90 From National Liberation to Democratic Renaissance in Southern Africa consequently, formulate a homegrown constitution. However, the NCC’s draft constitution was rejected by the people in the February 2000 Referendum. This outcome was due to the opposition campaign against the Commission’s Constitution through both the electronic and print media. Raftopoulos argues that the government began to face intense pressure, starting from the late 1990s, from many quarters calling for socio-economic reform. Much of this agitation began to be articulated through the newly formed neo-liberal oriented MDC: [T]his party was an outcome of broad alliance politics, bringing together trade unionists, intellectuals, the urban middle class, rural producers, commercial farmers, and sections of the industrial class. The alliance— based on a widespread disillusionment with the government’s economic mismanagement, the demand for constitutional, and criticism of a trans parent land reform process—has brought together many seemingly contradictory interest groups into a conjectural alliance, which faces many tensions over future policies (2001:1). All this pressure, linked to declining legitimacy, compelled the ruling party to revive its political fortunes through aggressive and violent means. Various interests groups were co-opted by the establishment in an attempt to win back lost political ground. Veterans of the liberation war and unemployed youths were used to aggressively mobilise and co-opt the disenchanted masses back to the ruling party fold. President Mugabe began to use radical rhetoric to condemn the West, the whites and the ‘misguided opposition’ for being responsible for the country’s increasingly poor state. He capitalised on the peasantry’s land hunger by attempting to generalise the struggle for land to a continental level and project it into the proposition that the struggle over land was the sole signifier of authentic, liberated nationhood (Raftopoulos 2001:3). With that claim, contradicted as it is by two decades of land reform failure, came something else: a memory of an anti-colonial struggle that only ZANU- PF can invoke, a memory of a time when the party was, in fact, a fish within the sea of the rural masses (Raftopoulos 2001:3). This revived form of nationalism emerged largely because of the government’s failure to improve the citizens’ material reality in the 1990s. According to Sklar, ‘any generation that fails to cope effectively with problems of society will seek solace in escapist, reactionary, and racialist forms of nationalism, which obscure the cause of its failure and accomplish little lasting value’ (cited in Falola 2002:xv). In the Zimbabwean social, political and economic conflagration, the country ‘has been divided into two’: the rural ZANU-PF.–dominated and the urban MDC-dominated spheres. In the last 4.Mashingaidze.pmd 90 31/10/2005, 12:54