Does serving under a dictatorship make one a dictator?

It must be difficult being Joice Mujuru right now, judging by the media reports from her recent tour to the United Kingdom. The media, both our own State and the British, have approached her bid as one of the 2018 presidential candidates with a lot of questions associated with her past links to Zanu PF.

Source: Does serving under a dictatorship make one a dictator? – NewsDay Zimbabwe March 20, 2017

Develop me: Tapiwa Gomo

Before getting into the details of my discussion this week, let’s start by her birth lottery and remind ourselves how we have known Mujuru.

Mujuru, born Runaida Mugari, is a 61-year-old female politician, who joined the war of liberation at a very early age after completing only two years of secondary education. On February 17, 1974, she reportedly downed a helicopter after refusing to flee with other men and women. She later, in 1977, married Solomon Mujuru, who would become the army general in independent Zimbabwe. She would later become the Vice-President of Zimbabwe from 2004 to 2014, before forming her own party after being fired from Zanu PF last year.

While on the London tour, she was invited to the Deutsche Welle television programme, the conflict zone hosted by Tim Sebastian. There is no prize for guessing the first question. “For 10 years you were Robert Mugabe’s Vice-President. Corruption, murder atrocities, torture — for a record like that around your neck why should anyone vote for you now,” Sebastian opened what would be an intriguing interview with the former Vice-President, who kept insisting that she was not the Executive.

This questioning is in line with a common and yet distorted narrative. For laymen or shallow minds on issues political, the question sounded intelligent and relevant. Or as a mundane, perhaps used to unsettle the interviewee. Sadly Sebastian is not alone in portraying and perpetrating this very narrow way of looking at issues.

There is no doubt that her time in Zanu PF, and most specifically under Mugabe, would give rise to those questions.

But there is equally no justification to assume that working under his administration makes her guilty by association. There are several names who worked under the same administration and yet are treated as heroes.

I am aware that making such a case triggers angst among many people, who have over the decades made themselves parochial consumers of Western narratives fleeing State media doses of propaganda. But let us interrogate this narrative and get over it. Is Mujuru guilty by association? This brings back the lottery of birth question. We don’t choose where we are born and how we become associated with our environment. She did not choose to be born in a country that needed to be freed from colonialism and yet she chose to change the environment by joining the struggle which would be described as a dictatorship. And the question itself is a logical contradiction and will be elaborated later.

The answer to the question on whether she is guilty or not is debatable and maybe we need to get on with that debate and get over it before the campaigns begin. The question arises from the assumption that she worked under what the Western media has described as a dictatorship. Her guilty verdict emerges from two factors; first that she worked under it and second that she did not do anything about the “corruption, murder atrocities, torture” and other vices committed during and after her time in the system.

When these factors are juxtaposed alongside the dictatorship narrative, they are in contradiction. For starters, dictatorship thrives on using and abusing people and, therefore, she could have been a tool to perpetrate abuse which made her a direct victim of abuse herself, that is if that was against her wishes.

The second point raised by the interviewer and most commonly raised is that she did not raise her voice against the system when those vices were being perpetrated. Without attempting to exonerate her, a dictatorship ceases to be one, once it allows or starts to be questioned within and by its own system. We cannot anymore describe a system as a dictatorship and still expect its members to have the ability to question it without risking their own lives. There could be many more Joices in that system today who fear to quit or raise their voices.

I am not raising this argument for purposes of exonerating Mujuru, but for precedence. The truth of the matter is that the President is ageing and at some point someone with their own institutional baggage, from within or outside the system, will have to take over. That person’s ability to effectively and successfully take over will depend on our ability to accept them as independent individuals and not who they worked for in their previous lives. Let us view Joice as Joice and not as former Zanu PF.

There is consensus among us Zimbabweans that this country needs a future. And achieving that future will, in the immediate, require compromises, sacrifices and forgiveness. The same familiar faces may still be with us and relevant to our causes, but in their own right and not representing their old systems anymore. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to achieving that future is the intuition that, although as human beings we are not responsible for the systems we found ourselves in and the identities allocated to us. But then those who choose to pursue the progressive agenda beyond the confines of their former systems is to convince the people that they have chosen to change their ways as they have matured. By doing so commit to become truly responsible — bad habits can be broken and overcome.

Tapiwa Gomo is a development consultant based in Pretoria, South Africa