The interests of the people

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