Robert Mugabe – Association of Concerned Africa Scholars

Mahmood Mamdani, a university professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City remains one of the pre-eminent scholars of African Studies in the West. He also remains prolific, often taking the lead in unpacking controversial debates. For example, this month he has a new book out on the Darfur crisis, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Knopf, 2009). And few can disagree about the impact of his previous two books. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon, 2004) certainly contributed—especially in popular media—to our understanding of the historical roots of the “War on Terror”: to the United States’ engagement in proxy wars in Southern Africa, Latin America and Afghanistan and the antecedents of “collateral damage.” A decade earlier, his Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996) became a must-read in universities.

So when, in early December 2008, the London Review of Books (hereafter LRB) published a long essay by Mamdani on the ongoing political and economic crises (at least for a decade now) in Zimbabwe, it was inevitable that it would provoke debate. As one critic of Mamdani’s concedes in this issue, “…whatever Mamdani writes he is always brilliant and provocative.”

In his LRB essay, Mamdani writes that “… it is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe,” but also that a pre-occupation with Mugabe’s character “… does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved,” or give any sense of how the Zimbabwean leader and his party, ZANU-PF, has managed to survive.

Mamdani then goes on to argue that Mugabe has not just ruled by coercion, but also by consent. That the land issue is at the crux of the crisis and that the “… the people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era” (this is the period of intense political violence, invasion and settlement of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe following Mugabe’s loss of referendum vote and parliamentary elections). For Mamdani the political split in Zimbabwe is largely rural-urban, respectively in support of, or opposition to, Mugabe and ZANU-PF. Furthermore, an ethnic split characterizes Mugabe supporters on the one hand against that of the alliance of the Movement for Democratic Change and the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions. Mamdani concluded his piece with a warning to neighboring South Africa:

Few doubt that this is the hour of reckoning for former settler colonies. The increasing number of land invasions in KwaZulu Natal (province in South Africa), and the violence that has accompanied them, indicate that the clock is ticking.

Not surprisingly Mamdani’s piece provoked wide response. Not only did it reflect the importance attached to his writings, but it also pointed to the passions that the Zimbabwe situation arouses.

The responses were quick and fast. For example, the distinguished Africanist Terence Ranger, of Oxford University, wrote in his letter to the LRB:

Mahmood Mamdani is correct to stress that Robert Mugabe is not just a crazed dictator or a corrupt thug but that he promotes a program and an ideology that are attractive to many in Africa and to some in Zimbabwe itself. Mamdani takes care to balance this by recognizing Mugabe’s propensity for violence. Yet this balance is hard to maintain and towards the end of his article Mamdani lets it slip.

Another early response came from 35 academics, who wrote a collective letter to the LRB. We publish that letter in full here, as well as Mamdani’s response to his critics in the LRB.

But it was not long after that the debate about the article extended beyond the pages of the LRB. Horace Campbell, author of Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation (Africa World Press, 2003) wrote an opinion piece for Pambazuka News. Sam Moyo (based at the Africa Institute for Agrarian Studies) and Paris Yeros (Catholic University of Minas Gerais) wrote a piece for Monthly Review’s Zine website. We reproduce those articles here.

A number of other academics, researchers and commentators have written commentaries on Mamdani’s original LRB piece since then and are published in this issue of ACAS Bulletin too: Patrick Bond (director of the Center for Civil Society at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa), Amanda Hammar (program coordinator at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala in Sweden), Elaine Windrich (Stanford University), David Moore (University of Johannesburg) and the former Zimbabwean liberation war Senior Commander and leader in the Zimbabwe Liberation Veterans Forum, Wilfred Mhanda.

Apart from Moyo and Yeros, this issue also includes contributions from two other scholars cited by Mamdani in his original essay: Ben Cousins, director of the Program on Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa — described by Mamdani as “… one of the most astute South African analysts of agrarian change” — as well as Brian Raftopoulos, one of Zimbabwe’s leading intellectuals. Raftopoulos is a former associate professor of the Institute for Development at the University of Zimbabwe and now director for Research and Policy at the Solidarity Peace Trust in South Africa.

The contributions of so many politically engaged scholars demonstrate how the debate over the Zimbabwe situation of the past nine years has never been simply an “academic” debate. At the same time, Mamdani’s contribution has helped to bring the more specific Zimbabwean debate to the attention of a wider audience.

While some may suggest that the frame of the debate has shifted since the formation of the unity government in Zimbabwe in February of 2009, it is important to fully consider how the fault lines in this debate will continue to shape domestic and international responses to the ongoing crises in Zimbabwe. How best to rebuild the economy and carry out sustainable land reforms, for example, or to locate sufficient international and regional support to end the cholera epidemic and restore much needed health services, are all questions that, in one way or another, must deal with the fundamental issues raised by the scholars included in this Bulletin.

This issue — like the last two [1 and 2]on the crises in Zimbabwe — reflects ACAS’s new focus to intervene publicly — and timely — as well as to disseminate widely key debates about contemporary African affairs, especially on-line.

A few final notes: We retained the British spelling and quotation style from the LRB and Pambazuka. We want to thank the editors of the London Review of Books, The Monthly Review Zine, and Pambazuka News for allowing us to reprint articles and letters here.

Finally, I’d like to thank Jacob Mundy, Bulletin co-editor, for layout and design of the issue, Wendy Urban-Mead and Blair Rutherford for their edits and ideas, Amanda Hammar and David Moore for coordinating and facilitating contributions to this issue from other key Zimbabwe experts, and most importantly, Timothy Scarnecchia, for collaborating on the idea for the special issue back in December, for cajoling people to write, and for coordinating collection of the articles.

Go to the table of contents

Feb 01, 2009

by Clapperton Mavhunga

in ACAS Review (Bulletin)

Zimbabwe: MDC Had to Get In Or Change Course

I was not surprised to see the MDC joining the Government of National Unity. In fact, I concluded so the moment that party president Morgan Tsvangirai decided to go home from Botswana earlier in the month.

When an opposition party takes the option of armed struggle off the table and vests all its energies in an internal solution after all nonviolent strategies have failed, there is indeed no choice other than to participate in the GNU or sink into oblivion.

The MDC National Council’s decision to participate in the GNU—whether an elopement with Zanu (PF) or traditional marriage where the festivities of a church ceremony are not the main issue but paying lobola—was merely a coup de grace.

My verdict is that Mugabe had already tactically and strategically outwitted the opposition, from the very moment that the MDC agreed to participate in the talks. When you plunge into a crocodile-infested pool, make sure you know how to swim.

The script had become predictable the moment the MDC signed without looking. If it had decided to reject SADC’s verdict, the MDC would have appealed to the African Union (AU). Ten months have elapsed since the March 29 plebiscite and Mugabe is almost one year into his ‘arbitrary’ term.

The AU process would have dragged on for at least one more year—or two since its membership is four times bigger than SADC. Then AU, at long last, would have referred the matter back to SADC. It reminds me of my rural childhood: you always knew that the next meal would be sadza and vegetables, no meat.

Meanwhile, the clock would be ticking, and before we knew it, five years would have passed and it would be time for another fraud of an election. We would have had even more meetings and resolutions deliberately designed to leave the MDC ‘unsatisfied’ so that another meeting would be set up about the previous meeting.

All the while, more abductions of opposition and human rights activists to feed narratives of MDC rebels training in Botswana to topple the ‘government’. The opposition would be forced on the defensive so that it loses its offensive edge as the appellant whose electoral ‘victory’ was robbed. And while at it, the regime would create new hurdles upon which to grant ‘concessions’ to the MDC at the next AU or SADC summit.

When such an indaba at last arrived, Zanu (PF) would go on the attack, its spokesmen struggling under the weight of thousands of pages, photos, and videos documenting MDC’s unholy alliance with the Batswana. This would be their new negotiating position: the MDC must first renounce violence as a condition for releasing the abductees and getting a couple of governors appointed from its ranks.

It does not need one from the former planet Pluto—now downgraded—to see that SADC was deliberately overlooking Zanu (PF)’s constantly shifting goalposts while dragooning the MDC into the GNU.

Had the MDC continued its ‘stayaway’ from the talks, it was going to still leave Zimbabweans at the mercy of a pan-continental body still struggling with understanding what Zimbabweans are fighting for. What do we do as a people when the majority of the region and the continent are not yet ready to accept our legitimate quest for democracy, one that challenges a godfather of the ‘liberation’ struggle?

It is imperative to understand that the core of the country’s problem is not just a struggle against Mugabe to reclaim individual freedoms that national freedom (from colonial rule) has taken away.

It is a struggle to redefine what true freedom really is: that a people who sacrificed their very blood and lives for genuine freedom by enabling guerrillas to fight with their guns against Rhodesian rule must now be held hostage by the very same politicians for whom the people and frontline guerrillas toiled? At what point does the rhetoric of liberation become freedom which people can live and experience in their own lifetime?

I must spend time on this issue because it is why I had my reservations about going to the AU.

At issue are two generations of struggle: the 20th century struggle of my father and mother against Rhodesian minority rule which I lived through traumatically as a child, and my own 21st century struggle for democracy that my children will live which neither their grandparents nor their parents ever tasted. Freedom that was promised in the name of black majority rule, but which has become black minority rule—our corruption-soaked politicians being what Franz Fanon called “black skin, white mask”.

Much of SADC and Africa is ruled by those who saw, endured, and overturned the 20th century oppression of the white colonialist, men who are easily roused to anger when Mugabe says the MDC has white members and sympathies. In the eyes of these Africans Zimbabweans are insane: the worst sign of this madness is the mere act of criticizing Mugabe—the guy who ‘ended white minority rule’ and ‘gave us land’. What an abomination!

Most of Africa does not see—let alone feel—Mugabe using land, pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism, and blackness as weapons of mass camouflage to create an alibi designed to turn his critics into stooges of the West. When Mugabe says that the British and Americans deliberately contaminated our water systems with cholera, he is playing to this audience, which is not just one of simpletons but also Africa’s best intellectuals—as Mahmood Mamdani’s recent article in the London Review of Books shows. Mugabe is doing something to these academics: without them knowing, they have become megaphones for the very people whose histories they write about. That is my anxiety about how Africa is being written as ‘palace narrative’.

Of course, the problem that Mugabe’s defenders will not explain off is how come Zimbabwe is ruled by an 85 year old—the only ruler the country has ever known since ‘independence’ when their own countries have seen countless, younger leaders retire gracefully.

That matters nothing to Africa; all it sees is land. The people of Zimbabwe are invisible to African leaders. They are dead to them. If given a choice between land and citizens, Africa chooses land. The people can have another life in heaven. They won’t need hell because they live it everyday; it is the renewable energy that feeds dictatorship.

Zimbabweans must understand this if they are to see their own position in the community of African nations and how the type of freedom they seek appears too utopian to deserve any attention at all from the continent.

Of course, Africa is various and these differences would have reflected upon the adjudication of the Zimbabwe issue. But the outcome was even more predictable than SADC.

There is an Africa where the old nationalist parties are still in power. They see opposition to Mugabe much like Christians would an anti-Christ or Muslims anybody who draws a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Opposition parties are seen as “reactionaries”.

There is a part of Africa which is under military rule, where somebody in uniform just wakes up, rides up to State House in tanks and armored cars, seizes the microphone and announces: ‘I am taking over as the newly elected head of state’. Call it self-election. These juntas quickly promise fresh elections which they either rig, contest as single candidates or never hold.

There are countries where tanks and AK-47 rifles are now old-fashioned ways of coups d’etat. The ballot has become the smart way of waging a coup: the pen in front, your hands around the pen barrel scribbling an X on the ballot, a cold gun barrel pressed against one’s back, reminding you that your vote is your life. It’s called ‘voting wisely’. The election is always held on time, almost to the minute. There will be only one result.

There is an Africa still ruled by kings. At least, in a continent where those elected through the ballot behave like kings, monarchs like King Mswati must be credited for their patriarchal honesty. I mean, when Mswati exercises authoritarianism, you know he is a king. That is how they must behave. The downside is not only that their majesties have no clue about the purpose, conduct or meaning of democratic elections. Whether they are held, rigged, or the results ignored, the sun still rises, shines, and sets.

There is also an Africa ruled by those whom the old nationalist parties reluctantly surrendered power to after a ballot, but who went on to become even worse dictators than the old nationalists. They know the limits and dangers of a ballot and cannot hazard encouraging opposition parties to succeed. They have ‘joined the club’.

Then, at the tail-end of many other types of African governments, there is an Africa whose leaders believe that only when rulers become accountable to their citizens—as opposed to citizens being sacrificed so that their blood nourishes their power and elevates them into gods—can Africa tap into the immense wealth of talent in the heads of their own citizens and the wealth underneath the feet. This is where one would find Ghana, Botswana, Kenya, Liberia, and (perhaps) Senegal.

The odds are that AU would have been worse than SADC. The Zimbabwean crisis is the stinking carcass in the backyard; that’s why SADC cares. The further one goes from the carrion, the less the smell; pan-Africanism becomes a more powerful force than cholera.

Zimbabwe is SADC’s dead and putrefying carcass, but there are even worse carrions for Africa. What urgency would Zimbabwe have compared to Somalia, where the Ethiopians have beaten a very hasty retreat after going in like cowhands to ‘round up the herd’ of Islamic rebels?

We are talking of 3,000 deaths from cholera, but are we going to make sense when nearly 300,000 have died in Darfur and millions in eastern DR Congo?

In Africa, while some heads of state might concede that Mugabe is not a good guy, there will be many who will see Zimbabweans as spoiled brats crying for a luxury toy called ‘democracy’ (incited by the former ‘colonial masters’), while other citizens of Sudan, Darfur, and Somalia do not even have dictatorships strong enough to keep them safe, alive, and fed.

Of course, going to the AU would probably have removed SADC’s current legitimacy to obstruct any country or ‘coalition of the willing’ from acting unilaterally to end the humanitarian catastrophe Zimbabwe has become. Such action has never required, or even asked for, the authorization of the AU or the UN, let alone regional bodies. Nigeria did that in Sierra Leone, en route to cunningly arresting Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor under the pretext of giving ‘asylum’ before handing him over to the War Crimes Tribunal. It worked: today Liberia is at peace. But that was not a big decision taken by the AU.

The latest example of such ‘horse-trading’ is Rwanda’s joint operations with DR Congo and Paul Kagame’s arrest of former rebel ally Laurent Nkunda. Before that we saw Ethiopia get into Somalia, South Africa into Lesotho, Zimbabwe into Mozambique before tag-teaming with Angola and Namibia in DR Congo. Decades earlier Tanzania had chased Idi Amin into Uganda and then to Saudi Arabian exile. All such decision were undertaken by neighbors in the proximity based on national security or economic interests.

My point is that in real terms, the UN, AU and any other bodies are completely powerless to prevent unilateral action. They will froth at the corners of the mouth and shout hoarse, but they never act.

Mugabe calculated that no such unilateral action to remove him would happen. The West is in financial crisis, America in transition and public opinion dead-set against any war no matter how noble the objective. Obama is not George Bush; he won’t ride shotgun for anybody.

Those Africans making noises for military intervention had no executive power to even swat flies. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga made some sounds, but the head of state is Mwai Kibaki, who maintained a stoic silence knowing his own circumstances. How was he to say anything without self-indictment? The rest were men of the cloth and academics who might shoot from the pulpit and laptop, but not much else.

Therefore, Mugabe was spot-on when he dared Africa to come and get him. Nobody had the stomach for it. If Africa could be so scared of Mugabe at a distance, imagine what would happen face-to-face! That or the national security imperative for member states to act against Mugabe—beyond him being an embarrassment to pan-Africanism—was absent.

To return to my opening argument, if the MDC had played hardball and decided not to ‘go in’ and form a government with Mugabe, what was Plan C besides the AU route?

The workers would go on strike Wednesday, religiously checking at their watches as the union or party leaders would have said. The clock started ticking. Friday morning, with the two-day strike over as announced, the workers would get on the road, squeeze into the kombi, Zupco commuter bus, or the back of a truck, and report to work at exactly eight o’clock. The state, quite rightly, got used to this routine.

Of course, for most Zimbabweans, only two instruments of democratic expression remained: to vote with one’s feet and to use one’s educational skills to migrate out of reach of an abusive state and a lethargic opposition. The other choice would have been to take up guns and confront their tormentor, but the MDC did not have the stomach to lead it—or, as it claims, it has always believed in a non-violent change. The litmus test on this positive and welcome philosophy will be seen in how the GNU succeeds or fails.

If we succeed, we will have shown Africa that civil wars are totally unnecessary. If that philosophy prevails and spreads, Africa is headed for a genuine renaissance.

This ‘linguistic turn’ did not happen overnight. Once the MDC took the armed option off the table, there was very little latitude to maneuver outside talks. It meant that the MDC would not do what Zapu and Zanu did after the détente talks in 1974-5.

Realizing that the stoic reluctance of Prime Minister Ian Smith to compromise on political power was a “What will you do to me if I don’t?” question, the military elements from both parties undertook to provide an answer on the battlefield. By 1979, they could answer Smith like this: “If you do not compromise we will take power militarily.”

The MDC had no such plans or capacity; in fact by Tsvangirai’s departure for Harare from Gaborone, it made the bold statement to its critics that the time to change course was before signing the September 15 agreement, not afterwards.

Under the current circumstances, the MDC only had two key instruments that substituted for guns and troops. First, they had the financial and diplomatic ear of the West, without which Mugabe could set up a government, but would never govern. From bad, things would get worse, especially as the downstream effects of the global recession kicked in. It is not wise to exaggerate this as an ace in the MDC’s pack in light of the turbulent global financial situation: how sure is the MDC that western countries will have money to spare when their own citizens and taxpayers are losing jobs?

The second weapon was that the MDC had the numbers: Zimbabweans at home and abroad are solidly behind them. Period. Deep down in their hearts, and in conversations, Zanu (PF) people will tell you that they have lost the people’s support.

Plan B—the party’s participation in the talks—was a go-for-broke strategy born out of previous mistakes whereby the MDC had stayed out and Mugabe had still finished his term. But it’s a decision that weakened, distracted and diverted the MDC from attending to the coordination of these two raw materials—the international and domestic support—into one compact network for change. All eggs, not just MDC’s but Zimbabweans’, we now in one basket: the talks.

The recent stirrings of outrage in South Africa, as well as growing consultations in the US, Canada and UK to use the 2010 soccer world cup as a pressure point to force Pretoria to act were spontaneous actions independent of the MDC. The sanctions were leaking precisely because of a failure to supply actionable information for enforcement.

This diversionary nature of dialogue suggests Zanu (PF) must declare a strategic victory: a party that lost the parliamentary and first round of the presidential election and then conned the opposition into signing a ‘sin’ of a document must surely reward anybody in its ranks who thought up the idea of talks.

Plan B was ‘sinful’ because it disarmed the broad-based civic society action and isolated power over change to a few politicians from Zanu (PF) and MDC to decide the future of 12 million souls. That is where Zanu (PF) triumphed: behind the drawn curtain, with Mbeki very partisan at that, it could command the agenda and play pacemaker to the dialogue process.

Zanu (PF) played ‘deverangwena’ (follow the crocodile into the pool) with the MDC. Knowing that its powers on land were limited, the party strategists said ‘no, let us ensnare the MDC into the deep pool, where we will use water to our advantage, knowing the adversary can’t swim. The MDC might flail and froth, but it cannot get out of the pool’.

If MDC got out of the talks, Mugabe knew the worst could not happen: MDC would never take up arms as Zanu and Zapu did. I cannot put the possibility that Botswana contemplated rear bases and training for MDC past Ian Khama. I suspect that Tsvangirai’s insistence on achieving a non-violent revolution, for reason of lack or latitude, convinced Khama to mellow his tone at the SADC meeting all of a sudden. That, or there was a secret assurance from Mugabe that this time he meant what he said.

Tsvangirai had the option to form a government in exile but opted to go and form a government at home. We will never know whether the issue came up for discussion while Tsvangirai was in Gaborone, or how far it would have helped.

Of one thing Zimbabweans can be certain. By going home, Tsvangirai laid one matter to rest: the road to a solution for him lay inside Zimbabwe, not outside going in. If the MDC avoids being swallowed and the GNU is implemented as publicized, the party will have pulled off a major shift in paradigm in Zimbabwean politics: the possibility of change without recourse to war.

We hear this talk about Tendai Biti and Morgan Tsvangirai not seeing with one eye on the way forward—which Biti dismissed. It’s okay, let him deny it. He knows where the truth lies and who was on the wrong riverbank of opinion within the National Council. If I were him I would actually publicly admit it, so that all of us confirm the MDC’s democratic culture, where it’s okay and humane to disagree and still move on. I would worry if such an important decision was unanimous; we expect leaders to exhaust all options through rational due process before committing ‘sinning’ us into the future.

Among the militant base, opposition to getting into government offered the possibility of leadership renewal and shift of strategy. That is a powder keg that won’t go away: if the GNU turns out to be a wild goose chase, this opposition, and those who opposed, will be used as a point of reference. That those who opposed the entry into the GNU did not go beyond constructive debate to split as what happened in 2005 is a sign of maturity.

Otherwise if that had happened and Zanu (PF) went on to honor its end of the bargain and the GNU succeeded, such revolt had as much potential to be “the Judas Iscariot moment” that split Zapu in 1963 and the 1974-5 détente that led to Ndabaningi Sithole’s ouster. The reverse is true; if this thing fails, those who pushed for it will be held responsible.

One warning: let’s not go into this vindictively hoping it fails. Let us give it due diligence and fair criticism.

Zimbabwe: What does the GNU hold for the MDC?

(Preface: Mavhunga wrote the piece (below) for The Zimbabwe Times on the eve of the Movement for Democratic Change’s National Council decision to participate in the Government of National Unity (GNU) on Friday 30th January. Since then, the MDC council has endorsed party president Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision to participate in the GNU. The author wishes to maintain his main argument–that when an opposition party takes the option of armed struggle off the table and vests all its energies in an internal solution, there is indeed no choice other than to participate in the GNU or sink into oblivion. He argues that Mugabe has tactically and strategically outwitted the opposition, from the very moment that the MDC agreed to participate in the talks. When you plunge into a crocodile-infested pool, make sure you know how to swim.)

There was no surprise from the SADC meeting, as Zimbabwe’s public had predicted. It was the same old song: the complainant appeals to a judge, who turns out to be the accused.

We know where the script is heading: from SADC, the MDC is expected to appeal to the African Union. Are you aware that one year is almost gone and March 29 is almost upon us? Happy anniversary Zimbabwe. Read that as one year into Mugabe’s term. The AU process will probably take one more year—or two since its membership four times bigger than SADC. Then AU may, at long last, refer the matter back to SADC. This is, after all, an ‘African problem’ requiring an ‘African solution’ (There is no hurry in Africa, remember?). It’s not proper to take it to the United Nations, now is it?

Another predictable menu.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and before we know it, five years have passed and it is another election. We shall have more meetings and resolutions deliberately designed to leave the MDC ‘unsatisfied’ so that we can set up another meeting about the previous meeting. In the interim, kidnap some opposition and human rights activists and create stories about the MDC trying to invade Zimbabwe. Put the opposition on the defensive so that it loses its offensive edge as the appellant whose electoral ‘victory’ was robbed. And while at it, create new hurdles so that you can have something to give concessions on at the next SADC summit.

The meeting arrives. Strategy? Dig your heels in on these new accusations about MDC banditry in Botswana, bring a thick dossier to accuse both Khama and Tsvangirai and dare them to take the case further. Then afterwards, make mild compromises, not on the original MDC grievances, but on your latest atrocities. That way, you obfuscate the original demands and change the subject—as well as luring SADC to your side by your ‘concessions’. You become the voice of reason; they become the voice of violent banditry and regime change.

Enough!

SADC cannot tell Zimbabweans that it is not seeing that Mugabe is shifting goal posts like this. SADC is aiding and abating Mugabe.

That’s not all.

The regional body is also bullying the MDC into a coalition government. Hear Kgalema Motlanthe’s bold declaration: “Yes, of course [MDC] will ensure that the Amendment 19 is enacted and will present themselves on the said date for the swearing-in ceremony.” That’s right—“present themselves”!

Or else?

The biggest problem for Zimbabweans is this: What do they do as a people when the majority of the region and the continent is not yet ready to accept their legitimate quest for democracy, one that challenges a godfather of the ‘liberation’ struggle?

I ask because the core of the country’s problem is not just a struggle against Mugabe to reclaim individual freedoms that national freedom (from colonial rule) has taken away. It is a struggle to redefine what true freedom really is: that a people who sacrificed their very blood and lives for genuine freedom by enabling guerrillas to fight with their guns must now be held hostage by the very same politicians for whom the people and frontline guerrillas toiled? At which point does the rhetoric of liberation become freedom which people are told exists, but never experience?

At issue are two generations of struggle: the 20th century struggle of my father and mother against Rhodesian minority rule which I lived through traumatically as a child, and my own 21st century struggle for democracy that my children will live knowing that neither their grandparents nor their parents ever tasted it. Freedom that was promised in the name of black majority rule, but which has become black minority rule.

Much of SADC and Africa is ruled by those who saw, endured, and overturned the 20th century oppression of the white colonialist, men who are easily roused to anger when Mugabe says the MDC has white members and sympathies. In the eyes of these Africans Zimbabweans are insane: the worst symptoms are the mere act of criticizing Mugabe. For how does one criticize a man who fought colonialism with the fiercest of rhetoric and seized white land and redistributed it (never mind to his party faithful and bigwigs with “degrees in violence)?” It is an abomination.

Indeed, land, pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism, and blackness have become the weapons of mass camouflage the regime wears to destroy not only the opposition or country, but—through cholera contagion arising out of obsession with political power—the entire region as well. The problem is not Zanu (PF) in toto; as one journalist friend suggested to me recently, how come Mugabe has been in power for 29 years if the issue is land? Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came. They went. Next John Major and George Bush the father came. They went. So too did Mandela. He came, he rocked, he went. Next Tony Blair and Bill Clinton came. They went. So too did George Bush the son and Thabo Mbeki. They came, they went. Is it to say then that Zanu (PF) was so short of leadership material that the party could not dig from its own humus to find a tenderer worm to catch the public imagination and hunger for change?

But of course, all that Africa sees is land. The people of Zimbabwe are invisible to African leaders. They are dead to them. If given a choice between land and citizens, Africa chooses land. The people can have another life in heaven. They won’t need hell because they live it everyday; it is the renewable energy that feeds dictatorship.

Of course, Africa is various.

There is a part of Africa which is under military rule, where somebody in uniform just wakes up, rides to State House in tanks and armored cars, seizes the microphone and announces: ‘I am taking over as the newly elected head of state’. Call it self-election. These juntas quickly promise fresh elections which they either rig, contest as single candidates or never hold.

There are countries where tanks and AK-47 rifles are now old-fashioned ways of coups d’etat. The ballot has become the smart way of waging a coup: the pen in front, your hands scribbling an X on the ballot, a cold barrel pressed against one’s back, reminding you that your vote is your life. It’s called ‘voting wisely’. The election is always held on time, almost to the minute. There will be only one result.

Point? So that we don’t expect miracles when the Zimbabwe issue goes before the AU. The Zimbabwean crisis is the stinking carcass in the backyard; that’s why SADC cares. We are cholera on two legs as well as the incubator of bugs and refugees. The further one goes from the decomposing carcass, the less the smell. Pan-Africanism—as intangible as it may sound to SADC citizens who must deal with floods of Zimbabwean refugees on a minute-by-minute basis—becomes a more powerful force than cholera. What urgency would Zimbabwe have compared to Somalia, where the Ethiopians have beaten a very hasty retreat after going in like cowhands to ‘round up the herd’ of Islamic rebels? We are talking of 3000 deaths from cholera, but are we going to make sense when nearly 300,000 have died in Darfur and millions in eastern DR Congo? In Africa, while some heads of state might concede that Mugabe is not a good guy, there will be many who will take Zimbabweans as children who cry for an electronic toy when he already has a plastic one, even as others have not even food in the stomach.

There is only one hope if the issue goes to Africa as a whole: it recuses SADC from preventing unilateral, small-group or individual action by any country from acting in any decisive form to end the humanitarian catastrophe Zimbabwe has become. Such action has never required, or even asked for, the authorization of the AU or the UN, let alone regional bodies. Nigeria did that in Sierra Leone, en route to cunningly giving the Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor ‘asylum’ and bodyguards, which turned out to be house arrest. Taylor was then handed over to the War Crimes Tribunal, and today Liberia is the first country to have a woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

The latest example of such ‘horse-trading’ is Rwanda’s joint operations with DR Congo and the arrest of former rebel Laurent Nkunda. Before that we had seen Ethiopia get into Somalia, South Africa into Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia into DR Congo, and Tanzania into Uganda.

In real terms, the UN, AU and any other bodies are completely powerless to prevent unilateral action. They will forth at the corners of the mouth and shout hoarse, but they never act.

At this moment, I do not see it coming. I won’t encourage false optimism. The west is neck-deep with the financial crisis. It’s too early to tell what exactly Obama will do differently, even though his overtures towards the Sino-Soviet and African ‘allies’ Mugabe used to spite the West with might actually work effectively to isolate Mugabe.

At the moment, I do not see any decibels raised for direct intervention achieving anything—most of African rulers acquired political power through spilling blood, not preventing its spillage. We have heard Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga saying some choice things about an African force intervening. However, the head of state in Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, has not said so: he sits comfortably in the club of African rulers who came to power by defeating the old nationalist party before behaving like them.

Mugabe was spot-on when he dared Africa to come and get him. Nobody had the stomach for it. So much then for African solutions for African problems.

The question is also that, in the even that the MDC plays hardball and decides not to ‘go in’ and form a government with Mugabe, what is Plan C?

Plan A was mass action. It was decisively crushed precisely because those planning it rendered it too predictable to the target of their chagrin. Amidst a blaze of publicity, the opposition would set a date for the mass action, outline the strategy completely with route plans, and set their watches. That gave ample time for the state to get ready with all its might, match the planned strategy point-for-point, and ride the storm. The workers would go on strike Wednesday, religiously checking at their watches as the union or party leaders would have said. The clock started ticking. Friday morning, with the two-day strike over as announced, the workers would get on the road, squeeze into the kombi, Zupco commuter bus, or the back of a truck, and report to work at exactly eight o’clock. The state, quite rightly, got used to this routine.

Of course, for most Zimbabweans, only two instruments of democratic expression remained: to vote with one’s feet and to use one’s educational skills to migrate out of reach of an abusive state and a lethargic opposition. The other choice would have been to take up guns and confront the tormentor, but the MDC did not have the stomach to lead it—or, as it claims, it believes in a non-violent change.

It is a position that Tsvangirai himself enunciated recently in response to the state’s allegations that the MDC is training ‘terrorists’ in Botswana. In saying so, he set a definitive bar beyond which the quest for democracy in Zimbabwe would not go under his leadership.

Once you do that, there is very little latitude to maneuver outside talks. It means that the MDC will not do what Zapu and Zanu did after the détente talks in 1974-5. Realizing that the stoic reluctance of Prime Minister Ian Smith to compromise on political power was a “What will you do to me if I don’t?” question, the military elements from both parties undertook to provide an answer on the battlefield. By 1979, they could answer Smith like this: “If you do not compromise we will take power militarily.” The MDC has no such plans or capacity

Under the current circumstances, the MDC only has two key instruments that have substituted for having an army of their own. First, they have the financial and diplomatic ear of the West, without which Mugabe may set up a government, but will never govern. From bad, things will get worse, especially as the downstream effects of the global recession kick in. The second weapon is that the MDC has the people of Zimbabwe—at home and abroad—solidly behind them.

What has been missing is to connect these two elements to finish off the regime. I suggest that Plan B—the party’s participation in the talks—has distracted and diverted the MDC from attending to the coordination of these two raw materials for change. Such a diversion would suggest that Zanu (PF) must declare a strategic victory: a party that lost the parliamentary and first round of the presidential election and then conned the opposition into signing a ‘sin’ of a document must surely reward anybody in its ranks who thought up the idea of talks.

Plan B was ‘sinful’ because it mortgaged an entire country to the whims of politicians, lifting the energy from an all-inclusive coalition of civic society that had started building up and investing the power over change to a few politicians from Zanu (PF) and MDC to decide the future of 12 million souls. That is where Zanu (PF) triumphed: behind the drawn curtain, with Mbeki advising here and there, it could command the agenda and play pacemaker to the dialogue process.

Zanu (PF) played Deverangwena (follow the crocodile into the pool) with the MDC. Knowing that its powers on land (elections) were limited, the party strategists said ‘no, let us ensnare the MDC into the deep pool (SADC), where we will use water to our advantage, knowing the adversary can’t swim. The MDC might flail and froth, but it cannot get out of the pool (talks)’.

If it gets out of the talks, Mugabe knows the worst cannot happen: MDC will not do what Zanu and Zapu did—to take up arms. Possibly realizing how hopeless the party is, Botswana is now seemingly recanting on its earlier robust stance. An analytic reading of its combative positive in the last couple of months suggests that it was waiting for the MDC to propose stronger cough medicine to the Zimbabwean cold. It did not, so Ian Khama could say: “If you can’t change course, and you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you must accept the status quo of the pool where the crocodiles swim’.

It does not seem to me that Khama had any bases set up, nor was he seriously contemplating taking on Zimbabwe for the sake of the MDC or to push back the wave of refugees flocking into his country. Rather, I think he was waiting for direction from the MDC on how it wished to proceed. One option—which Tsvangirai completely eliminated by going home—was a government in exile. We will never know whether it came up for discussion while Tsvangirai was in Gaborone, or how far it would have helped.

Of one thing Zimbabweans can be certain. By going home, Tsvangirai laid one matter to rest: the road to a solution for him lies inside Zimbabwe, not inside coming in.

Politics is a very crazy thing. We sit here as ordinary Jim and Jack while the politicians do deals, and then voila! A deal is announced.

Inevitably, the aura of a patriarch who listens to the majority view of his peers in SADC, and, like a true patriarch, completely ignores the opinions and decisions of his own children will raise emotions inside and outside the opposition’s top echelons alike.

For this reason, it is without surprise that there may be disagreements within the MDC over whether they will join in (un)holy matrimony with Mugabe or become runaway brides. Zimbabweans care about the reported and purported disagreements within the MDC because most (by their March 29 vote) identify themselves among the bride’s relatives (hama dzemukadzi).

This anxiety is the price people pay for their over-reliance on the MDC: a split in its ranks has collateral damage. It will defeat the will of the people and play straight into the Zanu (PF) strategy of ensnaring MDC into talks. The whole purpose is to encourage dissension and then cut a deal with one faction (Mutambara’s) and the one (who will be called a ‘sellout’) from MDC-Tsvangirai that enters the talks. The dissenter (who will be called a ‘warmonger’) can rot in jail for what it’s worth. This name-calling is a part of one overall ‘leaching strategy’: to strength Zanu (PF) through talking, time management, and defections. It is a strategy that has been well-thought, which demands careful response.

We hear this talk about Tendai Biti and Morgan Tsvangirai not seeing with one eye on the way forward. Among the militant base opposition to getting into government offers the possibility of leadership renewal and shift of strategy. Yet it has as much potential to be “the Judas Iscariot moment” that split Zapu in 1963 and led to Ndabaningi Sithole’s ostracization. It is also coin-tossing the fate of 12 million lives—tails you win heads you lose.

Since runaway brides often do so because they fear commitment and might in fact run away to another man to escape the would-be groom, those in MDC who do not want to get into the government must tell us exactly what alternative they see outside matrimony. Otherwise if they want to continue to flail and gasp for air in the pool (talks) until they get a solution, we are headed for a predictable AU process.

Some runaway brides flee a potential ‘horror marriage’, bide their time and eventually find ‘Mr. Right’ to come up, and find happiness. Others will run away and scuttle what could have been a ‘paradise marriage’. Still, the decision to go in or stay out should not be a blind one or secretive like the first decision to engage, lest the bride marries a philanderer and an abusive husband. If the decision is to go in, it has to be strategic beyond personal office, otherwise people will very quickly turn against those who took it and give support to those who opposed.

If the MDC decides to go in, it must not do so blindfolded, otherwise it will seal its own fate. If it stays out, it must change course.

Clapperton Mavhunga, a Zimbabwean national, is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Society (STS) at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology.

Dec 18, 2008

by Clapperton Mavhunga

in Briefs

Mugabe’s Endgame

Could it be possible that while the public, the press, and the international community were busy with cholera, the illegal regime in Harare actually declared a state of emergency under cover of a “national emergency” (ostensibly against cholera)?

I may not be the only one seeing the reality that what has intensified is not the energy with which Mugabe is combating cholera, but, rather, abducting human rights activists collecting information on human rights abuses and MDC activists.

We have also seen first ‘Comical Ali’ Sikhanyiso Ndlovu insinuating that the British and Americans deliberately infected Zimbabwe with vibrio cholerae. Mugabe himself further expanded on that accusatory narrative when declaring at the burial of the infamous former youth minister Elliot Manyika that cholera had ended and there was no longer a reason for these western powers to declare war.

In the meantime, the narrative of Anglo-American plotting is being linked to alleged MDC “training bases” in Botswana. In the past, the British and Americans have always been Mugabe’s curtain to shut Africa off from seeing his violent crackdown on internal opponents.

What’s left is to get evidence that the MDC and human rights NGOs are behind this broad strategy of regime change.

All this would not have been necessary if the MDC had agreed to ceding Home Affairs to Zanu (PF) or at least “sharing” it. Of course Zimbabweans know that such an arrangement was never going to work because Mugabe would always circumvent and usurp the position of the MDC co-minister and turn him into a deputy minister at best, or, more appropriately, a complete buffoon. The agreement in theory gave a semblance of power-sharing between two equal partners. However, that’s not how things work in Mugabe’s world: in practice, the deal was a virtual swallowing of the MDC and the end of multi-party democracy. The MDC would be used as a goblin to look for money from western countries while Mugabe was busy spending it.

Building a Case: Accusations, Abductions, ‘Assassination’

People should read and analyze carefully the timing of Mugabe’s threat to call new elections if the GNU deal flounders. Patrick Chinamasa, the Zanu (PF) official masquerading as justice minister (there being no government in Harare) made Mugabe’s strategy clear yesterday when declaring:

“If no support is forthcoming, it means that (the constitutional) amendment number 19 bill will be a dead matter…. In the event that the collaboration that we envisage (to pass the bill) is not forthcoming, then that will necessitate fresh harmonized elections at some point in time.”

For the first time in the history of Zimbabwe, Zanu (PF) is a minority party in parliament. While editors are letting their journalists get away with the lie that Zanu (PF) is the “ruling party”, the fact of the matter is that Zimbabwe is now effectively under military rule. It is the Joint Operations Command (JOC) that is running the circus. Zanu (PF) can’t live in a world without a two-thirds majority to chop and change the Constitution as it used to. Are we to assume, therefore, that those who are being “disappeared” daily are casualties in preparation for the next election?

What Chinamasa enunciated yesterday is tantamount to holding a gun at MDC and telling them to pass Mugabe’s laws or else he will dissolve parliament and ‘win’—as he did during the presidential election—through outright violence and rigging. What the MDC perhaps did not foresee when agreeing to the so-called ‘Global Political Agreement’ is that Mugabe would use his executive powers to dissolve parliament and call elections if he could not get his wish.

It seems to me convenient that the change of tone to call fresh elections coincided with the split of “Zapu” from Zanu (PF). Such a dovish approach turns out to be part of a broader constellation of events that add up to what is behind the abductions: a plot to obliterate the MDC.

So first Elliot Manyika dies and many Zimbabweans conclude that it is a “hit job” by internal enemies within Zanu (PF). And yet he was on his way to Gwanda to reorganize the party. Gwanda, in the same province in which a few days later, Dumiso Dabengwa leads the “revival” of Zapu. But how sure are we that the Elliot Manyika “accident” was not, like Cain Nkala’s abduction and murder, another plot designed to incriminate the MDC as a decoy to justify the clampdown that followed?

Anyway, so Manyika is sacrificed. Just as Nkala had been implicated in the abduction of an MDC official, one Patrick Nabanyama from Nketa, so too was Manyika implicated in the abductions, tortures, and murders of MDC operatives in Bindura. So they are convenient and believable alibis deserving of any “hit jobs” the MDC might plot.

Rest that bloody case. So Manyika dies, and the next day or two Zapu is “revived”. A reader of the Zimbabwe Times who is conscious of history questions the authenticity of the man chosen as Dabengwa’s deputy, Nziramasanga, saying he has some close associations with the state security apparatus. The observation and caution passes quietly as a “comment” on a published article.

Soon after this “revival”, Chinamasa discloses details of an MDC plot to destabilize the army and to invade Zimbabwe from Botswana. This is not anything analysts, readers, and observers were not already seeing in their crystal balls. The power of the internet, camera phones, laptop computers, and digital cameras lies in their ability to get information out quickly and expose such plots while they are being hatched. Some are able to do so using “anonymous inside sources” whose authenticity readers or those implicated can dismiss as not concrete enough.

However, the information itself, as each set of seemingly unconnected events unfolds, enables those who take time in the service of their country to think very deeply about what it may add up to. For several analysts, the answer was clear: There were signs that the illegal regime in Harare was plotting to implicate and destroy the MDC. The “mutiny” in Harare was a virtual giveaway—baton-wielding and even unarmed soldiers, well dressed in their combat gear, throwing stones at shops in downtown Harare, chased around by policemen armed with rifles. I digress.

So now we hear that Joseph Chinotimba, the notorious security guard whom Mugabe used as a hatchetman to orchestrate violence to seize white farms and redistribute them to Zanu (PF) bigwigs and cronies and to bludgeon pro-democracy activists and supporters, was involved in a “freak” accident and is probably now paralyzed. We have just learnt of attempts on the life of Perence Shiri as he left his farm. Exactly: sacrifice some of your best men to make the story authentic. That’s one way to read this: that even within JOC itself, nobody is safe from Mugabe’s bloodthirst. Let’s be less charitable. The guy is said to have been alone in his car. Nobody reliable has actually seen Shiri’s bullet wound, so cut the excitement. The bullet marks on his vehicle can be made: it’s expendable.

So here is a follow-up from the soldiers in the streets. That’s right, rebellious troops targeting first Gono and the forex people and now the commander of the air force. The question is not who-dun-it but who is behind it.

The same day Patrick Chinamasa, the Zanu (PF) person responsible for legal affairs and who calls himself a minister, is busy running with the conspiracy angle while Sikhanyiso Ndlovu is singing the hymn about British biological warfare.

Point? Who is behind the people who spread the cholera? Who is behind the people who tried to kill Shiri? One answer: They will say it is the MDC. That’s what Mugabe did to Joshua Nkomo. Our answer lies in the abductions. If the abductees are killed, there won’t be any evidence. So they will not be killed—yet. They will be tortured and made to admit that they were preparing the factual case for external military intervention, spreading cholera, and training in Botswana and possibly spying. Some will be made to confess that they attempted to kill Shiri. They will then be tried and sent either to jail or to heaven (God bless their innocent souls).

The idea is to soil the reputation of the MDC and Botswana in the region, not only as lackeys of the West and a destabilizing force in SADC. The ultimate aim is to make it appear moral in the eyes of Africa that it is right to destroy the MDC. It’s an appetizing prospect: Each country has its own MDC. The ANC has COPE and the DA, Mozambique Renamo—you get the picture. Several ANC members including in particular Blade Nzimande, have already labeled COPE “the modern face of counter-revolution” which is being paid to destroy the overwhelming majority of the ANC’s support. ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe has used similar words.

Mugabe is playing into the ANC’s own uncertainty and its search for alibis going into the 2009 elections. He knows that Pretoria will “persuade” him and will not take the route of sanctions or military intervention, as Mantashe himself declared a few days ago.

Therefore, it is a very realistic agenda to incriminate the MDC—with Botswana as a dangerous force for instability—as a prelude to disqualifying it from running if and when he calls an election. Who will speak for the MDC if the SADC’s Troika on Defense and Politics finds the evidence that Botswana is training insurgents? By Chinamasa’s own admission, the evidence he is relying on to make the charges of MDC training was unearthed by officers who went in disguised as defectors, before turning loose and betraying the plot to Harare. So suppose the “evidence” of the training is found, what is to stop us from saying that just as such spies could come and go to collect evidence, they were also capable of coming in to plant evidence which the troika will find?

Whatever the case, it may not be far-fetched to say that plans are already underway to create a diversionary “opposition” in any future election in which the MDC is banned from contesting because it is a terrorist organization. This is the internal settlement election of 1978 all over again, when Smith banned the “terrorist organizations” Zapu and Zanu from contesting and went ahead with Muzorewa, Sithole, Chirau, and Ndiweni.

This is where the “Zapu revival” must raise suspicion for each and every one of us. It is comforting to say that this development is a sign of Zanu (PF) disintegration. So people sing and dance, oblivious to the fact that the people who are leading it are the very same ones who said nothing and in fact defended the status quo under their bogus “unity accord”. They invaded farms together, orchestrated the burning alive of people like Chiminya. All of a sudden they come round and say, “Mugabe is a violent man”. Yah right.

It’s called being “sold a dummy” in football. The idea seems to be that all Ndebele people will vote for Zapu and then Zanu (PF) sweeps Matabeleland, and then the two parties strike a deal, with the MDC completely out of the equation.

If one is more charitable, one might say that the MDC will be severely weakened but not outlawed. The question then is: Which of the two parties, the MDC or Zanu (PF), will benefit from a Zapu “revival”? You guessed right: Zanu (PF), realizing that the individual MPs in the MDC-Mutambara faction have not cooperated as well as they should with Mutambara himself in swinging to Zanu (PF), has every need for a more usable front. The Mavambo project failed to do that with MDC’s urban electorate, so Zapu might do it with those who “think tribally”.

After all, this is the same thing that happened with Jonathan Moyo in Tsholotsho, is it not?
It’s much more serious than that. The idea is to incriminate the MDC and declare it a criminal or “terrorist” organization and ban it from contesting any election. Like he has done in the past, Mugabe will then sweeten the “shelf company” party as his contestants. Who will then say he competed alone? Zapu would step into the breach and “win” Matabeleland, with Mugabe winning Mashonaland.

The sort of planning that seems to have gone into this survival plot is more sophisticated than the one preceding Gukurahundi. One associate of Jestina Mukoko’s says “she had catalogued thousands of incidents of murder, assault, ?torture, arson, and who the perpetrators are. The work was so meticulous it ?could stand up in any court”. Hopefully the Zimbabwe Peace Project was smart enough to have back-up databases out of the country, where none of those abducted had any passwords.

What Zimbabweans have not realized in the battle against Mugabe is the role of information technology in unhinging a dictatorship. Anybody can be turned into a journalist simply because Zimbabwe has one of the highest numbers of cell phone users in Africa. It means that while journalists are the traditional sources of information, they are not the only sources of information that internet publishers can turn to. Nor do editors necessarily have to initiate the story; their websites are only warehouses to which citizens are depositing their keen observations on the ground.

In the next few days we will begin to see the “compelling evidence” of MDC “bandits” being paraded before ZBC and occupying even the sports sections of The Herald and The Sunday Mail. The venom in Chinamasa’s words is designed to rouse (Southern) Africa into a pan-Africanist defense of Mugabe against Botswana, which has “rendered itself a surrogate ?of Western imperial powers… has decided to be a destabilizing ?factor in the region”.

The plot is designed to re-brand Zanu (PF) as a dove while MDC is the hawk. Again, listen to Chinamasa: “As far as we are concerned as Zanu PF, we have done all we can ?to ensure peace and stability in the country which are prerequisites for ?economic recovery. MDC-T, on the other hand, is bent on foisting war on the ?country and the region. It has become evident that MDC-T is negotiating in ?bad faith and has engaged in dialogue as a ploy to string us along. They lack sincerity.

“We now have evidence that while they were talking peace they have been ?preparing for war and insurgency, as well as soliciting the West to invade ?our country on the pretext of things like cholera.

“We can look our people in the eye and say ‘enough is enough’. Our backs are ?now to the wall and a day may soon come when each and every one of us may be ?called to defend our revolutionary gains and our sovereignty.”

In other words, prepare for a formal declaration of a state of emergency and a draft to defend ‘your country’—code for Zanu (PF).

The World Cup as a Weapon Against Mugabe

All of the ingredients Mugabe has put into his plot have potential to backfire. SA President and SADC chair Kgalema Motlante has said the regional body does not believe that Botswana is plotting. Yet his country blocked the Security Council from taking action on Zimbabwe just yesterday, thereby continuing the policy Mbeki has followed since 2000.

It is crucial to note that begging South Africa to take action is not going to cut it. Pretoria must be forced into taking action. It is incumbent upon all concerned to now make the Zimbabwe issue “Issue # 1” in the forthcoming South African presidential elections, because this is now a domestic issue for all South Africans as well. It is now time to launch a “Get Mugabe Out Or No 2010 World Cup” campaign. SA has already sunk in billions into the tournament, all of which will go to waste if it loses the right to host this cup. There is no bigger issue upon which an entire world is united than soccer, the Fifa World Cup in particular.

It is THE pressure point diplomats and ordinary citizens all over the world who want Mugabe to go will unite on. Imagine at every match in Europe, Africa, US, Canada, Asia, and Australia placards demanding action: “Get Mugabe Out Or No World Cup”. Imagine the public in South Africa demanding: “Get Mugabe Out Or No World Cup”. Everywhere, there is a possibility of what Pele called “The Beautiful Game” saving the people of Zimbabwe from the tyranny executed in the name of liberation. Of course, if South Africa takes the sort of decisive action that South Africa, Zambia, and Kenya are talking about, by all means let us descend on every stadium to cheer Bafana Bafana. But when a soccer ball is what may be required to get the politicians to act, so be it.

This is a program of action which can be easily communicated to the South African public to take up without conflict. The xenophobic violence last year was triggered by accusations that foreigners are “taking away South African jobs”. It may be time to convince the South African public that it is within the power of their government to free up such employment opportunities by defusing the flood of immigrants. Zimbabweans would rather much stay in Zimbabwe and rebuild their own country, but they are not doing so because the SA government is unnecessarily protecting the illegal regime in Zimbabwe.

If the South African government is convinced that it is doing the right thing on Zimbabwe, how about putting the issue of intervention—by sanctions or force—to a referendum so that South African citizens can guide their government on the issue? As it is, Pretoria is simply acting on politicians’ opinions, even defying very glaring evidence of wheels that have come off in Harare. The World Cup is one way of putting the necessary pressure on Pretoria, while also making in clear that there are hefty rewards that lie in doing the right thing. Interactions with SA citizens reveal their disgust at Mugabe’s treatment of his own people, so from whom is Pretoria taking its cue?

The populist message is that the 2010 World Cup is going to relieve grassroots poverty. Yet the big contracts for stadium construction, tourism lodges, advertising and suchlike have already gone to the capitalist fat cats and party-connected Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) sharks. It will hurt their pocket if the cup is withdrawn. It might hurt the poor, but they are getting poorer still even with the cup. At least if the cup is used as a leverage, the Zimbabwean crisis will be solved and South Africans citizens don’t have to compete with the entire able-bodied Zimbabwean population for jobs and health services.

Turning Mugabe’s plotting on its head

It is positive, therefore, that Pretoria has seen what journalists and political analysts had already foreseen: that Mugabe is trying to ‘cook up’ a coup in a teacup to declare a state of emergency. To me, the exposure of this plot by Zimbabwe’s info-savvy public is a sign that citizens are exploiting the loopholes in Mugabe’s ‘go-for-broke’ strategy. Now is the time for Zimbabweans to start exposing those loopholes and exploiting them to turn the tables on the dictatorship.

President Motlante’s words must be seen by all Zimbabweans as an invitation to put forward a case for regional sanctions or the use of force. This is what he said today: “It’s really not for us,” he said when asked whether SA should force Mugabe out. “I mean I don’t know if the British feel qualified to impose that on the people of Zimbabwe but we feel that we should really support and take our cue from what they want.”

One doubts if the horror pictures of cholera, abductions, and his own confirmation of the “plot” as a farrago of nonsense isn’t enough message of a regime emasculating a clear message Zimbabwe have been sending out since March 29 and before.

Still, the question now is what we, as Zimbabweans, should do to communicate to President Motlante that we want him, and other SADC heads, to do. It is a call to intensify the methods we have been using to get the message across not just ourselves, but people within SADC, so that as a regional coalition of peoples tired of one man destabilizing the entire region while lying about land, we can communicate that message. It is a battle that will require the dissemination of information on a massive scale, as well as a more strategic assessment of means of communication.

Jun 25, 2008

by Timothy Scarnecchia

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 79

Introduction: The Zimbabwe Crisis

This special issue on the 2008 Zimbabwe elections introduces the issues surrounding the elections and the current political violence leading up to the June 27th Presidential run-off. The first article, by political scientist Norma Kriger, provides a helpful analysis of what took place during the March 29th elections, the subsequent fallout and reworking of the results, and the decision to establish a run-off election for president.

Jun 25, 2008

by Wendy Urban-Mead

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 79

An Open Letter to South African President Thabo Mbeki

The motivation behind this issue originates in our dismay at the growing urgency of the situation in Zimbabwe. Human rights are being violated with increasing frequency. See, for one example, a report recently published by the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR). Please read it; a link to the report appears at the end of this issue. We also have personal friends in Zimbabwe who have confirmed that such violations are indeed taking place, and at the hands of people acting in the name of the state. Such a development is in direct violation of all that the liberation struggles against colonialism in southern Africa stood for. We call for all speed and urgency from every agency acting to influence the government of Zimbabwe to allow for the run-off election to be free and fair. Additionally, we insist upon a halt to the intimidation, murder, and beating of persons deemed opposition supporters.

What has Mugabe’s rhetoric wrought, that the call to protect human rights is cast as a neo-imperialistic impulse? It was from studying the human rights abuses committed against colonized people in Africa, Jews in Nazi Germany, and enslaved Africans in America, that led many of us here in the United States to realize how important human rights are. We became teachers of African history in the interest of, among other things, making Americans aware of the evils of colonial rule as seen in the Smith and Apartheid regimes of the 20th Century. We want to see no more such atrocities committed, such as those suffered by Biko and countless thousands of others, by anyone in power against anyone, anywhere, no matter the race or religion or economic condition of the persons involved at either end of the power scale.

How is it that President Mugabe and his supporters can take the desire for a free Zimbabwe and from that somehow twist it to accuse people like us of neo-imperialism – we who cry out against the beating of grandmothers, children, pregnant and nursing women, beautiful and irreplaceable sons and fathers? The people of Zimbabwe sacrificed their lives and their well-being in the 1970s so that they could be free to express their views, to choose their own leaders, and to chart their own way forward to a prosperity that they could build for themselves. Zimbabwe’s people did NOT make the sacrifices of the liberation war so that Mugabe’s government could send militias out to beat, brutalize, and terrorize them. Haven’t southern Africans had enough of that under the previous regimes that were defeated at such cost and after such long struggle? The world looks to South Africa, the UN, and the SADC, to take courage and convincingly call upon Mugabe and his government to act in protection of its people, immediately, before another precious human life is damaged or lost.

_________

Wendy Urban-Mead, Bard College, wum@bard.edu.

Link to the May 9, 2008 Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) Report, available at kubatana.net: http://www.kubatana.net/html/archive/hr/080509zadhr.asp?sector=HR.

See also the statement in support of the ZADHR by the Physicians for Human Rights:
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/news-2008-04-30.html.

Jun 25, 2008

by David Moore

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 79

An Academic’s Journalism in the Zimbabwean Interregnum

Jun 25, 2008

by Norma Kriger

in ACAS Review (Bulletin), Bulletin 79

Can Elections End Mugabe’s Dictatorship?

Zimbabweans’ experience of elections, especially since 2000 when the MDC first challenged ZANU PF rule, has made them cynical about elections as a mechanism to transfer power. They have learned that ZANU PF will do whatever it takes to win elections. 2007 was rated the worst year in terms of the number of human rights abuses since 2001, most perpetrated by ZANU PF state and paramilitary forces, and aimed at decimating the top and lower level leadership of the opposition in advance of the anticipated 2008 elections.1 Also, there was growing disillusionment with the opposition. The March 29 2008 presidential, parliamentary, and local government elections initially aroused little interest among dejected voters. The MDC had split into two bickering factions in late 2005, the majority faction led by Morgan Tsvangirai (MDC-T) and the minority faction by Arthur Mutambara (MDC-M). The MDC-T was increasingly bedeviled by youth violence, problems of leadership transparency and accountability, and interest in positions for the material rewards they provided. Its political culture had begun to mimic the organization which it sought to remove.

When Simba Makoni, who had been a ZANU PF politburo member, announced that he would run for the presidency, it injected a refreshing uncertainty about his impact on the elections. For opponents of ZANU PF, Makoni’s candidacy signaled the ruling party’s internal unraveling. There was also a palpable shift in the political environment during the campaign, especially in ZANU PF’s rural strongholds. On brief visits to Chibi in Masvingo province and to the area in Manicaland province where powerful ZANU PF government minister, Didymus Mutasa, and Simba Makoni both own farms, I saw MDC supporters fearlessly wearing MDC-t shirts, moving freely, and organizing and attending rallies.

For the first time since 1980, ZANU PF lost control of the house of assembly. The MDC-T won 99 seats, the MDC-M 10 seats, ZANU PF 97 seats, and an independent one seat. [Three assembly constituencies, where candidates died before the March 29th election, will hold by-elections on June 27.] Despite the inroads made by the opposition into ZANU PF rural strongholds, ZANU PF still secured a majority of seats in four out of ten provinces. Should a new post-electoral unity agreement between MDC-M (which supported Simba Makoni in the presidential election) and MDC-T hold, the MDC factions will control the house of assembly. In the senate elections, the two MDC factions won 30 seats (MDC-T won 24 seats and MDC-M 6 seats), as did ZANU PF. The senate also has 33 reserved seats for chiefs, provincial governors, and presidential appointees, thus guaranteeing ZANU PF control. A caveat: these parliamentary results are not final. Fifty-three ZANU PF candidates and fifty-two MDC candidates have lodged petitions with the Electoral Court, mainly affecting House seats. Under the Electoral Act, the Electoral Court has six months in which to rule on the petitions.

Official presidential election results were finally announced on May 2, more than five weeks after the polling date. Tsvangirai won 47.9% of the votes, Mugabe 43.2%, and Makoni 8.3%. A fourth candidate won the remainder of the vote. Approximately 43% of registered voters participated in the presidential election. Legally, local government election results were declared at ward level within a day or two of polling on March 29. Councils are required to meet as soon as practicable after the declaration of the results to elect mayors and chairpersons. This did not happen, though. Councils apparently waited for the electoral commission to publish the results in the press, which it is required to do under law. The commission finally began to slowly publish the council results in the press days after it had announced the presidential election results.

Prior to the March 29 2008 elections in Zimbabwe, historical precedent suggested (at least to me) that President Mugabe would find a way to “win” the presidential election despite the inauspicious context – economic collapse and a three-way race in which the vote would be split among himself, Simba Makoni (who stood as an independent), and his longstanding rival, Morgan Tsvangirai (head of the MDC-Tsvangirai faction). While opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC faction (MDC-T) continue to claim outright victory (as they have since soon after the polls closed) and engage in diplomatic efforts to ensure that they inherit state power, President Mugabe predictably shows no signs of ending his 28-year reign. ZANU PF has handled the crisis arising from Mugabe’s failure to secure a majority of the popular vote with familiar guile and ruthlessness.

Almost immediately after the election, the media were abuzz with how a ZANU PF envoy had approached Morgan Tsvangirai to discuss forming a Tsvangirai-led government of national unity. Reportedly, Mugabe had indicated he would resign, as long as he was offered immunity from prosecution from crimes against humanity. These talks were allegedly derailed by hawks in the party, the military, and police. Fearful of facing future prosecutions, they apparently urged Mugabe not to capitulate. At the time, Secretary-General Tendai Biti (MDC-T) denied the reports, saying the MDC-T would not negotiate with ZANU PF until the results had been declared. That these negotiations took place was later confirmed by Morgan Tsvangirai and still later by veteran South African journalist Allister Sparks.

One must question whether this ZANU PF overture was ever more than a deliberate attempt to give the ruling elite time to consider its options and perhaps ensure that the MDC-T did not call for street protests to demand the announcement of the results. (There is no evidence that the MDC-T had such a plan, and its critics believe it lost another opportunity to back up its electoral performance with organized mass action.) Mugabe’s alleged readiness to quit is out of character. During his campaign, for instance, he vowed that he would never allow Morgan Tsvangirai to rule Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s verbal threats are seldom gratuitous.

Announcements made on April 3 and 4 indicated that ZANU PF had settled on the run-off scenario: Mugabe would challenge Tsvangirai in a second round ostensibly because neither candidate had secured the necessary 50% + one vote for a first-round victory. To ensure a Mugabe victory, the Joint Operations Command (JOC), reportedly led by Emmerson Munangagwa, himself an aspirant presidential successor to Mugabe, launched a strategy of violence and intimidation, chiefly against rural voters who had supported the opposition in former ZANU PF strongholds. The JOC is composed of the commanders of the army, air force, police, prison, and intelligence services. The military, police, war veterans, and youth militia, aided by ZANU PF supporters and senior ZANU PF officials, are leading the terror campaign. ZANU PF has a history of using state-orchestrated violence to punish those who vote against it. For example, it embarked on violent campaigns against ZAPU after the 1985 election and against urban MDC voters after the 2005 election.

A sad paradox of the effort to bring transparency to elections is that the new legal requirement to post the election results outside the polling stations enabled the ruling party to target those villages or farms or resettlement areas which had voted for the opposition in its Operation Makavhoterapapi (Where did you put your cross?). Victims of violence and arrests also include local election observers and those who administered the elections – the polling officers, MDC electoral agents, and even Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) officials. They are accused of assisting the MDC through fraud, vote-rigging, and other electoral irregularities.

ZANU PF continued to play for more time, not only to prepare for a run-off but also likely to explore other options, such as a government of national unity under President Mugabe. Legally, ZEC did not need to announce the parliamentary election results. Once they had been posted at the polling stations, they were official. Nonetheless, ZEC behaved as if it had the authority to declare the parliamentary results. The ZEC dragged out the announcement of the assembly results, then moved to a similarly drawn out process of announcing senate results. On April 12 the ZEC ordered a recount of the parliamentary, presidential, and local government election votes in 23 constituencies. The recount only began on April 19 and continued for over a week. Whether or not the ZEC intended to reverse ZANU PF’s narrow but historic loss of its majority in the house is unclear; in the end, the recount merely confirmed the parliamentary results announced earlier. Given the weakness of the House, ZANU PF may have decided to accept the loss of control over it rather than further inflame international and regional hostility.

ZANU PF normalized the abnormal. Mugabe’s cabinet, which he dissolved on the eve of the election, continues to serve as if legal. Moreover, at least six cabinet ministers lost their seats in the parliamentary election but remain in office which violates the legal requirement that ministers be elected to parliament. The state media, a mouthpiece of Mugabe and ZANU PF, focused attention away from the undeclared presidential election result, and alleged conspiracies against the nation’s sovereignty involving variously the US, the UK, the MDC, white farmers, critical SADC heads of state, and the UN.

After ZEC had announced the presidential election results on May 2, it initially said the run-off might not be held for up to a year. The commission cited lack of resources (the Reserve Bank governor says the run-off will cost at least US$60 million) and of preparation time. Under the electoral law, the electoral commission must announce the date for the run-off election within twenty-one days of “the election” – the only reasonable interpretation in this case must be that the run-off be held within twenty-one days of the declaration of the election result. However, the Electoral Act empowers the commission to make statutory instruments to extend the twenty-one day period – and indeed to affect virtually any aspect relating to the election – as long as the Minister of Justice approves the statutory instruments. The commission used these powers. On May 16, the commission announced that the run-off would be held on June 27.

On May 10 Morgan Tsvangirai announced that he would participate in the run-off. Over the past few weeks, the MDC and its leader first said that even though Tsvangirai was the president-elect, he would participate in a run-off but only under certain conditions, only to later assert he would not participate in a run-off under any conditions. Tsvangirai’s announcement to contest the run-off, or perhaps the reporting of it, does not entirely remove ambiguity about the MDC’s position. Some accounts say his participation is contingent on certain conditions being met: SADC must send peacekeepers, the election must be held within twenty-one days, international observers must have free access, SADC peacekeepers must be in-country, ZEC must be re-constituted, and the media must be free for local and international journalists. Other reports treat these conditions as an MDC wish-list rather than prerequisites for his participation. One thing is certain: the government, as it quickly responded, will not meet the conditions.

One sympathizes with the opposition’s dilemma, yet again, about whether or not to participate in another election. If Tsvangirai does not contest the election, Mugabe automatically becomes the next president. If he participates in the run-off, his supporters are almost certain to be the victims of ZANU PF’s escalating campaign of terror. Should Tsvangirai, who has been in self-imposed exile for weeks now, return to Zimbabwe as he said he would, he too may face the ruling party’s wrath. Beyond its use of terror tactics, ZANU PF plans to further tilt the playing field in other ways. ZEC and President Mugabe have the power to alter electoral rules that, according to the Minister of Justice, disadvantage ZANU PF vis-à-vis the MDC. And ZANU PF has already made changes to ensure that the state media will be even more pro-Mugabe for the run-off than the first round.

It is easy to see why the MDC would prefer to form a government of national unity rather than participate in a run-off which Mugabe will not allow them to win. Almost immediately after Tsvangirai said on May 10 that he would participate in the run-off, MDC Secretary-General Tendai Biti spoke in favor of a government of national unity as a solution to the electoral crisis. The independents – the Makoni faction and Jonathan Moyo, who broke from ZANU PF before the March 2005 house of assembly elections – also prefer the formation of a government of national unity to a run-off. The securocrats and Mugabe might consider a government of national unity, but only on condition that it is headed by Mugabe. Mugabe told President Mbeki on May 9 that he would consider a government of national unity only after the run-off. However, there are reports that Mugabe is interested in holding talks with Tsvangirai about forming a government of national unity rather than holding a run-off. Neither the independents nor the MDC factions will accept a Mugabe-led government of national unity, before or after the run-off. Nor will the MDC accept a government of national unity that its leaders do not dominate. President Mbeki has long promoted a government of national unity under a successor to Mugabe. His preferred candidate for the job was Makoni, whom he expected would win the presidential election. For a government of national unity to be brokered, mediation will be necessary.

Since the disputed presidential elections in 2002, which the MDC believes Tsvangirai won, there has been a cycle of elections followed by attempts to mediate a constitutional settlement between the MDC and ZANU PF so as to pave the way for holding elections that will be considered legitimate. To date, neither elections nor mediation has solved the political crisis. Moreover, after President Mbeki, who has served as SADC’s appointed mediator for the past year, famously declared on April 12 that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe and asked for ZEC to be given more time to declare the presidential results, the MDC-T asked SADC to remove Mbeki. SADC subsequently endorsed Mbeki’s role as mediator but a new mediator will probably have to be found. SADC is apparently exploring appointing a team of mediators, which would include President Mbeki. The pattern of disputed elections and failed mediation looms ahead.

For the overwhelming majority of Zimbabweans, the ruling party’s post-election shenanigans and its escalating campaign of violence will be further proof that ballots cannot change a dictatorship. Expect the percentage of registered voters who participate in the run-off – assuming that it is actually held – to plummet well below 43%.

Norma Kriger
Honorary Research Fellow,
School of Economic History and Development Studies,
University of KwaZulu/Natal, Durban, South Africa

1. Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, Political Violence Report: December 2007, 13 February 2008,

Note: This research was partially supported by a grant from Idasa, South Africa. An earlier version of this article appeared on the Royal Africa Society website

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