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New MDC vision integrates competing discourses
Tawanda Chisango
March 06, 2006

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in its two factions (or is fractions?) was failing to integrate competing discourses that are inherently problematic in the crises of the state in Africa. What is clear from Mutambara's speech is the need to recognize competing discourses in the Zimbabwean politics, which have resulted in deaf ear politics interested in political point scoring. What is not clear and should be made clear is 'the how' of coming with a flexible and fast-paced strategy to recreate a reunited MDC that does not have tribal mudslinging. Whether Mutambara becomes the president or not of that reunited party is the greatest question of the day although personally I believe that Mutambara or his ideas should play a central role. This is more so given that the MDC was failing to revitalize itself. In the Zimbabwean case there seemed to be a gross failure to understand that the political and economic challenges that Zimbabwe is facing are both a result of internal and external factors. The factions of the MDC now need to put national interest before personal interest and reunite not only the two factions but also all democratic forces that have emerged and are emerging as a broader strategy to dismantle authoritarian nationalism.

The ZANU PF discourse as articulated by various government officials and rearticulated by newspaper columnists boasted of an understanding of the role that the liberation struggle played in the struggle for Zimbabwe. The columnists were not only good at remooring a version of tradition which is cold and frozen in time and space as opposed to cultural dynamism, they were able propagandistically to construct an imagined agenda of an old fashioned version of Pan Africanism at the expense of new Pan African visions thus failing to negotiate with the challenges posed by the critical political economy of globalisation. Their broader strategy also included the daylight robbery, distortion and monopolisation of Zimbabwean liberation historiography on the basis that they participated in it with no role of youth who should play a central role in defining the national agenda. Their analysis is largely based on the creation of an unproblematised morally bankrupt and academically pedestrian, coaxing and coercing imagined community, which forgets conveniently the pitfalls of national consciousness. The discourse was broadly externalist in its location of the multilayered crises, impediments and challenges that Zimbabwe is facing.

On the other hand the MDC in its regime delegitimation, contestation and deconstruction of the ZANU PF rent seeking hegemonic project located the Zimbabwean crises in an internalist mode. The blame for the economic demise was located in internal policy and leadership failure not only solipstically but also 'Rip Van Winklically' forgetting Zimbabwean history and the complexities of the politics of the international economy. The party was failing to articulate in a diplomatic way its relationship with international players. It was failing to balance the competing demands and discourses of territorial integrity and sovereignty versus the need to neither to face East nor West but rather the need to look at Zimbabwe's internal resources (in the widest possible sense of its meaning), the need to come up with a meaningful and fast paced SADC agenda, Africa wide agenda and the best way to negotiate with the impediments and challenges in terms of Africa's growth in relation to the challenging and treacherous demands of the international political economy.

In one of the most interesting displays of a new vision for Zimbabwe, Arthur Mutambara's presidential acceptance speech has come at a right time when Zimbabweans both in Zimbabwe and abroad need to come up with a broad based coalition that tackles the Zimbabwean problematic from all angles. Mutambara's speech was a finer blend of competing discourses of democracy and development, nationalism and globalization, the discourses of territorial integrity and sovereignty in relation to the discourses of human rights and rule of law that need to be renegotiated in Zimbabwe.

In as much as international assistance is not only crucial but important it is both necessary and desirable that civil society forces understand the politics of neo-liberalism and models, their demands and applicability and negotiate these in relation to the internal nationalistic strategic stakeholders thinking which might not make sense to them ideologically. The simple truth however is that the latter have acted and continue to act as impediments to the democratisation process in Zimbabwe especially since the failed Constitutional Review Process in February 2000. Civil society in Africa has to be conceptualized within African political formations and have to broaden not only their agenda and content but also the understanding of democratisation given that democratisation processes and constitutionalism (not only constitutions) are inherently political processes. There is also an equally important process of rethinking the density of civil society given their urbanised nature.

The central issues related to democracy and development in Zimbabwe relate to the problematic between on the one hand nationalistic and Pan Africanist discourses (largely getting support from SADC, Third World, China and the East and their fora) which are competing with the "universalising" and "exported" discourses of liberal and neo-liberal democracy and human rights (largely propelled by the United States, Britain, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and developed western nations) in the construction of the Zimbabwean crises. These issues need to constitute and be critically discussed as a matter of urgency as prominent issues in the Zimbabwean public spheres. The normative role of the media on Zimbabwe's current political processes should be to provide prescriptions and proscriptions with a national outlook (but with an understanding of the international dimensions) in relation to these competing discourses. These competing discourses should be interested with the democratic ideal of creating a discursive and 'contestatory' space that informs public debate and public policy not the opposite, political point scoring deaf ear politics in political communication interested in agenda setting as highlighted not only in our media but in the all state and non -state actors' discourses.

*Tawanda Chisango teaches in the Department of Media and Society Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences at the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe. E-mail: t.chisango@yahoo.co.uk or chisangot@msu.ac.zw

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