The ABCD solution to Zimbabwe’s problems

A month following the casting of ballots in Zimbabwe, it is becoming all too apparent that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission messed up their job big time. This deadlock or “logjam” (as Mr Jacob Zuma so aptly described it) should never have occurred if the commission had properly done the job they were required to do in the first place – that is to ensure a victory for Mr Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu-PF party. The ZEC acting perhaps in misguided good faith decided to allow the people of Zimbabwe to vote freely for candidates of their choice and, having allowed that, are now stuck in stalemate in which they cannot pronounce the outcome of the ballot. They are still verifying and recounting the votes with, perhaps, an expectation that somehow the outcome will show a result which is different to the one so far produced.

This is just a quick riposte to vent my frustration with the lack of progress in resolving the election impasse. But that is not the subject on my installment of this week because, as I promised last week, I want to be a bit more positive and outline some of my thoughts on solutions and the way forward for Zimbabwe. I will call this the ABCD solution - this standing for acceptance, belief, contrition and determination. These are all very optimistic and positive words and I should start, perhaps, by explaining the rationale behind my thinking.

There is no doubt that the Zimbabwean nation has been badly abused and traumatised by the Mugabe dictatorship and this has greatly harmed the nation’s psyche. Whatever happens now and if indeed there will be a change of direction, a lot of the work will need to be done to repair the damage on the nation’s psyche in order to restore and rebuild its esteem, character and confidence as a nation. The one enduring memory that one has of the past two decades of independence is one of people suffering from one injustice or another. There are strong images of people being beaten, tortured or otherwise being brutalised for holding different political opinion, their home being razed to the ground in Operation Murambatsvina (Operation Clear-the-filth), the tribal genocide in Matebeleland and the economic meltdown which has spawned massive suffering amongst the generality of the population.

So the nation has to embark on a serious cleansing process and this should start with the acceptance that grievous wrongs have been committed and that things should not have happened the way they did. Mugabe and Zanu-PF should accept that they failed in their first and most important duty of acting in the best interest of the people who elected them into power and, instead, only acted in their own best interests exploiting their positions to their own individual benefit. They should accept that the people are angry because of this massive betrayal and have expressed their anger by voting them out of office. The retired army commander, General Vitalis Zvinavashe, demonstrated such acceptance earlier this week when he conceded defeat in his constituency. More voices in this vein are now required.

Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC party should accept and recognise that their victory in the election was as much a rejection of Zanu-PF by the electorate for its failures as it was an affirmation of their own popularity with the masses. This should tell them that they will also be swiftly rejected if they fail to deliver real and substantial improvements to the lot of the people. This is what happened in Kenya, where Mwaai Kibaki was rejected after only one term in office. He had to resort to rigging the elections in order to remain in power. It is therefore important that MDC should be prepared to work hard and quickly to deliver on its promises and to meet people’s expectations. That should help take the country forward.

The second element is to restore belief amongst the people. Belief in all those things that are important and necessary for national character building – freedom, security, prosperity, democracy and justice. There is no doubt that many Zimbabwean people have lost their belief and confidence in their government. And there are good and justifiable reasons for that. Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF have worked very hard to undermine the belief and confidence in government and all that it represents. The government has spawned and nurtured corruption to levels never before seen in the country. They have destroyed a once vibrant economy through reckless and vindictive policies and with it institutions of delivering public services such as education and health. The government has wantonly disregarded the rule of law – brazenly ignoring court decisions and applying selective justice. Millions of disposed and impoverished people have left the country to seek relief and solace elsewhere.

It is therefore important to restore belief in the people of Zimbabwe – belief in their individual selves and in their national character. With restored belief will come greater hope, expectation and confidence in the future of the country. The one thing that Mugabe and his acolytes have not completely destroyed is the goodwill that the country still enjoys both from its own people and from the wider international community. Many exiled Zimbabwean are prepared to return to the country if there is political change and to contribute to the rebuilding of the nation. The international community is also prepared to provide significant levels of aid and support to help turn the country around. This is why there is now a pressing urgency to get Mugabe and his lot out. If the ballot cannot do it, all other means necessary should be taken to ensure that he goes now.

Once Mugabe and his lot have been driven out, the third aspect will kick in. The outgoing lot should show publicly some contrition and remorse for their evil deeds while in office. I know that one of the more vexing issues now facing the opposition is what to do about the crimes that were committed by the Mugabe regime and whether some amnesty should be given in the interest of national healing. There will be some arguments that Ian Smith was left alone after independence and so the same must be extended to Mugabe. In my mind that argument does not wash. Mugabe’s sins are infinitely worse than Smith’s sins. Laying aside the political arguments a bit, Smith’s security forces fought against an armed insurgency while Mugabe’s army has largely fought against unarmed civilians. Smith fought against black Africans (a different racial grouping) while Mugabe has been fighting against his own people. Smith did not rule with the mandate of the majority of the people while Mugabe had the mandate of the majority, at least initially.

Given all that I think it would not be in anyone’s best interests to give a blanket amnesty to Mugabe and his people. People have to be brought to account for their misdoings, even if it is only to serve as a deterrent for the future. But there should be no retribution and those who show some level of contrition should be forgiven and rehabilitated. This may call for something somewhere between Tutu’s truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa and Charles Taylor’s indictment for crimes against humanity.

Finally there should be a determination by the people of Zimbabwe to forgive the past and embrace the future. There is very little to look back to with any degree of pride but there is a whole lot of bright future to look forward to. The people should also realise that reconstruction will not be easy and that there will be a lot of pain. But forge ahead they must if they are going to haul the country back from the edge of the precipice where Mugabe has taken it to. In practical terms this will require that the many people who had become disconnected to and disenchanted with national political systems should be fully re-engaged with the body politic of the country. They should now start to actively influence policy and developments in the country.

Those with the means must return to invest their human and material assets for the development of the country. There should be a determination to succeed in the face of the many adversities which will no doubt be laid in the path of progress. However most importantly, there should be determination that never again should our country be dragged to the dogs as has happened under Mugabe’s stewardship. Never again should our people suffer the way they have done in the past decade. Never again.

The ABCD of Zimbabwe’s problems

To say that the people of Zimbabwe have undergone a traumatic and debilitating experience over the past nine years is, perhaps, a great understatement. In the normal scheme of things, nine years is not a very long time compared to, say, the four hundred years that the biblical children of Israel were held in bondage in Egypt. For the past nine years, however, there has been a consistent cry from the oppressed and suffering masses in Zimbabwe to be set free from Robert Mugabe’s diabolical and corrupt regime. In elections in 2000, 2002, 2005 and, now, in 2008 the message from the voters has been a loud, clear and consistent “let my people go”.

However Mugabe has not listened and, instead, has hardened his heart to the pleas of the suffering people. I have been exercising my mind on why Mugabe has so far failed to read the very clear signs around him that he is now a spent force – despised, hated and unwanted by his own people. Why he has tolerated persistent humiliation in successive elections, the results of which he has unashamedly rigged and manipulated to retain power. I have arrived at the conclusion that Mugabe is sustained, if not trapped, by a combination of four forces which I will designate the ABCDs of Zimbabwe’s problems. These four forces are accumulation, betrayal, collusion and deception.

The first problem we have is accumulation of personal wealth and benefit by the ruling elite. Until very recently, Zimbabwe was a well endowed country. It had a well functioning economy backed by an abundance of natural resources and an educated and industrious population. While corruption existed in high places it was not widespread, was generally petty in scope and was disdained by much of the population. Corrupt activities were quickly exposed and perpetrators punished as was the case in the Willowgate scandal of the late 1980s when a number of minister’s were forced to resign and one committed suicide following a public enquiry into their role in looting a government owned company.

Well into the 1990s corruption continued to be shunned, with some ministers losing their positions when they were caught on the wrong side of the law. Somewhere along the way, probably in the mid 90s the corruption scales tipped beyond the point of return and, all of sudden, there was a frenzy of accumulation by those in power. This accumulation polarised the nations into classes of “haves” and “have nots”. The haves were mostly the ruling elite and their close associates while just about everyone else slid into the have nots category. This divide precipitated deep social anger and instability which culminated in the demands by the war veterans for a share of the spoils to which the politicians were gratuitously indulging alone. This group had fought in the frontlines of the liberation war yet had become marginalised and forgotten after the attainment of independence. It is this same spirit of accumulation that has become an obstacle for change as those in power are not willing to move away from their feeding trough for fear of hunger in future.

The second problem is the betrayal which the Zimbabwean people have endured at various times and in different guises. Firstly, the people have been betrayed by their own government and leaders – people who they put in power to preside over their affairs and to defend their interests. The government has demonstrated utmost incompetence, disdain and disregard of good governance principles and practices and, if anything, has shown that they are only interested in protecting their own interests and damn everyone else’s. Mugabe has betrayed everything for which the sons and daughters of Zimbabwe sacrificed so much during the liberation war – freedom, liberty, peace, security and prosperity. Now the people of Zimbabwe are less free than at any time during their history – so much so that even the Ian Smith era now appears to have been paradisiacal.

The people have also been betrayed by the world which has stood by and done very little or nothing to relieve them of their suffering. Much of the world has watched as the helpless people of Zimbabwe have been decimated and dismembered by the voracious and ferocious regime of Mugabe. While others have made polite noises and imposed token and ineffective sanctions against the regime, many more have simply watched like spectators in a Roman arena watching slaves being torn up by hungry lions. The latter’s world’s view in encapsulated in President Thabo Mbeki recent infamous statement that “there is no crisis in Zimbabwe”. In my mind, Mbeki has been the greatest betrayer of the Zimbabwean people in that, over many years, he has been entrusted to find solutions to relieve the Zimbabweans of their suffering yet he has chosen to side with the oppressor.

This brings me to the big C – collusion. There is very little doubt in my mind that the present situation in Zimbabwe is a result of active and, sometimes, passive collusion by many in positions of influence and power who have strived to defend, promote and strengthen the status quo instead of working towards change. Starting with the corrupt generals and security chiefs who have colluded with the politicians in Zimbabwe to deny the people their democratic rights and privilege, to institutions such as the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission who have abandoned their constitutional duty to administer free and fair elections and are now openly colluding with the ruling clique to deny the people the right to know the results of the election, to leaders of neighbouring countries who persistently failed to condemn the excesses of their colleague and to reign him in.

Last but not least is the deception which the people of Zimbabwe and the world at large have endured for so long. Just the other day, I had an unannounced visitor who, upon learning that I was Zimbabwean, began to extol the virtues of Mugabe and to complain bitterly about how he was being victimised by the western countries for his stand against the whites. For a good part of half an hour I listened with growing exasperation as the man went on and on about how Mugabe was a great fighter and the world’s last great hope against the domination of the black race by the whites. All the problems being experience in Zimbabwe were not a fault of Mugabe, he expatiated, but of Messrs Brown and Bush, the World Bank, the IMF and other international donors.

Of course I didn’t have an opportunity to throw in one or two words edgewise otherwise I would have asked why, if Mugabe was putting up such a gallant fight against evil white people, it was his black people who were suffering the most and now fleeing the country in droves? This experience showed me to what extent the deception of Mugabe has sunk in the minds of many left wingers around the world. What is worth remembering is that the problems of Zimbabwe did not start with the so called repossession and redistribution of the land in 2000. The land issue became a useful decoy and distraction after Mugabe’s loss of the constitutional referendum of that year. Before then, the land issue was one of those insoluble and perennial issues which Mugabe’s government conveniently ignored and only remembered at or around election time.

Scholars and historians will no doubt agree that the real problems of Zimbabwe started on some fateful day in late 1997 when Mugabe, under intense pressure for compensation and reward for the war efforts from the liberation war veterans, unilaterally decided to award them five billion Zimbabwean dollars which was not budgeted for. In a matter of days, the value of the Zimbabwe dollar collapsed by more than one hundred percent. That decision had nothing to do with the British or the Americans or the World Bank or the IMF. It was a Mugabe decision, made under pressure from his own allies and probably under advice from the people around him. That was the real genesis of all the economic problems which Zimbabwe is facing today. Of course the problem was then compounded by Mugabe again unilaterally sending his troops into a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a war from which Zimbabwe did not stand to benefit in any way other than for the few generals and senior politicians.

To now claim that the problems of Zimbabwe are due to British machinations over the land issue is deceit of the worst kind. It is a jaundiced and delusional perspective to the issues and a brazen denial of the realities on the ground. For a long time and for some known and unknown reasons most of the African leaders and other leftists have stuck to the fallacy that Mugabe is a victim of neo-colonialism but the recent events in Zimbabwe have proved this to be a lie. It’s now clear that Mugabe is no better than other infamous African megalomaniac dictators – Mobutu, Idi Amin, Bokassa, Mengistu, Eyedéma, etc. The real tragedy is that many of these dictators existed in the era of the cold war where their excesses were tolerated in pursuit of geopolitical and ideological alliances. Mugabe, on the other hand, is living in an era of globalisation and enlightenment when human rights abuses and undemocratic behaviour are no longer accepted or tolerated.

So what are the prospects and solutions for Zimbabwe? Again I have exercised my mind at length on this matter and have identified my ABCD solution which will be the subject of my next instalment in this blog.

Options for getting rid of Mugabe

First, apologies are in order. This blog has been silent for a while because I have been away for three weeks on a long delayed holiday and to catch up with some pressing personal and domestic commitments. I did have a conversation during the period with one regular reader of the blog and I assured him that I was alive and well and had not been picked up by Mr Robert Mugabe’s feared secret police. For a writer and political commentator I had, perhaps, chosen the most inappropriate time to be away from the “desk” because it was a time of very promising and exciting developments.

The elections in Zimbabwe did hold on 29 March as decreed by Mr Mugabe and I have it on very good account, that the voting process itself went very well – peaceful, free and fair. The day after the elections I met some folks who had participated in the historic event and noted how delighted they were to have made their say on the ballot paper. One of them was even involved as a returning officer at one of the polling stations in Harare and had witnessed the early results emerging. There was a high sense of expectation and drama. The air was pregnant with anticipation that something good was finally about to emerge from the once beautiful country.

On the Sunday following the voting, rumours began to swirl that President Mugabe and his ruling Zanu-PF party had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the opposition MDC led by the brave and indefatigable Morgan Tsvangirai. The only thing about which the rumours were not in consensus was the margin of victory with early indications giving an even wider winning margins to the opposition. Mind you, this election was different from all other previous elections held in Zimbabwe. This was the first election which was held on the basis of the election guidelines of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) meaning that the counting of the votes was done at the polling station immediately following the closure of the polling and the results were posted outside each polling venue. So everyone had access to the results as soon as the counting was completed.

The quick witted gathered what results they could, extrapolated the numbers and declared who the winners were. However, the wait for the official announcement of the results would prove to be lengthy and frustrating. One started getting a sense that something was terribly amiss when the parliamentary results were being announced piecemeal with the main contestants acquiring equal number of seats with each batch of results released. The announcement of the parliamentary results took the best part of a week and both parties were still running neck to neck. Many a time, our people have been taken too much for granted and this weird election outcome proved this to be cruelly true yet again for the long suffering Zimbabwean people.

I mean can you tell me where you have the two leading contestants in a national election splitting votes and sharing seats right down the middle? I am not sure about the statistical probability of that happening, much less am I sure that the results which were being announced were indeed accurate and not being manufactured by a compromised and cowed electoral commission. Be that as it may, people were quite prepared to live with the results, defective as they may be because the real big prize, the real telling story was not with the parliamentary election. The big prize was the presidential election result and, as it turned out, the election officials were not in a hurry to release the results.

By the end of the first week and without the official announcement of the results, the clever ones who had done the extrapolations and calculations and the not-so-clever ones who merely listened to what was being said in the media and on the streets had all come to one inescapable conclusion – Robert Mugabe had lost the election. What remained in debate was the margin of the loss and this was a very important issue. Was the margin sufficiently wide to avoid a run-off election or was it too narrow? Two weeks after the elections, the answers to this question is still pending. And as I write this piece there is no sign yet that results of the presidential elections are about to be announced. In fact, the offices of the electoral commission have been reportedly closed.

This weekend, the SADC heads of state are meeting in Lusaka, Zambia in an emergency session to review developments in Zimbabwe. As with previous summits of the SADC, much would not have been expected to emerge from this august gathering but this time things may just be different. For the first time the SADC heads of state are facing a situation where they all know, without any shadow of doubt, that their colleague has lost a free and fair election and thus cannot claim any longer to be legitimately representing the people of Zimbabwe. The SADC leaders should not and cannot be seen to be aligning themselves with and propping up a failed and discredited dictator. Fortunately, by turning down the opportunity to attend the summit and present his own case, Mugabe has shown that even at home he has lost control.

What has become quite clear in the past two weeks is that Mugabe has not just lost the election but he has also effectively lost power. He may still be the nominal head of state but he is now under the direct control of a cabal of power brokers comprising senior army and police officers and political and economic chiefs who are calling the shots. These de facto rulers of Zimbabwe did not trust the 84 year geriatric to be able to adequately defend the status quo when faced with more sceptical and critical SADC colleagues. So they stopped him from going to Lusaka. Even if Mugabe is not there the summit could achieve a lot to stop the madness going on across the Zambezi River. In my view, there are three options to resolve the Zimbabwe problem.

The first is to use diplomatic pressure. The SADC heads of state must state in unequivocal terms that they will not accept the subversion of the democratic will of the citizens of a member state. Such statement should not be based on just diplomatic and humanitarian sentiments but should be grounded in the many protocols and conventions of the SADC, the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), African Union and United Nations, which Zimbabwe is now in breach of. Such statement must be supported by additional diplomatic pressure such as suspension or expulsion of Zimbabwe from SADC or suspension of diplomatic relations with Harare. Of course it is not realistic to expect that all this should be done or accomplished at once. At a practical level, diplomatic pressure will have to be applied incrementally but consistently.

If diplomacy fails, the second option is armed resistance by Zimbabweans against Mugabe’s government. There are millions of Zimbabweans now outside the country and these can be easily and quickly mobilised into a fighting force to go in and topple Mugabe. But as was the case when Mugabe was fighting the racist regime of Ian Smith, the new liberation army will require training, ammunitions and bases and SADC should be prepared to provide these. The downside of this option is that such armed resistance tend to metamorphose into really ugly blood-lets as has been seen in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Rwanda, etc. It may certainly not be the preferred option but nonetheless it remains one to be considered in the medium to long term.

The last option is for external forces to invade Zimbabwe and topple Mugabe, Saddam style. There are several precedents in this regard. One can recall how Tanzania went into Uganda in 1979 to topple the murderous regime of Idi Amin and, more recently, South Africa’s (under SADC auspices) foray into Lesotho in 1998 to restore law and order following disputed elections. It is also common knowledge that the Rwandan army were the chief architects of the overthrow of Mobutu in the then Zaire. So with all these precedents it is not unrealistic to expect outside military intervention to remove Mugabe from power. If the SADC cannot accomplish this feat, they should perhaps let the Brits and Yankees do the dirty work. I suspect that the people of Zimbabwe have suffered too much pain for far too long to really care how the job is done and by who.