Hopewell Chin’ono@daddyhope
My dear brother, we are largely a politically illiterate society. We are still evolving. We follow personalities, not ideas and not principles, such that when somebody is leading us into the river, we will still follow.
That is why it is normal to see people defending failed projects or failed politicians, because they feel they should die for a person, not for a cause. And you see that this is not just in the opposition. Even in ZANUPF you find people saying that they will die for Mugabe or they will die for Mnangagwa. The same thing happens in the opposition. People say they will die for Chamisa.
Even with all the self evident information that has been before us since 2018, when Chamisa took over the leadership of the opposition movement, you still find people defending his failures. Because we are a politically illiterate society, you will also hear people saying, “Why do you not lead yourself?” A journalist, or even an electrician having an argument about politics, is suddenly told to go and lead.
We do not even understand the historical background to why we behave that way. We do so because we believe that certain individuals are anointed leaders. That is why the Bible is very central in our politics. Many people genuinely believe that Chamisa was anointed to lead. That is where the political illiteracy comes in.
We do not look at how a leader has performed. We do not examine their failures. Instead, we support them through thick and thin, whether they are good, bad, or terrible. Loyalty becomes personal rather than principled.
It will take a generation for us to move away from that. You and I might not experience that change in our lifetime, but at some point it will happen, because every society has gone through a similar political evolution.
We are not a country like France, where Emmanuel Macron created his own movement and won the presidency. That does not happen in Zimbabwe. Even Chamisa did not emerge in a vacuum. To become the leader he had to inherit the leadership from Morgan Tsvangirai, who had built an institution that many people saw as the legitimate opposition to the ruling party. That institutional inheritance is what made Chamisa appear as the legitimate opposition leader.
But when you combine that political culture with the quality of education in the country, you begin to understand the deeper problem. Our education system is so bad that our O level pass rate has never been above 33 percent. When you put all these factors together, they help explain why our politics still revolves around personalities rather than ideas.
Some of us have a choice to either tell people what they want to hear or tell them the truth. The truth is that ZANUPF will be with us for at least the next nine years. They are virtually guaranteed that, unless something dramatic happens.
Even if Mnangagwa were to fail to get the amendment through, it is Chiwenga who is still likely to become president. In other words, it remains ZANUPF. The individuals might change, the factions might fight each other, but the system itself remains the same.
So the reality is that ZANUPF will be with us for a long time, whether people like it or not. The real question is not whether ZANUPF disappears tomorrow, but whether the opposition can organise itself into a credible, united force that can genuinely challenge for power. Until that happens, ZANUPF will continue to dominate the political landscape.
