BSR: You have had a fascinating and controversial political career. Before joining government, and wearing your academic hat, you were a well-known and much-admired critic of the government upon whom many people relied. These people felt betrayed when you became a vociferous defender of the Mugabe regime. Do you, when you reflect upon it now that you are outside government once again, understand why people felt this way? What would you say to them?
ANSWER: You are referring to the period when I was at the University of Zimbabwe, between 1988 and 1993. I never at that time styled myself as a government critic or an opposition politician. Being a government critic cannot be a career. I was an academic doing research and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on electoral politics, state politics and public policy in Zimbabwe and in developing countries. Prior to that when I was a student in California, I had been an active member of Zanu PF and had served as the party’s political commissar in Los Angeles. I had also worked at the party’s offices in New York. If you revisit my record as a lecturer at UZ, you will find that I was not just a government critic, as you put, but I was public analyst critical of various public institutions including the ruling party, government as well as other public players including opposition parties, civil society, churches and international organisations.
I was critical of Zanu PF as I was of PF Zapu joining Zanu PF and I was brutally critical of Zum and Edgar Tekere as I was complimentary of Zum’s challenge to the one-party state in 1990. The same is true of my criticism of Enoch Dumbutshena’s Forum party, despite the excellent personal relationship I had with Dumbutshena whom I immensely respected. I was not a member of any political party and I did not want to be associated with any. I did not then nor would I now, as I look back, consider myself a government critic. No. I considered myself a critical academic. Full stop. I was a full time academic and I did not then dabble in partisan politics. I cherished academic freedom and distinguished it from political or civil freedoms that all human beings are entitled to regardless of their station in life. Not all human beings are entitled to academic freedom because not all of them are academics.
If as you say, as politicians or activists, people relied on my academic work in my UZ days between 1988 and 1993, that’s good news to hear but it cannot be my responsibility as to what they did with my academic work in the pursuit of their politics.My academic work was not communal or associational, it was my work as an academic and I am very proud of that work even today. That is why I have never withdrawn any of it or apologised for it. Ahead of the coup, Chiwenga publicly and shockingly cited things I wrote in my preface to my book, “The Politics of Administration in Africa” published in 1992 as evidence of my alleged treason in 2017.
Anyhow, the notion that academics should be for this or that political party as academics is repugnant and unacceptable to me. An academic cannot research or teach well, using a party manifesto. While political affiliation is like faith, in that it dictates regardless of facts, academic pursuit is not like that. Academic theories follow practice, they follow facts. And facts are stubborn.
When I joined the Constitutional Commission in 1999 and became its spokesperson, some people, I guess including those you say felt betrayed by my political choices, threw brickbats at me wanting me to boycott the Commission only and only because they were boycotting it for their own political reasons which had nothing to do with me. That offended me. I joined the Commission as an academic with practical experience in African countries that had gone through instructive constitution-making experiences. I had relevant experience which I was ready, willing and happy to offer.The draft constitution produced by the Commission was very progressive. If it had been adopted in 2000, Zimbabwe would have averted some of the calamities that have visited the nation since then. But I of course respect the fact that the people rejected that draft in a referendum.I have no regrets whatsoever about that.
And when I joined Zanu PF, a party that I had been associated with as a student, I did not do so as an academic. I did so as a human being, of course also as a Zimbabwean citizen exercising my human rights as an individual. I was making a personal decision, not a group decision. It cannot be right that you say people felt betrayed by my decision to exercise my individual rights. Freedom of association is a fundamental, inalienable and therefore natural, right that each and everyone of us is born with and thus entitled to enjoy. Significantly, freedom of association is enshrined in our Constitution. There would be no point in having this right so enshrined if its exercise requires that I consult you or anyone else to get your permission as to how I should exercise or enjoy it. For me this is fundamental. I don’t owe anyone any explanation about the exercise of my God given human rights that are constitutionally enshrined. I deal with this question extensively in my forthcoming autobiography.
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