavambo have all struggled to deal with the issue. The MDC split of 2005, for instance, largely evolved around the question of Matebeleland and how to handle issues of regional and ethnic representation within the party.[58] Similarly, the split in Mavambo after its modest performance in the 2008 elections also had a lot to do with issues of Ndebele people’s ethnic and regional representation within the party and how the party’s policies dealt with issues of Matebeleland’s historic marginalization. The Matebeleland question has continued to loom large in the MDC-T’s current internal politics, and the party has increasingly come under fire from its Matebeleland supporters for its alleged insensitivity to the problems of the region and its failure to come out with clear policies on ethnic power balancing as well as a concise justice and reconciliation framework that adequately deals with the Gukurahundi legacy. At the same time, there has also continued to be simmering ethnic and regional struggles within the Welshman Ncube-led MDC over how to handle the Matebeleland question. All these problems, in a way, indicate serious challenges in current approaches towards resolving the Matebeleland question. Conclusion Nowhere throughout Zimbabwe have feelings of exclusion and marginalization been felt more strongly than in Matebeleland. Since 1980, the ‘Matebeleland Question’ has continued to project dynamics that speak to the unexplored legacies of hegemonic politics and violence as modes of governance, decentralization and devolution of power, linguistic and cultural diversity, and perceptions and realities of regional marginalization. The failure by the central state to address all these issues satisfactorily has evoked different responses from the people on the ground. The responses have included intensified calls for devolution of power, regional and ethnic fundamentalism as well as secessionism. Today, Matebeleland has become a theatre of renewed and frenzied political interest and the centre of a potentially seismic shift. As captured by The Standard of 15 January 2011: ‘If developments over the past year are anything to go by, there is every reason to expect the region to play a leading role in influencing the political direction in Zimbabwe.’[59] But what is this Matebeleland question? It can be best described as a multifaceted one. It is historical and political. It is old and new. It is a national question. Its roots are traceable to the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial periods. It is deeply lodged within the development of the idea of Zimbabwe itself. It is about nation-building and authentic subjects of the nation. It is about who is considered a Zimbabwean and who is not. It is about inclusion of ethnicities into a single nation. It is a challenge to ethno-nationalism. It is about the style of governance and inclusive citizenship. It is about fair exercise of power and tolerance of diversity. As such, its resolution is inevitably about rethinking nation-building, citizenship and belonging as well as sharing of resources and power configuration. To resolve it, there is need to re-visit the idea of Zimbabwe and to democratize it. ZANU-PF messed it up since its emergence in 1963. Its resolution needs genuine nationalists, not lip-service ones. It reveals the failures of nation-building. It indicates the limits of coercion as a lever of nation-building. It points to the limits of ethno-nationalism that masquerades as territorial nationalism. It cannot therefore be resolved simply by elections as elections have proven to be more of an ethnic census.