Letter from America :
'Followership' problems in Zimbabwe opposition movement

With Dr Stanford Mukasa

18 September 2006

The ZCTU mass action last week was both a failure and a success.

However, the jubilant state media and other propaganda machinery of the Mugabe regime were quick to pronounce the mass action a flop.

Some analysts felt the ZCTU leadership had not adequately prepared its membership for the mass action.

Others said that people were reluctant to engage in a two-hour action that did not seem to promise any significant push for the demands the ZCTU was making.

There can be no doubt that the mass action preparations could have been improved, taking into account lessons learnt from the past experiences.

But there are overriding issues over and above organizational strategies that need to be considered.

With the unemployment in Zimbabwe at 80 percent the number of Zimbabweans in the formal workforce has shrunk considerably to the extent that they are now a minority in the overall population of the country.

A significant number of workers are engaged in the informal sector – doing what they can to earn a living. It can be argued that workers in the formal sector are no longer a very powerful force by themselves. On their own workers are not powerful enough to engage in action that can significantly push Mugabe to make meaningful reforms.

ZCTU’s strength now lies in a coalition of the Zimbabwean opposition movement as a whole. Trying to tackle the Mugabe monster on their own was too much of a task ZCTU had taken on itself.

The ZCTU action may have been effective if it had been coordinated with protests from other groups in the opposition movement. This way Mugabe’s police would have had to deal with numerous protest groups taking place simultaneously.

 Imagine if during the ZCTU mass action, Tsvangirai would have been leading his supporters in the historic march to Parliament and WOZA women would have been demonstrating as well as NCA!

Another major issue that needs to be considered here is the fact that most supporters did not join when the ZCTU leadership took to the streets.  This gave police and the army the golden opportunity to savagely beat the ZCTU leadership.  Had people turned up in thousands police would have found it extremely risky to assault the ZCTU leadership.

A very troubling situation is that the ZCTU leaders, supported by some members of the MDC leadership, were out in full force and in front but with very few followers. This raises a serious question about whether the Zimbabwean opposition movement has a leadership or followership crisis.

How does the ZCTU membership feel about the barbaric assault on their leaders? And even after the assault the membership of the ZCTU does not seem to have been outraged enough to take it to the streets to protest.

One would have thought this assaulting of their leaders would have triggered a mass revolt! Yet for most membership it was business as usual while leaders were licking their wounds in hospital.

ZCTU members must realize that their leadership are mere mortals. They are human beings just like anybody else. On their own, the leadership cannot achieve much and they stand a great personal risk like what happened to the ZCTU and some MDC leaders who took to the streets.

Had the leaders been made sacrificial lambs by what appears to be an uncaring membership?

The same fate befell NCA chair, Lovemore Madhuku, when a few years ago he was savagely assaulted by police and left for dead. There was hardly any mass protest at this act of brutality. In other countries this would have been the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

Commentators and analysts have always talked about the need for a triggering event to galvanize the otherwise passive Zimbabweans into mass protests.  There have been many such triggering events. The assault on the ZCTU leadership was simply the latest in a series of failed opportunities to mobilize.

Having said this, ZCTU mass action was not a total failure. Even though it was cancelled at the last minute the ZCTU leaders, by their very heroic stand against the Mugabe regime, made some important gains.

First it dramatized the ruthlessness of the Mugabe regime. The savage beating and manhandling of the ZCTU leaders once again brought the international spotlight on Mugabe and his despotic regime.

To those in the international community who were beginning to think that Mugabe was reforming or easing up or scaling back on violence the latest action showed  very clearly and unambiguously that violence is Mugabe and ZANUPF trademark for their repressive rule.

The ZCTU action also created panic within the Mugabe regime. The unusually heavy deployment of soldiers and police demonstrated an increasingly unstable regime.

Mugabe’s police and army had mobilized a large chunk of their manpower and military resources in a bid to cover all areas of the country.

Had the mass action been indefinite and actually taken place in the large numbers that had been anticipated it is very doubtful that Mugabe’s military machinery would have been able to sustain this kind of nationwide deployment.

The calling off of the mass action by the ZCTU must have come as a big relief to the already tense regime. To this extent, therefore, the ZCTU action scored some considerable successes.

What the ZCTU needs to do now is build on its success and learn from its failures.

Lesson Number 1 for the ZCTU and the opposition movement is that any preparations for a nonviolent action must be planned using military strategies. This means an element of surprise. ZCTU and other opposition groups must have learned by now that giving widest publicity to their planned actions only helps the regime to plan a counter action.

Mass actions must never be publicly announced in advance. The opposition movement should use its own information networks, not the public mass media, to mobilize people.

The repressive law called POSA must never be followed. A mass protest is an act of civil disobedience. Not following the POSA requirement to notify the police is part of that civil disobedience strategy.

Secondly the opposition movement should learn to coordinate their actions. This fragmented and individualized approach to confronting Mugabe is potentially counterproductive. It renders the protesters easy prey to Mugabe’s military machine. If mass action is to be initiated, all opposition groups must be involved in their own ways.

It is also a good idea to spread out the mass action as much as possible. Create pockets of resistance throughout the city or the country. This will stretch the police and army to the limit and possibly degrade their resources and capacity to sustain their control of the protestors.

While it is important that leaders march in front of their followers adequate security measures should be undertaken not to expose the leaders to the brutality of the police and army. What happened with the ZCTU protest where leaders were savaged by  the Mugabe military machinery must never be repeated.

Leaders must never be used as sacrificial lambs. For all we know the ZCTU leadership could have been killed by the trigger-happy marijuana-smoking killer gangs of Mugabe.

Mugabe’s dream by day and night is to wipe out the leadership of the opposition movement. He can easily be tempted to use the occasion when the opposition leadership appears on the streets without their followers to massacre them, and then later blame it on some unruly elements in the police. Whatever inquiries he may establish the damage will have been done already.

However, the only thing stopping Mugabe from carrying this plan to murder opposition leadership is the fear of what the masses could do in retaliation. This is why the apartheid regime in South Africa kept Nelson Mandela alive when they could have easily killed him.

Equally important is the fact that when leaders call for mass action they must always operate on the worst possible scenario. Leaders must be cognizant of the real possibility that people may not turn up in the anticipated numbers. If this happens leaders must have a backup plan other than simply canceling the protest.

Mass protests should be viewed in the broader context of a civil disobedience campaign in which alternative forms of nonviolent protests should be explored and enacted.

The bruised leadership of the ZCTU has announced that the mass protests will continue. They see their brutalization by Mugabe’s thugs as a baptism of fire and they are all fired up and raring to go.

Are the followers also ready to answer the clarion call? Only time will tell.