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Zimbabwe: Three Men Holding 12 Million People Hostage

Shereen Essof

6 November 2008

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opinion

Highlighting the chronic lack of representation for women within each of Zimbabwe's main political parties, Shereen Essof asks how Zimbabwean feminism should proceed in its essential challenge to the oppressive dominance of the country's political elites. In a nation suffering the world's highest inflation rate and among the world's lowest life expectancy, the author asks what these statistics mean in practical day-to-day terms for Zimbabwe's women. With Mugabe, Tsvangirai, and Mutambara continuing to fail to settle their differences and articulate a worthwhile path for their country's immediate future, those at the apex of political power effectively hold their entire population hostage to their decisions, a state maintained in no small part by the behind-closed-doors nature of negotiations and ultimate absence of democratic accountability.

What is life like for women in a country where inflation is 300 million percent and counting? What is life like for women in a country where their life expectancy is 34 years? What is life like for women in a country where three men hold a nation hostage?

It is difficult to answer these questions. In fact there are no easy answers. It is only once you visit a country that has been torn apart that you can fully understand the implications of this dismembering and subsequently what constitutes life. But the media has become very good at reporting the pulse of Zimbabwe via palatable sound bites and this reporting has been such a recurring blip on the so-called media electro-cardiogram that we no longer notice it, we no longer notice that it has flat-lined.

But despite this women are fighting to stay alive. They are fighting to survive. And in Zimbabwe right now the contradictions of this struggle run deep. I listen to stories of women who have nothing to eat, who forage for roots, wild fruit and rats. Stories of desperation, displacement and despair. But the magic of capital plays interesting games in a context of dire need and so the development of a highly sophisticated informal economy means the deprivation coexists with plenty. And everything and anything can be conjured up if you have the money, just not in the places you would expect to find it: petrol is available not at a garage, but under a tree on a quiet side road in Harare's avenues, at an office on the ninth floor of an office block, or after a quick phone call to arrange a pick-up (if you can get through given the ever breaking down mobile networks and stolen fixed line cables). Sugar and rice can be purchased from a car boot, and chickens from the hardware store near the train station. Some fresh produce can be bought from women selling on the side of the road, a victory given that roadside vendors were 'cleaned up and out' after operation murambatsvina removed the filth, but then given that the country has 'dollarised' you have to have 'maUSA' - as its known locally - or US dollars to make your purchases even of a few tomatoes, sweet potatoes or greens.

So if you don't have access to 'forex', you don't have anything right now and basic commodities will remain an illusion. Depending on the formal sector for jobs or access to services means you just don't survive. More so because there is no cash and the endless queues outside the banks are evidence of the difficulty that women have getting their, and you can take your pick of 're-valued', 'de-valued', 'under-valued', but certainly hard-earned cash out of the banks. This means that everyone is trying to make a quick a buck, to wheel or deal to generate maUSA's and remittances from diaspora workers abroad go a long way.

And while this may read like a comedy of errors, women, whether in the leafy suburbs or in the remote rural areas, are tired of the struggle for survival, of the inconveniences, of deprivation, of trying to figure out where to get the next meal to put on the table. Women are tired of the collapsed healthcare system, characterised by a lack of drugs, the shortage of personnel and the breakdown of equipment. They are tired of an ailing education system characterised by continued strikes by teachers due to poor remuneration, lack of supplies such as textbooks and stationery, delays in the writing of exams and in 2008, owing to elections and political instability, schools operating for only 65 days in the year. Women have had enough of the electricity and water cuts that sometimes last days and weeks, tired of the violence, the grave politically motivated and sexualised violence that women and women activists of all ages have suffered during the post-election period and which has continued to prevail due to impunity. Women are fatigued with having their roles dictated by the private sphere even when entering the public and are fed up of the months and of the retrospective years of waiting, waiting while the quality of women's lives continues to decline.

AND THE 3 MEN AND THEIR TEAMS CONTINUE TO DELIBERATE

The election on 29 March 2008 was one in a series - eight in the last eight years - meant to break the stranglehold of the increasingly authoritarian Mugabe-led Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) regime. With the birth in 1999 of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), elections as an expression of democratic practise were meant to do just that: to reinstate a new and democratic dispensation. But as history records, the extreme politically motivated violence and accompanying post-election machinations have meant that elections have lost their integrity in Zimbabwe and the voting public are both traumatised and fatigued by the process.

The polarisation of Zimbabwean politics means that women only have two options (now three in truth, with the split in the MDC producing MDC Tsvangirai (T) and MDC Mutambara (M), along with the ruling ZANU-PF). If you take the time to examine the parties' constitutions, election manifestos, and programmes, none adequately addresses or expresses a commitment to the priorities and needs as identified by women, thus none provides a really viable alternative for a new dispensation that seeks alternatives that allow for the freedom of all. For this freedom is not something to be decreed and protected by laws or states, it is something that we shape for ourselves and share.

So there are thoughts that knot my stomach in the wee hours of the morning: can we really say that a 'new' dispensation has arrived if over half of the population's structurally subjugated position at best remains the same or at worst has regressed? If we call this a victory for a democratic movement, what does it say about our definitions? If we are serious about the so-called change that Zimbabwe needs, it is important to ask what is the kind of change we are hoping for. Should we not be concerned about the quality as well as the quantity of the change? What exactly is the prescription or framework that will resuscitate Zimbabwe? Are we going to be ushered into an age that is even more intolerable and dehumanising? We live in a pitiless era of neoliberal market dependence whose end is even more poverty and misery. It will require much more radical thinking of what is possible and much more imagination of what is desirable for a so-called 'new' Zimbabwe. And once the current impasse has been overcome and the ink has dried on the agreements and deals, what then? Will we, as we did in 1980, breathe a sigh of relief and put our feet up, basking in the glow of 'victory' for this 'democratic movement'? Will women be co-opted in order to once again serve male agendas? How do feminist activists conceptualise the work ahead?

But let me not get carried away by critical questions for some uncertain future.

As I write in November 2008 it has been eight months since the harmonised elections, and subsequent South African Development Community (SADC) endorsed, Mbeki-facilitated negotiations that put in place the Global Political Agreement (GPA), a hybrid document that provides a framework for the formation of a new government and a plan for the subsequent reconstruction of Zimbabwe. But as I write the talks between the leaders of the political parties have deadlocked and are awaiting the deliberations of a full SADC heads of state meeting. The media tells us that they have deadlocked on the allocation of 'key' ministries and apparently even with this so called 'new' dispensation on the horizon the key ministries have been identified as: home affairs, finance, foreign affairs, information, and defence. Surely if this new Zimbabwe in the making was committed to rule not by manipulation and coercion, and was serious in putting the needs of the Zimbabwean people first, the key ministries would be identified as that of public works, health, education, women's affairs and the how of the reconstruction programme would be uppermost in their minds.

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