Nelson Chamisa (left) and Tendai Biti, seen here with US Congressmen genuinely believe they have the keys to billions of dollars from the West
Reason Wafawarova on Monday
It is an accepted fact in political intellectualism that political engagement is an important facet of the relationship between authorities and citizens. Engaging citizens is an indispensable component of leadership if any authority is to decently present its duties to the people.
There are many avenues that are often created to ensure that people actively take part in politics. In our part of the world we have various party structures, political rallies, media campaigns, and of course we routinely carry out elections to ensure that we can respect “the will of the people”.
It is not always that governments across the world engage citizens in the most transparent of ways. We have states where political engagement is unfastened. These are states that do not carry out elections, states that are authoritarian and led by an established and accepted leadership hierarchy or order. Good examples are the dynasties of the Middle East like Saudi Arabia and others. In these countries there are those that are born to lead, and those all others that are born to be led.
We have embraced liberal democracy as our preferred form of governance and we often want to portray or showcase a democratic signifier of administration. When we hear of a “new dispensation” in Zimbabwe today, the anticipated identity of this new entity is characterised by democratic indicators — the so-called “reforms” that the United States and others seem to really care about. So we try our best to depart from our Mugabe past and prove that we have now discovered the meaning of the rule of law, human rights, democratic space, and so on and so forth — the very essence of what we picked up arms for when we fought to demolish the colonial empire.
That we did under the leadership of the same Robert Mugabe. Our shortcomings on all these matters were contextual, not a result of ignorance on democracy and its tenets. We had a revolution to defend, and as the West often does when threatened with terror attacks, certain of democratic values are sacrificed and shelved to allow pursuit of defeat of the threat at hand. That is all Robert Mugabe did, besides his excesses in pursuit of personal power.
When a richer and political superior country presses its political bidding on a materially and politically weaker country, we begin to have an internationalised form of patron-client political relations. At the domestic level we have our powerful and wealthy elites using their power and wealth to manipulate the behaviour of voters. That too is patron-client order of political relations.
Patron-client political relations are defined as the relationship wherein frequenters that belong to high positions in society provide protection and resources to manipulate and take down low-class clients. So the frequenters demand the clients’ ballots and support in exchange for what they promise to give. The frequenters often promise essential needs and services such as land, food, water, health, education, and even life in general.
So an aspiring MP will first establish relations with those that already have power in the establishment; be they political leaders of opposition political parties or the governing authorities. Once established authorities have embraced an aspiring candidate, the clients are often instructed to accept and respect that person as their choice for the vote. We all know how political authorities in our country are notorious for imposing unpopular candidates on the electorate.
Patrons are most of the time composed of government functionaries, landlords, land barons, employers, cultural or traditional leaders and party functionaries and activists. These people in a true democracy can act as intermediaries of social development, but in our case they often act as intermediary agents of control. So we end up with politicisation of food, health, livelihood, and indeed of the economy itself.
Those acting as intermediary agents of the sitting government will politicise food aid, land, health facilities, privileges, education and so on and so forth. Those in the opposition will mobilise economic sanctions to ensure they can starve the patronage pipeline for their competitors in government. So we hear they have gone to the Americans and the rest of the Western world begging for economic sanctions so there are no food…
