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Transcript of interview with Brian Kagoro on SW Radio Africa's Hot Seat
Violet Gonda, SW Radio Africa
January 17, 2006

The divisions in Zimbabwe’s main opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has had a devastating effect on the party’s support base resulting in the general membership being confused and forced to choose between two MDC factions. The situation for the party’s supporters has been made worse by the fact that the party is going to hold two separate congresses. The congress for the faction led by vice president Gibson Sibanda is scheduled for February while the other camp led by President Morgan Tsvangirai is expected to hold its congress in March. Also, most recently in the urban council elections, the MDC fielded 2 candidates representing the rival factions, thereby splitting the opposition vote. SW RADIO AFRICA journalist Violet Gonda spoke with political analyst and human rights lawyer Brian Kagoro about the political crisis in Zimbabwe.

Violet Gonda: Now let’s start of with the chaos in the country’s main opposition party the MDC, HOW DO YOU SEE THINGS THERE

Brian Kagoro: Clearly that is a personal vendetta amongst two factions that has very little to do with national interest, it’s partly male egos that are refusing to heal. In a sense I think the critical point that you perhaps must all note is that, firstly that crisis does not simply affect the MDC as a political party, that crisis affects an entire oppositional movement, it suggests that the opposition is not made up of leadership, of values of processes or structures that are different to Zanu PF. It is in essence the Zanufication of the political space.

Then the second one is that it affects a generation, represented within the MDC was an entire generation of young people who one hoped because they were not tainted with the politics of yesteryear which was the politics of ethnicity, the politics of greed, the stone age politics which depended on who had the largest stick and the biggest stone, that this generation carried the hope of Zimbabwe. Tragically the MDC chaos as you describe it suggests that perhaps the sins of the fathers manifest themselves in the sons and the daughters.

And if that is the case, this does not augur well for futuristic imagination of Zimbabwe, or thinking of the Zimbabwe of the future or the future of Zimbabwe.

The third element of course is the whole point around resource disputes, the suggestion why many of us joined the pro-democracy movements line NCA, Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, to mention but a few, was our desire to see a new gender politics, was a desire to see a new ethos in terms of leadership accountability to the electorate, was a desire to see the end of a kleptocracy so that people have nations that are not founded by thieves and on theft but on values of integrity and on values of service.

Clearly the feud in the MDC suggests that we are still way off the mark, it suggests that not only are we way off the mark, that we have become very shoddy copy cats of the very system that we for years invested our very lives to fight.

So it is a crisis that should be viewed as national, not in the sense of the disintegration of a political party but the unmaking of a hope that has taken so many lives, taken so many years to build. A hope that Zimbabwe can be reconstituted by new persons, new men and women, by new politics, by new values, this is the tragedy of the MDC fight.

VIOLET: Now, Brian, what you have just told us is quite sobering but I will also like to ask how did it go so terribly wrong, these are people that were viewed as sensible people fighting the struggle especially in the last six years, how did it go so horribly wrong?

BRIAN: I have a premise that says in everyone of us resides the capacity to be ultimate good, to do ultimate good and also to do ultimate evil. That the fate of good men is the capacity to resist those traits within ourselves that tend to evil, or to vindictiveness or to bitterness. Clearly there is much that the current MDC leadership can do to bury the hatchet, it all remains on the consciences to weigh what is good for the nation, what is good for the future and what is good for Zimbabwe.

It went terribly wrong because I think that the country was so fixated in the substituting of what we viewed as an authoritarian leadership mode and style led by Mugabe and his cronies, a repressive system. Our focus on supplanting repression left us very little room to critique our own democratic credentials, to critique our own value base, to critique our own shortfalls and to critique our own Zanufication or the tendencies towards the same Zanu type politics, thinking and actions. The tragedy though is that this is a race that permitted little else, so in the years past since 1997, there were very few moments where we able to stock take, we formed eh, if you like an alternative authoritarianism. Everybody who dared said that Mugabe and Zanu were wrong was seen as a revolutionary, and therefore criticising them seemed counter-productive. And perhaps that is the learning that we take from this, that the healthiness of a system is the consistent capacity to generate within its own self opposition and self critique, introspection and evaluation.

VIOLET: In light of all this, do you think it would be better for the political future of Zimbabwe for the MDC to disband?

BRIAN: The MDC as an institution is hardly what we must be fighting to preserve or to protect, but rather the values that informed its formation and indeed the formation of the broader progressive forces in Zimbabwe, what were those values? Broad participation by the masses in governance and in the policy formulation in our country, accountability of those who wield power to those whom they lead, inclusivity so we were looking beyond the discriminatory nature of old. Looking beyond discrimination based on age, on region, on religion on political persuasion, discrimination based on tribe and related matters. So what we would rather scowl around to save within the MDC is its soul, or the soul of an opposition politics which says the people as a general collective must determine the future.

What perhaps we should be happy to lose is bigotry, bigotry that sees the tribe as paramount, bigotry that sees a class of people as paramount, bigotry that will put self difference above the nation.

So, in a sense, we are stuck between two goods and two evils. The first being a split of the MDC is really a non-event in itself because neither faction necessarily epitomises the hope nor the value system judging by how they have behaved in the last few months that we have so hard fought for, but then again their contribution to the process of democratisation is something that we cannot write off or write out of history. As such one is caught in the desperate mode of literally wanting to save them from themselves, before we even think about the impact and the benefit that accrues to Zanu PF as a result of this internal feuding. So one would say there are lives, men and women within the MDC, within both factions, men and women ordinarily of integrity, men and women who sacrificed and whose contribution towards Zimbabwe’s democratisation cannot be overlooked. If we could save these souls, if we could redeem that essence of their humanity from the current madness perhaps we can save not just the MDC as an entity but the democratic ethos that Zimbabweans had begun to engender through the emergence of the NCA and others over the years.

VIOLET: In a way are you saying that the leadership of the MDC on both sides of the argument should resign thereby allowing a new generation of politicians to unite and seek a way forward?

BRIAN: I would not be as drastic because I think vacuums create in themselves potential for either total collapse and dilapidation or renewal. I certainly think the MDC needs a leadership renewal, needs a value renewal. I think my first premise would for Gibson (Sibanda) and Morgan (Tsvangirai) to sit and talk, for everybody who is a Zimbabwean of goodwill to force them to so do. Rather than aligning ourselves with either faction, we must insist, we must insist that both history and posterity require that they sit and talk…that they bury their differences. The arguments by the hoodlums and sycophants around them for a split of the MDC into two is hardly what Zimbabwe needs. You cannot seriously suggest to Zimbabweans that differences of such a deep-seated nature arise purely out of the senate race as though the senate race itself is a process that eventuated in a more democratic Zimbabwe or one that was in any event likely to eventuate in a democratic Zimbabwe. So the excuses that both camps are using for chopping each other with political machetes are unacceptable, and I think there is a duty incumbent upon civil society, upon faith based organisations and upon even the business sector that supports democracy to insist…eh, somebody must read them the riot act. However if they are unable, if they are not brought together, if they don’t come together, I think Zimbabweans reserve the right to exercise a more drastic form of disapproval.

And that form of disapproval may be to say ‘listen, you are both not good for business, either we withdraw our vote which is the premise why you came into existence or we create an alternative to the alternative’, and that would be the last resort really, I am not one to call for the formation of new entities. It’s a waste of time, we have wasted resources, we have wasted time and lives have been lost in the process of doing so. I would rather we built…..Violet interrupts

VIOLET: But Brian on that issue of alternatives, I was going to ask, what chances are there for a third political party to make any headway in the current political climate in Zimbabwe?

BRIAN: I think, related to my earlier point Violet about why we form political parties or organisation, ultimately others argue it is for the conquest or retention of political power, I would rather argue it is to give the citizens a vehicle to express themselves, to congregate around co-identical interests and to fashion a new society.

If that be the case, a political party’s headway, and one would assume that perhaps what Tsvangirai ultimately said albeit in violation of his own party’s procedures, the business is not purely to participate in elections, it is to epitomise what we call democracy. Others argue that if you are not participating in elections then there is no premise for your existence. I think, in my view, if the business of a political party is to fashion a new society, we must go back to the drawing table, I am not even talking about a convention to hold a new leadership in the MDC. I am talking about an all-stakeholders’ forum where both MDC stake holder, non-MDC stake holder can come together and say hang on, what is the glue that binds us together as a pro-democracy formation. Why are we here, beyond losing elections or winning them, what is the broader agenda? When we formed the NCA, we were not going into an election, you are aware of that. We didn’t think things would move as quickly as they did up to 1999. In fact we were pleasantly surprised when they did. In a sense, let’s go back to that which motivated us in the beginning. And I am not just being hysterical and historical, in a sense I think that we must go back and retrace where we lost the steps, where did we lose the broad masse in Zimbabwe, where did we lose national interest. Did we ever have it? If we had it, what are the processes and mechanisms that held us accountable to that national interest? I would go back to the all-stakeholders convention and I would bring both MDC factions and non-MDC actors and have a national dialogue.

VIOLET: Still on that note, I know we have talked about what the split has done to the MDC and to the nation, but do people really realise the full extent of this MDC split and what do you think the Zimbabweans really want now. Is it really to remove Robert Mugabe from power?

BRIAN: In a sense I think unmasking the Zimbabwean aspiration is a much more difficult thing. The Zimbabwean aspiration if one were to capture it through my own thinking and the ordinary people that I live with an interact with, the Zimbabwean aspiration is for a nation that is not only democratic but a nation that is prosperous economically, socially and otherwise, a nation in which co-existence is possible and benefit is accrued not on the basis of alignment to a political party, racial group or ethnic group. So Zimbabweans are literally looking constantly for that new day, a day of hope where Zimbabwe’s true capacity and resources can be applied to its development as opposed to self destruction. If that be the case, the sentiment expressed towards Robert Mugabe of discontent is a suggestion by Zimbabweans that his politics, his policies and his government have been responsible for eroding the very promise that the same government brought at independence, the promise of gutsaruzhinji, the promise of freedom, rusununguko, inkululeko the promise of growth. So in a sense, if that be the same aspiration, MDC was therefore formed by people who were literally saying you have locked us out of the room, the premises of the governance of our country, you have locked us out of opportunities, you have locked us out of the very systems which if we apply our innovativeness and initiative as Zimbabweans we would unleash our potential for our benefit and benefit of the future.

So therefore this removal of Mugabe, while seen as a process is not an end in itself, equally the defeat of Zanu PF at the polls is purely in my view, and I see Zanu not as a political party necessarily, Zanu is a culture, it is a way of doing things, it is a system and I have argued repeatedly that I have seen Zanu replicate itself like an infection amongst our own people, our own friends and our own movements.

So I would say that the grand aspiration of Zimbabweans is to have a political culture alternative to Zanuism.

VIOLET: Is the opposition dead in a nutshell, and if so, how do Zimbabweans change the tide?

BRIAN: I don’t think it is necessarily dead. There is a great degree of feeling in either MDC camp which is not targeted towards the broad democratic objective, but rather to the defeat of the other faction. So you have a very living, very much alive opposition, but not indisposed to contest either to political power or to occupy the democratic space in order to fashion whether it’s an argument and debate or an alternative process and way of doing things. So yah, it is very much alive, but it is an irrelevance in the sense that the things it is consuming its energies upon hardly constitute the Zimbabwean aspiration or the Zimbabwean dream. So if you ask me, one would rather be dead than living an irrelevant life, a purposeless life. So one would urge for instance I would speak to the good conscience of my old friend Morgan Tsvangirai and old colleagues Welshman Ncube and Gibson Sibanda to re-evaluate the opportunity cost, to re-evaluate the political cost of this feud and how they are quickly becoming in the annals of Zimbabwe’s history an irrelevance, and if not, an irritation and a nuisance. There is every opportunity, they are all very intelligent beings, that they can set aside their differences, and if not get back together, they can set aside their differences and work together. So one is not asking for a marriage, one is simply asking for a cooperation because the broad agenda is the same.

VIOLET: We also understand that the infighting has had an effect on the international front, And it reported that the opposition seems to be losing United States support or support from the West who may now be looking to work with a reformed Zanu PF. What’s your comment about this?

BRIAN: I am not a great fan of the support of the West, I think that it has been an albatross on the opposition’s neck, I realise the practicality of course that resources are not always available in abundance. I personally think that the liberation of Africa must be by Africans. I have been accused before of articulating a theory that you need a patriotic bourgeoisie that the local business frontiers must fund the struggle, but even if one went beyond that I am not sure that I would be particularly unsettled by loss of support of the West. No matter how critical it is in the scheme of things. I think that it might allow us to grow a politics which is separate from external imperial interests, a politics that is also purely informed by our own internal democratic dynamics and accountability to our electorate and constituency, that’s one. But the second bit, I think the misfortune though is to suggest to those international development partners that the alternative is to build an alliance with the same authoritarian structures that withdraw people’s passports, same authoritarian structures that inhibit free operation of the press, that is a dangerous precedent, it shows a lack of value on the part of the international community, it shows a desperation and an emphasis on strategic interest as opposed to moral and value interest. But it then exposes that international community for what it truly has always been, one might argue that it has always been a leech, it has always been a tick sucking on the blood and energy of those who are working for genuine change, if it hasn’t been then certainly I think its patience as different dynamics unfold in the MDC and as the pro-democracy movement weathers the storm is one that is naturally expected.

VIOLET: Thank you very much Brian Kagoro.

BRIAN: You are welcome

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