A few free lessons for the opposition
Nevanji Munyaradzi Chiondegwa
A couple of years back, I used to watch a television series called Tyrant.
It was a political drama series mimicking Arabic aristocracy politics.
It centered around a father who was a king and a ruthless dictator at that. He had two sons, Jamal and Bassam.
Jamal was his first born and heir and having grown up watching the father rule and the methods he used, when the father died, he took over and continued with the dictatorship ruling.
Frankly speaking he was not palatable at all.
Bassam on the other hand had gone to the United States of America got an American education, married an American wife and had children in America.
Bassam was quite Western even his hairstyle was western and disapproved of the way his father and now brother ruled the country.
He was forced by circumstances and birth right to eventually venture into politics. He was for democracy and boy, he was loved by all.
He managed through his democracy advocacy to have the political establishment changed and was elected President.
But once he gained the presidency, he learnt democracy is a far cry from what it’s cut out to be, gets very little done and that it is not glitter, gold and roses or idealistic up there.
He changed tune and started being a dictator.
In fact, he became a jaw dropping tyrant, he began to realise why his father and brother acted like they did before him.
This is what describes, they preach democracy but struggle to uphold it.
They struggle to hold peaceful processes, a split follows each of their congresses or conferences.
Democracy is easy to describe, hard to perform.
*A paralysis of praxis*
Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realized.
“Praxis” may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas.
Some have proposed the concept of a crisis of praxis to attend to the misalignment between theory and practice at the Zimbabwean opposition organizational level that has led to melancholia and distance from the consciousness of the democracy they speak of, despite the potential held by new mobilizations both spontaneous and organized.
To watch our opposition activists, from their leadership to foot soldiers and social media spokespersons and some whom have been labelled gatekeepers, one realises that for them, the democracy they speak of is an alien ideal, a praxis that gets paralysed the moment they have to practice it.
They are like one Hopewell Chin’ono, intolerant, unpallatable, self-centred, egoistic bullies who speak in what Americans call falksies.
One cannot preach democracy while at the same time being intolerant, an extreme and unpalatable bully, but that is all you find in the opposition.
Within their rank and file, you cannot question how things are done, worse, they do not even have a constitution and any suggestion at holding an Elective congress is shot down with so much vehemence and with such innocuous accusations of being a State Security agent or ZANU PF spy.
The opposition is so vile and intolerant one wonders what they would do if they ever obtained State power.
The amount of energy they expend to attack anyone who brings to the fore the issues they must address and face, makes it clear that they are so entitled and have now become toxic.
If one is to be honest with themselves, they would probably admit that most of our their views on democracy and how to get into power leads to paralysis rather than praxis.
Between induced or resigned apathy, boisterism feel good fist waving protest, and acts of real violence, where is the space productive resistance if not in historical education as praxis and action?
Most of us have been led into cynicism and paralysis by their double act.
The amount of toxicity and vileness they exhibit is actually worse than that they accuse the ruling party ZANU PF of.
In fact, their actions amount to little more than an indictment of some imaginary praxis paralysis yet to be proven real with respect to either the democracy or so called fighters of same.
Not that this is lost on their Western sponsors, on the contrary, they are the sponsor.
That it is double standards legitimized if executed by the so-called aggrieved leads to life as praxis and paralysis; and the dream life of the truly hammered fails to yield new insights but only leads to worse things to come. Big eye-opener there.
That these chaps get weepy as pejorative when everything is problematic and resilience is code for fascism, you get leisure of the theory class conflict.
We see it everyday when they quote authors like Fannon but leave out the context in which he wrote and that he believed in socialism which ZANU PF fights for as compared to the neo-colonialism they support.
A true paralysis of praxis.
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