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NewsDay

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Zanu PF’s Frankenstein

Opinion & Analysis
IT IS clear that Zanu PF’s election campaign strategy is in full swing.

IT IS clear that Zanu PF’s election campaign strategy is in full swing. Editorial by Brian Ngwenya

Jabulani Sibanda’s forerunning forages in different provinces have been at full throttle for a very long time now, preparations for primary elections have escalated, as have rallies and other campaign strategies.

 

At all this, it becomes almost impossible for ZBC to conceal its role as a partisan Zanu PF propaganda mouthpiece with the main news on TV having been reduced to reporting, ad nauseam, Zanu PF meetings even of the most minuscule relevance.

But perhaps the most controversial and talked about of these election campaign strategies has been President Robert Mugabe’s donations of agricultural inputs worth $20 million.

Criticism of Zanu PF’s agricultural inputs donations has been wide-ranging, chief among them, the secretively-guarded, but questionable source of the money to finance the programme and the partisan way in which the recipients of the inputs are selected.

However, beyond these framed commentaries, the inputs programme, like many of Zanu PF’s similar campaign policies in the past, speaks far lot more to the politics of a dependency cycle that was created among the peasant farmers by Zanu PF over the three decades that it has been in power.

In a sense, this may be likened to a cruel and psychotic husband who subjects his wife to deliberate and insensible domestication as a way of creating a facade of total dependence on himself.

As psychologists will have it, oft times, men who behave in this manner usually suffer from extreme paranoia that their wives will fall in love with other men if they expose or allow them in the public domain.

The rights to work, mingle and socialise are denied without any logical explanation. Consequently, the woman becomes inertly and totally dependent on the husband, financially, emotionally, and otherwise. What they get to know and believe is also determined by the husband.

The husband makes the hapless wife believe that he alone is capable of fending for her, while seizing every opportunity to remind the poor woman how fortunate she is to have him for a husband.

The granting of rewards when the wife does well and conforms; and deprivation as punishment for any form of disloyalty and independent thinking become an important tenet of this misogynist form of control.

It is interesting how both the agricultural inputs saga in particular, and Zanu PF’s modus operandi, in general, mirror most of this analogue. Prior to the formation of the Government of National Unity (GNU) as with the present, Zanu PF government and its MPs portrayed rural development as some form of gift or privilege to people living in the rural areas when, as a matter of fact, it is the mandate of the government to provide the same. The same Zanu PF gloats about these “presents” to the people despite the money having come from State coffers.

On the same token, rural development and underdevelopment have been used to reward loyalists while punishing the recalcitrant. Provisions such as boreholes, dip tanks, even schools, roads and clinics have always been politicised with areas that have been traditionally known to support Zanu PF better provided than those that are not.

Zanu PF’s entrenchment of the dependency syndrome in the rural areas was further assisted by its pursuit of poor agricultural marketing programmes in the pre-GNU era. One needs not look any further than cotton.

The prices of cotton are determined mainly by international prices especially in a country like Zimbabwe that consumes very little of its own produce locally.

The world over, this discrepancy is bridged by subsidies for the farmers in order to keep them on the fields. Running a failing economy for the greater part of its stay in power, this was hardly possible.

As a result, the Zanu PF government gave farmers inputs and, in the absence of a sustainable local industry or meaningful government support after input donations, this often left farmers vulnerable to the vagaries of international markets.

In the absence of a drought, the results were good harvests, poor prices, failure to transform livelihoods and back to the begging bowl. Eventually, even those who are being rewarded by more donations of seed will soon realise that this way of doing things is superfluous, unsustainable and redundant, while transforming very little of their lives.

Needless to say, it further alienates those who were affected by exclusions.

Interestingly, now that Zanu PF is in a unity government with the two MDCs, its pundits have, true to fashion, passed the buck of their own Frankenstein monster on Minister of Finance Tendai Biti (MDC-T), for failing to provide the money to pay for agricultural commodities at good prices in the last agricultural season.

Be it by mere deliberate plot or by financial incapacity, they were never able to do this themselves and, whatever the case is, the buck is theirs. What is even true is that the state of the economy and the legacy left by the Zanu PF government make it even more difficult for any Finance minister, MDC or extra-terrestrial, to fix the current state of the rural economy and its attendant problems overnight.

Brian Ngwenya is a former political science lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe.