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Opposition shambles sets back Zimbabwe struggle
Dumisani Muleya, Business Day (SA)
March 22, 2006

IN 1902 — the year before the Bolshevik-Menshevik split over their clashing views about the political situation in Russia — Lenin wrote the book What is to be Done? in which he criticised the legal approach to his country’s struggle for change.

He said that the approach was ineffective and had lost sight of the main objective of the struggle: the challenge for state power.

Although the situation in Russia then and current politics in Zimbabwe are very different in terms of dynamics, time and space, the one common denominator is that Russia was then, as Zimbabwe is now, at a crossroads.

One of the feuding factions is Zimbabwe’s main opposition, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai, which held its congress last weekend. Tsvangirai was re-elected for another five years. This came shortly after the recent congress of the country’s other rival faction, now led by Professor Arthur Mutambara.

The events formalised the split of the MDC, which nearly defeated President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu (PF) in 2000. Tsvangirai came close to defeating Mugabe in 2002. Both elections produced disputed results, which in turn created the current political impasse now at the heart of the economic crisis.

Apart from blowing hot air, Tsvangirai and Mutambara do not offer anything new. They have not convincingly articulated their political and policy programmes and in the process have failed to chart the way forward. Their supporters expected to hear new strategies and tactics of engaging the Mugabe regime. They also wanted to hear fresh ideas and their strategic plans in the medium to short term.

By failing to come up with clear policy agendas, the two leaders cannot locate their factions on the ideological map. As such nobody really knows what the two MDC camps stand for. While they say they are social democratic parties, their policies, largely influenced by the neoliberal agenda, remain vague and unpersuasive.

Tsvangirai is still clinging to the MDC’s shallow Restart blueprint, which has found no purchase within local business or the international communities. The jury is still out on Mutambara who promises a holistic, multivariable, mathematical economic model. Critics are sceptical but willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

During their congresses, Tsvangirai and Mutambara offered more threats, more unfocused promises. Tsvangirai warned Mugabe of an impending "sustained cold season of peaceful democratic resistance"; Mutambara threatened to "outflank Mugabe’s regime in every area of political combat".

Zimbabweans have heard this before. While the opposition leaders are doing the best they can under very difficult conditions, they are failing to break new ground in the struggle and show a critical lack of dynamism.

In his 1905 article Reorganisation of the Party, Lenin offered a credible alternative, saying those who believed in spontaneous revolution — as some clearly do in Zimbabwe opposition circles — were really abdicating their role as political leaders.

What was needed, Lenin suggested, was a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries. Its strategies and tactics should be rooted in the working class, and its task was to lead the workers to a socialist consciousness.

He argued for the creation of a critical mass among workers, and placed the Bolsheviks firmly behind the peasants’ demand for land. It worked.

In Zimbabwe the economy is in a meltdown. The country has the highest inflation in the world at 782% and the fastest shrinking economy outside of a war zone. Last week’s refusal by the International Monetary Fund to bale Harare out will further complicate the situation. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s government is showing all the signs of growing paranoia, revealed in last week’s "arms-cache discovery", which is turning out to be a typical state security plot to justify a crackdown on the opposition and dissenters, and in the proposed law to snoop on telephone and e-mail communications.

But the opposition is now fractured. The MDC break-up has left the opposition a complete shambles and has put back the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe by years.

Against this background, Lenin’s question may be asked again: what is to be done?

* Muleya is Harare correspondent and Zimbabwe Independent news editor.

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