Teach the people: Viable alternative to street protests in Zimbabwe

By Kuda Bhejana

If you read the American Declaration of Independence penned by the great Thomas Jefferson, it starts with the words, “We the People. . .” Don’t be tempted to think it’s a document that was written by mass consensus. That would be a miracle. Everyone contributing a word here, a sentence here, a line there and Thomas Jefferson just as the chief editor? No!

In fact,The Declaration of Independence was written by one man, Thomas Jefferson, after a couple of drafts. However, it became a people’s document after the men and women of America read it, and agreed that yes, indeed, these words represented them.

The words resonated with them and they adopted Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as The American Declaration of Independence.Where is our own Thomas Jefferson? Where is The Zimbabwean Declaration of Independence? No, these are serious questions, folks!

I want to propose a new way for Zimbabwean opposition parties to step up the revolution for freedom through a different form of mass mobilization – bringing the people into a different kind of action, unanticipated by the Zanu-PF regime, which can then surely deliver the change that we have been seeking.

Protests

2016 was characterized by countless protests, some led by prominent opposition leaders, others led by citizen movement groups such as the #ThisFlag and the Tajamuka/Sesijikile Groups.

Whilst the protests where met with the heavy handed security apparatus, I always thought to myself if Robert Mugabe was indeed losing sleep over these protests. Was Emmerson Mnangagwa and his fellows at all perturbed? No!

The truth is that power is not won on the streets. And Zanu-PF knows this. Power is won where it is kept, in the corridors and halls of power. Ask Ian Smith. Power is not won by throwing temper tantrums, either.

Mass Education

What Zanu-PF wants to know for it to be afraid and to take Zimbabweans and Zimbabwean opposition parties seriously is that Zimbabweans are now educated about the fundamentals of nationhood, foundations of government and of state.

Our people need to learn what power is,and how it is derived. This is a huge task, to educate a nation, but if that is what it means to be free, genuine leaders will take the challenge.

Yes, power is derived from the people, and the government should always listen to the people that elected it into power. Power belongs with the people, but they give it to the government to run their affairs.

When government misuses the power, how do the people claim it back? The tragedy of democracy is that once the power is won, it is now a device of the winner to be used at the winner’s own whims. We hope that the winner uses the power to benefit the people who gave him the power. That’s the social contract. But what do we do when the social contract is violated?

We need leaders, not vote seekers

Let me start by saying civilization is a collective effort, it’s a culture. Just the same, nation building is a fire in the belly of the citizens. When building the nation, it is not so much that you give yourself to working for your fellow citizens, as much as it that you give yourself to working to the collective standard agreed upon by the majority of the people in your community, city, and ultimately in the country.

We are social animals, aren’t we? We desire honor when we are doing more than everyone else, and we fear shame when we are doing less than everyone else. This is where nationhood is born, through doing.But we need to be told what to do.

We need torch bearers, philosophers, teachers of truth, whose truth we write on all Zimbabwean hearts. We need men and women who inspire us again – by their words, and their actions, that when the clime is steep, when the air is hot, we reread their words, we remember their voices and we are rejuvenated to persevere, until we achieve the goal – freedom.

Zanu-PF Liberation Struggle Example,

Remember, brothers and sisters, that when faced with Smith, Zanu-PF did not organize people to protest on the streets of Salisbury. Zanu-PF went to the people, who I could argue some other time that were at first reluctant to fight against the well-oiled Rhodesian machine of Ian Smith. Zanu-PF went to the people and educated them.

They not only educated them about the struggle, they drilled to the masses the philosophy behind the struggle albeit Marxism and the Chinese lessons of Mao Zedong. Not once or twice, but on a continuous basis. Zanu-PF led weekly pungwes and biras all across the nation.

That is how Zanu-PF captured the masses of Zimbabwe, to such an extent that the thought of a one party state was not hard for Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF because they understood the strength of their grassroots structures.

Do not forget that the men and women of Zimbabwe sacrificed their lives to liberate the country at the leadership of Zanu-PF. And it is easy for us today to criticize our countrymen and call Zimbabweans cowards, amongst other insults.

Our people need to be shown the way, they need to be made to understand why things have gone wrong – not by just pointing fingers at Mugabe and Zanu-PF but by explaining to them the dynamics of what Zanu-PF has messed up.

Grassroots Education Program

Opposition in Zimbabwe does not only need grassroots support. Zimbabwean opposition need to educate its grassroots about nationhood. Grassroots support has always been thrown around as an idea for garnering votes during election time.

I am suggesting that grassroots structures should be used even before election time through a mass mobilization, mass education program – to educate the people about what it means to be Zimbabwean. People should be educated about belonging to a civilization, a Zimbabwean one, and participating in one.

This means that opposition has to have both a basic definition of nationhood palatable by the people and an overarching vision of the kind of Zimbabwe it wants, a vision not borrowed from Americans or the British, but one that is built on what we already have.

This vision should be great, very enticing both to the city dwellers and to the rural folks such that when the time to vote comes, people go to vote for that vision. And when elections are won, people should be ready to work very hard to achieve the vision given to them by their leaders.

If it then happens that the elections are stolen, people when educated enough about what it means for the elections to be stolen, and fearing to lose the grandiose vision impressed upon them by their leaders, they will fight so hard to claim the stolen election.

But if the vision is not explained enough, and if there is no vision at all, except to point fingers at the wrongs that Zanu-PF has committed without offering any palpable alternative, the people will resign back to their poor lives without a fight.

What I am saying is that our people need to be taught, not about the vision of the MDC, or Mavambo Kusile Dawn, or ZimPF. People need to be taught that Zimbabwe is a republic and what that means. Our people need to understand democracy, constitutionalism, justice, and civilization.

Our people have to understand the economics of the nation, where the government gets its money – from the taxpayers that is, what it means to pay taxes, and what rights the taxpayer has.

Every revolution needs philosophers. Where are our philosophers? What inspired the French Revolution, was the work of the French philosophers, who wrote ideas about government and how people should relate to it. They articulated the evils for the current regime whilst at the same time offering alternatives of how they envisioned their country and the world working.

We talk of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s classic Social Contract, the work of Montaigne, and others. They were ordinary men and women like you and me, who took to the task of using their minds to write ideas that not only overthrew the monarchy, but became the bedrock of the French government and other western governments as well.

We need to teach our people about their rights and responsibilities.

The good thing is that we do not need to start from scratch. This work has already been done in other nations. These ideas are well known, written in books and implemented across the globe. We have seen the power of these ideas in history and contemporary politics.

Where are our philosophers? Where are our writers? Where are our strategists?Where are our journalists and our editors? Where are our economists? Why do we expect the people to just miraculously have an understanding of things that we did not explain to them? Why do we just expect people to resist evil that we have not explained to them that is evil?

When you want to take a bone away from a dog, you do not wrestle the dog. You bring a juicy meat ball, and the dog will not only abandon the bone, it will chase you for the meat ball. Even the disciples, having spent years with Jesus, finally asked him, and said, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Our people need to be told how to end their misery.