Leadership style, scope and direction only one month into the post-Mugabe Zimbabwe may well be too new to offer us a solid indication of just where and just how President Emmerson Dambudzo (ED) Mnangagwa is taking us.
Mathabelazitha/The Anvil
Clearly, the question grips our collective national psyche, and naturally, it is generating, in equal measure, sanguine excitement of measured hope for renewal and confused, but fearful dismay at national regress and real and potential democratic deficit. The land of surprise has not disappointed once more and since no one could have predicted we would be here come 2017, the all-knowing political pundits out there are awash with bemused crisscrossing theories of just how clear this muddy mess is, as we enter the future.
Having so long enjoyed and endured a leader they deliberately elected, gave an unambiguous popular mandate and a binding constitution to deliver and fulfil… a leader who, however, most eloquently pronounced democracy and proudly claimed its very authorship, but in reality happily parked the people’s voice and instead mastered the art of centralised power, self-worship, dictatorship and the routine use of patronage, fear and exclusion — Zimbabweans had grown to know and understand and resign themselves to their devil! The pain of citizenship and just life under Mugabe was deep and unbearable, but hey, you could pretend it week in, week out! Without doubt, dysfunctional leadership style and poor governance was, and has always been our Achilles’ heel and the epicentre of the national rot of our beautiful country.
The advent of a new, unelected, gun-totting leadership administration, albeit a most welcome relief from the claws of a marauding despotic dynasty, ushers in a fresh regime of spasms of uncertainty, anxiety and fear down the long drained spines of Zimbabwean citizens. Yet again, who knows, it could just be what the doctor ordered. Stemming from the man’s unique and clearly unorthodox entry onto the leadership fray, everything is novel and without precedence both to the governed and the governing, but also to Sadc and the rest of the world – and the political guessing game and social conjecture is wild as much in business broad rooms as in our lounges; in the corridors of politics as in the salons and kombis. Is this man indicating right, but simply staying the course we have always known?
Yet Mnangagwa’s early footprints may have just become symbolic and indicative, if some attention were to be paid to some of the pointers of practical actions and the recurring motifs that seem to nuance the new president’s speeches, depending of course on which side of the “elephant-croc” you stand.
Leadership is often understood by its intrinsic bias or orientation either to the rigorous achievement of set tasks or to popular appeal and the immediate pleasure of the people. Very rarely is it both. The extent to which Mnangagwa’s leadership manages the precarious balancing between public gallery, populist policy and the no-nonsense pursuit of action-deliverables and economy targets, with scant tolerance of the “mediocrity of the marres”, will quickly tell us where we are headed. Without doubt everyone does believe there is a massive job to be done here: rescuing Zimbabwe.
Without doubt too, the well knows industry and great work ethic of the average Zimbabwean citizen and worker out there has, over the years, been significantly dispersed, disoriented, compromised and reduced to demonstrable levels of sloth, sloppiness, individualism, greed and outright corruption. Today, no one works if there isn’t immediate personal benefit in the assignment. No one works if there aren’t clear loopholes to enable diversion of public resources for self-benefit. We have watched the cancerous culture develop and envelop and eat away our very humanity. It is no fault of their own but today’s Zimbabwean virtually demands payments for a simple greeting.The moral core of society is rotten and our conventional pride in ubuntu and “getting the job done” has long been replaced by downright corruption, avarice and laziness.
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The question that arises thence is whether or not and to what extent your ordinary, softly softly, people-oriented leader can manage to turn this dysfunctional culture and rot around and commit to deliver the requisite framework of the Zimbabwe we dream of: The clear preference for military tools, the transfer and ascendance of military power from barracks to cabinet, early tone of command, the absence of a distinct people constituency to appease or indeed uncontested elective legitimacy — there is little doubt what the leadership orientation of the Mnangagwa government is leaning towards. Whether or not the very protagonists of the “smart coup” and the new leadership are themselves clean of crimes and the messy culture that landed us here, seems neither here nor there. What is apparent is that this is a leadership with a strategic mission to accomplish. It is founded on a reasonable suspicion that, by now ordinary Zimbabweans may be understandably afflicted by a collective phobia for honest work, a cancerous appetite for freebies and a pandemic penchant for corrupt practices.
This leadership therefore invests heavily in an authoritative structure and chain of command that will soon be churning out rules and orders of just how to get this economy out of the doldrums without need for tedious consensus — building or any expectation to be challenged or questioned.
There is a strong school of thought out there that seems to suggest that a situation such as that of Zimbabwe, defined at many levels as a critical crisis situation, requires a special dispensation of authoritarian and task oriented leadership to be resolved. Its proponents argue though that such leadership must only be viewed as “crisis-management” that is project-specific, or whose tenure is strictly unified to the resolution of the immediate fire-fighting crisis. The usefulness of such autocratic structure is also largely depended on its ability to use effective tools, people, technocrats that are deliberately identified as fit and fine-tuned for purpose.
Such theory raises the worrying questions therefore on whether the military government of Mnangagwa perceives itself as a time-bound, project-specific administration or a 37-year regime; whether it is capable of deliberately identifying the requisite skills and personnel, lots of which are critical to a successful economic recovery strategy!
We share the sinking feeling of the dejected democratic forces out there — nut in the short run, “left is left and right is right; comrades!”
