China: When bullets begin to flower
When goodness triumphs to ring loudest across the veld, even the dead stir back to life.
China’s decision to grant Zimbabwe a staggering US$950m credit barely a week after the Prime Minister’s dry-womb trip to the West, has sent tremors far and deep, certainly right into the sanctum of MDC-T.
His claim that his Secretary-General, now Finance Minister in the Inclusive Government, Tendai Biti, negotiated the deal, rings fatuous and ridiculous.
Why would he choose to go to the barren West when the generous East so beckoned? Why would he time the fulfilment of such a wonderful deal so close to the empty one of the West, all to invite such a damning comparison upon his all-time benefactors?
If anything, this claim confirms the tremors I refer to.
But first things first.
Let the parameters of this piece be made clear. Both the managers and hosts of the Prime Minister’s ill-fated trip undermined the trip’s claim to national status or purpose.
The trip was decidedly narrow, by composition, host preferences and by outcome.
That reality acquits me from any politeness, taking me right into the murky world of party politics.
Fate’s pace and parcel.
So, back to substance. Play the US$200-plus little the MDC leader got against the stupendous sum China has given Zimbabwe through Government, then you give the mathematical magnitude to MDC-T’s worries.
Here was a man who ventured out into the western world — first home to him — wrapped in lofty people-goals, all in the hope of what he mistook for guaranteed plenty. Politically, he hoped the trip would ram home his wish status as the only wielder of the golden key to the vaults of the "monied" West.
That way, he would have placed himself implacably high, well on the messiah pedestal, to great grief of Zanu-PF, great personal grief of President Mugabe.
But fate had its own pace and parcel for him. Instead of bagfuls of money, drums of enhanced leverage against Zanu-pf (PF), he came back limping, dragging a vast list of governance beatitudes and conditionalities the hungry and expectant could never eat.
For the face of an Inclusive Government which had risen and received embrace as "manna" from the West, all this hardly added up.
Today the MDC leader stands very short as a pathetic anti-Christ figure who dared to make a sermon on the mountain, without feeding the hungry five thousand, all of them down and to earth. It is going to be a long while before they are ready to forgive him.
Fighting the task and task-man
Zanu-pf (PF)’s propaganda mandarins did not help matters. Wrestling initiative, they framed the Prime Minister’s trip as Mugabe-initiated, as Mugabe-defined, a position Tsvangirai is still battling to shake off. They defined the trip around the twin objectives of getting the utterly illegal sanctions removed, and of securing soft loans — not grants — for the sanctions-wrecked Zimbabwe economy.
Against such a filling propaganda take by Zanu-pf (PF), the MDC leader and his acolytes were quite appropriately galled.
They frantically sought to challenge this forming and settling orthodoxy to the story, indeed to re-frame the whole trip well outside of the twin orders, twin purpose, clearly with enormous difficulties, in all attempts with ever diminishing success.
That included the wrap-up press conference given this week. For how else would one reframe the trip away from the twin objectives, away from the twin tasking executive — the Cabinet and the President — and still justify to the hungry the use of public funds? And to justify the more than three weeks this public figure was out of the country?
And if sanctions are the only outstanding reason for present penury, how would one distance the Prime Minister of this country from attacking them to enhance public weal?
You do not want propaganda which coincides with reality, much less one which leaves you rebelliously wondering directionless within its overbearing framework.
It was an unenviable bind, one spawning near desperate, multinational response by way of the Andrew Chadwick-led, USAID-funded newsletter, itself an utterly poor show which gave the MDC more headaches and fury.
The Chamisas, the Bangos, themselves real owners of the propaganda portfolio of the MDC, had been left out, and did not find this whole "white" effort exactly quite polite, exactly well-intentioned, would they?
Another second-level tribute to the efficacious Zanu-pf-PF propaganda mandarins.
In Zanu-pf-PF’s duodenum
Much worse, liberating the Prime Minister from the politically pregnant emissary status ascribed to him by unremitting media pot boilers, meant making him personally responsible for the whole trip and its disastrous outcome.
Much early in the Inclusive Government, in fact well before its constitution, the western world had warned Mugabe would suffer Tsvangirai in the power-sharing deal in order to use him to unlock the fabulously giving heart of Europe and America.
With enough silver and gold, they added, Tsvangirai would be dumped right into the chewing gut of Zanu-pf-PF, much the same way PF-Zapu went.
This propaganda by Zanu-pf-PF mandarins appeared to validate this visceral fear in the West. Had Zanu-pf-PF turned Tsvangirai into the thin end of the wedge with which to prise open Europe and America’s hitherto unyielding heart?
Was Tsvangirai and his MDC already on his way to Zanu-pf-PF’s duodenum, a deadly process whose preface was the fatal inclusive kiss of Pretoria?
Still the MDC propagandists reasoned it much better to free the Premier from emissary status and deal later with the full load of trip failure, well docked on the premier’s doorstep. Wakava mufakwose.
The trip did not convince the West the Prime Minister was his own emissary. Equally, the trip brought nothing back home, leaving him more vulnerable to swallowing.
The US$8,3 billion Biti claims Zimbabwe needs has become the shibboleth by which his boss fails the test. The US$200 million is now read against this enormous figure.
And how it falls far, far short! Jonathan Moyo, in Parliament the sole leader and member of Zimbabwe’s official opposition, was not slow to stick in the first deadly dagga.
Tsvangirai went out on an ego-trip, as a Prime Minister of NGOs, cut in the lethally persuasive Jonathan!
One liner that was such a dramatic and humiliating shrinkage for a man whose stature would have risen beyond the dust of party politics to the pinnacle of national leadership.
Diminishing leverage, stature
Now the hard facts. After a three-week sojourn in the wild Worst — sorry, West, MDC-T comes back with a hugely diminished stature and leverage in the Inclusive Government.
So does its embattled leader whose options have shrunk to a mere two: that of disappearing deeper into the smothering arms of the dictating West, or shrinking to a second-rate Mugabe through latter-day, catch-up radicalism.
Founded on claims of wielding the key to ending "isolation" and mobilising resources — re-engagement and mobilising transitional assistance in MDC lingo — the trip which saw Tsvangirai limping home on empty, simply made him and MDC party as much victims of sanctions as Mugabe and his Zanu-pf-PF.
The only and soon-to-prove decisive difference being that Tsvangirai and his MDC are viewed as careless and deserving victims who invited sanctions, again in the vain hope of plenty, while Zanu-pf-PF is seen as carrying the cross for daring assert a national good.
Across continents, across leadership temperaments and personalities, Tsvangirai was told in very clear and no uncertain tones that sanctions would not come off, with the same voices adding soto voce, unless the goals for putting them in place are met!
He seemed to agree that Zimbabwe had not done much to deserve relief. This was mildly complicit.
Thanks to McGee, the whole admission was transfigured into downright incrimination when the restless US ambassador, in a remarkable verbal miscue, put it plainly, bluntly: Tsvangirai would not seek the removal of sanctions because he knows and shares in the purpose for which the sanctions were put in place in the first place!
Hau!
And precious little was left to imagination.
The sanctions had been put in place for two goals: the reversal of land reforms, and delivery of Mugabe’s head on a platter, the second being a prime enabler to the first goal.
Beneath inclusivity
And during the trip, a new word entered the political vocabulary of Zimbabwe: "incremental".
The MDC-T’s purpose in the Inclusive Government in the about four months that have gone by, has been to subtly loosen President Mugabe’s hold on levers of power, in the ultimate hope of pushing him off and out, while "incrementally" enlarging Tsvangirai’s hand on the wheel of the vessel of State.
This is what young Chamisa meant when he said — ungainly in my view — we agreed to share power in order to "take it". Victoria Falls "bonding" was a power-profiling and assessment exercise in the bureaucracy, pending a sequenced, surgical attack on carriers of the State.
Innocent STERP was the facade. After it, an observation post (OP) or sentinel disposal strategy for the bureaucracy was worked out: plaint players in the bureaucracy getting won over, brittle ones meriting a bad name — "hardliners" — before being hanged! You want to
understand the attack of the likes of Gono, Tomana, JOC and lately information leadership, in that context.
A different strategy — charm and technicality (land audit) — is being attempted for the land sector.
When angry Tapa was set on him
The burden on the MDC leader was to convince his Western funders that the strategy was working, was delivering.
Or so expected the West. Plainly, he did not. If anything, he irritated them: by denying any land invasions; re-characterising Mugabe as a big, kind heart, rare and reserved for statesmen; denying any human rights abuses, in fact making Mugabe’s and his own fate Siamese.
He made the fatal error of honesty in a world accustomed to deceptive politics.
After all the game plan had been made plain: the stage-managed Amnesty International visit and damning report; the cold reception in Holland which set the tone, the debate and subsequent more-sanctions resolution in the US Senate, the false Human Rights Watch report on diamonds, already known but to be published later.
All these efforts were to be underpinned by a Tsvangirai full of complaints against Mugabe as an untrustworthy partner in the Inclusive Government. Tsvangirai did not shore up this
political position and livid Albion set Tapa and all on him, at Southwalk.
Icho!
This is the broad context within which to appreciate what China has done to the politics of Zimbabwe.
Globally embattled, globally vilified, the Zimbabwe revolution seemed orphaned, condemned both in the East and in the West. Although those in Zanu-PF knew better, China appeared hostile, or at best reticent.
Russia appeared languid. Both seemed not too keen to go beyond gestures in the Security Council, although admittedly very important at the time. Zanu-pf-PF’s Zimbabwe appeared easy to rescue, harder to nourish and defend.
But with what has happened this week, China has moved in emphatically, clearly showing the sun truly rises in the East, dies in the West. Morgan Tsvangirai’s beatitudinal West! And China has done it in such a way that even the common man in Zimbabwe visualises how foreign policy matters domestically.
China’s guns which only yesterday brought freedom to Zimbabwe, have today flowered to trigger real, unconditional welfare for the liberated. The credit touches on welfare pillars, development pillars so, so sorely lacking. What remains to be seen is whether Zanu-pf-PF can be helped. Will it have the courage to reassert the role of the central bank on the back of this credit? Indeed to end this Multilateral Donor Trust Fund, itself an economy within an economy, indeed a government within a government?
Indeed to reassert the place of the new farmer, the nationalist entrepreneur, both of them orphaned by the inclusive Government?
Or will it, as before feed the treacherously fawning managerial bourgeoisie that had so quickly abandoned it for a new suitor, a new benefactor?
Those who had taken to platforms to denounce Zanu-pf-PF and its leadership at Trade Fairs are already dusting their party regalia, sharpening their words for another round of praise poetry. For the daffodil is blossoming again.
Charira!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
O lift high the banner, the flag of Zimbabwe. The symbol of freedom proclaiming victory; We praise our heros' sacrifice, And vow to keep our land from foes; And may the Almighty protect and bless our land. O lovely Zimbabwe, so wondrously adorned; With mountains, and rivers cascading, flowing free; And may the Almighty protect and bless our land. O God, we beseech Thee to bless our native land; The land of our fathers bestowed upon us all.
Friday, 3 July 2009
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Violet Gonda's 'hot seat' of ice for Andrew Pocock.
After behaving like Pocock is her Sugar Daddy, Violet Gonda then goes on to ask leading questions.
Leading questions to answers that are sweet to her ears.
There are some sharp questions she should have asked, only if she wasnt a political activist masquerading as a journalist.
For example, one could easily ask why Andrew Pocock feels the Black Zimbabwean tax payer should compensate white farmers for stealing his land? Why would anyone pay for being colonized, having your land stolen and being dumped at gunpoint in malarial, tsetse infested, hot, dry, infertile 'reserves'? Under normal circumstances its actually the white farmer who would pay compensation for the loss blacks incurred. No?
Greed and low self esteem always corrupts our people. Violet Gonda is a prize idiot.
Interview: UK's Andrew Pocock
by: Violet Gonda
Britain's outgoing ambassador to Zimbabwe Andrew Pocock was a guest on SW Radio Africa's Hotseat programme. In his final interview as Britain's top diplomat to Harare, he categorically says his country has no moral or legal obligation to compensate Zimbabwe's displaced white farmers. Host Violet Gonda asked the questions:
Broadcast: June 26, 2009
Violet Gonda: My guest on the Hot Seat programme this week is Andrew Pocock, the outgoing UK Ambassador to Zimbabwe. Hallo Ambassador Pocock.
Andrew Pocock: Violet, how are you?
Gonda: I’m OK. How are things going there in Zimbabwe?
Pocock: Well, we are in an interesting position. There are winds of change but there’s still quite a long way to go.
Gonda: Right, has there been a significant shift though in the political situation in Zimbabwe?
Pocock: Yes I think there has. The new government itself has changed the politics of Zimbabwe and I think indeed the formation of that government reflects the political dead end that Zimbabwe had reached last year when the then regime had no ideas or solutions for the crisis they had themselves created. So this new government and its emergence is a shift and is significant but I think perhaps not quite yet decisive because there is a great deal more work to be done.
Gonda: Can you tell us a bit more about that – what progress have you seen so far and what have been the failures of the coalition government?
Pocock: Progress and failure – I think they’re two big issues. There has been progress to start with that on the micro-economic side, on micro-economic reforms, I think including the trimming of powers from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe which as you know was once virtually a parallel government. Ironically it was the Reserve Bank governor’s printing to extinction of the Zimbabwe dollar that helped a bit, it killed hyper-inflation at a stroke, it allowed dollarisation and the use of real money and that has allowed some small economic recovery and the ability to buy and sell and save. And in the public sector a move to cash budgeting and better revenue rating that’s helped with the budget and again new measures – the abolition of price controls for instance that’s helped the private sector – so there’s some good news here. The other element of good news is the beginnings of reconnection with the international financial institutions. That’s very important and Zimbabwe’s friends, including the UK, are helping with this.
But I think it is perhaps a little bit too early for full rejoicing – there’s a very long way to go on restoring trust and confidence. There’s still too much about the systems here that are not transparent or accountable and that leads us to areas where there hasn’t been I think yet success or enough success and that’s the politics. In almost all the areas that are traditional here – human rights, the justice system, the media, land invasions, corruption – there’s still a great deal of work to be done. I think the new government is trying to address this but it is heavy sledding.
Gonda: What about in terms of the leadership itself – do you think Robert Mugabe has relinquished sufficient powers?
Pocock: I don’t think he has. I think the issue of the power balance in the new government is still very much a work in progress. The fact is that Zanu-PF has run this state for 29 years and it still controls the hard levers of power. I mean the army, the police, the courts, the official media and key elements of the civil service. They have no intention in the short term of relinquishing this. It’s a question of the MDC slowly inserting itself into the processes of the state and I think they’re making progress on that but again there’s work to do.
Gonda: What about some of the accusations that Robert Mugabe has made against western countries especially Britain where he believes that Britain is responsible for the crisis in Zimbabwe. What are your thoughts on this, do you think Mugabe really believes that Britain is responsible for the crisis or is it a matter of convenience to blame the old colonial master?
Pocock: Well I think it is certainly a convenient thing to say. It’s hard to know whether Zanu-PF really believe that the United Kingdom is responsible for the crisis or whether as you say it is a matter of convenience. It’s probably a combination. If one repeats something long enough, enough people begin to believe it including oneself. The truth is, as we see it, that the crisis is as a direct consequence of very bad policy choices, of the unrestrained exercise of executive power and a pretty complete disregard for the impact of all this on Zimbabwe’s people and economy. I’m being direct about it because I think it needs to be said. So what we do need to see is a change of mindset. I’m quite happy to accept that it needs to be on more than one side, but a change of mindset is needed.
Gonda: On the issue of a change of mindset do you think that western countries are ever going to be able to trust a party like Zanu-PF?
Pocock: Well I think frankly there will have to be some evolution, some change in the way that Zanu-PF see the world, a change in their policies and a change in the way of doing business. I want to be clear about this Violet, this is not the UK dictating terms to Zanu-PF or anyone else, what I’m saying is simply as we see it, a matter of reality. Certain forms of behaviour in the modern world have certain consequences. Zanu-PF need to look very carefully at how they approach the outside world and what they do then is up to them but it’s worth just making clear that people, including I think crucially Zimbabweans will then make their own judgement on how that process works and whether trust and confidence is fully possible.
Gonda: I was going to ask that for the sake of progress should Zimbabwe and western countries forget the past.
Pocock: No I don’t think we should forget the past. I mean forgetting the past usually condemns us to repeat it. I think we must learn from the past and try jointly to move on. Learning from the past means a genuine recognition on all sides of mistakes; mistakes in policy, mistakes in analysis, mistakes in implementation. And to begin the process of moving on I think we need a genuine dialogue and that hasn’t fully started yet and of course there are elements of the inclusive government we talk to very freely. There are other elements we don’t yet do but that process is beginning and the joint visit to London last week, which included the Zimbabwean Foreign Minister I think is a potentially important first step in sitting down and looking very carefully at the balance of accounts. But this is not a question of forgetting the past as I say, it’s a question of learning from it.
Gonda: What do you think should be done to people who are guilty of human rights violations?
Pocock: I think that’s a question very much for Zimbabweans themselves to decide. There’s no question that the charge sheet in Zimbabwe is long and grim but there are many models in Southern Africa for dealing with this, for national healing and there are Ministers in Zimbabwe now for precisely that, to truth and justice commissions on to a full judicial process. But I think very much, and so does the British government, that this is a matter for Zimbabweans to decide for themselves.
Gonda: But as an observer? You wouldn’t have any views on this?
Pocock: Well I think it’s very difficult for the nation to move on without some accounting for what has happened and it goes back to the 1980s in Matabeleland as well, not just recent history, so there does need to be an accounting. How that’s done, what mechanisms are chosen, what process is used is as I say very much for Zimbabweans, it is not something that either the United Kingdom or indeed Zimbabwe’s western friends would wish to insert themselves into. That’s for people here to decide.
Gonda: Right. Let’s talk a bit about the land issue. You mentioned earlier on that that the invasions are carrying on, but just a bit of background, Mugabe has always accused the British of reneging on provisions of the Lancaster House agreement - on the issue of compensating white commercial farmers. Is this accurate in your view?
Pocock: I think when I go to my grave Violet, Lancaster House will be found tattooed on my liver, but let me just say very plainly, and I’m glad you asked the question – accusations of Britain reneging on Lancaster House are simply not accurate. It’s one of the convenient myths that have unfortunately dogged our relationship. We fulfilled all our Lancaster House obligations. And let me say by the way in passing, that Lancaster House was a treaty that worked. It ended a civil war, it transferred sovereignty to the new Zimbabwean government, it helped unite warring factions into a single security force and it still, ironically, provides Zimbabwe with its only working constitution 29 years after it was framed.
But we did meet our obligations. During the period of the 1980s the UK spent 44 million pounds on land reform which was a substantial sum at the time. We did it on a willing seller, willing buyer basis as had been agreed and we only stopped funds for land when it was clear that land was not being passed to the poor and the landless. That is not reneging, that is simply pointing to the evidence and it’s also resisting the proposition that has crept in that the UK somehow has unlimited liability forever and a day to fund land reform in Zimbabwe.
The Lancaster House never said anything like that. What Lancaster House said and what we undertook then was (a) to do everything we could to help with land reform (b) to contribute substantially ourselves and (c) to seek support from others in the international community. Now we did all that so this is really again another urban or rural myth that we need at some early stage to lay to rest.
Gonda: But I understand that (former) Minister Claire Short actually wrote a letter and I think it was in 1997 saying that Britain no longer has any obligation. Now do you think that letter could have, to some extent, influenced the events which resulted in the land invasions?
Pocock: I think what was unfortunate was that it was a two page letter which the government here seems to have read only the first half. It made comments about how Britain looked at its obligations under land reform and Lancaster House but what it then very clearly stated at length and in terms was that Britain had no intention of ceasing its development relationship with Zimbabwe but what it wished to do was to find a different way of doing it. To move from where we were to a relationship that dealt more with helping the poor, relieving poverty and on the basis of that, what was asked of the Zimbabwean government was a dialogue on the best means of moving that forward. Sadly that dialogue never emerged. What happened was a powerful reaction from Harare that accused us of reneging on treaty obligations when that was never stated in the letter nor was it intended or implied. What was being sought was a different kind of development relationship.
So one of the misunderstandings to put it no more strongly of the past, one which we’ve tried to revisit on occasions and not had the political contacts in which to do it. So again, something that needs to be looked at in its proper context and moved on from.
Gonda: Is this something that the two governments have started working on?
Pocock: Yes it is. Not solely on issues of land, they’re important but they’re not the only issue on the agenda - but in terms of looking at how we might begin reconstructing a relationship. Zimbabwe’s important to the UK and vice versa. So although we’re at a very early stage we have begun that process and that is a good thing.
Gonda: Now the white commercial farmers want compensation and they’re demanding US$5 billion from the Zimbabwean government. What are your thoughts on that?
Pocock: Well I think their requirement for compensation from the Zimbabwean government is probably the right legal process. Whether it has any practical impact is another matter. Compensation is a very tangled issue. In the fairly recent past, the Zimbabwean government has said that compensation rests with the United Kingdom. Well it does not – either legally or morally. In Lancaster House, sovereignty was transferred to the new Zimbabwean government.
The disruption on the farms was not caused by anything to do with the United Kingdom, it was driven by Zimbabwean government policy therefore we have no legal obligation for compensation. We’ve never accepted that and we won’t. But people have been, as the SADC tribunal has recently reiterated, unlawfully and unconstitutionally displaced from their personal property.
And I think and I hope as we move into the future, as we reach a situation where the restoration of commercial agriculture is possible, it won’t be on the old paternalistic basis, it will be on some new foundation but when we reach that point, as part of the natural justice, as part of building confidence for future investors, some element of compensation for people unconstitutionally displaced might be considered. I think we haven't got anywhere near the mechanisms and we certainly haven't decided who would pay for that compensation or indeed how much it would be but I think in natural justice, some form of address to this should be considered and I hope in due course will.
Gonda: That’s what I was going to ask – is it possible to ever see the United Kingdom actually providing compensation directly to the white commercial farmers for land that had been taken by the Zimbabwe government - so it’s not completely or totally off the table, it is possible that the UK could provide compensation directly to the white farmers?
Pocock: No I don’t think in the way you suggest Violet, not at all. What I’m trying to say is that if we get to the issue of compensation it will be in the context of some broad land commission or other institutional assessment of what might be done to re-revive commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe. That’s a very broad issue. Compensation is one part of it. If we do reach closure on the broader issue and compensation can be addressed, I’m sure the United Kingdom would wish to be part of that but it is not something that we will take on singly and solely, it is not something we feel we have legal or moral obligations to. But we do recognise there is a case in natural justice to compensate people illegally deprived of their property. So it is a rather more, rather broader context than you’re suggesting. It is not a bilateral obligation, this is something that we think needs to be addressed in a much wider context.
Gonda: And of course the Prime Minister is denying the severity of farm invasions, but the commercial farmers say the invasions are continuing. Now is it of concern to the diplomatic community when they hear Mr Tsvangirai saying the reports of farm invasions have been overblown?
Pocock: Well I’ve said that farm invasions certainly are continuing. They accelerated indeed and I think not without coincidence from the actual formation of the inclusive government in February. And farm invasions include by the way, pressure on the last remaining wildlife conservancies in the south of Zimbabwe which are not only a biological asset but could and should be a trigger to improve, resume tourism to this country. So that’s worrying in itself - but I think this programme is intended to put pressure on the Prime Minister and on the MDC, but it is also extremely damaging to Zimbabwe’s image, to its economy and to its potential for recovery. It discourages investment and it hurts people so I think it does remain a major issue that will have to be grappled with. Frankly there is no avoiding this.
Gonda: But does it concern the diplomatic community that it’s the Prime Minister who’s also saying the situation is not as bad as it sounds and there are no fresh farm invasions that are happening right now?
Pocock: Well what I would say is we’re continuing to talk to the Prime Minister and his office and the MDC generally about our concerns in this. Not may I add from the hysterical, stereotypical point of a background of a British ambassador complaining constantly about land, this is a very broad concern within the international community for the reasons I’ve mentioned – it damages the economy and the country’s image but we are in constant contact with the Prime Minister and his office on this.
Gonda: And what is his response?
Pocock: Well his response is concern. I think what he’s said in public that his response is concern as it should be so this is an issue that we will continue to discuss
Gonda: What is the UK’s position on lifting restrictive measures that have an economic impact?
Pocock: Well let me first say there are no restrictive measures that have an economic impact. This is again one of these myths that has been convenient in the past. Let me put on record for the umpteenth time – there are no economic sanctions from the European Union or the United Kingdom which is a part of the EU and there never have been. The only restrictive measures are a visa ban, an asset freeze on 243 individuals and an arms embargo - full stop. There is no other measure so the alleged economic impact I think is another effort to lay off blame for domestic policy failure.
And in the international financial institutions for instance where there’s recently been publicity that the UK has raised its ban on IFI lending – well we never had a ban so we couldn’t raise it. The reason why there is no lending from the international financial institutions is because of Zimbabwe’s arrears. If a country fails to pay its debts to the international financial institutions they stop lending and I’m afraid Zimbabwe owes 1.2 billion dollars or thereabouts, mostly in arrears.
So there is no block, it is simply a question of Zimbabwean debt which is a complicated one. But let me say the UK and indeed our international friends are helping Zimbabwe and the new financial minister to re-engage with the IFIs which is a lengthy process but a crucial one.
The IFIs are responding. They are sending teams, the IMF has sent Article Four mission, the World Bank has a mission here at the moment and they are also contributing technical assistance. But there will be no new resource until the debt issue is addressed but continued engagement will continue even though that is subject to sustained policy change. But as I said earlier, we’re seeing policy change on the micro economic side so there is some progress here.
Gonda: Has the UK been trading with Zimbabwe in the last few years?
Pocock: The UK has never ceased trading with Zimbabwe. In fact until fairly recently until the virtual complete collapse of the Zimbabwe economy in 2007, Zimbabwe actually had a trade surplus with the United Kingdom. We bought minerals and other things from Zimbabwe and exported very little because Zimbabwe couldn’t pay for it. So the idea that we never traded with Zimbabwe is again not true. There is no economic impediment to that and we have done so, we continue to do so and we hope, if we move in the right direction, that trade can resume again.
Gonda: But there have been reports saying that the British government has been putting pressure on UK companies, for example those that buy produce from farms that were taken over from white farmers. Is this the policy of the British government?
Pocock: My impression was it was very much a policy of supermarkets and other people who felt they had a responsibility to trade fairly and who didn’t therefore wish to be taking produce from farms in Zimbabwe that you say had been illegally seized. But let me put the picture in perspective. Part of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s visit to the UK included a very important investment conference which was chaired jointly by Lord Branson of Virgin and the Foreign Secretary. To that conference was invited potential and actual investors in Zimbabwe to allow the Prime Minister to set out his view of why he thought Zimbabwe could again be a reasonable and attractive investment destination and for investors to put to him their concerns about protection for private property and the judicial system and respect for the rule of law. This is evidence of a mutual wish to help the Zimbabwean economy. Now clearly there’s got to be sensible conditions on the ground before investors will commit money but it is strong and active evidence of a genuine wish on both sides to move this process forward.
So far from looking at sanctions, which as I say economically have never existed, we are looking at ways in which we can incentivise reform in Zimbabwe and indeed reward it. So the debate about sanctions, certainly from the Zimbabwean end, has always been misleading and an attempt to defer, deflect blame for domestic policy. It is an old-fashioned debate, we really need to move on from it for the sake of Zimbabwe’s recovery.
Gonda: Why was the Mines Minister, Obert Mpofu denied a visa to attend these investment conferences in the UK with the Prime Minister?
Pocock: Because he is on our banned list and the person that the investment conference really wanted to hear from was the Prime Minister which they did. He made the keynote speech and that is the way I think probably was best outcome to this. So it was as simple as that. As you know, we had granted visas to the Foreign Minister and the Minister of Tourism so I don’t think there can be an accusation that somehow the United Kingdom wasn’t being flexible but we didn’t think that on the mining issue it was appropriate to issue a visa.
Gonda: The Herald newspaper this week claims that the decline in food production in Zimbabwe was due to global warming. What do you think about this?
Pocock: I think the decline in food production in Zimbabwe is due to farm seizures and a catastrophic economic and agricultural policy. Global warming may have a marginal impact but what you are really saying is this is the old excuse about drought. Well Zimbabwe has had some very major droughts in its recent history in the 80s and 90s which didn’t affect by and large its ability to produce food, indeed to export agricultural produce. What has affected that is the disruption of commercial agriculture, the decline of inputs, the loss of asset value, the general implosion of the economy and the scattering of skills and capital which has been freely distributed to other countries in Southern Africa but also elsewhere. So Zimbabwe’s ironically, its greatest value added export in the last decade has been its skilled people. That is the reason for food production decline.
Gonda: And of course, sticking with the Herald, there was an outcry when the paper published a story saying that sanctions hit local British pensioners and that the UK had started to airlift its citizens from Zimbabwe to the UK. What is the position of your government on this?
Pocock: Well the Herald is a great reservoir of fantasy. First of all, there are no economic sanctions, as I say what has destroyed pensioners’ ability to sustain their livelihoods here has been the policies of the previous regime, not sanctions. What the United Kingdom is doing is not airlifting our people, what we recognized was that the elderly and vulnerable here have found it increasingly difficult, indeed as have everybody else, but those categories particularly, to sustain life. And so as a responsible government we offered our citizens, on a wholly voluntary basis, the opportunity to apply for repatriation to the United Kingdom if they met certain criteria and those criteria are to do with vulnerability and with the inability to sustain themselves economically and medically in Zimbabwe. So far from it being an airlift, there is still a substantial residual British population in Zimbabwe, it is a wholly humanitarian programme on a voluntary basis aimed at a particular category of British nationals. No more and no less.
Gonda: And the paper went on to say that the repatriation showed shocking double standards as it showed that London was acknowledging the ruinous nature of the sanctions yet it was keen to maintain them against black Zimbabweans.
Pocock: Well Violet you simply mustn’t believe everything you read in the Herald, and of course they would say that, wouldn’t they? They base their premise on the wholly erroneous proposition that Zimbabwe’s economy has been ruined by sanctions. As I have said repeatedly, it hasn’t. That was domestic policy driven. And secondly, it’s not as if we are ignoring black Zimbabweans, the United Kingdom is now going to put $100 million of assistance into Zimbabwe this year. When you combine it with the money that we have put in at least since 2000, we’ve probably put in almost half a billion dollars in humanitarian and now transitional support assistance for Zimbabwe. That is to tackle everything from food insecurity created again by domestic policy, to HIV, to orphans and vulnerable children. We’re now moving on to a range of infrastructural areas including education.
If we and our international partners had not done that then I fear a great many more Zimbabweans would either have died or left this country than the three or four million who have already done so. So the Herald is full ofagitprop but none of it makes sense and no responsible adult believes it.
Gonda: So do you feel that the diplomatic community in Harare has been effective during the last eight years of the crisis?
Pocock: Well broadly I think yes. There are obviously many areas in which we haven’t been able to be particularly helpful. One of them is in combating the kind of stories you’ve just mentioned and continue to be produced but overall we have managed to maintain humanitarian assistance and in March this year we were feeding seven million people. We’ve helped with the areas I’ve mentioned – HIV and orphans and vulnerable children, we’ve supported human rights defenders and indeed we’ve kept Zimbabwe a global issue and I think it was important that we did these things because without them, there was a risk that Zimbabwe’s plight would have slipped beneath the radar. It hasn’t and the world has stayed remarkably focussed on what has been happening here and I think that is a good thing.
Gonda: And of course you have concluded your term. What do you think you have achieved and do you have any regrets?
Pocock: Well diplomacy is a trade where there’s very seldom an easily quantifiable outcome but I think while I’ve been here I have seen a movement from desperate times – 2008 last year was the worst year in Zimbabwe’s independent history – to the beginnings of change. We have a new government, we have a start to re-engagement with the international community, we have over 700 million dollars a year of donor inputs coming in with much greater flexibility on how it is spent in response to Zimbabwean priorities and I think it’s not too strong to say that we have had the rebirth of an element of hope here and the beginning of the end of Zimbabwe’s self-imposed isolation.
And I’ve also been lucky here to meet many very brave and patriotic Zimbabweans who are dedicated to the revival of their country and to have worked with friends and colleagues including, may I say, a very dedicated and professional British Embassy team. So I’ve not contributed to any of it in a particular way but I’m very happy to have been associated with it and oh by the way, we’ve just, the British Embassy moved to a new building which is a symbol of long term commitment here. So I’ve been glad to have been associated with that.
But regrets as the song says, I’ve had a few. I’ve regretted the unnecessary suffering of so many and the treatment of human rights defenders and frankly the impoverishment of a nation. None of that has been pretty. I’m not sure if there was a great deal we could realistically have done about that other than supporting the people in the way I’ve described but I leave here with a degree of optimism and looking forward I hope to a new Zimbabwe.
Gonda: Has you replacement been named yet?
Pocock: Yes, his name is Mark Canning, he is coming from Rangoon and he arrives on the 2nd of July.
Gonda: He’s coming from Burma.
Pocock: He is.
Gonda: Quite interesting…
Pocock: Very interesting.
Gonda: And a final word Ambassador.
Pocock: Well it has been a pleasure talking to you and going over these issues. I think that the winds of change are stirring in Zimbabwe, it’s important that they be given all the help they can and the point I would make just to end is the international community is helping. We hear a great deal of criticism about conditionalities and about waiting and seeing. Of course there will be some conditionalities, we would be unreasonable to expect there to be none but we are already as an international group, putting as I say $700 million a year into Zimbabwe.
We are taking risks, we are trying to be innovative, we’re trying to support change and fundamental reform. So we are not sitting on our haunches, we are not letting the reforming elements of the new government twist in the wind, we’re doing the opposite. The reason that we haven’t sailed straightforwardly to success is because things still are very difficult and there are many impediments and 30 years of under-investment and political difficulty are not solved overnight but we’re addressing it and we’re on the case.
Gonda: And where are you going from here?
Pocock: Back to London, to serve my time for my sins I think.
Gonda: Well Ambassador Andrew Pocock, we wish you well and thank you very much for talking to us.
Pocock: Violet, a great pleasure, thank you.
Feedback can be sent to violet@swradioafrica.com
Leading questions to answers that are sweet to her ears.
There are some sharp questions she should have asked, only if she wasnt a political activist masquerading as a journalist.
For example, one could easily ask why Andrew Pocock feels the Black Zimbabwean tax payer should compensate white farmers for stealing his land? Why would anyone pay for being colonized, having your land stolen and being dumped at gunpoint in malarial, tsetse infested, hot, dry, infertile 'reserves'? Under normal circumstances its actually the white farmer who would pay compensation for the loss blacks incurred. No?
Greed and low self esteem always corrupts our people. Violet Gonda is a prize idiot.
Interview: UK's Andrew Pocock
by: Violet Gonda
Britain's outgoing ambassador to Zimbabwe Andrew Pocock was a guest on SW Radio Africa's Hotseat programme. In his final interview as Britain's top diplomat to Harare, he categorically says his country has no moral or legal obligation to compensate Zimbabwe's displaced white farmers. Host Violet Gonda asked the questions:
Broadcast: June 26, 2009
Violet Gonda: My guest on the Hot Seat programme this week is Andrew Pocock, the outgoing UK Ambassador to Zimbabwe. Hallo Ambassador Pocock.
Andrew Pocock: Violet, how are you?
Gonda: I’m OK. How are things going there in Zimbabwe?
Pocock: Well, we are in an interesting position. There are winds of change but there’s still quite a long way to go.
Gonda: Right, has there been a significant shift though in the political situation in Zimbabwe?
Pocock: Yes I think there has. The new government itself has changed the politics of Zimbabwe and I think indeed the formation of that government reflects the political dead end that Zimbabwe had reached last year when the then regime had no ideas or solutions for the crisis they had themselves created. So this new government and its emergence is a shift and is significant but I think perhaps not quite yet decisive because there is a great deal more work to be done.
Gonda: Can you tell us a bit more about that – what progress have you seen so far and what have been the failures of the coalition government?
Pocock: Progress and failure – I think they’re two big issues. There has been progress to start with that on the micro-economic side, on micro-economic reforms, I think including the trimming of powers from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe which as you know was once virtually a parallel government. Ironically it was the Reserve Bank governor’s printing to extinction of the Zimbabwe dollar that helped a bit, it killed hyper-inflation at a stroke, it allowed dollarisation and the use of real money and that has allowed some small economic recovery and the ability to buy and sell and save. And in the public sector a move to cash budgeting and better revenue rating that’s helped with the budget and again new measures – the abolition of price controls for instance that’s helped the private sector – so there’s some good news here. The other element of good news is the beginnings of reconnection with the international financial institutions. That’s very important and Zimbabwe’s friends, including the UK, are helping with this.
But I think it is perhaps a little bit too early for full rejoicing – there’s a very long way to go on restoring trust and confidence. There’s still too much about the systems here that are not transparent or accountable and that leads us to areas where there hasn’t been I think yet success or enough success and that’s the politics. In almost all the areas that are traditional here – human rights, the justice system, the media, land invasions, corruption – there’s still a great deal of work to be done. I think the new government is trying to address this but it is heavy sledding.
Gonda: What about in terms of the leadership itself – do you think Robert Mugabe has relinquished sufficient powers?
Pocock: I don’t think he has. I think the issue of the power balance in the new government is still very much a work in progress. The fact is that Zanu-PF has run this state for 29 years and it still controls the hard levers of power. I mean the army, the police, the courts, the official media and key elements of the civil service. They have no intention in the short term of relinquishing this. It’s a question of the MDC slowly inserting itself into the processes of the state and I think they’re making progress on that but again there’s work to do.
Gonda: What about some of the accusations that Robert Mugabe has made against western countries especially Britain where he believes that Britain is responsible for the crisis in Zimbabwe. What are your thoughts on this, do you think Mugabe really believes that Britain is responsible for the crisis or is it a matter of convenience to blame the old colonial master?
Pocock: Well I think it is certainly a convenient thing to say. It’s hard to know whether Zanu-PF really believe that the United Kingdom is responsible for the crisis or whether as you say it is a matter of convenience. It’s probably a combination. If one repeats something long enough, enough people begin to believe it including oneself. The truth is, as we see it, that the crisis is as a direct consequence of very bad policy choices, of the unrestrained exercise of executive power and a pretty complete disregard for the impact of all this on Zimbabwe’s people and economy. I’m being direct about it because I think it needs to be said. So what we do need to see is a change of mindset. I’m quite happy to accept that it needs to be on more than one side, but a change of mindset is needed.
Gonda: On the issue of a change of mindset do you think that western countries are ever going to be able to trust a party like Zanu-PF?
Pocock: Well I think frankly there will have to be some evolution, some change in the way that Zanu-PF see the world, a change in their policies and a change in the way of doing business. I want to be clear about this Violet, this is not the UK dictating terms to Zanu-PF or anyone else, what I’m saying is simply as we see it, a matter of reality. Certain forms of behaviour in the modern world have certain consequences. Zanu-PF need to look very carefully at how they approach the outside world and what they do then is up to them but it’s worth just making clear that people, including I think crucially Zimbabweans will then make their own judgement on how that process works and whether trust and confidence is fully possible.
Gonda: I was going to ask that for the sake of progress should Zimbabwe and western countries forget the past.
Pocock: No I don’t think we should forget the past. I mean forgetting the past usually condemns us to repeat it. I think we must learn from the past and try jointly to move on. Learning from the past means a genuine recognition on all sides of mistakes; mistakes in policy, mistakes in analysis, mistakes in implementation. And to begin the process of moving on I think we need a genuine dialogue and that hasn’t fully started yet and of course there are elements of the inclusive government we talk to very freely. There are other elements we don’t yet do but that process is beginning and the joint visit to London last week, which included the Zimbabwean Foreign Minister I think is a potentially important first step in sitting down and looking very carefully at the balance of accounts. But this is not a question of forgetting the past as I say, it’s a question of learning from it.
Gonda: What do you think should be done to people who are guilty of human rights violations?
Pocock: I think that’s a question very much for Zimbabweans themselves to decide. There’s no question that the charge sheet in Zimbabwe is long and grim but there are many models in Southern Africa for dealing with this, for national healing and there are Ministers in Zimbabwe now for precisely that, to truth and justice commissions on to a full judicial process. But I think very much, and so does the British government, that this is a matter for Zimbabweans to decide for themselves.
Gonda: But as an observer? You wouldn’t have any views on this?
Pocock: Well I think it’s very difficult for the nation to move on without some accounting for what has happened and it goes back to the 1980s in Matabeleland as well, not just recent history, so there does need to be an accounting. How that’s done, what mechanisms are chosen, what process is used is as I say very much for Zimbabweans, it is not something that either the United Kingdom or indeed Zimbabwe’s western friends would wish to insert themselves into. That’s for people here to decide.
Gonda: Right. Let’s talk a bit about the land issue. You mentioned earlier on that that the invasions are carrying on, but just a bit of background, Mugabe has always accused the British of reneging on provisions of the Lancaster House agreement - on the issue of compensating white commercial farmers. Is this accurate in your view?
Pocock: I think when I go to my grave Violet, Lancaster House will be found tattooed on my liver, but let me just say very plainly, and I’m glad you asked the question – accusations of Britain reneging on Lancaster House are simply not accurate. It’s one of the convenient myths that have unfortunately dogged our relationship. We fulfilled all our Lancaster House obligations. And let me say by the way in passing, that Lancaster House was a treaty that worked. It ended a civil war, it transferred sovereignty to the new Zimbabwean government, it helped unite warring factions into a single security force and it still, ironically, provides Zimbabwe with its only working constitution 29 years after it was framed.
But we did meet our obligations. During the period of the 1980s the UK spent 44 million pounds on land reform which was a substantial sum at the time. We did it on a willing seller, willing buyer basis as had been agreed and we only stopped funds for land when it was clear that land was not being passed to the poor and the landless. That is not reneging, that is simply pointing to the evidence and it’s also resisting the proposition that has crept in that the UK somehow has unlimited liability forever and a day to fund land reform in Zimbabwe.
The Lancaster House never said anything like that. What Lancaster House said and what we undertook then was (a) to do everything we could to help with land reform (b) to contribute substantially ourselves and (c) to seek support from others in the international community. Now we did all that so this is really again another urban or rural myth that we need at some early stage to lay to rest.
Gonda: But I understand that (former) Minister Claire Short actually wrote a letter and I think it was in 1997 saying that Britain no longer has any obligation. Now do you think that letter could have, to some extent, influenced the events which resulted in the land invasions?
Pocock: I think what was unfortunate was that it was a two page letter which the government here seems to have read only the first half. It made comments about how Britain looked at its obligations under land reform and Lancaster House but what it then very clearly stated at length and in terms was that Britain had no intention of ceasing its development relationship with Zimbabwe but what it wished to do was to find a different way of doing it. To move from where we were to a relationship that dealt more with helping the poor, relieving poverty and on the basis of that, what was asked of the Zimbabwean government was a dialogue on the best means of moving that forward. Sadly that dialogue never emerged. What happened was a powerful reaction from Harare that accused us of reneging on treaty obligations when that was never stated in the letter nor was it intended or implied. What was being sought was a different kind of development relationship.
So one of the misunderstandings to put it no more strongly of the past, one which we’ve tried to revisit on occasions and not had the political contacts in which to do it. So again, something that needs to be looked at in its proper context and moved on from.
Gonda: Is this something that the two governments have started working on?
Pocock: Yes it is. Not solely on issues of land, they’re important but they’re not the only issue on the agenda - but in terms of looking at how we might begin reconstructing a relationship. Zimbabwe’s important to the UK and vice versa. So although we’re at a very early stage we have begun that process and that is a good thing.
Gonda: Now the white commercial farmers want compensation and they’re demanding US$5 billion from the Zimbabwean government. What are your thoughts on that?
Pocock: Well I think their requirement for compensation from the Zimbabwean government is probably the right legal process. Whether it has any practical impact is another matter. Compensation is a very tangled issue. In the fairly recent past, the Zimbabwean government has said that compensation rests with the United Kingdom. Well it does not – either legally or morally. In Lancaster House, sovereignty was transferred to the new Zimbabwean government.
The disruption on the farms was not caused by anything to do with the United Kingdom, it was driven by Zimbabwean government policy therefore we have no legal obligation for compensation. We’ve never accepted that and we won’t. But people have been, as the SADC tribunal has recently reiterated, unlawfully and unconstitutionally displaced from their personal property.
And I think and I hope as we move into the future, as we reach a situation where the restoration of commercial agriculture is possible, it won’t be on the old paternalistic basis, it will be on some new foundation but when we reach that point, as part of the natural justice, as part of building confidence for future investors, some element of compensation for people unconstitutionally displaced might be considered. I think we haven't got anywhere near the mechanisms and we certainly haven't decided who would pay for that compensation or indeed how much it would be but I think in natural justice, some form of address to this should be considered and I hope in due course will.
Gonda: That’s what I was going to ask – is it possible to ever see the United Kingdom actually providing compensation directly to the white commercial farmers for land that had been taken by the Zimbabwe government - so it’s not completely or totally off the table, it is possible that the UK could provide compensation directly to the white farmers?
Pocock: No I don’t think in the way you suggest Violet, not at all. What I’m trying to say is that if we get to the issue of compensation it will be in the context of some broad land commission or other institutional assessment of what might be done to re-revive commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe. That’s a very broad issue. Compensation is one part of it. If we do reach closure on the broader issue and compensation can be addressed, I’m sure the United Kingdom would wish to be part of that but it is not something that we will take on singly and solely, it is not something we feel we have legal or moral obligations to. But we do recognise there is a case in natural justice to compensate people illegally deprived of their property. So it is a rather more, rather broader context than you’re suggesting. It is not a bilateral obligation, this is something that we think needs to be addressed in a much wider context.
Gonda: And of course the Prime Minister is denying the severity of farm invasions, but the commercial farmers say the invasions are continuing. Now is it of concern to the diplomatic community when they hear Mr Tsvangirai saying the reports of farm invasions have been overblown?
Pocock: Well I’ve said that farm invasions certainly are continuing. They accelerated indeed and I think not without coincidence from the actual formation of the inclusive government in February. And farm invasions include by the way, pressure on the last remaining wildlife conservancies in the south of Zimbabwe which are not only a biological asset but could and should be a trigger to improve, resume tourism to this country. So that’s worrying in itself - but I think this programme is intended to put pressure on the Prime Minister and on the MDC, but it is also extremely damaging to Zimbabwe’s image, to its economy and to its potential for recovery. It discourages investment and it hurts people so I think it does remain a major issue that will have to be grappled with. Frankly there is no avoiding this.
Gonda: But does it concern the diplomatic community that it’s the Prime Minister who’s also saying the situation is not as bad as it sounds and there are no fresh farm invasions that are happening right now?
Pocock: Well what I would say is we’re continuing to talk to the Prime Minister and his office and the MDC generally about our concerns in this. Not may I add from the hysterical, stereotypical point of a background of a British ambassador complaining constantly about land, this is a very broad concern within the international community for the reasons I’ve mentioned – it damages the economy and the country’s image but we are in constant contact with the Prime Minister and his office on this.
Gonda: And what is his response?
Pocock: Well his response is concern. I think what he’s said in public that his response is concern as it should be so this is an issue that we will continue to discuss
Gonda: What is the UK’s position on lifting restrictive measures that have an economic impact?
Pocock: Well let me first say there are no restrictive measures that have an economic impact. This is again one of these myths that has been convenient in the past. Let me put on record for the umpteenth time – there are no economic sanctions from the European Union or the United Kingdom which is a part of the EU and there never have been. The only restrictive measures are a visa ban, an asset freeze on 243 individuals and an arms embargo - full stop. There is no other measure so the alleged economic impact I think is another effort to lay off blame for domestic policy failure.
And in the international financial institutions for instance where there’s recently been publicity that the UK has raised its ban on IFI lending – well we never had a ban so we couldn’t raise it. The reason why there is no lending from the international financial institutions is because of Zimbabwe’s arrears. If a country fails to pay its debts to the international financial institutions they stop lending and I’m afraid Zimbabwe owes 1.2 billion dollars or thereabouts, mostly in arrears.
So there is no block, it is simply a question of Zimbabwean debt which is a complicated one. But let me say the UK and indeed our international friends are helping Zimbabwe and the new financial minister to re-engage with the IFIs which is a lengthy process but a crucial one.
The IFIs are responding. They are sending teams, the IMF has sent Article Four mission, the World Bank has a mission here at the moment and they are also contributing technical assistance. But there will be no new resource until the debt issue is addressed but continued engagement will continue even though that is subject to sustained policy change. But as I said earlier, we’re seeing policy change on the micro economic side so there is some progress here.
Gonda: Has the UK been trading with Zimbabwe in the last few years?
Pocock: The UK has never ceased trading with Zimbabwe. In fact until fairly recently until the virtual complete collapse of the Zimbabwe economy in 2007, Zimbabwe actually had a trade surplus with the United Kingdom. We bought minerals and other things from Zimbabwe and exported very little because Zimbabwe couldn’t pay for it. So the idea that we never traded with Zimbabwe is again not true. There is no economic impediment to that and we have done so, we continue to do so and we hope, if we move in the right direction, that trade can resume again.
Gonda: But there have been reports saying that the British government has been putting pressure on UK companies, for example those that buy produce from farms that were taken over from white farmers. Is this the policy of the British government?
Pocock: My impression was it was very much a policy of supermarkets and other people who felt they had a responsibility to trade fairly and who didn’t therefore wish to be taking produce from farms in Zimbabwe that you say had been illegally seized. But let me put the picture in perspective. Part of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s visit to the UK included a very important investment conference which was chaired jointly by Lord Branson of Virgin and the Foreign Secretary. To that conference was invited potential and actual investors in Zimbabwe to allow the Prime Minister to set out his view of why he thought Zimbabwe could again be a reasonable and attractive investment destination and for investors to put to him their concerns about protection for private property and the judicial system and respect for the rule of law. This is evidence of a mutual wish to help the Zimbabwean economy. Now clearly there’s got to be sensible conditions on the ground before investors will commit money but it is strong and active evidence of a genuine wish on both sides to move this process forward.
So far from looking at sanctions, which as I say economically have never existed, we are looking at ways in which we can incentivise reform in Zimbabwe and indeed reward it. So the debate about sanctions, certainly from the Zimbabwean end, has always been misleading and an attempt to defer, deflect blame for domestic policy. It is an old-fashioned debate, we really need to move on from it for the sake of Zimbabwe’s recovery.
Gonda: Why was the Mines Minister, Obert Mpofu denied a visa to attend these investment conferences in the UK with the Prime Minister?
Pocock: Because he is on our banned list and the person that the investment conference really wanted to hear from was the Prime Minister which they did. He made the keynote speech and that is the way I think probably was best outcome to this. So it was as simple as that. As you know, we had granted visas to the Foreign Minister and the Minister of Tourism so I don’t think there can be an accusation that somehow the United Kingdom wasn’t being flexible but we didn’t think that on the mining issue it was appropriate to issue a visa.
Gonda: The Herald newspaper this week claims that the decline in food production in Zimbabwe was due to global warming. What do you think about this?
Pocock: I think the decline in food production in Zimbabwe is due to farm seizures and a catastrophic economic and agricultural policy. Global warming may have a marginal impact but what you are really saying is this is the old excuse about drought. Well Zimbabwe has had some very major droughts in its recent history in the 80s and 90s which didn’t affect by and large its ability to produce food, indeed to export agricultural produce. What has affected that is the disruption of commercial agriculture, the decline of inputs, the loss of asset value, the general implosion of the economy and the scattering of skills and capital which has been freely distributed to other countries in Southern Africa but also elsewhere. So Zimbabwe’s ironically, its greatest value added export in the last decade has been its skilled people. That is the reason for food production decline.
Gonda: And of course, sticking with the Herald, there was an outcry when the paper published a story saying that sanctions hit local British pensioners and that the UK had started to airlift its citizens from Zimbabwe to the UK. What is the position of your government on this?
Pocock: Well the Herald is a great reservoir of fantasy. First of all, there are no economic sanctions, as I say what has destroyed pensioners’ ability to sustain their livelihoods here has been the policies of the previous regime, not sanctions. What the United Kingdom is doing is not airlifting our people, what we recognized was that the elderly and vulnerable here have found it increasingly difficult, indeed as have everybody else, but those categories particularly, to sustain life. And so as a responsible government we offered our citizens, on a wholly voluntary basis, the opportunity to apply for repatriation to the United Kingdom if they met certain criteria and those criteria are to do with vulnerability and with the inability to sustain themselves economically and medically in Zimbabwe. So far from it being an airlift, there is still a substantial residual British population in Zimbabwe, it is a wholly humanitarian programme on a voluntary basis aimed at a particular category of British nationals. No more and no less.
Gonda: And the paper went on to say that the repatriation showed shocking double standards as it showed that London was acknowledging the ruinous nature of the sanctions yet it was keen to maintain them against black Zimbabweans.
Pocock: Well Violet you simply mustn’t believe everything you read in the Herald, and of course they would say that, wouldn’t they? They base their premise on the wholly erroneous proposition that Zimbabwe’s economy has been ruined by sanctions. As I have said repeatedly, it hasn’t. That was domestic policy driven. And secondly, it’s not as if we are ignoring black Zimbabweans, the United Kingdom is now going to put $100 million of assistance into Zimbabwe this year. When you combine it with the money that we have put in at least since 2000, we’ve probably put in almost half a billion dollars in humanitarian and now transitional support assistance for Zimbabwe. That is to tackle everything from food insecurity created again by domestic policy, to HIV, to orphans and vulnerable children. We’re now moving on to a range of infrastructural areas including education.
If we and our international partners had not done that then I fear a great many more Zimbabweans would either have died or left this country than the three or four million who have already done so. So the Herald is full ofagitprop but none of it makes sense and no responsible adult believes it.
Gonda: So do you feel that the diplomatic community in Harare has been effective during the last eight years of the crisis?
Pocock: Well broadly I think yes. There are obviously many areas in which we haven’t been able to be particularly helpful. One of them is in combating the kind of stories you’ve just mentioned and continue to be produced but overall we have managed to maintain humanitarian assistance and in March this year we were feeding seven million people. We’ve helped with the areas I’ve mentioned – HIV and orphans and vulnerable children, we’ve supported human rights defenders and indeed we’ve kept Zimbabwe a global issue and I think it was important that we did these things because without them, there was a risk that Zimbabwe’s plight would have slipped beneath the radar. It hasn’t and the world has stayed remarkably focussed on what has been happening here and I think that is a good thing.
Gonda: And of course you have concluded your term. What do you think you have achieved and do you have any regrets?
Pocock: Well diplomacy is a trade where there’s very seldom an easily quantifiable outcome but I think while I’ve been here I have seen a movement from desperate times – 2008 last year was the worst year in Zimbabwe’s independent history – to the beginnings of change. We have a new government, we have a start to re-engagement with the international community, we have over 700 million dollars a year of donor inputs coming in with much greater flexibility on how it is spent in response to Zimbabwean priorities and I think it’s not too strong to say that we have had the rebirth of an element of hope here and the beginning of the end of Zimbabwe’s self-imposed isolation.
And I’ve also been lucky here to meet many very brave and patriotic Zimbabweans who are dedicated to the revival of their country and to have worked with friends and colleagues including, may I say, a very dedicated and professional British Embassy team. So I’ve not contributed to any of it in a particular way but I’m very happy to have been associated with it and oh by the way, we’ve just, the British Embassy moved to a new building which is a symbol of long term commitment here. So I’ve been glad to have been associated with that.
But regrets as the song says, I’ve had a few. I’ve regretted the unnecessary suffering of so many and the treatment of human rights defenders and frankly the impoverishment of a nation. None of that has been pretty. I’m not sure if there was a great deal we could realistically have done about that other than supporting the people in the way I’ve described but I leave here with a degree of optimism and looking forward I hope to a new Zimbabwe.
Gonda: Has you replacement been named yet?
Pocock: Yes, his name is Mark Canning, he is coming from Rangoon and he arrives on the 2nd of July.
Gonda: He’s coming from Burma.
Pocock: He is.
Gonda: Quite interesting…
Pocock: Very interesting.
Gonda: And a final word Ambassador.
Pocock: Well it has been a pleasure talking to you and going over these issues. I think that the winds of change are stirring in Zimbabwe, it’s important that they be given all the help they can and the point I would make just to end is the international community is helping. We hear a great deal of criticism about conditionalities and about waiting and seeing. Of course there will be some conditionalities, we would be unreasonable to expect there to be none but we are already as an international group, putting as I say $700 million a year into Zimbabwe.
We are taking risks, we are trying to be innovative, we’re trying to support change and fundamental reform. So we are not sitting on our haunches, we are not letting the reforming elements of the new government twist in the wind, we’re doing the opposite. The reason that we haven’t sailed straightforwardly to success is because things still are very difficult and there are many impediments and 30 years of under-investment and political difficulty are not solved overnight but we’re addressing it and we’re on the case.
Gonda: And where are you going from here?
Pocock: Back to London, to serve my time for my sins I think.
Gonda: Well Ambassador Andrew Pocock, we wish you well and thank you very much for talking to us.
Pocock: Violet, a great pleasure, thank you.
Feedback can be sent to violet@swradioafrica.com
China offers Zim $950m credit lines
ZIMBABWE has secured US$950 million in credit lines from China to help rebuild the country's economy, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said on Tuesday.
Zimbabwe has appealed to the world for a "financial stimulus package" for its devastated economy, saying lack of foreign support put a recovery plan drawn up by the unity government in peril.
The MDC is now at the forefront showcasing Chinese credit lines, the same China the MDC spent a decade deriding for her support of Zimbabwe.
The MDC would show off its 'wealthy friends' (meaning Britain and America) at every rally they held. Not only that, their rallies were also pregnant with anti-china rhetoric.
Its interesting though that since the formation of the ZANU-MDC government of national unity (GNU), nothing significant has come from the MDC's so called 'wealthy friends'. If anything Tsvangirai's trip helped reinforce his inferior status as western leader after leader gave teacher-like comments to Tsvangirai. Even going to the extent of commanding him to change Zimbabwe's constitution and re-establishing British settler colonial monopolies on Zimbabwe's land before any crumbs can be thrown at Zimbabwe.
Reality is dawning at last. So far, real meaningful financial deals have come from the MDC-T's traditional enemies, Africa and China. We hope Tsvangirai's learning curve is a steep one this time. Parading himself like a slave in front of 'all important' and patronizing western leaders has only embarrassed Tsvangirai. His begging has largely went unanswered as the West hanker for restoration of neocolonial access to Zimbabwe's land.
Is this the aha moment for Tsvangirai and his followers? Only time will tell.
Monday, 8 June 2009
Zimbabwe: Sanctions a Damaging Reality
Tichaona Zindoga
ON May 4, Finance Minister Tendai Biti spoke of "billions and billions" of World Bank money that Zimbabwe was being barred from accessing by the illegal sanctions imposed on the country by America.
Hearing this, one could be forgiven for hoping that the era of political sophism, or its no-less-evil relation called intellectual dishonesty, had thankfully ended.
The historical, chronological and intellectual contexts of his revelation, which is rather a belated admission, offer a significant basis for the review of Zimbabwe's eco-politics for the last decade in general, and the first 100 days of the inclusive government in particular.
Minister Biti's acknowledgement that US-imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe scuttled government efforts to meaningfully discharge its mandate came on the 81st day of the "inclusive government" formed out of the country's three main political parties -- Zanu-PF and the two MDC formations.
He had come from the Spring Meetings of the Bretton Woods institutions, held in America, where he also met personalities he described as "mothers and those who gave paternity to ZDERA (Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act)", America's sanctions law on Zimbabwe signed by George W. Bush in December 2001.
At the behest of America, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have denied Zimbabwe access to critical developmental aid, credit lines and technical assistance.
Coming as it did on the twilight zone of the first 100 days of the inclusive government of Zimbabwe, Minister Biti's admission gave an important innuendo.
Minister Biti suggested that first 100 days (the much vaunted and oft-unrealistic yardstick which has somewhat been taken for a fact since 1933), which also saw him compiling the Short-Term Emergency Recovery Programme document, were never the coup it was hoped to be because of the illegal embargo.
This admission should have marked a turning point from the plausible but largely false arguments that Zimbabwe's decade-old economic distress has been a result of the "mismanagement" of Zanu-PF, and that sanctions imposed by the US and her allies were simply "targeted" at Zanu-PF officials and their families.
The sanctions, in fact, were a calculated measure of bullying the Zanu-PF government into reversing black empowerment initiatives such as land reform and indigenisation programmes, which not only upset historical capitalist injustices but raises the spectre of socialism which the West lives in mortal fear of.
Such programmes, the West also feared, set a "bad" precedent to other Third World countries whose vast natural resources remain in the hands of a minority of Western colonial stock.
But Minister Biti's rare honesty has largely gone unshared in the circles that might well have been inspired to finally come to grips with the real impediment of Zimbabwe's success.
In fact, the world has been treated to a cacophony of sophistic arguments which have not only sought to explain away the damaging centrality of the illegal sanctions, but the fact that the new players in government have not been a magic wand in and of themselves as to bring a dramatic turnaround of the economy.
The twilight zone of the first 100 days of the inclusive government, when Minister Biti noted the adverse effects of the sanctions also saw the escalation of the talk about "the outstanding issues of the GPA (Global Political Agreement)".
The GPA is the broad-based agreement signed on September 15 last year that led to the formation of the inclusive government.
The "outstanding issues", are chiefly the alleged "unilateral" appointment by President Mugabe of Reserve Bank Governor Dr Gideon Gono and Attorney General Mr Johannes Tomana.
These "key appointments", we have been made to understand, are one reason why the government has failed, for example, to go beyond measures which were mooted before its inception, like awarding its civil service the very modest US$100 allowances.
Neither can the government be able to speak with one voice against the illegal sanctions imposed on the country, which the parties undertook to do in the letter and spirit of the agreement, one could assume.
The two appointments were undertaken in terms of the law and President Mugabe has maintained that the two will not leave, in spite of the political pressure.
However, MDC-T has said it is taking up the matter with the guarantors of the GPA, with party president, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai saying recently he was only a "worker of the party" and needed to do the bidding of his charges.
This is despite his stated belief that there was no deadlock and that 95 per cent of the issues in the agreement had been resolved.
The second reason, which has been attributed to the new government's modest showing, is that there have not been "genuine reforms" since the new government took over and that is why donors have not been too generous with their funds hence.
(Donor countries, in all honesty, have been too hard hit by the current global financial crisis to open their purses easily.)
But the countries have been made to appear like some kind of "hard-hearted partners" -- like the picture of MDC-T badgering Prime Minister Tsvangirai out of his conscience -- as to demand seismic changes without which there cannot be any meaningful progress.
US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, was trying to assume this mould of the "hard-hearted partner", when she told a television station recently that "it was in the best interest of everyone" for President Mugabe to leave office.
She divined that in the "the last years" President Mugabe he has visited misery on "his children and the children of his children".
What she did not say was that she is, in Minister Biti's words, one of the "mothers" of the same misery, being one of the sponsors of ZDERA along with other persons such as Jesse Helms.
It is to be assumed that the former first lady and once-presidential aspirant was, riding a moral high horse, telling the world that her country cared so much for the Zimbabwean populace which her country has illegally sanctioned. But she missed the point, just as could be pictured of MDC-T pressuring its leader out of his convictions, that Prime Minister Tsvangirai had just recently told off any pressure on President Mugabe to leave office, saying he was part of the solution to Zimbabwe's American-created problems.
Yet still others, like that perennial "people-driven constitution" campaigner Lovemore Madhuku believe that the implementation of "neo-liberal" values are the basis of, and yardstick for a successful government.
For some reason, Minister Biti himself for all his knowledge of how "the mothers and those who gave paternity" to the misery of Zimbabwe in the name of ZDERA, has not been immune to this.
Some analysts have expressed reservations for such apparent preoccupation with endearing the country to such institutions as the World Bank through "neo-liberal" partiality, while systematically ignoring how the same neo-liberalism has been used as a smokescreen in the aggression on Zimbabwe's interests.
Sunday Mail columnist Dr Tafataona Mahoso, in a recent article, expresses dismay with the use of "neo-liberal human rights propaganda" as well as "the fanatical insistence on parity" (which is part of the "outstanding issues" drive).
He said, "what people expect is competency and speed in de-mining the gulf of Anglo-Saxon sanctions dividing our people".
In essence, he believes the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe are not only the single most devastating manifestation of undue external interference, but have set an agenda that deflects nationally-beneficial discourse through entrenching a lot of political sophism.
And that is enough to say all the shadowy "Zim Eyes" might still make a living out of neo-liberal baloney and seeing Zimbabwe's eco-polity at a parallax, and enjoy themselves immensely out of the other side of the coins that have brought suffering to the generality of Zimbabweans.
ON May 4, Finance Minister Tendai Biti spoke of "billions and billions" of World Bank money that Zimbabwe was being barred from accessing by the illegal sanctions imposed on the country by America.
Hearing this, one could be forgiven for hoping that the era of political sophism, or its no-less-evil relation called intellectual dishonesty, had thankfully ended.
The historical, chronological and intellectual contexts of his revelation, which is rather a belated admission, offer a significant basis for the review of Zimbabwe's eco-politics for the last decade in general, and the first 100 days of the inclusive government in particular.
Minister Biti's acknowledgement that US-imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe scuttled government efforts to meaningfully discharge its mandate came on the 81st day of the "inclusive government" formed out of the country's three main political parties -- Zanu-PF and the two MDC formations.
He had come from the Spring Meetings of the Bretton Woods institutions, held in America, where he also met personalities he described as "mothers and those who gave paternity to ZDERA (Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act)", America's sanctions law on Zimbabwe signed by George W. Bush in December 2001.
At the behest of America, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have denied Zimbabwe access to critical developmental aid, credit lines and technical assistance.
Coming as it did on the twilight zone of the first 100 days of the inclusive government of Zimbabwe, Minister Biti's admission gave an important innuendo.
Minister Biti suggested that first 100 days (the much vaunted and oft-unrealistic yardstick which has somewhat been taken for a fact since 1933), which also saw him compiling the Short-Term Emergency Recovery Programme document, were never the coup it was hoped to be because of the illegal embargo.
This admission should have marked a turning point from the plausible but largely false arguments that Zimbabwe's decade-old economic distress has been a result of the "mismanagement" of Zanu-PF, and that sanctions imposed by the US and her allies were simply "targeted" at Zanu-PF officials and their families.
The sanctions, in fact, were a calculated measure of bullying the Zanu-PF government into reversing black empowerment initiatives such as land reform and indigenisation programmes, which not only upset historical capitalist injustices but raises the spectre of socialism which the West lives in mortal fear of.
Such programmes, the West also feared, set a "bad" precedent to other Third World countries whose vast natural resources remain in the hands of a minority of Western colonial stock.
But Minister Biti's rare honesty has largely gone unshared in the circles that might well have been inspired to finally come to grips with the real impediment of Zimbabwe's success.
In fact, the world has been treated to a cacophony of sophistic arguments which have not only sought to explain away the damaging centrality of the illegal sanctions, but the fact that the new players in government have not been a magic wand in and of themselves as to bring a dramatic turnaround of the economy.
The twilight zone of the first 100 days of the inclusive government, when Minister Biti noted the adverse effects of the sanctions also saw the escalation of the talk about "the outstanding issues of the GPA (Global Political Agreement)".
The GPA is the broad-based agreement signed on September 15 last year that led to the formation of the inclusive government.
The "outstanding issues", are chiefly the alleged "unilateral" appointment by President Mugabe of Reserve Bank Governor Dr Gideon Gono and Attorney General Mr Johannes Tomana.
These "key appointments", we have been made to understand, are one reason why the government has failed, for example, to go beyond measures which were mooted before its inception, like awarding its civil service the very modest US$100 allowances.
Neither can the government be able to speak with one voice against the illegal sanctions imposed on the country, which the parties undertook to do in the letter and spirit of the agreement, one could assume.
The two appointments were undertaken in terms of the law and President Mugabe has maintained that the two will not leave, in spite of the political pressure.
However, MDC-T has said it is taking up the matter with the guarantors of the GPA, with party president, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai saying recently he was only a "worker of the party" and needed to do the bidding of his charges.
This is despite his stated belief that there was no deadlock and that 95 per cent of the issues in the agreement had been resolved.
The second reason, which has been attributed to the new government's modest showing, is that there have not been "genuine reforms" since the new government took over and that is why donors have not been too generous with their funds hence.
(Donor countries, in all honesty, have been too hard hit by the current global financial crisis to open their purses easily.)
But the countries have been made to appear like some kind of "hard-hearted partners" -- like the picture of MDC-T badgering Prime Minister Tsvangirai out of his conscience -- as to demand seismic changes without which there cannot be any meaningful progress.
US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, was trying to assume this mould of the "hard-hearted partner", when she told a television station recently that "it was in the best interest of everyone" for President Mugabe to leave office.
She divined that in the "the last years" President Mugabe he has visited misery on "his children and the children of his children".
What she did not say was that she is, in Minister Biti's words, one of the "mothers" of the same misery, being one of the sponsors of ZDERA along with other persons such as Jesse Helms.
It is to be assumed that the former first lady and once-presidential aspirant was, riding a moral high horse, telling the world that her country cared so much for the Zimbabwean populace which her country has illegally sanctioned. But she missed the point, just as could be pictured of MDC-T pressuring its leader out of his convictions, that Prime Minister Tsvangirai had just recently told off any pressure on President Mugabe to leave office, saying he was part of the solution to Zimbabwe's American-created problems.
Yet still others, like that perennial "people-driven constitution" campaigner Lovemore Madhuku believe that the implementation of "neo-liberal" values are the basis of, and yardstick for a successful government.
For some reason, Minister Biti himself for all his knowledge of how "the mothers and those who gave paternity" to the misery of Zimbabwe in the name of ZDERA, has not been immune to this.
Some analysts have expressed reservations for such apparent preoccupation with endearing the country to such institutions as the World Bank through "neo-liberal" partiality, while systematically ignoring how the same neo-liberalism has been used as a smokescreen in the aggression on Zimbabwe's interests.
Sunday Mail columnist Dr Tafataona Mahoso, in a recent article, expresses dismay with the use of "neo-liberal human rights propaganda" as well as "the fanatical insistence on parity" (which is part of the "outstanding issues" drive).
He said, "what people expect is competency and speed in de-mining the gulf of Anglo-Saxon sanctions dividing our people".
In essence, he believes the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe are not only the single most devastating manifestation of undue external interference, but have set an agenda that deflects nationally-beneficial discourse through entrenching a lot of political sophism.
And that is enough to say all the shadowy "Zim Eyes" might still make a living out of neo-liberal baloney and seeing Zimbabwe's eco-polity at a parallax, and enjoy themselves immensely out of the other side of the coins that have brought suffering to the generality of Zimbabweans.
Thursday, 21 May 2009
Gono against the sanctions begging western puppet Tendayi Biti.
The Rt. Hon. Prime Minister of the
Republic of Zimbabwe
Mr. M. R. Tsvangirai
Munhumutapa Building
Samora Machel Avenue
HARARE
Rt. Hon. Prime Minister, Sir,
RE: COMPLAINT AGAINST PERSONAL VICTIMIZATION AND
VILIFICATION BY HON. MINISTER OF FINANCE T. L. BITI.
1. As you may be aware Hon. Prime Minister, the strained relations between the Hon. Minister of Finance and myself are a matter of public knowledge and, need I say, concern.
2. For more than a year now, the Minister has uttered, publicly and privately, words and statements that are not only criminally defamatory but also, seriously insulting to my person, family and indeed, to the institution that I work for, its Board, management and staff. His misleading statements are also career limiting in my field of Finance and economics.
3. Professional disagreements in public offices are a matter of daily life for public personalities but constant and malicious misrepresentations, unrestrained utterances, incitement of violence against the person of the Governor, outright lies and victimization against persons doing their normal duties are traits normally unheard of especially coming from “Offices that are supposed to know and act better”
4. Examples may drive home the point:
(a) At a campaign rally in Masvingo last year, Hon. Minister called me names and accused me of “being at the epicenter of ZANU (PF) terror machine”; “an economic saboteur, terrorist and number one Al-Qaeda who deserves to be shot by a firing squad”
These utterances were widely circulated both in the print and electronic media and today form the basis of the hate-mail that I receive and the hatred many MDC-T supporters display against the Governor. Indeed the international community has also been poisoned to believe that I am a member of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. These threats to my life and family are very unsettling and may one day be carried out by an over-zealous MDC-T Party Member or just criminals hiding behind the Minister’s publicly declared wishes of getting me killed.
(b) On several occasions, the distinguished Minister has accused me of “killing this economy through printing money”. This is despite the overwhelming evidence that the country was and remains under the yoke of debilitating sanctions and other constraints such as droughts/floods and political differences all of which are/were militating against international support in the area of Lines of Credit among other needs. The Hon. Minister only came to acknowledge on Monday 4 May, 2009 when he returned from the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings held in Washington DC. USA that SANCTIONS are “real” and that they need to be removed if we are to turn around this economy. This admission was despite previous denials.
5. Now if indeed the Hon. Minister, after only 3 months in office is now realizing that this economy cannot be stabilized let alone turned-around without the repeal of ZIDERA and other pieces of “restrictive” actions by some economic powers in the West, and that without such a repeal of these toxic pieces of legislation and actions against Zimbabwe, the country cannot access the much needed lines of credit, how did or does the Hon. Minister expect me to successfully turn-around this economy in the presence of ZIDERA which some have accused him of having participated in its “birth” and “sustenance” over the years?
6. After my three (3) children were unceremoniously expelled out of Australia before your visit to that Country, Sir in 2006 they suffered a two year roll-back in their university education, and when they found new universities to go to, they found themselves being called upon to explain how their father is allegedly associated with the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization with the threat of further expulsion from their new university if the allegations were/are not refuted. Who among us parents can stomach such misfortune if directed at their own children?
7. It is a known fact that Leadership is not about expecting others to perform miracles where the leader himself cannot perform same. What is difficult to achieve for the Hon. Minister today (raising lines of credit) is a fraction of what my team and I were expected to achieve in an environment of not only ZIDERA but serious political and social in-fighting between Zimbabweans prior to the Inclusive Government.
8. A lot more “kiya-kiyering” was and had to be done to sustain the economy, sustain life and everything else this Inclusive Government found in place. Without such gymnastics including the so-called printing of money or “quantitative easing” as they are now calling it in Europe and elsewhere, this country could have easily degenerated into unprecedented chaos with no opportunity ever for anyone in the Inclusive Government to be in the comfortable positions from where they are now calling the “shots” today.
9. I have suffered and continue to suffer abuse and ridicule at a time when you as Prime Minister have been telling the Nation that bye-gones are bye-gones and that we need to move forward but this message doesn’t seem to have found root in some quarters.
10. You know very well Rt. Hon. Prime Minister that people are being highly dishonest when they allege that it is/was the Governor of the Reserve Bank who “killed” this economy for I do have on file, letters from Ministers of Finance and other stakeholders including Labour and Business dealing with requests for funding and/or authorizations to move in a given direction.
11. I believe that it needs to be appreciated, Rt. Hon. Prime Minister, that the last ten years have been a period of both political and economic madness in this country and that the work of sanctions-busting, the world-over, is not a walk in the garden park or a straight-forward text-book lesson and practice from an Apprenticeship Economic textbook.
12. Sanctions are a form of war-fare against the sanctioned country or people and my job was to try and defeat them, not physically but through “out-of-the-box” type of thinking strategies all of which had the blessings of my Head of State and President Cde. R. G Mugabe whom you are free to check and verify with, as well as the entire Cabinet of the day.
13. It is heartening to note though that Hon. Minister Biti is following the same path, going to the same African Banks and friends who stood by us during the said period of madness and only last week, the Hon Minister happily and proudly ran with and announced to the world facilities that my team and I had negotiated and secured namely the US$300 million Country Program from Afrieximbank which was approved in Mauritius on 12 December 2008 and the PTA Bank facility, again which we had negotiated last year and was awaiting activation.
14. These two institutions, together with Al-Shams linked to Mr. Jayesh Shar, are the three main sources of funding who helped us during difficult times. Today it is an open secret that Hon. Minister Biti is going to all of them for support and all three are supporting the Inclusive Government at a critical time when noone else, including the so-called donor community is giving us funds due to understandable economic difficulties in their own backyards.
15. The point here Rt. Hon. Prime Minister is that nothing my team and I did is not being followed by the new Minister of Finance and I can point out that 99% of our recommendations for the turn-around of this economy have been included in STERP (see attached analysis and evaluation document).
16. This is not to take away anything/credit from the Hon. Minister’s well received STERP but to draw attention to the need for “modesty in pronouncements made and credit taken while standing at the pulpit” so to speak when the Minister is addressing stakeholders.
17. It is against this background that charges to the effect that this Governor and his team “murdered” or committed atrocities in this economy are hereby vehemently denied.
A LOT SAID, DONE AND MISREPRESENTED…
18. A lot has been said by the distinguished Hon. Minister, done and misrepresented all in an effort to destroy the Governor, to remove me from the post (as if I re-appointed myself!).
WHERE IS ALL THIS HATRED COMING FROM?
19. In trying to examine the possible angles from where such personal hatred, venom and attacks have been coming, it has dawned on my team and I, that all this noise about “Governor must Go song” especially as it rings loudest from the powerful Secretary General of MDC-T and Minister of Finance may have its background in self-interest and protection. The background to it is as summarized in the attached write-up involving the Hon. Minister’s Legal Firm, Honey and Blanckenberg.
20. The background involves the Bank’s investigation into alleged rampant externalization of foreign currency resources and money laundering activities discovered at the Minister’s legal firm Honey & Blanckenberg where he is (or was) a partner.
21. After getting a tip-off on the case in which the Law Firm was allegedly prejudicing the country of the much needed foreign currency and possibly tax-revenues due to Government through such Exchange Control Violations, my team investigated the Firm’s Records (those which had not yet been deleted by then) and came up with a “can of worms” suggesting that the Firm could have been involved in these forex scams from before 2003.
22. As the attached summary will show you, in the few months that the investigating team considered, it uncovered a total of over US$1 million which was allegedly kept outside the country in violation of Section 9, 10(1)C and 11 of the 1996 Exchange Control Regulations.
YEAR
AMOUNT
October 2005
US$102 210.00
November 2005
174 179.00
December 2005
110 664.00
January 2006
139 758.00
February 2006
145 939.66
March 2006
168 047.11
April 2006
153 281.00
May 2006
31 864.50
TOTAL US$1 025 943,53
Records for other months were allegedly deleted before the investigating team could lay their hands on them.
23. Intimidatory tactics are said to have been encountered during these investigations leading to various forms of delays in the completion of this assignment/case.
24. Ultimately as the attached report shows, one of the whistle-blowers who was employed by the Law Firm had to leave the Firm due to alleged victimization, the same that I am suffering from today.
25. Of course legal explanations, arguments and justifications were proffered by the Law Firm, as would be expected, but these were found to hold no substance as it was proven that the Honey and Blanckenberg as a Law Firm were banking their money into Barclays Bank PLC, Barclays House, Victoria Street, Douglas, Isle of Man via UK, account details being:
Swift Code: BARCGB22
Account No. 68949366,
Sort Code : 20-26-74.
IBAN : GB95BARC20267468949366.
26. The case and its facts were analysed by the Bank’s legal personnel in the normal way that the Bank does with all other cases before deciding to go ahead with prosecution and as we speak, the matter is yet to come to actual trial although it is at the courts.
27. With Advocate Eric Matinenga the one set to be Accused Firm’s defence lawyer, (as of January 2009), my team members, seeing what victimization is being meted against the Governor, is now expressing reluctance to go and stand in court to testify against the Minister of Finance’s legal Firm.
GOVERNOR’S VICTIMISATION…
28. The issue now at stake is, how come the Governor continues to be victimized for doing his job while the Rt. Hon. Prime Minister, who is supposed to be in the picture of all this “through ministerial declarations of interest or conflict(s) with institutions or persons that the Ministers deal with under their Ministries?
29. It is not difficult to conclude that threats of investigating the Governor “left right and centre” as well as putting the Governor on the GPA list of persons who must go has all along been motivated by the desire to intimidate the Governor and his team or at best to scandalize and remove me from the scene so that a pliable Governor is put in my place and certain matters then get buried under the carpet in the process.
30. This also explains the “personal hatred” nature of the Minister’s zeal, enthusiasm and speed with which he seeks to remove the present Governor from the Chairmanship of the RBZ Board in conflict with best practices in SADC, IMF, World Bank, China, Russia, UK and the world over. The pre-occupation is total and no stone has been left unturned todate to try and achieve this.
31. Is this the policy or policies of the Inclusive Government to victimize its officials or that of MDC-T to disguise personal wars and camouflage them as national matters of incompetence?
32. There have also been various misrepresentations made to Cabinet and Cabinet Committees by the Hon. Minister relating to false allegations of “borrowing US$1 billion without authority” which proved embarrassing to the Minister when refuted with evidence.
33. Are the Parties (MDC-T) aware that they are being enjoined in a personal war far removed from national issues but financial at personal levels? Are SADC Heads of State or the Facilitator, the IMF/World Bank and others in the picture of this scandal?
34. There is more that I could say and have come up with to prove a case of victimization against me but it is not necessary to deal with those issues now.
PROPOSED WAY FORWARD
35. Rt. Honourable Prime Minister, herewith my proposals for the way forward:
(a). That this letter be discussed between yourself and the Minister and if you see it fit, failing which I propose that it be brought for discussion in Cabinet or Parliament or JOMIC and, that, I be called upon to testify if need be.
(b). That RBZ be granted autonomy in the current legislative amendments to report to Parliament as recommended by SADC in its Model Central Bank Legislation – copies of which were sent to the Rt. Hon. Prime Ministers Office and not the current Minister of Finance until the Hon. Minister renounces his vindictive mission against me.
(c). That the Hon. Minister and myself be invited for discussion with the Rt. Honourable Prime Minister to iron out the issues I have raised and to normalize and our relationship.
(d). That the Governor and team be given/granted immunity/protection at law against victimization by the Ministers, some of whom may have been involved in nefarious/regrettable activities before. Otherwise all RBZ Governors will continue to face the same fate that I am facing and experiencing, disguised as national desire to do good yet the reality is that deep down there are personal interests at stake in need of protection.
(e). That a public apology be made to the Governor by the Minister of Finance and both MDC-T and MDC-M Parties and their followers be informed that the Governor did not “kill” this economy and that he is not a member of Al-Qaeda nor does he deserve to be shot by the “firing squad”. In addition a smart way has to be found to advise the International Community of the true facts so that it gives a correct and informed judgment on the Governor.
CONCLUSION
36. It is not unusual for two or more people to fail to work together and if I am to leave RBZ at some stage, as I will in future, the current approach and strategy is definitely not the correct one.
37. There are better, more mature, effective, cordial and amicable ways of people partying ways but not in the manner of the “PURSUER” and the “PURSUED”, the “Victor” and the Vanquished”. That approach does not work in the area of economics and finance.
38. I await direction(s) from the Rt. Hon. Prime Minister.
Yours Sincerely
G. GONO
GOVERNOR
Enclosures
1. The Evidence relating to Honey & Blanckenberg Forex Externalization Investigations – Basis for Victimization by Minister of Finance Hon. T. L. Biti.
2. Evidence to show that the African Export-Import Bank (Afrieximbank and PTA Facilities recently announced were successfully negotiated by Governor prior to INCLUSIVE GOVERNMENT.
3. Comparative Analysis of STERP with the Governor’s Economic Advices over the Last 5 Years. So much about the Governor being incompetent when in fact the same STERP is 99% a product of my Advice.
Republic of Zimbabwe
Mr. M. R. Tsvangirai
Munhumutapa Building
Samora Machel Avenue
HARARE
Rt. Hon. Prime Minister, Sir,
RE: COMPLAINT AGAINST PERSONAL VICTIMIZATION AND
VILIFICATION BY HON. MINISTER OF FINANCE T. L. BITI.
1. As you may be aware Hon. Prime Minister, the strained relations between the Hon. Minister of Finance and myself are a matter of public knowledge and, need I say, concern.
2. For more than a year now, the Minister has uttered, publicly and privately, words and statements that are not only criminally defamatory but also, seriously insulting to my person, family and indeed, to the institution that I work for, its Board, management and staff. His misleading statements are also career limiting in my field of Finance and economics.
3. Professional disagreements in public offices are a matter of daily life for public personalities but constant and malicious misrepresentations, unrestrained utterances, incitement of violence against the person of the Governor, outright lies and victimization against persons doing their normal duties are traits normally unheard of especially coming from “Offices that are supposed to know and act better”
4. Examples may drive home the point:
(a) At a campaign rally in Masvingo last year, Hon. Minister called me names and accused me of “being at the epicenter of ZANU (PF) terror machine”; “an economic saboteur, terrorist and number one Al-Qaeda who deserves to be shot by a firing squad”
These utterances were widely circulated both in the print and electronic media and today form the basis of the hate-mail that I receive and the hatred many MDC-T supporters display against the Governor. Indeed the international community has also been poisoned to believe that I am a member of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. These threats to my life and family are very unsettling and may one day be carried out by an over-zealous MDC-T Party Member or just criminals hiding behind the Minister’s publicly declared wishes of getting me killed.
(b) On several occasions, the distinguished Minister has accused me of “killing this economy through printing money”. This is despite the overwhelming evidence that the country was and remains under the yoke of debilitating sanctions and other constraints such as droughts/floods and political differences all of which are/were militating against international support in the area of Lines of Credit among other needs. The Hon. Minister only came to acknowledge on Monday 4 May, 2009 when he returned from the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings held in Washington DC. USA that SANCTIONS are “real” and that they need to be removed if we are to turn around this economy. This admission was despite previous denials.
5. Now if indeed the Hon. Minister, after only 3 months in office is now realizing that this economy cannot be stabilized let alone turned-around without the repeal of ZIDERA and other pieces of “restrictive” actions by some economic powers in the West, and that without such a repeal of these toxic pieces of legislation and actions against Zimbabwe, the country cannot access the much needed lines of credit, how did or does the Hon. Minister expect me to successfully turn-around this economy in the presence of ZIDERA which some have accused him of having participated in its “birth” and “sustenance” over the years?
6. After my three (3) children were unceremoniously expelled out of Australia before your visit to that Country, Sir in 2006 they suffered a two year roll-back in their university education, and when they found new universities to go to, they found themselves being called upon to explain how their father is allegedly associated with the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization with the threat of further expulsion from their new university if the allegations were/are not refuted. Who among us parents can stomach such misfortune if directed at their own children?
7. It is a known fact that Leadership is not about expecting others to perform miracles where the leader himself cannot perform same. What is difficult to achieve for the Hon. Minister today (raising lines of credit) is a fraction of what my team and I were expected to achieve in an environment of not only ZIDERA but serious political and social in-fighting between Zimbabweans prior to the Inclusive Government.
8. A lot more “kiya-kiyering” was and had to be done to sustain the economy, sustain life and everything else this Inclusive Government found in place. Without such gymnastics including the so-called printing of money or “quantitative easing” as they are now calling it in Europe and elsewhere, this country could have easily degenerated into unprecedented chaos with no opportunity ever for anyone in the Inclusive Government to be in the comfortable positions from where they are now calling the “shots” today.
9. I have suffered and continue to suffer abuse and ridicule at a time when you as Prime Minister have been telling the Nation that bye-gones are bye-gones and that we need to move forward but this message doesn’t seem to have found root in some quarters.
10. You know very well Rt. Hon. Prime Minister that people are being highly dishonest when they allege that it is/was the Governor of the Reserve Bank who “killed” this economy for I do have on file, letters from Ministers of Finance and other stakeholders including Labour and Business dealing with requests for funding and/or authorizations to move in a given direction.
11. I believe that it needs to be appreciated, Rt. Hon. Prime Minister, that the last ten years have been a period of both political and economic madness in this country and that the work of sanctions-busting, the world-over, is not a walk in the garden park or a straight-forward text-book lesson and practice from an Apprenticeship Economic textbook.
12. Sanctions are a form of war-fare against the sanctioned country or people and my job was to try and defeat them, not physically but through “out-of-the-box” type of thinking strategies all of which had the blessings of my Head of State and President Cde. R. G Mugabe whom you are free to check and verify with, as well as the entire Cabinet of the day.
13. It is heartening to note though that Hon. Minister Biti is following the same path, going to the same African Banks and friends who stood by us during the said period of madness and only last week, the Hon Minister happily and proudly ran with and announced to the world facilities that my team and I had negotiated and secured namely the US$300 million Country Program from Afrieximbank which was approved in Mauritius on 12 December 2008 and the PTA Bank facility, again which we had negotiated last year and was awaiting activation.
14. These two institutions, together with Al-Shams linked to Mr. Jayesh Shar, are the three main sources of funding who helped us during difficult times. Today it is an open secret that Hon. Minister Biti is going to all of them for support and all three are supporting the Inclusive Government at a critical time when noone else, including the so-called donor community is giving us funds due to understandable economic difficulties in their own backyards.
15. The point here Rt. Hon. Prime Minister is that nothing my team and I did is not being followed by the new Minister of Finance and I can point out that 99% of our recommendations for the turn-around of this economy have been included in STERP (see attached analysis and evaluation document).
16. This is not to take away anything/credit from the Hon. Minister’s well received STERP but to draw attention to the need for “modesty in pronouncements made and credit taken while standing at the pulpit” so to speak when the Minister is addressing stakeholders.
17. It is against this background that charges to the effect that this Governor and his team “murdered” or committed atrocities in this economy are hereby vehemently denied.
A LOT SAID, DONE AND MISREPRESENTED…
18. A lot has been said by the distinguished Hon. Minister, done and misrepresented all in an effort to destroy the Governor, to remove me from the post (as if I re-appointed myself!).
WHERE IS ALL THIS HATRED COMING FROM?
19. In trying to examine the possible angles from where such personal hatred, venom and attacks have been coming, it has dawned on my team and I, that all this noise about “Governor must Go song” especially as it rings loudest from the powerful Secretary General of MDC-T and Minister of Finance may have its background in self-interest and protection. The background to it is as summarized in the attached write-up involving the Hon. Minister’s Legal Firm, Honey and Blanckenberg.
20. The background involves the Bank’s investigation into alleged rampant externalization of foreign currency resources and money laundering activities discovered at the Minister’s legal firm Honey & Blanckenberg where he is (or was) a partner.
21. After getting a tip-off on the case in which the Law Firm was allegedly prejudicing the country of the much needed foreign currency and possibly tax-revenues due to Government through such Exchange Control Violations, my team investigated the Firm’s Records (those which had not yet been deleted by then) and came up with a “can of worms” suggesting that the Firm could have been involved in these forex scams from before 2003.
22. As the attached summary will show you, in the few months that the investigating team considered, it uncovered a total of over US$1 million which was allegedly kept outside the country in violation of Section 9, 10(1)C and 11 of the 1996 Exchange Control Regulations.
YEAR
AMOUNT
October 2005
US$102 210.00
November 2005
174 179.00
December 2005
110 664.00
January 2006
139 758.00
February 2006
145 939.66
March 2006
168 047.11
April 2006
153 281.00
May 2006
31 864.50
TOTAL US$1 025 943,53
Records for other months were allegedly deleted before the investigating team could lay their hands on them.
23. Intimidatory tactics are said to have been encountered during these investigations leading to various forms of delays in the completion of this assignment/case.
24. Ultimately as the attached report shows, one of the whistle-blowers who was employed by the Law Firm had to leave the Firm due to alleged victimization, the same that I am suffering from today.
25. Of course legal explanations, arguments and justifications were proffered by the Law Firm, as would be expected, but these were found to hold no substance as it was proven that the Honey and Blanckenberg as a Law Firm were banking their money into Barclays Bank PLC, Barclays House, Victoria Street, Douglas, Isle of Man via UK, account details being:
Swift Code: BARCGB22
Account No. 68949366,
Sort Code : 20-26-74.
IBAN : GB95BARC20267468949366.
26. The case and its facts were analysed by the Bank’s legal personnel in the normal way that the Bank does with all other cases before deciding to go ahead with prosecution and as we speak, the matter is yet to come to actual trial although it is at the courts.
27. With Advocate Eric Matinenga the one set to be Accused Firm’s defence lawyer, (as of January 2009), my team members, seeing what victimization is being meted against the Governor, is now expressing reluctance to go and stand in court to testify against the Minister of Finance’s legal Firm.
GOVERNOR’S VICTIMISATION…
28. The issue now at stake is, how come the Governor continues to be victimized for doing his job while the Rt. Hon. Prime Minister, who is supposed to be in the picture of all this “through ministerial declarations of interest or conflict(s) with institutions or persons that the Ministers deal with under their Ministries?
29. It is not difficult to conclude that threats of investigating the Governor “left right and centre” as well as putting the Governor on the GPA list of persons who must go has all along been motivated by the desire to intimidate the Governor and his team or at best to scandalize and remove me from the scene so that a pliable Governor is put in my place and certain matters then get buried under the carpet in the process.
30. This also explains the “personal hatred” nature of the Minister’s zeal, enthusiasm and speed with which he seeks to remove the present Governor from the Chairmanship of the RBZ Board in conflict with best practices in SADC, IMF, World Bank, China, Russia, UK and the world over. The pre-occupation is total and no stone has been left unturned todate to try and achieve this.
31. Is this the policy or policies of the Inclusive Government to victimize its officials or that of MDC-T to disguise personal wars and camouflage them as national matters of incompetence?
32. There have also been various misrepresentations made to Cabinet and Cabinet Committees by the Hon. Minister relating to false allegations of “borrowing US$1 billion without authority” which proved embarrassing to the Minister when refuted with evidence.
33. Are the Parties (MDC-T) aware that they are being enjoined in a personal war far removed from national issues but financial at personal levels? Are SADC Heads of State or the Facilitator, the IMF/World Bank and others in the picture of this scandal?
34. There is more that I could say and have come up with to prove a case of victimization against me but it is not necessary to deal with those issues now.
PROPOSED WAY FORWARD
35. Rt. Honourable Prime Minister, herewith my proposals for the way forward:
(a). That this letter be discussed between yourself and the Minister and if you see it fit, failing which I propose that it be brought for discussion in Cabinet or Parliament or JOMIC and, that, I be called upon to testify if need be.
(b). That RBZ be granted autonomy in the current legislative amendments to report to Parliament as recommended by SADC in its Model Central Bank Legislation – copies of which were sent to the Rt. Hon. Prime Ministers Office and not the current Minister of Finance until the Hon. Minister renounces his vindictive mission against me.
(c). That the Hon. Minister and myself be invited for discussion with the Rt. Honourable Prime Minister to iron out the issues I have raised and to normalize and our relationship.
(d). That the Governor and team be given/granted immunity/protection at law against victimization by the Ministers, some of whom may have been involved in nefarious/regrettable activities before. Otherwise all RBZ Governors will continue to face the same fate that I am facing and experiencing, disguised as national desire to do good yet the reality is that deep down there are personal interests at stake in need of protection.
(e). That a public apology be made to the Governor by the Minister of Finance and both MDC-T and MDC-M Parties and their followers be informed that the Governor did not “kill” this economy and that he is not a member of Al-Qaeda nor does he deserve to be shot by the “firing squad”. In addition a smart way has to be found to advise the International Community of the true facts so that it gives a correct and informed judgment on the Governor.
CONCLUSION
36. It is not unusual for two or more people to fail to work together and if I am to leave RBZ at some stage, as I will in future, the current approach and strategy is definitely not the correct one.
37. There are better, more mature, effective, cordial and amicable ways of people partying ways but not in the manner of the “PURSUER” and the “PURSUED”, the “Victor” and the Vanquished”. That approach does not work in the area of economics and finance.
38. I await direction(s) from the Rt. Hon. Prime Minister.
Yours Sincerely
G. GONO
GOVERNOR
Enclosures
1. The Evidence relating to Honey & Blanckenberg Forex Externalization Investigations – Basis for Victimization by Minister of Finance Hon. T. L. Biti.
2. Evidence to show that the African Export-Import Bank (Afrieximbank and PTA Facilities recently announced were successfully negotiated by Governor prior to INCLUSIVE GOVERNMENT.
3. Comparative Analysis of STERP with the Governor’s Economic Advices over the Last 5 Years. So much about the Governor being incompetent when in fact the same STERP is 99% a product of my Advice.
Thursday, 14 May 2009
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY on ZDERA.
SPEECH OF HON.
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY OF GEORGIA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
* Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, at the international Relations Committee meeting of November 28, 2001, which considered the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, I asked a question of my colleagues who were vociferously supporting this misdirected piece of legislation: ``Can anyone explain how the people in question who now have the land in question in Zimbabwe got title to the land?''
* My query was met with a deafening silence. Those who knew did not want to admit the truth and those who didn't know should have known--that the land was stolen from its indigenous peoples through the British South Africa Company and any ``titles'' to it were illegal and invalid. Whatever the reason for their silence, the answer to this question is the unspoken but real reason for why the United States Congress is now concentrating its time and resources on squeezing an economically-devastated African state under the hypocritical guise of providing a ``transition to democracy.''
* Zimbabwe is Africa's second-longest stable democracy. It is multi-party. It had elections last year where the opposition, Movement for Democratic Change, won over 50 seats in the parliament. It has an opposition press which vigorously criticizes the government and governing party. It has an independent judiciary which issues decisions contrary to the wishes of the governing party. Zimbabwe is not without troubles, but neither is the United States. I have not heard anyone proposing a United States Democracy Act following last year's Presidential electoral debacle. And if a foreign country were to pass legislation calling for a United States Democracy Act which provided funding for United States opposition parties under the fig leaf of ``Voter Education,'' this body and this country would not stand for it.
* There are many de jure and de facto one-party states in the world which are the recipients of support of the United States government. They are not the subject of Congressional legislative sanctions. To any honest observer, Zimbabwe's sin is that it has taken the position to right a wrong, whose resolution has been too long overdue--to return its land to its people. The Zimbabwean government has said that a situation where 2 percent of the population owns 85 percent of the best land is untenable. Those who presently own more than one farm will no longer be able to do so.
* When we get right down to it, this legislation is nothing more than a formal declaration of United States complicity in a program to maintain white-skin privilege. We can call it an ``incentives'' bill, but that does not change its essential ``sanctions'' nature. It is racist and against the interests of the masses of Zimbabweans. In the long-run the Zimbabwe Democracy Act will work against the United States having a mutually beneficial relationship with Africa.
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY OF GEORGIA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
* Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, at the international Relations Committee meeting of November 28, 2001, which considered the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, I asked a question of my colleagues who were vociferously supporting this misdirected piece of legislation: ``Can anyone explain how the people in question who now have the land in question in Zimbabwe got title to the land?''
* My query was met with a deafening silence. Those who knew did not want to admit the truth and those who didn't know should have known--that the land was stolen from its indigenous peoples through the British South Africa Company and any ``titles'' to it were illegal and invalid. Whatever the reason for their silence, the answer to this question is the unspoken but real reason for why the United States Congress is now concentrating its time and resources on squeezing an economically-devastated African state under the hypocritical guise of providing a ``transition to democracy.''
* Zimbabwe is Africa's second-longest stable democracy. It is multi-party. It had elections last year where the opposition, Movement for Democratic Change, won over 50 seats in the parliament. It has an opposition press which vigorously criticizes the government and governing party. It has an independent judiciary which issues decisions contrary to the wishes of the governing party. Zimbabwe is not without troubles, but neither is the United States. I have not heard anyone proposing a United States Democracy Act following last year's Presidential electoral debacle. And if a foreign country were to pass legislation calling for a United States Democracy Act which provided funding for United States opposition parties under the fig leaf of ``Voter Education,'' this body and this country would not stand for it.
* There are many de jure and de facto one-party states in the world which are the recipients of support of the United States government. They are not the subject of Congressional legislative sanctions. To any honest observer, Zimbabwe's sin is that it has taken the position to right a wrong, whose resolution has been too long overdue--to return its land to its people. The Zimbabwean government has said that a situation where 2 percent of the population owns 85 percent of the best land is untenable. Those who presently own more than one farm will no longer be able to do so.
* When we get right down to it, this legislation is nothing more than a formal declaration of United States complicity in a program to maintain white-skin privilege. We can call it an ``incentives'' bill, but that does not change its essential ``sanctions'' nature. It is racist and against the interests of the masses of Zimbabweans. In the long-run the Zimbabwe Democracy Act will work against the United States having a mutually beneficial relationship with Africa.
Sunday, 15 February 2009
Zimbabwe: Back to halcyon days!
Zimbabwe: Back to halcyon days!
WHILE I agree with JOMIC’s call for some forbearance in respect of the newly inaugurated inclusive government, I hotly oppose any attempt to privilege this new arrangement.
Or to turn JOMIC into some kind of "policeman" over the media.
And JOMIC’s meeting with journalists did not do much to dispel this apprehension. For a start, there was no one from the Information Ministry, as if to suggest a new, supra-governmental regulatory layer was being inaugurated.
Secondly, the remarks from the speakers were pretty hackneyed and even intimidatory, in fact reminiscent of Zimbabwe in the early eighties.
The whole event would have been more useful if JOMIC had sought to achieve greater media understanding through a very detailed, off-the-record brief on the whole political process and its prospects.
Much worse, the format of getting representatives of political parties to speak rotationally, in equal measure, suggested exactly the opposite of what the speakers were asserting and sought to project.
Mis-governance by consensus?
But there are more substantive reasons for keeping media regulation off JOMIC’s limits. Politically, after the inauguration of the inclusive government Zimbabwe will not have an official opposition.
It will be governed by consensual politics worked out by the hitherto warring parties.
This raises the spectre of consensual mis-governance to which we have to find institutional cures by way of countervailing alternative power points.
Needless to say the media is one such. JOMIC was set up specifically to review or audit the political agreement of the three parties.
That does not quite give it a blank cheque over larger societal institutions.
While the media, alongside other countervailing institutions normal in a democracy, have to defer to the new kid on the block, they do not have to doff to it.
Whatever adjective comes before it, the new creature to emerge out of the September 15 Agreement is still a government whose work or lack of it impacts variously on citizens.
As it makes decisions, implements them, it will draw reactions — some happy, some quite unhappy — from various interest groups who will seek ventilation through the media.
Bringing views of citizens into the public domain is the reason for existence of the media which profits power by communicating feedback to it.
The bicker from within
More practically, politicians themselves will be the first ones to scald the inclusive government.
Not the media.
We are already beginning to get a foretaste of this: by way of larger pronouncements and visions purveyed before the new creature launches its inaugural meeting by way of cabinet.
There is impulsiveness.
There is perfect confusion regarding party agendas and governmental policies and programmes.
What is worse, one sees an uncanny attempt to answer to outside interests before the views of Zimbabweans — themselves the owners of this thing — are consulted.
Noticing this propensity, outsiders have not wasted time in setting parameters and benchmarks for the new government.
The British have done so, in the process exhibiting their disavowal of this settlement. The Americans are being made to have said so, much as I know better.
The European Union is still keeping a façade of unanimity to placate Britain, much as I know that a good number of member countries are already putting feelers on how best to break out of the straitjacket of British government hatred of Mugabe, which daily pretends to pass for "a policy".
It is a pity that a country that seeks to "mother" another, shows such spiteful fixation with mere individuals, while the "child" shows such remarkable precocity.
Surely a whole big country whose roots in international relations span over centuries cannot obsess over Mugabe, Tsvangirai, Gono, etc, etc?
It suggests a certain infantile outlook which strikes one as backward.
And of course as politicians in the inclusive government jockey and bicker, they will seek the support of different sections of the media, in the process entrenching the polarisation which already exists.
Usurpation of power?
What is more, the Zimbabwe Media Commission, itself a constitutional body, is set for launching.
All the parties agreed to its formation, and even set clear parameters for its operations. Is it not better suited for the kind of role JOMIC sought to do last week?
Does it not have a better claim to leadership in the media industry?
And when members of JOMIC go to serve in different ministries of the inclusive government, can they make demands on the media without appearing to want to put themselves above scrutiny as performers in the inclusive government? I think the idea of creating a media subcommittee under JOMIC is ill-advised.
It must be shelved before a situation of conflict pitting it against the parent Ministry and the proposed Zimbabwe Media Commission.
Media impertinences
I said I agree with JOMIC in so far as the new experiment needs to be nurtured. Or rather in so far as the media need to understand the new political arrangement.
Already, there is abundant evidence that the media have not understood the moment.
For instance, does it make sense to describe the new Prime Minister as taking "charge"?
Taking charge of what?
And this said before the full cabinet is in place?
And this said before the first Cabinet meeting? This said before the Prime Minister has even got staff?
You can see an outdated media working in old mould, in pre-inclusivity mode.
Does it make sense to put the new prime minister under pressure in respect of accused persons already under the charge of courts?
Why instigate the prime minister to undermine the courts on the very first day of taking office? Does it make sense to ask him what he will do on the economy?
What he will do for workers?
What the new Finance Minister will do with the Zimbabwe Dollar; will do with the Governor of the Reserve Bank?
And this from journalists who have copies of the budget on their desks?
And this from journalists who are supposed to know how the cabinet system works; who are supposed to know the place and status of the RBZ and its Governor in terms of the law of the land?
Who appoints the Governor of the Reserve Bank?
Clearly there are sections of the media who are seeking conflict, indeed seeking to upset and ruin the spirit of inclusivity.
By so doing, they are bringing into the home logs infested with ants.
They should not cry when "JOMIC" or some such creature pays them a visit.
Well before they have educated Zimbabweans on what this new creature is all about, they are already seeking a throwback to the days of conflict.
Which way Zimbabwe?
What then is the way forward?
Last week I challenged the inclusive government by asking it to tell us under whose colours it is marching.
That challenge still stands, and will, in my view, determine what amount of harmony there will be in the new structure.
For external western powers, the issue has been whether or not Mugabe will yield to Tsvangirai.
The challenge of recovering the economy has been presented as that of Tsvangirai alone.
I hope we have got to the bottom of this whole argument.
It is an argument about the vision of the new government, specifically a demand to know how nationalistic the new arrangement will be. Or the obverse: how neo-colonial the new arrangement will be.
If it remains nationalistic, the western world has made it clear it will not move in with any assistance, whatever that means.
For any structure with a nationalistic fervour will suggest Mugabe has not given way, something quite in conflict with what I know inclusivity to mean.
If it becomes neo-colonial, aid will come flowing, whatever that aid means.
It will mean Mugabe will have given way. This is exactly what Milliband and Brown meant when they said they will judge the new government in terms of how far it provides a window for Mugabe’s departure.
A window for regime change, in other words, to the extent that Mugabe personifies the liberation government.
Disregarding coy West
Now, how do those in the new government view things? For me that is what is fundamental.
Zimbabwe has had its days of glory in the recent past. In fact until ESAP and sanctions, Zimbabwe was a vibrant, going concern.
It has, in other words, a glorious past to draw from. Zimbabwe has her own resources and a vibrant private sector tradition for exploiting those resources.
It is a rich country full of ingenuity.
While the former is God-given, the latter was achieved through a set of policies deliberately pursued at Independence.
The men and women who designed those policies are still in Government, this time renewed by a change agent called MDC.
In fact those in the MDC cannot dispute this point without negating themselves.
Almost to the man and woman, they are products of post-independence enterprise in Government, an enterprise that got fatigued somewhere, somewhat.
To be pro-people while being pro-private initiative is probably what is needed.
Zimbabwe now has more partners outside of the West. The resource world has more nations, more possibilities.
The present coyness of the West need not be a major hurdle, for as long as we know our strengths and our actual and potential allies. Western assistance may not be what begins; it could very well be what follows after we have made the first tentative steps, alone.
The West cannot afford to ignore Zimbabwe much longer, in a world of resource hungry powers always on the prowl.
Nor should we worry about Mr Brown. If we should worry at all, we should worry about a country called Britain, a people called the British. On it, in them we should dock our foreign relations politics respectively.
Not in Mr Brown. After all, it will not be long before the British people do us a favour by handling Mr Brown for us. What is critical is what we can do with what, who, follows him.
The ambiguities of South African capital
Sadc made a commitment to assist. Already, we have seen a bit of that assistance coming in by way of agricultural inputs.
Another layer of intervention is at the level of currency, specifically the co-circulation of the rand in our economy. It is a very emotive issue, made worse by the fact that the South African economy remains predominantly white and multinational.
That country’s interface with sister republics in the region has not been that edifying. Zambia’s experience with South African capital has been especially sobering.
Had it not been for Chinese mining capital, Zambia would have been reduced to a giant supermarket of South Africa, the way many countries in the rand zone are presently. South African capital only creates real wealth in respect of extractive, non-renewable sectors. Rarely does it beneficiate. Even with the best intentions, the South African Government cannot check the predatory nature of capital in South Africa, particularly its propensity to de-industrialise its hinterland. Which is why we need a properly formulated response that is deeper than Minister Biti’s frenetic, knee-jerk views proffered through Al Jazeera.
Illustratively, after the South African President said it was possible to have Zimbabwe use the rand, the matter quickly became an issue for boardrooms, away from the Government House. It tells us who our partners will be, should we decide on that course of action.
Congratulations and welcome Sirs, Madame!
Whichever way we go, one thing is certain to me. No one man, no one party, will bring Zimbabwe back to her days of glory. It will not be Robert Mugabe. It will not be Morgan Tsvangirai or Arthur Mutambara.
It will be Zimbabweans united by the three men working together. That, for me, is what inclusivity is all about: getting Zimbabweans to refocus and work. In the meantime, congratulations and welcome Mr Prime Minister, Mr Deputy Prime Minister and Madame Deputy Prime Minister. I give my peace; I give my respect and earned support. Icho!
l nathaniel manheru@zimpapers.co.zw.
WHILE I agree with JOMIC’s call for some forbearance in respect of the newly inaugurated inclusive government, I hotly oppose any attempt to privilege this new arrangement.
Or to turn JOMIC into some kind of "policeman" over the media.
And JOMIC’s meeting with journalists did not do much to dispel this apprehension. For a start, there was no one from the Information Ministry, as if to suggest a new, supra-governmental regulatory layer was being inaugurated.
Secondly, the remarks from the speakers were pretty hackneyed and even intimidatory, in fact reminiscent of Zimbabwe in the early eighties.
The whole event would have been more useful if JOMIC had sought to achieve greater media understanding through a very detailed, off-the-record brief on the whole political process and its prospects.
Much worse, the format of getting representatives of political parties to speak rotationally, in equal measure, suggested exactly the opposite of what the speakers were asserting and sought to project.
Mis-governance by consensus?
But there are more substantive reasons for keeping media regulation off JOMIC’s limits. Politically, after the inauguration of the inclusive government Zimbabwe will not have an official opposition.
It will be governed by consensual politics worked out by the hitherto warring parties.
This raises the spectre of consensual mis-governance to which we have to find institutional cures by way of countervailing alternative power points.
Needless to say the media is one such. JOMIC was set up specifically to review or audit the political agreement of the three parties.
That does not quite give it a blank cheque over larger societal institutions.
While the media, alongside other countervailing institutions normal in a democracy, have to defer to the new kid on the block, they do not have to doff to it.
Whatever adjective comes before it, the new creature to emerge out of the September 15 Agreement is still a government whose work or lack of it impacts variously on citizens.
As it makes decisions, implements them, it will draw reactions — some happy, some quite unhappy — from various interest groups who will seek ventilation through the media.
Bringing views of citizens into the public domain is the reason for existence of the media which profits power by communicating feedback to it.
The bicker from within
More practically, politicians themselves will be the first ones to scald the inclusive government.
Not the media.
We are already beginning to get a foretaste of this: by way of larger pronouncements and visions purveyed before the new creature launches its inaugural meeting by way of cabinet.
There is impulsiveness.
There is perfect confusion regarding party agendas and governmental policies and programmes.
What is worse, one sees an uncanny attempt to answer to outside interests before the views of Zimbabweans — themselves the owners of this thing — are consulted.
Noticing this propensity, outsiders have not wasted time in setting parameters and benchmarks for the new government.
The British have done so, in the process exhibiting their disavowal of this settlement. The Americans are being made to have said so, much as I know better.
The European Union is still keeping a façade of unanimity to placate Britain, much as I know that a good number of member countries are already putting feelers on how best to break out of the straitjacket of British government hatred of Mugabe, which daily pretends to pass for "a policy".
It is a pity that a country that seeks to "mother" another, shows such spiteful fixation with mere individuals, while the "child" shows such remarkable precocity.
Surely a whole big country whose roots in international relations span over centuries cannot obsess over Mugabe, Tsvangirai, Gono, etc, etc?
It suggests a certain infantile outlook which strikes one as backward.
And of course as politicians in the inclusive government jockey and bicker, they will seek the support of different sections of the media, in the process entrenching the polarisation which already exists.
Usurpation of power?
What is more, the Zimbabwe Media Commission, itself a constitutional body, is set for launching.
All the parties agreed to its formation, and even set clear parameters for its operations. Is it not better suited for the kind of role JOMIC sought to do last week?
Does it not have a better claim to leadership in the media industry?
And when members of JOMIC go to serve in different ministries of the inclusive government, can they make demands on the media without appearing to want to put themselves above scrutiny as performers in the inclusive government? I think the idea of creating a media subcommittee under JOMIC is ill-advised.
It must be shelved before a situation of conflict pitting it against the parent Ministry and the proposed Zimbabwe Media Commission.
Media impertinences
I said I agree with JOMIC in so far as the new experiment needs to be nurtured. Or rather in so far as the media need to understand the new political arrangement.
Already, there is abundant evidence that the media have not understood the moment.
For instance, does it make sense to describe the new Prime Minister as taking "charge"?
Taking charge of what?
And this said before the full cabinet is in place?
And this said before the first Cabinet meeting? This said before the Prime Minister has even got staff?
You can see an outdated media working in old mould, in pre-inclusivity mode.
Does it make sense to put the new prime minister under pressure in respect of accused persons already under the charge of courts?
Why instigate the prime minister to undermine the courts on the very first day of taking office? Does it make sense to ask him what he will do on the economy?
What he will do for workers?
What the new Finance Minister will do with the Zimbabwe Dollar; will do with the Governor of the Reserve Bank?
And this from journalists who have copies of the budget on their desks?
And this from journalists who are supposed to know how the cabinet system works; who are supposed to know the place and status of the RBZ and its Governor in terms of the law of the land?
Who appoints the Governor of the Reserve Bank?
Clearly there are sections of the media who are seeking conflict, indeed seeking to upset and ruin the spirit of inclusivity.
By so doing, they are bringing into the home logs infested with ants.
They should not cry when "JOMIC" or some such creature pays them a visit.
Well before they have educated Zimbabweans on what this new creature is all about, they are already seeking a throwback to the days of conflict.
Which way Zimbabwe?
What then is the way forward?
Last week I challenged the inclusive government by asking it to tell us under whose colours it is marching.
That challenge still stands, and will, in my view, determine what amount of harmony there will be in the new structure.
For external western powers, the issue has been whether or not Mugabe will yield to Tsvangirai.
The challenge of recovering the economy has been presented as that of Tsvangirai alone.
I hope we have got to the bottom of this whole argument.
It is an argument about the vision of the new government, specifically a demand to know how nationalistic the new arrangement will be. Or the obverse: how neo-colonial the new arrangement will be.
If it remains nationalistic, the western world has made it clear it will not move in with any assistance, whatever that means.
For any structure with a nationalistic fervour will suggest Mugabe has not given way, something quite in conflict with what I know inclusivity to mean.
If it becomes neo-colonial, aid will come flowing, whatever that aid means.
It will mean Mugabe will have given way. This is exactly what Milliband and Brown meant when they said they will judge the new government in terms of how far it provides a window for Mugabe’s departure.
A window for regime change, in other words, to the extent that Mugabe personifies the liberation government.
Disregarding coy West
Now, how do those in the new government view things? For me that is what is fundamental.
Zimbabwe has had its days of glory in the recent past. In fact until ESAP and sanctions, Zimbabwe was a vibrant, going concern.
It has, in other words, a glorious past to draw from. Zimbabwe has her own resources and a vibrant private sector tradition for exploiting those resources.
It is a rich country full of ingenuity.
While the former is God-given, the latter was achieved through a set of policies deliberately pursued at Independence.
The men and women who designed those policies are still in Government, this time renewed by a change agent called MDC.
In fact those in the MDC cannot dispute this point without negating themselves.
Almost to the man and woman, they are products of post-independence enterprise in Government, an enterprise that got fatigued somewhere, somewhat.
To be pro-people while being pro-private initiative is probably what is needed.
Zimbabwe now has more partners outside of the West. The resource world has more nations, more possibilities.
The present coyness of the West need not be a major hurdle, for as long as we know our strengths and our actual and potential allies. Western assistance may not be what begins; it could very well be what follows after we have made the first tentative steps, alone.
The West cannot afford to ignore Zimbabwe much longer, in a world of resource hungry powers always on the prowl.
Nor should we worry about Mr Brown. If we should worry at all, we should worry about a country called Britain, a people called the British. On it, in them we should dock our foreign relations politics respectively.
Not in Mr Brown. After all, it will not be long before the British people do us a favour by handling Mr Brown for us. What is critical is what we can do with what, who, follows him.
The ambiguities of South African capital
Sadc made a commitment to assist. Already, we have seen a bit of that assistance coming in by way of agricultural inputs.
Another layer of intervention is at the level of currency, specifically the co-circulation of the rand in our economy. It is a very emotive issue, made worse by the fact that the South African economy remains predominantly white and multinational.
That country’s interface with sister republics in the region has not been that edifying. Zambia’s experience with South African capital has been especially sobering.
Had it not been for Chinese mining capital, Zambia would have been reduced to a giant supermarket of South Africa, the way many countries in the rand zone are presently. South African capital only creates real wealth in respect of extractive, non-renewable sectors. Rarely does it beneficiate. Even with the best intentions, the South African Government cannot check the predatory nature of capital in South Africa, particularly its propensity to de-industrialise its hinterland. Which is why we need a properly formulated response that is deeper than Minister Biti’s frenetic, knee-jerk views proffered through Al Jazeera.
Illustratively, after the South African President said it was possible to have Zimbabwe use the rand, the matter quickly became an issue for boardrooms, away from the Government House. It tells us who our partners will be, should we decide on that course of action.
Congratulations and welcome Sirs, Madame!
Whichever way we go, one thing is certain to me. No one man, no one party, will bring Zimbabwe back to her days of glory. It will not be Robert Mugabe. It will not be Morgan Tsvangirai or Arthur Mutambara.
It will be Zimbabweans united by the three men working together. That, for me, is what inclusivity is all about: getting Zimbabweans to refocus and work. In the meantime, congratulations and welcome Mr Prime Minister, Mr Deputy Prime Minister and Madame Deputy Prime Minister. I give my peace; I give my respect and earned support. Icho!
l nathaniel manheru@zimpapers.co.zw.
Zimbabwe: Mamdani, Moyo And 'Deep Thinkers'
In response to the reaction of 33 scholars to the publishing of Mahmood Mamdani's 'Lessons of Zimbabwe', David Johnson casts doubt on their critique of an article that is ultimately informed by body of African expertise on Zimbabwe. While these scholars, along with Horace Campbell, seek to ignore or discredit the considerable research of Sam Moyo on the land question, Johnson stresses that 'deep thinking' requires an actual engagement with the scholarship of informed individuals in place of mere dismissals and allegations of Mugabe 'cronyism'.
Following his intervention in the stultifying 'debate' on Zimbabwe (Mahmood Mamdani, 'Lessons of Zimbabwe'), a squad of 33 scholars, mainly from the US and Europe, placed Mamdani and his main accomplice on the land question, Sam Moyo, in the firing line (Timothy Scarnecchia and Jocelyn Alexander et al, 'Lessons of Zimbabwe', London Review of Books, 2009-01-01). However, the executioners showed up with little but blanks and hubris, leaving this reader to ask more questions about their methods than their targets.
Scarnecchia and Alexander et al begin their response by chiding Mamdani for a simplistic take on Zimbabwe, leading one to anticipate the long awaited complexity of analysis on the Zimbabwe crisis. But their misrepresentation of Mamdani's argument on ethnicity as a portrayal of 'stark ethnic dichotomies' in the opening paragraph gave early indication of more polarised polemics on Zimbabwe and an inability to deliver. By the second paragraph promises to enrich the debate had been abandoned for hand wringing over their difficulty in persuading non-Zimbabwe specialists like Mamdani to think as 'deeply' on the crisis as they do. One major obstacle they have encountered in this quest to produce deep thinkers on Zimbabwe like themselves, is the virus of anti-imperialist rhetoric unleashed by the cunning Mugabe, who has 'fooled' Mamdani, but, thankfully, not our alert experts. As a humanitarian gesture, our scholars, most of whom don't see contemporary imperialism as a category for analysis in their scholarship, offer to help inoculate Mamdani from the dangerous anti-imperialist virus, noting that he is already showing symptoms of 'fantasy' from contact with it.
Relying on personal insults (Mamdani is 'dishonest') and attempts to link Mamdani's arguments to Mugabe and ZANU-PF narratives (what better or simpler way to dismiss an idea on Zimbabwe than associating it with the demonised Mugabe), the Africanists implore Mamdani to abandon the scholarship of Sam Moyo and company for that of their 'more informed scholarship' if he wants to be healed. No explanation is offered as to why Moyo, who has spent the past 25 years in Zimbabwe researching and writing on the land question - publishing four books and over twenty-five articles on the subject - is a less informed source of information and analysis than Scarnecchia and Alexander et al and contributors to the special bulletin on Zimbabwe by the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS). The reader, one assumes, must simply trust in the wisdom of our self-declared deep thinkers, who, after all, are from the US and Europe, where true expertise on Africa resides. A reading of the literature recommended by the learned doctors as an antidote to the dangerous anti-imperialist virus and Moyo's scholarship revealed more documentation on the repressive state acknowledged by Mamdani, and a complete avoidance of the issues raised in the scholarship of Moyo and company.
These more informed deep thinking Africanists are not alone in urging Mamdani to detach himself from Moyo's work and see the light in their recommended sources. Emerging some distance to their left, Horace Campbell, a committed pan-Africanist and activist-scholar, also avoids an engagement with Moyo's work as employed by Mamdani, while dismissing its relevance, in the most curious manner. He faults Mamdani for 'merely recycling' the work of Moyo, even though he himself depended on Moyo's scholarship for his analysis of the land question in his book, Reclaiming Zimbabwe. It seems Moyo's data and analysis can no longer serve Campbell's polemics on the Zimbabwe crisis, but he offers no explanations of its shortcomings. He resorts instead to the diversionary tactics that have become stock in trade for many factions in the 'debate' on Zimbabwe, from the diaspora nationalists who can see no wrong in Mugabe and ZANU-PF to the human rights activists who must see all wrong.
He protests that the African Institute of Agrarian Studies (AIAS), which Moyo founded and directs in Harare, 'claim[s] that [the] horrors of Operation Murambatsvina (the operation to round up hundreds of thousands of citizens) were exaggerated by the western media', which Campbell seemingly presents as an abomination disqualifying their scholarship from critical engagement. How bizarre! I haven't seen the claim from the AIAS authors as there was no reference for the source, but since when did Campbell begin to see criticism of the Western media as a disqualification for being taken seriously on Zimbabwe? Of course they exaggerated the horrors of Operation Murambatsvina, as they did and do on so much else relating to Zimbabwe. Recently I heard folks on the BBC equating the current violence in Zimbabwe to the genocide in Rwanda. Is Campbell in agreement with them on this? Does he, like other scholars, think of admitting to the Western media's exaggeration while exposing the horrors of the repressive state in Zimbabwe as mutually exclusive projects? There might be a tension in these simultaneous pursuits of human rights and opposition activists, whose raison d'être in so many Zimbabwe instances centres on magnifying the horrors of the regime, but aren't scholars and intellectuals supposed to subscribe to another mode of analysis, another relationship with difficult truths?
A scholar who has expended as much energy and intellect as Sam Moyo in attempting to understand the land question in Zimbabwe deserves better treatment from his detractors. At the minimum, they could engage his scholarship and identify the fault lines. Relying on breast-beating about being more informed scholars or attempting to represent him as a Mugabe crony is a retreat from 'deep thinking'. Among other things, the scholarship of Moyo and the AIAS disrupts the dominant narrative around the war veterans as nothing but instruments of a violent state hell bent on maintaining power. It allows intellectuals like Mamdani to argue that outcomes in Zimbabwe cannot be seen only and simply as the 'machinations of those in power.' It also challenges those who insist that land reform resulted in all the land seized from settlers being transferred to the ruling elite by documenting a much wider distribution in the aftermath of land reform. Moyo and the AISA may be wrong on all counts, but it would take more than noisy polemics to prove it.
* David Johnson teaches history at The City College, City University of New York.
Following his intervention in the stultifying 'debate' on Zimbabwe (Mahmood Mamdani, 'Lessons of Zimbabwe'), a squad of 33 scholars, mainly from the US and Europe, placed Mamdani and his main accomplice on the land question, Sam Moyo, in the firing line (Timothy Scarnecchia and Jocelyn Alexander et al, 'Lessons of Zimbabwe', London Review of Books, 2009-01-01). However, the executioners showed up with little but blanks and hubris, leaving this reader to ask more questions about their methods than their targets.
Scarnecchia and Alexander et al begin their response by chiding Mamdani for a simplistic take on Zimbabwe, leading one to anticipate the long awaited complexity of analysis on the Zimbabwe crisis. But their misrepresentation of Mamdani's argument on ethnicity as a portrayal of 'stark ethnic dichotomies' in the opening paragraph gave early indication of more polarised polemics on Zimbabwe and an inability to deliver. By the second paragraph promises to enrich the debate had been abandoned for hand wringing over their difficulty in persuading non-Zimbabwe specialists like Mamdani to think as 'deeply' on the crisis as they do. One major obstacle they have encountered in this quest to produce deep thinkers on Zimbabwe like themselves, is the virus of anti-imperialist rhetoric unleashed by the cunning Mugabe, who has 'fooled' Mamdani, but, thankfully, not our alert experts. As a humanitarian gesture, our scholars, most of whom don't see contemporary imperialism as a category for analysis in their scholarship, offer to help inoculate Mamdani from the dangerous anti-imperialist virus, noting that he is already showing symptoms of 'fantasy' from contact with it.
Relying on personal insults (Mamdani is 'dishonest') and attempts to link Mamdani's arguments to Mugabe and ZANU-PF narratives (what better or simpler way to dismiss an idea on Zimbabwe than associating it with the demonised Mugabe), the Africanists implore Mamdani to abandon the scholarship of Sam Moyo and company for that of their 'more informed scholarship' if he wants to be healed. No explanation is offered as to why Moyo, who has spent the past 25 years in Zimbabwe researching and writing on the land question - publishing four books and over twenty-five articles on the subject - is a less informed source of information and analysis than Scarnecchia and Alexander et al and contributors to the special bulletin on Zimbabwe by the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS). The reader, one assumes, must simply trust in the wisdom of our self-declared deep thinkers, who, after all, are from the US and Europe, where true expertise on Africa resides. A reading of the literature recommended by the learned doctors as an antidote to the dangerous anti-imperialist virus and Moyo's scholarship revealed more documentation on the repressive state acknowledged by Mamdani, and a complete avoidance of the issues raised in the scholarship of Moyo and company.
These more informed deep thinking Africanists are not alone in urging Mamdani to detach himself from Moyo's work and see the light in their recommended sources. Emerging some distance to their left, Horace Campbell, a committed pan-Africanist and activist-scholar, also avoids an engagement with Moyo's work as employed by Mamdani, while dismissing its relevance, in the most curious manner. He faults Mamdani for 'merely recycling' the work of Moyo, even though he himself depended on Moyo's scholarship for his analysis of the land question in his book, Reclaiming Zimbabwe. It seems Moyo's data and analysis can no longer serve Campbell's polemics on the Zimbabwe crisis, but he offers no explanations of its shortcomings. He resorts instead to the diversionary tactics that have become stock in trade for many factions in the 'debate' on Zimbabwe, from the diaspora nationalists who can see no wrong in Mugabe and ZANU-PF to the human rights activists who must see all wrong.
He protests that the African Institute of Agrarian Studies (AIAS), which Moyo founded and directs in Harare, 'claim[s] that [the] horrors of Operation Murambatsvina (the operation to round up hundreds of thousands of citizens) were exaggerated by the western media', which Campbell seemingly presents as an abomination disqualifying their scholarship from critical engagement. How bizarre! I haven't seen the claim from the AIAS authors as there was no reference for the source, but since when did Campbell begin to see criticism of the Western media as a disqualification for being taken seriously on Zimbabwe? Of course they exaggerated the horrors of Operation Murambatsvina, as they did and do on so much else relating to Zimbabwe. Recently I heard folks on the BBC equating the current violence in Zimbabwe to the genocide in Rwanda. Is Campbell in agreement with them on this? Does he, like other scholars, think of admitting to the Western media's exaggeration while exposing the horrors of the repressive state in Zimbabwe as mutually exclusive projects? There might be a tension in these simultaneous pursuits of human rights and opposition activists, whose raison d'être in so many Zimbabwe instances centres on magnifying the horrors of the regime, but aren't scholars and intellectuals supposed to subscribe to another mode of analysis, another relationship with difficult truths?
A scholar who has expended as much energy and intellect as Sam Moyo in attempting to understand the land question in Zimbabwe deserves better treatment from his detractors. At the minimum, they could engage his scholarship and identify the fault lines. Relying on breast-beating about being more informed scholars or attempting to represent him as a Mugabe crony is a retreat from 'deep thinking'. Among other things, the scholarship of Moyo and the AIAS disrupts the dominant narrative around the war veterans as nothing but instruments of a violent state hell bent on maintaining power. It allows intellectuals like Mamdani to argue that outcomes in Zimbabwe cannot be seen only and simply as the 'machinations of those in power.' It also challenges those who insist that land reform resulted in all the land seized from settlers being transferred to the ruling elite by documenting a much wider distribution in the aftermath of land reform. Moyo and the AISA may be wrong on all counts, but it would take more than noisy polemics to prove it.
* David Johnson teaches history at The City College, City University of New York.
Friday, 6 February 2009
Inclusive Govt: Under whose colours do you march?
Inclusive Govt: Under whose colours do you march?
nathaniel.manheru
NEARLY a decade ago, a white business figure shared with select business executives what he considers vital piece of intelligence.
A new party was just about to be formed, one which could turn out much worse than Zanu-PF, unless urgent steps were taken "to infiltrate and influence it" in another direction.
The year was 1999, the setting a Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries meeting. The speaker was Eddie Cross.
A little later, the MDC was launched with great fanfare.
It had a good load of white sponsors, white supporters and white office holders, something which gave it a lasting image problem in a country in which race connotes quite heavily.
To this day, the image the acronym MDC evokes in the mind of an average Zimbabwean is that of a burly white farmer clad in khaki shirt and short, set against an all-white audience backdrop, somewhere in Banket, justifying why supporting the new party was "a good investment", before making a cheque donation to the cause.
Lost in that throng and evidently discomfited is a Morgan Tsvangirai, supported by a few aides, worried about the camera that roved, eternalising the moment.
The Banket that will not die
Historically Banket was a preserve for the Rhodesian pedigree, a setting for undisturbed agricultural pursuits for scions of Rhodesia’s offshore royalty, loosely defined as descendants of the Pioneer Column, or those who had distinguished themselves in defending the Rhodesian laager.
That Tsvangirai went to Banket for the inaugural fund raising for his party, was of lasting significance to the politics of this country.
Indeed for many years to come, MDC used strongholds of white plantation settlement — principally Banket and Marondera — as springboards for its launch and spread.
To this add Clause 57 in the rejected 2000 draft constitution, which focused on land, as well as the role of the black plantation workers vote in both the referendum and subsequent elections, including the March 2008 one, then you catch the full significance of what I am getting at.
Indeed so confident were whites of an outright MDC victory this last March that they actually released a document under JAG, detailing the computation of the black plantation worker vote in local electoral outcomes.
Rhodesian angst
Today Eddie Cross is an MDC Member of Parliament.
He is in charge of the party’s economic affairs desk. He may or may not play a direct role in the inclusive Government.
His worries then, arguably his worries now — worries which were widely shared by his white peers in industry and commerce — was the rise of a radical worker party under a trade unionist.
This would upset industrial relations, in the process trimming returns on white investments.
After all Rhodesia’s industrial base, while remarkably ingenious, remained notoriously inefficient well into Independence, which is why super-profits and stability to the country’s comparative advantage — commercial tobacco agriculture — was key to white settler prosperity.
This was about to be threatened. After all, the 1998 riots had vividly demonstrated how unpredictably threatening to capital MDC’s support base could be.
After all, for all the rheum against Zanu-PF, the nearly two decades of Zanu-PF rule had clearly shown the need to own or at the very least influence the post-colonial state as a bulwark against restive labour practices against tenuous profit margins.
These were both worries and aspirations of Rhodesian capital. These are both worries and aspirations of Rhodesian capital.
MDC strange staccato
But it is capital that comes as a package; that comes with an ethos.
Definitionally, an ethos is hard to pin down, harder to notice its approach. Always diffuse and hard to notice, yet inexorable, the Rhodesian ethos has been slowly but inexorably rebuilding, as a harmonious accompaniment to MDC’s perceived ascendancy.
The remarks by Eddie Cross a few weeks back, remarks that contained his wish for Zimbabwe "to crash and burn", while staggering, was hardly surprising. My worry is that it has not been well understood and appreciated.
Beyond its obvious meaning, the phrase suggested the destruction of an order and all its instruments of self-preservation, to be replaced by a "new" one.
But what is that order; what is that "new one" captured by the phrase "and pick up the pieces"? And the public relations flurry, which followed those utterances, largely mounted by the MDC at the highest level, meant what?
In case you may have, gentle reader, missed it, Eddie Cross was given the chance to cleanse himself by announcing that MDC would join the inclusive Government, and this after two days of utter confusion in the media.
What did that rescue effort suggest and portent regarding MDC obligation to Rhodesian politics?
Subtleties of Rhodesiana
Curiously, my "good friend" Heathen, sorry, Iden Wetherell, decided this week this time to take charge to make a case for a free media which his employers — all of them functionaries of UDI — never granted anyone else, least of all the church Press which was the only other meaningful alternative to the dominant Rhodesian ethos.
He went much further.
He made the case for the return of all "banned journalists", by which I understood him to refer to the likes of Andrew Meldrum and David Blair. Read closely, the piece suggested deep white angst, which is what made its headline — "Do join us" — quite redolent.
Join who? To do what? Maybe Zhangazha can tell us. But that is superficial.
The piece passes a far-reaching and surprisingly indiscriminate judgment on a certain type of politics: "What we need is a robust and independent media, free of the depredations of a post-liberation aristocracy that resents an outspoken Press for exposing its extractive career."
He goes much further, taking on the tone of a biblical Moses, Rhodesian Moses if you ask me: "Freedom of expression is our lifeblood.
Further, we want to see the return of the rule law, an independent judiciary, and people not afraid to speak their minds on the issues of the day."
And those "political prisoners currently held in reportedly appalling conditions redolent of the Stalinist era" must be freed, forthwith.
The other Iden….
Just across the page, Iden speaks as another voice, possibly another person. Some character called "Muckraker" (no doubt no relation of Iden!) expresses envy that Jestina Mukoko and Gandhi Mudzingwa are the only "political prisoners" getting attention. John Naested, Angus Thompson and Brian Baxter are still held at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison while the state tries to find a case against them," says Muckraker helpfully adding: "The Herald has tried to be helpful by branding them Selous Scouts. In fact Naested was in the RLI.
The others were no more than reservists, we gather." Muckraker matronly adds that "at least the International Bar Association is watching the situation in Zimbabwe carefully." And the person watching is Justice Richard Goldstone, a person whose claim to a place in post-apartheid is his self-vaunted liberal spirit — in all ways and habits.
Marking new territory
Iden rails at "depredations of a post-liberation aristocracy" which appear on close examination to be the depredations of UDI only paste or fastened on post-liberation politics.
Why did he not deplore them under Rhodesia? Why does he not recall Rhodesian depredations for the education of post-liberation Zimbabwe?
And what does the condemnatory benchmarking of "post-liberation" imply about the preceding UDI white aristocracy?
That it was impeccable, flawless and diametrically different from the post-liberation which Iden gladly indicts?
And what is the time frame of "post-liberation" politics denigrated as "aristocracy"? Does it begin and end with Mugabe, or does it begin and end with African self-rule?
Clearly, this is an attitude against post-colonial Zimbabwe, against post-colonial Africa, itself an inverted yearn for the return of Rhodesia, of colonial governance.
And you notice the condemned epoch is post-liberation, not post-colonial. Not even a mere reference to colonialism is permitted under Rhodesiaspeak.
The trouble is that Iden’s sweeping "post-liberation aristocracy" etches a very wide epochal continuum, one that smothers Tsvangirai as an incoming but one such player in an interminable series. Is he epochally condemned?
Are the organic intellectuals of white Rhodesia marking territory and boundaries against the newly reconstituted power matrix of "a post-liberation aristocracy"?
Would that suggest white Rhodesian angst with the inclusive Government, which means more white sponsored agitation? Is that what we are being invited to join?
And what passes for "a return to the rule of law" and an "independent judiciary"? What is returning: the rule of law for "post-liberation" or a law for white property rule?
The kind Rhodesia Light Infantry!
Muckraker, who uses journalistic license to say those things Iden cannot openly say, makes a case for the "liberation" of three whites facing very serious charges.
The Herald gets pilloried for suggesting one of the three was a member of the notorious scouts. No, he was a member of the RLI, an acronym we must all know and be familiar with as a household item.
Well, RLI means Rhodesia Light Infantry, a brutal fighting arm of settler Rhodesia.
How does that Herald inaccuracy reverse the point its report made? And the reference to the other two as "no more than reservists" of the Rhodesian army? Mitigatory?
It is a scary euphemism for this Rhodesia’s deadly machinery designed to brutalise Africans, to fight an unjust, racist settler war which Wetherell seeks to whitewash through a diversionary damnation of post-liberation politics. Is it being suggested the Rhodesia Light Infantry was less murderous?
Is it being suggested that Rhodesian reservists killed more kindly?
Is it not a fact that Rhodesia, which did not have a significant standing army, relied on reservists for its war effort?
And is it not white luxury to be finicky with Rhodesian compartmentalisation of its murderous army.
Did these classifications mean less death to the dying, pre-liberation Africans under a post-settler Rhodesian racist aristocracy Iden so lamely but gladly defends?
And why did Iden decide to emerge from the laager this time in the evolution of the inclusive
Government?
Maybe MDC may have made the unforgivable error of obliging an inclusive Government.
Is Iden venting British frustration with the turn of events here?
Bennett for Finance!
A little more. As the MDC national Executive Council met last week, a fugitive from justice was amongst them, one Roy Bennett. The following day the Herald gave us an image of him, widely grinning.
He had flown into the country for the meeting guaranteed from arrest by the MDC. Another rescue package?
And you watch events, the MDC hopes to appease the Rhodesian lobby by nominating him minister of finance! And his resume will show his skills at interfacing with donors, a skill that kept the MDC campaign well oiled.
Except they have to reckon with the fact that Bennett was largely drawing from the Rhodesian lobby worldwide, a Rhodesian cause which galvanised this scattered tribe, a little hopeful for a second "little England", supported by the real, big England.
I grant them that one such Rhodesian --- Mark Malloch Brown --- is a real link between little England and real England. Yet it must be reckoned that a Finance Minister in the Government of Zimbabwe cannot be about post-settler racist Rhodesian depredations.
Will that fly?
When the mosaic crumbles
Which takes me to my point, a relational point. Far more critical for the stability of the inclusive government will be the way the MDC leadership in Government relates to its disparate formations, many of which are already creating a rumpus. What yesterday gave the MDC a mobilisation edge over Zanu-PF, namely creating and replicating interest groups and organisations seemingly independent of it, today return to haunt it as it slouches into Government. Illustratively, the NCA is not going to fizzle out merely because the MDC is now in Government. Over the years, it has acquired a personality of its own, a leadership which has existed and agitated outside of the MDC, albeit with some coordination and mutuality. It has run its own budget, acquired its own donors and yes, developed its own taste and appetite. More importantly, it has staked a claim in the present outcome. All these will not go away. The same is true of ZCTU. But I make special mention of JAG and its women’s league, WOZA. Through it, white Rhodesia’s landed interests projected their politics and organised for their furtherance. What is the MDC-in-government’s attitude towards this whole advocacy? The ZCTU. Already unhappy, already sidelined, but with a serious suitor, the ZCTU will want to see how the anxiety of Rhodesian capital, which dominates the economy, will mean in terms of labour policy or stance. The 2009 budget appears to have set a stage where MDC will --- sooner than later --- have to take a position. After all, the Finance minister will have to find the money for wages. And as Tsvangirai walks to Munhumutapa, he leaves behind men and women who are only too happy to stir the pot against him. I hope he is following what is happening to Makoni. Having been made mbato by elements within the ruling party, that same connection is now being used to damn and evict him politically. Will someone cry "MDC: the revolution which lost its way", a few months down the inclusive government? We shall see.
Which way Manheru?
I saw a rather naughty letter in the Financial Gazette wondering what will become of my pen, now that Tsvangirai is coming into Government. The letter went much further. It visualised a role for the police in my destruction, taking as proof the alleged cheer from "the police" as Tsvangirai addressed his supporters. Let us grant that such a cheer came, much as I know it did not. What is the writer’s understanding of the inclusive government? One in which Tsvangirai and his MDC hold sway, un-sharing? One in which the police are used against writers, un-caring? That is the inclusive government and democratic change he had been waiting for? Well, I will try and be polite. The Nathaniel Manheru column has been anti-Rhodesian, robustly so. It has busied itself with Tsvangirai and his MDC to the extent that both agreed to be white Rhodesia’s Trojan horses. Born differently, bred differently, this column would not care a hoot what they do in, with, their ambitions. But Rhodesia must die and for as long as it is not dead, Nathaniel Manheru will expose, attack and hopefully bury. The return of Rhodesia, under any guise, is what the struggle is all about. Apart from becoming itself, Zimbabwe must never regress to white rule and white dominance. The white millennium is dead and gone. It must never come back.
Raking Biti’s muck
The editor of the Herald must have had a chuckle after reading Muckraker. Correctly, the columnist attacked Biti’s squeamish recourse to the law against normal journalistic questions that dog all politicians. Biti renounces ambition, denounces any imputations to strategies for political self-elevation. One wonders why he is in politics if he does not have or do all those things. I suppose he is hoping for a second Zvobgo suit. But that is to wander off the point. As with all seeming praises from enemies, Muckraker does not take long to bite the Herald. "The Herald, whatever its manifest shortcomings, especially when it comes to inventing stories, is perfectly entitled to speculate about supposed plots within MDC-Tsvangirai. That is the stuff of politics. It just looks a bit daft when the story remains exclusive to the Herald’s political desk." Whaooo! Until one reads page two of the Independent where its own Constantine Chimakure writes about the same "daft stuff". Or those South African papers through which its news editor, Dumisani Muleya, moonlights, but without declaring those earnings for tax purposes. Now we know the spread and reach of the Herald political desk.
Icho!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
nathaniel.manheru
NEARLY a decade ago, a white business figure shared with select business executives what he considers vital piece of intelligence.
A new party was just about to be formed, one which could turn out much worse than Zanu-PF, unless urgent steps were taken "to infiltrate and influence it" in another direction.
The year was 1999, the setting a Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries meeting. The speaker was Eddie Cross.
A little later, the MDC was launched with great fanfare.
It had a good load of white sponsors, white supporters and white office holders, something which gave it a lasting image problem in a country in which race connotes quite heavily.
To this day, the image the acronym MDC evokes in the mind of an average Zimbabwean is that of a burly white farmer clad in khaki shirt and short, set against an all-white audience backdrop, somewhere in Banket, justifying why supporting the new party was "a good investment", before making a cheque donation to the cause.
Lost in that throng and evidently discomfited is a Morgan Tsvangirai, supported by a few aides, worried about the camera that roved, eternalising the moment.
The Banket that will not die
Historically Banket was a preserve for the Rhodesian pedigree, a setting for undisturbed agricultural pursuits for scions of Rhodesia’s offshore royalty, loosely defined as descendants of the Pioneer Column, or those who had distinguished themselves in defending the Rhodesian laager.
That Tsvangirai went to Banket for the inaugural fund raising for his party, was of lasting significance to the politics of this country.
Indeed for many years to come, MDC used strongholds of white plantation settlement — principally Banket and Marondera — as springboards for its launch and spread.
To this add Clause 57 in the rejected 2000 draft constitution, which focused on land, as well as the role of the black plantation workers vote in both the referendum and subsequent elections, including the March 2008 one, then you catch the full significance of what I am getting at.
Indeed so confident were whites of an outright MDC victory this last March that they actually released a document under JAG, detailing the computation of the black plantation worker vote in local electoral outcomes.
Rhodesian angst
Today Eddie Cross is an MDC Member of Parliament.
He is in charge of the party’s economic affairs desk. He may or may not play a direct role in the inclusive Government.
His worries then, arguably his worries now — worries which were widely shared by his white peers in industry and commerce — was the rise of a radical worker party under a trade unionist.
This would upset industrial relations, in the process trimming returns on white investments.
After all Rhodesia’s industrial base, while remarkably ingenious, remained notoriously inefficient well into Independence, which is why super-profits and stability to the country’s comparative advantage — commercial tobacco agriculture — was key to white settler prosperity.
This was about to be threatened. After all, the 1998 riots had vividly demonstrated how unpredictably threatening to capital MDC’s support base could be.
After all, for all the rheum against Zanu-PF, the nearly two decades of Zanu-PF rule had clearly shown the need to own or at the very least influence the post-colonial state as a bulwark against restive labour practices against tenuous profit margins.
These were both worries and aspirations of Rhodesian capital. These are both worries and aspirations of Rhodesian capital.
MDC strange staccato
But it is capital that comes as a package; that comes with an ethos.
Definitionally, an ethos is hard to pin down, harder to notice its approach. Always diffuse and hard to notice, yet inexorable, the Rhodesian ethos has been slowly but inexorably rebuilding, as a harmonious accompaniment to MDC’s perceived ascendancy.
The remarks by Eddie Cross a few weeks back, remarks that contained his wish for Zimbabwe "to crash and burn", while staggering, was hardly surprising. My worry is that it has not been well understood and appreciated.
Beyond its obvious meaning, the phrase suggested the destruction of an order and all its instruments of self-preservation, to be replaced by a "new" one.
But what is that order; what is that "new one" captured by the phrase "and pick up the pieces"? And the public relations flurry, which followed those utterances, largely mounted by the MDC at the highest level, meant what?
In case you may have, gentle reader, missed it, Eddie Cross was given the chance to cleanse himself by announcing that MDC would join the inclusive Government, and this after two days of utter confusion in the media.
What did that rescue effort suggest and portent regarding MDC obligation to Rhodesian politics?
Subtleties of Rhodesiana
Curiously, my "good friend" Heathen, sorry, Iden Wetherell, decided this week this time to take charge to make a case for a free media which his employers — all of them functionaries of UDI — never granted anyone else, least of all the church Press which was the only other meaningful alternative to the dominant Rhodesian ethos.
He went much further.
He made the case for the return of all "banned journalists", by which I understood him to refer to the likes of Andrew Meldrum and David Blair. Read closely, the piece suggested deep white angst, which is what made its headline — "Do join us" — quite redolent.
Join who? To do what? Maybe Zhangazha can tell us. But that is superficial.
The piece passes a far-reaching and surprisingly indiscriminate judgment on a certain type of politics: "What we need is a robust and independent media, free of the depredations of a post-liberation aristocracy that resents an outspoken Press for exposing its extractive career."
He goes much further, taking on the tone of a biblical Moses, Rhodesian Moses if you ask me: "Freedom of expression is our lifeblood.
Further, we want to see the return of the rule law, an independent judiciary, and people not afraid to speak their minds on the issues of the day."
And those "political prisoners currently held in reportedly appalling conditions redolent of the Stalinist era" must be freed, forthwith.
The other Iden….
Just across the page, Iden speaks as another voice, possibly another person. Some character called "Muckraker" (no doubt no relation of Iden!) expresses envy that Jestina Mukoko and Gandhi Mudzingwa are the only "political prisoners" getting attention. John Naested, Angus Thompson and Brian Baxter are still held at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison while the state tries to find a case against them," says Muckraker helpfully adding: "The Herald has tried to be helpful by branding them Selous Scouts. In fact Naested was in the RLI.
The others were no more than reservists, we gather." Muckraker matronly adds that "at least the International Bar Association is watching the situation in Zimbabwe carefully." And the person watching is Justice Richard Goldstone, a person whose claim to a place in post-apartheid is his self-vaunted liberal spirit — in all ways and habits.
Marking new territory
Iden rails at "depredations of a post-liberation aristocracy" which appear on close examination to be the depredations of UDI only paste or fastened on post-liberation politics.
Why did he not deplore them under Rhodesia? Why does he not recall Rhodesian depredations for the education of post-liberation Zimbabwe?
And what does the condemnatory benchmarking of "post-liberation" imply about the preceding UDI white aristocracy?
That it was impeccable, flawless and diametrically different from the post-liberation which Iden gladly indicts?
And what is the time frame of "post-liberation" politics denigrated as "aristocracy"? Does it begin and end with Mugabe, or does it begin and end with African self-rule?
Clearly, this is an attitude against post-colonial Zimbabwe, against post-colonial Africa, itself an inverted yearn for the return of Rhodesia, of colonial governance.
And you notice the condemned epoch is post-liberation, not post-colonial. Not even a mere reference to colonialism is permitted under Rhodesiaspeak.
The trouble is that Iden’s sweeping "post-liberation aristocracy" etches a very wide epochal continuum, one that smothers Tsvangirai as an incoming but one such player in an interminable series. Is he epochally condemned?
Are the organic intellectuals of white Rhodesia marking territory and boundaries against the newly reconstituted power matrix of "a post-liberation aristocracy"?
Would that suggest white Rhodesian angst with the inclusive Government, which means more white sponsored agitation? Is that what we are being invited to join?
And what passes for "a return to the rule of law" and an "independent judiciary"? What is returning: the rule of law for "post-liberation" or a law for white property rule?
The kind Rhodesia Light Infantry!
Muckraker, who uses journalistic license to say those things Iden cannot openly say, makes a case for the "liberation" of three whites facing very serious charges.
The Herald gets pilloried for suggesting one of the three was a member of the notorious scouts. No, he was a member of the RLI, an acronym we must all know and be familiar with as a household item.
Well, RLI means Rhodesia Light Infantry, a brutal fighting arm of settler Rhodesia.
How does that Herald inaccuracy reverse the point its report made? And the reference to the other two as "no more than reservists" of the Rhodesian army? Mitigatory?
It is a scary euphemism for this Rhodesia’s deadly machinery designed to brutalise Africans, to fight an unjust, racist settler war which Wetherell seeks to whitewash through a diversionary damnation of post-liberation politics. Is it being suggested the Rhodesia Light Infantry was less murderous?
Is it being suggested that Rhodesian reservists killed more kindly?
Is it not a fact that Rhodesia, which did not have a significant standing army, relied on reservists for its war effort?
And is it not white luxury to be finicky with Rhodesian compartmentalisation of its murderous army.
Did these classifications mean less death to the dying, pre-liberation Africans under a post-settler Rhodesian racist aristocracy Iden so lamely but gladly defends?
And why did Iden decide to emerge from the laager this time in the evolution of the inclusive
Government?
Maybe MDC may have made the unforgivable error of obliging an inclusive Government.
Is Iden venting British frustration with the turn of events here?
Bennett for Finance!
A little more. As the MDC national Executive Council met last week, a fugitive from justice was amongst them, one Roy Bennett. The following day the Herald gave us an image of him, widely grinning.
He had flown into the country for the meeting guaranteed from arrest by the MDC. Another rescue package?
And you watch events, the MDC hopes to appease the Rhodesian lobby by nominating him minister of finance! And his resume will show his skills at interfacing with donors, a skill that kept the MDC campaign well oiled.
Except they have to reckon with the fact that Bennett was largely drawing from the Rhodesian lobby worldwide, a Rhodesian cause which galvanised this scattered tribe, a little hopeful for a second "little England", supported by the real, big England.
I grant them that one such Rhodesian --- Mark Malloch Brown --- is a real link between little England and real England. Yet it must be reckoned that a Finance Minister in the Government of Zimbabwe cannot be about post-settler racist Rhodesian depredations.
Will that fly?
When the mosaic crumbles
Which takes me to my point, a relational point. Far more critical for the stability of the inclusive government will be the way the MDC leadership in Government relates to its disparate formations, many of which are already creating a rumpus. What yesterday gave the MDC a mobilisation edge over Zanu-PF, namely creating and replicating interest groups and organisations seemingly independent of it, today return to haunt it as it slouches into Government. Illustratively, the NCA is not going to fizzle out merely because the MDC is now in Government. Over the years, it has acquired a personality of its own, a leadership which has existed and agitated outside of the MDC, albeit with some coordination and mutuality. It has run its own budget, acquired its own donors and yes, developed its own taste and appetite. More importantly, it has staked a claim in the present outcome. All these will not go away. The same is true of ZCTU. But I make special mention of JAG and its women’s league, WOZA. Through it, white Rhodesia’s landed interests projected their politics and organised for their furtherance. What is the MDC-in-government’s attitude towards this whole advocacy? The ZCTU. Already unhappy, already sidelined, but with a serious suitor, the ZCTU will want to see how the anxiety of Rhodesian capital, which dominates the economy, will mean in terms of labour policy or stance. The 2009 budget appears to have set a stage where MDC will --- sooner than later --- have to take a position. After all, the Finance minister will have to find the money for wages. And as Tsvangirai walks to Munhumutapa, he leaves behind men and women who are only too happy to stir the pot against him. I hope he is following what is happening to Makoni. Having been made mbato by elements within the ruling party, that same connection is now being used to damn and evict him politically. Will someone cry "MDC: the revolution which lost its way", a few months down the inclusive government? We shall see.
Which way Manheru?
I saw a rather naughty letter in the Financial Gazette wondering what will become of my pen, now that Tsvangirai is coming into Government. The letter went much further. It visualised a role for the police in my destruction, taking as proof the alleged cheer from "the police" as Tsvangirai addressed his supporters. Let us grant that such a cheer came, much as I know it did not. What is the writer’s understanding of the inclusive government? One in which Tsvangirai and his MDC hold sway, un-sharing? One in which the police are used against writers, un-caring? That is the inclusive government and democratic change he had been waiting for? Well, I will try and be polite. The Nathaniel Manheru column has been anti-Rhodesian, robustly so. It has busied itself with Tsvangirai and his MDC to the extent that both agreed to be white Rhodesia’s Trojan horses. Born differently, bred differently, this column would not care a hoot what they do in, with, their ambitions. But Rhodesia must die and for as long as it is not dead, Nathaniel Manheru will expose, attack and hopefully bury. The return of Rhodesia, under any guise, is what the struggle is all about. Apart from becoming itself, Zimbabwe must never regress to white rule and white dominance. The white millennium is dead and gone. It must never come back.
Raking Biti’s muck
The editor of the Herald must have had a chuckle after reading Muckraker. Correctly, the columnist attacked Biti’s squeamish recourse to the law against normal journalistic questions that dog all politicians. Biti renounces ambition, denounces any imputations to strategies for political self-elevation. One wonders why he is in politics if he does not have or do all those things. I suppose he is hoping for a second Zvobgo suit. But that is to wander off the point. As with all seeming praises from enemies, Muckraker does not take long to bite the Herald. "The Herald, whatever its manifest shortcomings, especially when it comes to inventing stories, is perfectly entitled to speculate about supposed plots within MDC-Tsvangirai. That is the stuff of politics. It just looks a bit daft when the story remains exclusive to the Herald’s political desk." Whaooo! Until one reads page two of the Independent where its own Constantine Chimakure writes about the same "daft stuff". Or those South African papers through which its news editor, Dumisani Muleya, moonlights, but without declaring those earnings for tax purposes. Now we know the spread and reach of the Herald political desk.
Icho!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
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