THE
INTERESTS OF THE PEOPLE
ZANU believes that the common interests of the
people are paramount in all efforts to exploit the country’s resources, that
the productive processes must involve them as full participants, in both the
decision-making processes, management and control (of those resources). (ZANU
Election Manifesto. 1980).
In 1980 ZANU presented an obvious - and noble - proposal to the people of
Zimbabwe: Vote for us and this will be our policy: the interests of the people
will be paramount. The link with the people was fresh in the minds of those who
conducted the war of liberation. They depended on the people to protect them
and feed them as they moved around the country. After the elections, when ZANU
was safely in power, they no longer depended on ‘the people’ and could govern
with diminishing reference to them.
This process of ‘de-linking’ between governing and governed also happened
in Ethiopia after the victory of Emperor (King of kings, Neguse Negest) Menelik
II over the Italians at Adewa in 1896. Up to that time Ethiopia was held
together, according Tsehai Berhane-Selassie, by the chewa, a
self-trained army with definite links to the ordinary people. She writes:
Modernity ‘failed to bring with it the chewa spirit of
two-way communication between state and population and to uphold the impersonal
working principles that a ‘modern’ civil service was supposedly meant to apply.
The gradual centralisation of power in the hands of ‘modern’ state monarchs
eclipsed the status and crucial role of the chewa. For the salaried
officials of the ‘modern’ structure land was a peripheral structure for their
administrative services. The development of banks, ministries and other
‘modern’ state facilities, and resources with which the state could employ
salaried administrators, effectively marginalised the long-standing role of
rural people in local political matters. While the ‘modern’ state took over
from the chewa it failed to adopt their idealised spirit of
participation in local decision making by ordinary local people … and so paved
the way for despotism (Ethiopian Warriorhood, Defence, Land and Society,
1800-1941, Tsehai Berhane-Selssie (2018) p 4 ff).
The belief that democracy is inevitably attainable by every
people under heaven is looking more and more fragile as we view the increased
sophistication in methods of control of those who govern us. In China, thirty
years after Tiananmen Square, the government is fixed in a determined mindset
that seeks to control every aspect of life and yet it was in China, almost 100
years ago, that Mao pioneered the idea of the army and the people are one.
Listening to the people – rural and urban – and making their
interests ‘paramount’ is not a simple matter. But if the determination to at
last set out on that demanding journey were begun, we could again begin to
hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment