How Long is Too Long? Persistence in Office in Zimbabwe.

May 13th, 2008 Posted in Culture, Politics

Consider: Robert Mugabe in his actions is saying that he has ascended to the office of president for life. The anomaly, the unexpected moment, is the fact that he had presented himself before the people of Zimbabwe again and asked to be re-elected. His resistance to their decision to have him stand down is an expression of his miscalculation. The seemingly irrational moment is his permitting this last election in the first place.

So we have this revealed contradiction in a culture–the president for life running for democratic re-election. The two patterns do not fit together.

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People sent to prison do time. Found guilty, they are sentenced, locked in until their time is up and they are released. It is normal to not want to be in jail. It is a limbo, a place of waiting where movement and will are restricted. Companions are felons, mainly unreliable, aggressive. It is an uncomfortable, demeaning place. One is penned like a captured wild animal. Doing time is a mind set, an acceptance of the here and now. Not free yet reserving and preserving a real free self until the bridge of the incarcerated time is crossed.

Yet parallel to the physical time, the tick-tick of the clock, is a passing biological time that we all do in one place or another or traveling between.

In marriage, which we normally think of as forever or until death, we date our commitment and measure the time together, but we do not do time. It is a place we want to be. It is time and not time, a living approximation of paradise. The unhappy marriage is something else.

There are some places, like being the executive-governing-leader-president of a sovereign country, where some people desperately want to be. A place of being and doing, a place of action and decision, a place of eminence, omnipotence. But it is very difficult to win entrance. It is the opposite, in a way, of jail. Once the desire for it seizes you, life becomes a seat in an antechamber, an anticipation. It is a time out as in outside, not there yet. A moment before. The prisoner is inside waiting to get out; the candidate is outside wanting to enter.

Under a democratic regime the way to this job is through popular election. But in other settings it can be seized by force, inherited by kinship, earned by test. Or it can be awarded by a specially constituted group or person.

Once in, the president (maximum leader, monarch, chief or whatever) tends to stay, as in marriage, until death except, again, in a democracy where time in is limited by law and convention. This place of desire, of comfort, of stimulation that reeks of power is hedged under the democratic dispensation. It is like the successful drone’s single and final mating with the queen bee. After a long nuptial flight, after fierce competition against a swarm of others the winner has a very short moment in office, a limited though highly erotic engagement.

The elected president form (prime-minister or other similar types of sovereign leadership) is the revolutionary bourgeoisie’s answer to the overthrown absolute monarch and his supporting band of exploiting nobles. The limited term is one of the barriers to the temptations of self-interest that can wean the people’s agent away from his collective oriented duties.

The vote, with its progressive expansion toward the universal franchise, is one of the great human inventions. Since the end of the Cold War it has become widely accepted in more and more countries as a normal way to certify and sanction the limited right for a cadre to govern. The monarch’s right to govern was based on the will of the ineffable. The democratic governor’s right comes from the majority will of the people.

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But where is the imputed source of Mr Mugabe’s right?

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Mugabe in Zimbabwe is a concrete process. Complete description and analysis would require inquiry into all analytical categories: physical, biological, psychological, cultural, social organizational. In my next post I will make a partial start through speculations about cultural-organizational context.

Until that time…

Please note: My knowledge of Zimbabwe and all that is ordinary and derivative. My objective is simply to exhibit the sociological method and attitude (as I understand it) in action. For more on the practicalities of Zimbabwe track through the expert sources available on the web.