3/31/2023 0 Comments Deep state![]() ![]() However, the agreement failed to touch on the issue of security sector reform. On the surface, the GPA appeared to provide a framework for important and necessary reforms. Zimbabwe’s 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA) epitomises this propensity towards containment. The diffuse nature of leadership that is inherent in these movements compounds the challenge to transform attempts into political action, and risk-averse leaders who broker agreements tend to resort to measures that emphasise containment rather than laying the foundations for substantive change. But in other countries, caught up in the euphoria of populist uprising, very little thought was given to a blueprint for what was to follow. This reflects the failure to maintain and deepen the momentum for reform, with a few arguable exceptions such as Morocco and Tunisia which sought to introduce significant pre-emptive and retro-active reforms. ![]() Barely five years later, the world now speaks of the ’Arab Winter‘. When the Tunisian Revolution spread across North Africa and the Middle East in 2010/11, the world hailed it as a triumph for democracy. To this end, the Arab Spring offers prescient lessons for Zimbabwe. Popular movements often signal the urgency for change they rarely translate into successful movements in the long run. In spite of the hope that the movement inspires, a nagging concern lingers: How do you convert broad-based social movements into meaningful and sustainable political transformation? The world is replete with examples of popular movements that have failed to convert their ability to overthrow a government into a successful dismantling of the previous regime and its deep-rooted political and economic tentacles. The #ShutDownZim2016 campaign that has called for a nation-wide boycott to protest the rapidly deteriorating conditions in the country is a non-partisan civil society campaign and has been hailed a true ‘people’s movement’. Indeed, amidst the chaos and uncertainty that has unfolded across our northern borders, the perverse resilience of the Zimbabwean state has been nothing short of remarkable – but it has come at a significant cost to the political and economic rights and freedoms of its people and regional stability.Ībandoned by capable political opposition, Zimbabwean citizens have turned to other means of expressing their discontent. And when the Western world sought to force its hand by imposing sanctions, it turned the other cheek – East – for succour. An atrophying domestic manufacturing industry and commercial agriculture has not moved it. It out-manoeuvred attempts to dilute its power during the Government of National Unity. Zimbabwe has survived world-record-breaking hyperinflation (peaking at 123 million percent in 2008) forcing it to abandon the Zimbabwean Dollar. ![]() Its government, headed by the indomitable Robert Mugabe, has failed to ‘definitively fail’ despite every warning since ZANU-PF war veterans began the land invasions that prompted the first wave of crisis in that country in 2001. The Zimbabwean state has provided some of the biggest lessons in humility for political analysts in this century. ![]()
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