The Politics of Polarization (1998–2000)

Abstract

The chapter identifies this period as a key, albeit brief, moment when civil society was able to shape political discourse and practice in Zimbabwe. It first sets out the economic conditions in the late 1990s. It then delineates the changing alignments and increasing polarization between state and society. It traces the origins of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), and the unease with which it was met by some NGOs and churches. The ways in which the NCA frames the constitutional debate fundamentally challenges the post-independence record of the Mugabe government, its development agenda and its liberation credentials. The focus of the chapter then turns to the regime’s reaction: both institutionally, in the form of the Constitutional Commission and rhetorically, as it first intensified the nationalist rhetoric of previous decades and then labeled those who chose to work with the NCA as illegitimate interlocutors, disloyal to the state and the legacy of liberation. It concludes with the 2000 constitutional referendum.