The Sunday Mail
National Unity Day, which we celebrate on Thursday, is perhaps the most forward-looking of our political public holidays and goes far beyond the merger of Zanu PF and PF Zapu on December 22, 1987, and the commemoration of the end of a serious conflict and a very bad experience in post-independent Zimbabwe, important as that was.
The Unity Accord marked and recognised several absolutely vital steps. The first was that national unity was not automatic. It was something that needed everyone to work on and to ensure that, whatever our differences, we all put Zimbabwe first.
In the glory and excitement of independence in 1980, the result of a stunning victory by our liberation forces and the result of a willingness to put the past behind us as we started building the Zimbabwe we wanted, we all assumed that differences could be sorted out without any special effort. We were wrong. They could be sorted out, but that would require a lot of special effort, by everyone.
Mistakes were made, of many different kinds and degree and by a lot of people, and they were seized on and exploited by the deliberate and secret interference of the dying apartheid regime in South Africa to damage Zimbabwe, to ensure Zimbabwe could not offer significant opposition to that regime, and could not offer the sort of example that would make it easier to bring democracy to both South Africa and Namibia.
So, we had the double. Disunity in Zimbabwe, or more precisely, not using all the constitutional and legal ways of living with our differences, accepting our differences, but with everyone putting the country first as we argued and debated just what sort of Zimbabwe we wanted. We are not called upon to agree with each other, even when we are united. We are called upon to put our country first, and discuss our differences rationally.
We might just have managed that without the additional element of the apartheid military intelligence willing to use people and drive their fears over the brink. But those fears were there and we could have managed them better.
So, one major point of the National Unity Accord, and one that is not often stressed, is that it marked us admitting that when something went wrong, we did not need to play blame games, but, instead, we needed to step back from the brink and work out how we could put everything back together again, undo the divisions, some of them stretching back almost a quarter century, and start figuring out how to work together.
The actual practical solution at that stage, considering the political set up in Zimbabwe, was to unite the two major parties. These two parties totally dominated the electoral returns; there were very few ideological differences between the parties; but there was the inherited unpleasant and dangerous factor that support was geographically and, to a significant extent, linguistically split.
This was not automatic, just the practical way in Zimbabwe’s particular circumstances after independence to implement the main point, that we needed to be a united country and needed to work on that unity.
Mozambique, a little later, faced a different setup, again exploited by South African- backed insurgency for the same reasons. Frelimo and Renamo were at different ends of the political spectrum, pockets of support were more geographically scattered.
So, the solution there, which Zimbabwe did a lot to help negotiate, was different. The parties agreed to fight their battles in Parliament, the military was totally professionalised, recruited more widely and cut all ties with political parties. It was a different solution but it still created the unity that Mozambique enjoys today, the terrorism in the extreme northeast coming from a different non-party source.
But the basis of the solution was the same, that the people of Zimbabwe and the people of Mozambique withdrew from the brink and found ways of dealing with differences in united countries, and that jaw-jaw was the way forward, not physically fighting.
The present multi-party Zimbabwe is still a united country in most respects, but again we need to continuously work on what unites us under one flag and an agreed constitution. We can differ, dramatically at times, but when those differences are being argued out in Parliament, with presiding officers demanding decorum and reason, and in the polling booths, with winners and losers accepting results, we can manage our differences. It helps when support is scattered, within constituencies and within provinces.
We still get some politicians who go beyond acceptable behaviour, and make wild statements not based on fact or reason. But the final lesson we learned from that post-independence conflict was that we need exceptional levels of professionalism within our police and defence forces, coupled with exceptional levels of training, and a totally independent court system that can deal with the problems that may arise when an immature politician shoots their mouth off.
There is a difference between highly robust political debate, and attempts to create conflict. National Unity Day reminds us what happens when we go over the brink and leave robust but rational debate, and descend into the morass of our baser instincts and seek division, or for that matter, let outsiders manipulate our differences.
It also helps when our Government acts as a national government, and here President Mnangagwa, who has been in Government long enough to remember what went wrong and what went right in the 1980s, shows the way. He has made a strong point of ensuring that no person, and in the spirit of national unity, no area is left behind.
