Nuggets to understanding Social Movement Building within the “per diem economy”

I have been privileged to have been involved with the work of social movements since the beginning of my young adulthood years. It all started when I was a student at the university fighting for my socio-economic rights. Then, as a student, I was solely dependent on government grants and loans for my tertiary education. Little did I know that student activism was a necessary nursery bed for my career path of defending of social and economic rights for all, respecting them for their universality, indivisibility and inalienability.   The other bit is, as an activist working within a Coalition that is deeply involved in stimulating active citizenship and organising citizens and communities to challenge social and economic injustices through very ambitious citizen led initiatives.

My passion stem out of the link between my very personal encounters with an unequal society, as a young girl who grew up being sometimes sent back home for unpaid school fees, struggling for sanitary wear and having to improvise, carrying a measly lunch pack to school and many other experiences I have come across being an activist and I would not wish for any other young child growing in Africa to experience. Fighting for a just world is therefore a way of life for me as I am now working with communities that in so many ways still reflect my very own life growing up. Besides my own experiences, just being born in Africa and the experiences just pushes its daughters and sons towards making ours a better world, a better planet for us all.

In the years that I have been honoured to work with the social movements, I have been enriched by the acts of bravery that some communities have taken to challenge brutal governance and economic systems, trying to shake off the shackles of repression, oppression and poverty in the history of our lives. Sometimes I have also taken a step back to ponder at how the economic dynamics have made the efforts of building social movements such a toll order threatened by the superficial drive of what I would like to term “the perdiem economy” and others have termed it the perdiemisation of activism.  Off  course as I write now, I am kind of cushioned from the vagaries of a venomous economy, spraying vitriol on its most unsuspecting citizens because I somewhat am in productive employment, but I never forget that I have been in all situations of lack, poverty and the very extreme poverty which is what drives my energy levels high everyday as I work for a better Zimbabwe and a  better world.

I try to imagine if an NGO had come with an economic literacy programme in Shurugwi back then. If I was my mother with a child at home facing  food insecurity threats, with unpaid fees and in need of the very basic things in life and ZIMCODD telling me about my role in the municipal and national budgets, social impacts of debt, teaching me skills of how I could be an active citizen who asks critical questions to her councillor, Member of Parliament even the President. Showing me that my friends and I could actually come together and discover the power in us, discover that we have a voice, a voice we could use to turn our fortunes and lead dignified livelihoods. Many questions would have rolled like an episode of a soap opera; some of the questions would have been;

As all these questions would have been rolling in my mind, I would surely retreat into my cocoon and in the cold embrace of my situation and wait to dance my way to the per diem signing desk to take my most valuable and real take for the day, its normally slightly higher than my transport cost or I could even walk back home and pass through the grocery store for some bottle of cooking oil and a few grams of beef, it will be a special day for my family. Again and again I will not miss these meetings, they do talk sense, only that it sounds impossible to achieve, even though what they say doesn’t happen at least the per diem signing will surely happen!

While this is my imagination, in taking a step back and pondering on the progress made in social movement building, this is a reality that those who have endeavored or have intentions to venture into this noble cause must face and understand the dynamics thereof in order to be astute in building self-sustaining movements that challenge the myriad and complex injustices in our world today. The motivation of the per diem economy is real amongst the activists and it is necessary given the context, dismissing it only as commodification of the struggle is not only futile but also a threat in building the capacities required to challenge the status quo. However, if it is not balanced, managed and supported by granular strategies to build stronger movements and it becomes the only strategy to bring people together and the only motivation, then social movement building becomes operational on a prepaid platform to build just societies.

In order to build a sustainable, vibrant and broad based movement, I have learnt to employ a few nuggets that I would like to share. These are very simple but make the big difference that I have seen working to bulletproof social movements from crushing in the face of a shrinking per diem economy which is a reality and inevitable;

1)  Minimise the importance of per diems. I have done this by talking to activists either as individuals or in groups at workshops. Trivialise per diem payments just as they are, peg them just so they can facilitate a decent struggle- nothing much, nothing less. Make it clear that you can never fund a revolution- ours is a revolution against injustices, poverty, inequality, neo-colonialism, neoliberalism etc and the power lies more in the numbers and access to information more than in economic power.

2) Social movements are built by the discovery of a long lost and forgotten voice not by oiling the per diem economy. This is also at the heart of safeguarding and doing no harm to the “beneficiaries”, whom I like to call “owners” of the many projects we implement. I have learnt that when one organises platforms, make the community members the real drivers of those platforms- make them organise, mobilise and lead the processes before, during and after the intervention. They must be given opportunities to engage with their fellows, this way they not only discover their abilities and voices but also the big possibilities that are within their reach for them to be the change without motivating for the less important per diem economy.

 3) Reduce the significance of this economy by taking your interventions right at the “owners” door steps. It is cheaper and it builds the tight social capital required in building social movements. Build from below; facilitate nuclear communities within the bigger community- at the end they will all converge together. Meetings for these nuclear communities take place as below as at the household level- if your issues cannot make sense at that level then the dream of building a social movement will remain just that- a dream. There is trust, cohesion and sustainability at those very basic levels of society.

4) Never make social movements seek for alignment either with the status quo or blue prints generated elsewhere- that is what they are already fighting! These kinds of interventions make them feel disempowered. Social movements are born to disrupt- they are disruptors, period! Anything outside disruption is calling them to conform and conformity is not for social movement. It is like hearing the birds singing and asking the pigs nearby to sing along- pigs cannot sing, you will get frustrated and the pigs will get annoyed with you and your efforts will only become self-defeating, the perdiem economy will only flourish.

5) Do not short circuit the change processes being championed by social movements. In the Silicon Valley they talk about the dangers of premature optimisation in technological gadgets. Social movements operate in stages- they are baby ones, the adolescence, middle aged and the elderly ones, at all these stages there are a myriad of challenges (each with its hormonal crises) that must be understood and solved. People make pre-judgements, expect results too soon and. they seem not to get them. This is off course with good intentions but it casts self-doubt, minimising the role that social movements play- that of raising the cost of dictatorship, oppression and the coasting of political and economic systems. They are there to keep oppressors on their toes, dismantle their sense of entitlement and absolute power.  Trivialising this role decimates them within an already fluid and fragile per diem economy and surely so the social movement will die together with the aspirations of the bigger society.

6) Understand the push back by social movements on dialoguing with the system. Social movements prefer negotiation rather than dialogue- seek to understand the difference. Dialogue if  not properly handled perpetuates power relations while negotiations demystify these power relations, there is no one centre of power- each part recognises the power that each holds and therefore seek win-win and empowering solutions to identified problems. Both are necessary but understanding which tactic to employ determines the kind of social movement you are going to have- a social movement growing its own wings or one that needs to be greased by per diems forever.

7) Social Movements that have a digital foot print will transcend the limitations of time and the fate of mortality which every social movement is threatened with. Social movements need the support and encouragement to write their stories, their journeys such the story of the “the hunting escapade” is not a single sided story of the hunter only. A digital foot print is important for the future generations of social movements to refer to and most importantly for the process of reincarnation of the older social movements if the struggles being fought are to the inter generational and carry the wisdom of the past years gone by. Understanding the need for reincarnation of older but critical social movements is paramount and will fern off the dominance of the per diem economy in the people’s movements.

There are many observations and lessons I have learnt in igniting the fire for true and total freedom in ordinary citizens, these lessons are not at all conclusive but can only be a starting point towards understanding social movements’ dynamics and navigating the sloppy, slippery terrain called the per diem economy. Social movement building is targeted at the individual, recruiting them into a community of people who are tired of living in their situations and the de-bundling of abstracts can make it easier for them to discover their voices, remove the victim mentality and build monumental victories beyond the monetization of their struggles.