Repeated often around the world is the mantra that Captain Mugabe set sail smoothly, but lost his head halfway through the voyage – single-handedly dragging the country into a hole where he and his retinue have been digging since.

In a recent pathetic pot-shot at South African President Jacob Zuma for his refusal to chastise the Mugabe, the Times of London reported: “It is now 30 years since Mugabe seized power, during which time he has personally orchestrated the most dramatic peacetime collapse of any country since Weimar Germany.”

Zimbabweans themselves have lined out of the country to shout from all over the world, blaming Mugabe for their misery and many still dance and capper from the foreign cities imploring Pretoria and whomever is there to scapegoat or persuade to “please do something about Mugabe”.

The impression painted is that everybody else in Zimbabwe and elsewhere is pulling the right direction — only Mugabe and his cabal, blinded by power, are headed down the wrong route.

One gets the sense that Zimbabwe was once a flourishing democracy wilfully despoiled only by a venal leader. What unalloyed propaganda!

Argument by smear has had its day and it’s time to face the facts in the face. This flawed narrative that nobody else is to blame for Zimbabwe’s degeneracy but the incumbent political authority has held sway for no reason other than that it serves as a shield for those who for many years championed, cheered, protected and assisted Mugabe even as he was setting the country on the wrong route, diving the country on tribal lines and cultivating a culture of violence and impunity, for example.

Few, basic but vital questions must be answered anew: Just how did we fall into this hole inside which an oligarchy has colluded with varying external interests to inflict damage on our country? Who dug this hole? Just who is still digging?

“If it is a despot you should dethrone,” says Almustafa in Gibran Kahlil’s book The Prophet, “see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed … And if it is fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.”

Written almost a century ago, these words remain a genuine indictment of the people of Zimbabwe — a people who, while they find it easy to complain about Mugabe and Pretoria’s alleged complicity in propping him up — have yet to accept the role they played and continue playing in ensuring that Mugabe remains in the driving city to this date.

When Mugabe’s goons were out in rural Midlands and Matabeleland in the 1980’s, he was consistently given fresh mandates and the commercial farmers came out on the BBC defending Mugabe’s crackdown on the civilian population. Their thinking then was that Matabeleland massacres were a little local difficulty, convinced that Mugabe would never touch them.

Bodies such as the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions never uttered a word when some among their membership such as rural teachers and mine workers were hacked to death and their remains scattered down the mine shafts and the flowing rivers.

Anybody complaining about the gross human rights violations in the Matabeleland and Midlands regions then was a dissident. All those young people from the western parts of the country who sought economic refuge in apartheid South Africa were denigrated as lazy, uneducated scum of the nation. And yet today, South Africa hosts millions of Zimbabweans most of whom were vowing they were never going to set foot there and were singing praises for Mugabe.

The reason for this is not because anything ever changed about Mugabe, but that his malevolence finally caught up with his earlier minders only for them to flee.

Mugabe’s earlier champions — the Zimbabwean electorate and the western liberals and the former commercial farmers — are so troubled by their guilty consciences that they have not only erected stonewalls around their consciences but they have even criminalised any other narratives. Question their interpretation of Zimbabwe’s decline and they descend on you like a tonne of bricks.

It has become almost a circus: Zimbabweans who continuously handed Mugabe fresh mandates over the years flee the country to dance and denounce Pretoria. The west and the business people with connections to white farmers sponsor a handful of activists to shout the loudest.

Western politicians, journalists and diplomats insist everyday and everywhere and in every way that South Africa, the African Union and the SADC must take the lead in the fight to oust Mugabe.

African leaders, the song goes always, are a disgrace and are complicit in the “genocide” unfolding in Zimbabwe. Africa, says the Economist, has demonstrated “a woeful reluctance … to chastise, ostracise or help to oust villainous leaders such as Mugabe or Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir …,” and the AU must be cajoled into action.

But the question is: If Africans in general and South Africans in particular are so important in the fight against Mugabe, were they ever consulted when western institutions and governments were honouring, garlanding and knighting Mugabe?

It is telling that no other African state of note, save for Malawi with whom Mugabe has said he has a “common ancestry”, and Sam Nunjoma’s Namibia (and perhaps a few less significant others), has ever honoured Mugabe.

Indeed all Mugabe’s major awards and honours were from the west and were granted in the wake of one of the worst horror shows ever conducted in modern Africa – Gukurahundi — and without consultation with the people who are today being cajoled into ostracising him.

Africans are now being squeezed and shouted at to shed tears for the guilty to wash their hands soiled by pampering an evidently vile Mugabe over the years.

Pot-shots such as the Times of London’s attack on Zuma are awash in the western press signalling the revival of the old habit of the earlier era of rubbishing and denigrating Africans as long as they are unwilling to bend to unreasonable demands. In this case, Mugabe has become the reason to revisit the old trick.

Recently, BBC Newsnight showed a range of Rwandese rights activists alongside the Human Rights Watch representatives complaining bitterly about how western nations bail out President Paul Kagame’s demonstrably vile dictatorship.

Which African was consulted before a decision was made to shield and prop up Paul Biya and Kagame and Yoweri Museveni? Just as Mugabe was forced down on the African conscience as an exemplary leader, Kagame and Museveni are having their turn at enjoying the western blind eye, thanks to the same forces and tactics.

Vile as he is, Mugabe has, sadly, not let go of his hold on the thinking and general world view of Zimbabweans. Having been in power for more than a quarter of a century, he has managed to instil in the electorate a culture of hate, violence, obsequiousness and foster a climate of ignorance.

Try to start a discourse with the many activists dotted around the globe or to listen to the statements of those still at home and you will be shocked to see how Mugabe’s thinking reigns supreme in Zimbabwe.

Clearly, Zimbabweans dug their own hole and even as they say they are tired of Mugabe, one can still hear from the bottom of the ever deepening hole the clanking of picks and shovels. Mugabe was made in Zimbabwe by the Zimbabweans. The British, the liberals and the west in general seized the opportunity to paint, decorate and offer him to the world to marvel at.

When he was showing signs of cracking under pressure from democratic demands, they continuously repainted him, pampered the cracks over and ignored the warning from some indigenous Africans that he was an explosive steadily spilling poison.

Now that the poison has decimated the farmlands and displaced populations across Zimbabwe, the explosive has been hurled at other Africans to detonate. How cunning!

While criticism is the hallmark of philosophical inquiry, he brands the sceptics’ approach as “destructive criticism”. This form of criticism is meant to destroy the spirit of inquiry after the truth. We have something akin to that kind of criticism in the current controversy over indigenisation in Zimbabwe.

Debate presupposes rational discourse where people try to balance their views. In our case, the discourse has shifted from the merits and demerits to outright opposition to indigenisation as a policy. Those who debate have become so dogmatic about methodology that this has become an end in itself, like the parallel debate on the constitution-making process. The process has become an end in itself with Lovemore Madhuku campaigning against a constitution which doesn’t yet exist.

The “destructive criticism” of Zimbabwe’s indigenisation policy revolves around at least three disempowering pillars:

• Only Zanu PF fat-cats will benefit;
• It will fail like the fast-track land reform;
• It will chase away foreign investors.

The conclusion is that it cannot be done.

To tackle the issue of Zanu PF first: Suppose it was true, why is it so repugnant for say 50,000 indigenous people to control 50% of the economy but it is politically and morally correct for 4,500-6,000 whites to control 75% of the same when the mode of coming by such control is the same — usurpation?

To me the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act seeks merely to reverse that order. Nobody said people should not be compensated for their investment.

Second, Zanu PF fat-cats can only benefit alone if the rest of us miss the vision and become obsessive about methodology. That is how the land reform was turned into a Zanu PF affair.

Already, ordinary people are being deceived to shun indigenisation as another devilish scheme by Zanu PF for self-enrichment. Beware of these cheap divide-and-conquer tactics. We risk being bitten twice in the same argument.

Third, the real debate should be on how to make it almost impossible for the rich to get super-rich after benefiting from previous affirmative action programmes. The idea is not to take from a white minority to give to a black minority. The debate is how Mr & Mrs Allofus can mobilise resources to be part of the 50,000 imaginary Zanu PF beneficiaries of indigenisation.

Fourth, the racial overtones in the debate have clouded the overall vision of indigenisation and turned the discourse into an ideological contest between political parties. There are hundreds of Zimbabweans in the Diaspora who want to leverage their resources to benefit from the 51% to be ceded by the huge conglomerates. Instead, they are being made to fight over a policy initiative meant to benefit the majority if properly articulated and executed.

I find it pointless to respond to proponents of another willing-seller, willing-buyer model. I wonder whether such people are aware of how farmers paid only lip-service to supporting the same approach on land in the 1980s and early 1990s and how it failed because those who “owned” land believed it was “private property” to be sold at the grotesquely inflated “market price” because they didn’t want to share fertile land. The major difference this time is that short of insider dealings, the “market price” for most listed companies is in the public domain.

Another errant argument is that everyone should start their own companies. Even the Bible acknowledges that the poor shall always be with us. It is the duty of every responsible government to try and reduce their number or at least ease their suffering. That is why Barack Obama is passionate about health policy in the US. That is why there are unemployment benefits in the UK. That is why the welfare doctrine is so strong among in Nordic and Scandinavian states.

In Zimbabwe, you will be told all this is about cronyism, patronage, corruption or downright mismanagement. We can’t all be self-sufficient, let alone entrepreneurs.

Indigenisation will fail like the fast-track land reform, so we are told. To start with, most of the people advancing this argument don’t want to visit the tobacco sales floors to witness the riches farmers are reaping from the land and the properties they are buying in town.

They are also not interested in talking to the new farmers themselves to hear their side of the story. How can a one-sided tale about the SADC Tribunal ruling and the plight of 79 white farmers be the whole truth? What about Justice Bharat Patel’s landmark January judgement on the land reform policy?

Second, what is needed are not louder prayers for indigenisation to “fail” like the land reform. What is needed is debate on how it can be made to succeed without avoidable dislocations in the economy. There is no disputing that to a large extent, the land reform was chaotic. But that is not the only reason it “failed”.

Land reform “failed” mainly because there were “interests” which didn’t want it to succeed. Most such interests controlled finance, technical skills, the manufacturing, storage and supply of fertiliser and seed production. They had the connections to markets for the produce and sources of equipment and machinery. Above all, they had a voice which could be heard far and wide.

Suddenly all banks closed their agro-business sections which were dedicated to supporting farmers because without title, land had become “dead capital”. In their headlong rush to grab what was on the farms, those who responded to the fast-track land reform forgot about tomorrow – that they didn’t control the whole supply chain. Left on barren lands with neither skills, fertiliser nor financial resources, they vandalised some of the irrigation infrastructure.

Indigenisation will “fail” if the debate is not focused on financing the various small-scale enterprises already in existence to enable more people to purchase shares in big companies. Resistance will be immense.

Niccolo Machiavelli quickly comes to mind: “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has, for enemies, all those who have done well under the old.” Who is resisting change?

Third, closely linked to the land reform were sanctions to make sure it “failed”. Normal human behaviour is that once someone gets into trouble, regardless of however foolhardy their behaviour leading to the present calamity, we assist them by, if necessary, putting them on a life support system. In Zimbabwe’s case, not only was the life support system withdrawn, an albatross was tied round its neck to punish the “innovator”. Sanctions became the United States’ Marshall Plan.

It is tempting to speculate that the maintenance of sanctions on Zimbabwe is to make sure the economic recovery takes long and is as painful as possible. As early as 2005, we were already being told by “experts” it would take at least 15 years for the economy to recover to 1997 levels. By 2008, it must have been 25 years. But Zimbabwe’s dramatic stabilisation with the introduction of the multicurrency regime in January 2009 demonstrated that this could be wild speculation.

The recovery period can be shortened even with the economy and infrastructure supporting more people than in 1997. Zimbabwe needs a humane Marshall Plan as originally conceived for Europe’s recovery from World War II by General George Marshall, that is to restore people’s confidence in the future of their own economy!

Investor flight is another favourite scare-crow. But for me that is the more reason why indigenisation is vital so that we are not perpetually held to ransom by the threat of withdrawal or withholding of investment money by aliens. Once indigenous people control 75% of the economy they constitute a formidable bulwark against the fickleness of international capital.

There is a limit to how far Philip Chiyangwa, Trevor Ncube, Strive Masiyiwa, Shingi Mutasa, Shingi Munyeza or Mutumwa Mawere can run away with their investments because they object to certain government policies. Even more, once they are the dominant group, their financial muscle should give them clout over those policies as key stakeholders. An alien only has an interest in our resources but his loyalty lies with his capital whereas a Zimbabwean owes loyalty first to his country.

We need investment, yes, but not at our own expense.

Second, it is not clear what figures are involved when we talk about investor flight. The Indigenisation Act is a fairly new law. Why were we not getting a deluge of investment before it was enacted? What guarantee is there that stopping indigenisation will bring huge foreign investment when this is tied to nebulous benchmarks which are interpreted subjectively? Who will pass us the test?

The trouble with Zimbabweans is that we have been taught self-contempt, and not only have we internalised it but have turned it into a fetish and a source of national pride. Matters of bad governance and corruption plague all nations and solutions to local problems can never be outsourced to foreigners. God gives every nation enough brains to match the problems it creates.

Third, Zimbabwe has a lot to commend it for the serious investor, from a vast variety of minerals to excellent soils, road and rail networks, natural attractions and a fabulous weather. No long-term investor will run away because of scare-mongering by those who have become slaves to the experience of past failure.

Serious investors mainly need explicit and consistent policies so they can hedge their bets. Have people stopped climbing Mt Everest because there is a possibility of dying? Can investing in Zimbabwe be more treacherous than trying to climb Mt Everest?

We are also told that investors need special treatment because they create employment. That might be true but what is the value of that employment? How is this better for me than owning a big stake in the company? One investor here in Zimbabwe often advises people to buy a company, not shares. That is, when you decide to invest in a company do it in a big way; try to indigenise it if you have the resources.

Still on employment creation, AFP news agency recently did a feature on the plight of garment factory workers in Bangladesh. These are produced for giants such as Wal-Mart, H&M, Correfour and Levi Strauss.

Quote: “Bangladesh’s 4 500 garment factories are the country’s largest employers providing jobs to 2,5 million people or 40% of the industrial workforce. Last year the country was one of the world’s top three garment exporters, with shipments up 10% to US$12,3 billion – around 80% of the country’s total exports.”

Impressive, you think. The working conditions are appalling while the wages are a scandal. Workers are paid US$25 a month which they say can’t buy food or pay rent. While exports last year hit a staggering US$12,3 billion for the Western companies, the 2,5 million employees together got a measly US$750 million in wages. That has been the situation on Zimbabwe’s farms since before Independence, even after the black government set minimum wages for the sector.

The destructive criticism against newly-resettled farmers for low productivity is largely unmerited given the lack of skills and resources in addition to the forces ranged against the land reform programme. It is not a secret that farming is heavily subsidised by the state in much of Europe and the US.

Closer to home in South Africa, white farmers recently threatened to quit if the government removed subsidies. They have been at it since Jan Van Riebeeck was governor of the Cape Colony in 1653 — using slave labour, yet Zimbabwe’s new farmers are supposed to be weaned off and self-sustaining in just 10 years, failing which black empowerment must be stopped!

We all learn something from open debate and criticism. It need not be destructive criticism.

Joram Nyathi is Jomic communications manager. He writes here in his personal capacity and the views expressed have nothing to do with those of Jomic

It was constituted under Article XXII of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) signed on September 15 2008 between the leaders of Zanu PF, MDC-T and MDC. That is where the “joint” comes from.

The committee is composed of 12 senior members, four each from the three signatory parties to the GPA. The committee is co-chaired on a monthly rotational basis by leaders of the parties’ representative members. It needs to be stressed that all 12 members of Jomic are senior members in their own political parties.

In summary, the functions of Jomic are to ensure the full implementation of the GPA, create mutual trust between the parties, promote continuous dialogue and to receive “reports and complaints” relating to the implementation of the GPA. Jomic is the “principal body dealing with issues of compliance and monitoring” of the GPA.

The three political parties themselves also undertook under the GPA to “channel all complaints, grievances, concerns and issues relating to compliance with this agreement through Jomic and refrain from any conduct which might undermine the spirit of cooperation necessary” to fully implement it.

Jomic has in the past few months been criticised for not “doing anything” or “not doing enough” to enforce compliance with the provisions of the GPA by the signatory parties. Many have called it a toothless dog or suspect it of being an agency of one party or the other. It is not clear why a committee composed of four senior members each from all the three parties to the GPA should be an agency of one of them. Jomic is in fact the collective face of the three political parties in action.

It is, however, vital to clear the air on the “toothless dog” tag. This to me is a result of either genuine misreading and therefore misunderstanding of the functions of Jomic or a deliberate distortion of the same for some unknown motives.

The reality is that Jomic is not the implementing agency of the GPA. Rather, the operative verb should be “monitor” to ensure “compliance” by the signatory parties with the provisions of the GPA. An undue emphasis on “implementation” has tended to create false expectations among some members of our community who come demanding solutions which are beyond Jomic’s legal mandate.

A pivotal function of Jomic is to monitor compliance with the GPA. It is also there to receive complaints from any member of society or group, including political parties, about the implementation or lack thereof of the GPA. It must then “sensitise” the principals to the GPA, President Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara about these complaints and deficiencies in the implementation of the GPA. It cannot force parties to perform any specific provision.

Jomic can only persuade the parties to be faithful to the letter and spirit of the GPA. Where the parties hit a deadlock, Jomic’s role is to try and break it or propose alternatives.

More importantly, because of its role as a “permanent” negotiating forum of the parties to the GPA, Jomic cannot afford the luxury of standing on hilltops to attack or condemn its constituent partners for infringements of the GPA. It operates by way of “continuing dialogue” between the parties.

If Jomic is relatively “invisible” as some critics tend to say, it is because by the nature of its mandate, it cannot draw light unto itself. What Jomic seeks to make most visible is the GPA. We want to make as many members of the public as possible more acquainted with the GPA and its provisions.

Jomic cannot be expected to monitor the implementation of the GPA alone nor can members of the public raise pertinent complaints about non-compliance with the GPA when they have not read it, let alone be familiar with its provisions. In the interests of transparency and inclusivity, we believe it is only when people have turned the GPA into a bedtime story book that they can make informed comments and decide for themselves what they believe to the top priorities of the new government. It is lack of familiarity with the provisions of the GPA which has led to either misdirected accusations against Jomic or misplaced expectations of its role and functions.

We believe it is because a majority of the people are not familiar with the provisions of the GPA that we have not been getting any direct complaints or comments about its implementation, except what newspapers tell them are the priorities. To date the only direct complaints the Jomic secretariat has received since it was set up in July have been about “fresh” or “continuing” farm invasions or “disruptions” from the Commercial Farmers’ Union. Some farmers have personally brought their cases to our offices. We have complemented these initiatives through site visits to randomly selected farms from the list we have to find out the situation on the ground.

It is these farm tours which have revealed a gap between what the media report and the situation on the ground, and the chasm between Jomic’s mandate under the GPA and people’s expectations on the acquired farms.

For instance, the most embarrassing question we have had to face is a farmer whose land was acquired by the state as early 2002. He is excited about the Jomic team’s visit, clearly hoping that finally his “troubles” are over. What do you tell him when at the end of his narration of the history of the farm, he asks the Jomic team what he should do? “Should I continue farming or not?” asked several farmers we have visited in Mashonaland West, Central, East and Manicaland.

Where I have been able to comment on this question, the truth of it has left most of them disappointed. My observation has been that Jomic is not taking over the role of the police, the courts or the Ministry of Lands. Cases which have to be reported to the police must be reported, those in the courts will be handled by the courts and the Ministry of Lands, not Jomic, executes government policy on land reform and farm allocations and the issuing of offer letters.

Jomic’s power is limited to what the principals to the GPA decide based on the information placed before them.

Joram Nyathi is Jomic communications manager

Unprepared … CNN’s Amanpour found wanting in Mugabe interview

CNN’S Chief International Correspondent, Christine Amanpour’s interview with President Robert Mugabe on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly was appallingly inept and very nearly scandalous.

Indeed outraged Zimbabweans rightly, if jokingly, dismissed the journalist as Aman-poor.

The Cable network claims its new global interview programme on which the President was featured sees its Chief International Correspondent apply the totality of her ‘experience’, ‘sharp intelligence’ and ‘extraordinary depth of knowledge’ to set the agenda for a ‘new global conversation’.

Yet while the veteran journalist may be ‘sharply intelligent’ and ‘deeply knowledgeable’ about other issues, she is terribly ignorant about Zimbabwe and the challenges the country faces today.

As it turned out, what CNN sought to pass as an exclusive and incisive conversation with the President was overally a shoddy piece of work which will not set any useful ‘new agenda’ in the ‘global conversation’ on Zimbabwe.

Particularly disappointing, however, is the fact that Amanpour was manifestly ill-prepared for the interview which enabled the President to get away without substantively addressing the issues dominating public debate in Zimbabwe today.

The fact she and her employers did not bother to do any basic research before the interview – apart from consulting a few ex-Rhodesian soldiers by Amanpour’s own admission — resulted in such silly errors as confusing people that were affected by ‘Operation Murambatsvina’ with farm workers, many of whom were left in limbo after government acquired land for resettlement.

Again any ‘experienced’ and ‘intelligent’ journalist would know that trying to engage President Mugabe on the ‘land issue’ and the matter of ‘sanctions’ is a hopeless enterprise.

The President is at his most passionate and eloquent when talking about these issues; and as soon as Amanpour inexpertly raised them, the Zimbabwean leader quickly overcame his initial unease and seized control of the interview.

A better strategy would have been to grant the President his oft-repeated position that the country is under economic sanctions.

The Interviewer could then have put it to him that the impact of the sanctions need not have been so grave given that supportive countries such as China have become huge players in global investment and the provision of development assistance.

Indeed it is China that is financing most of the post-war reconstruction efforts in countries like Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo; and not the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Instead of hopelessly trying to argue that Zimbabwe is not under sanctions, the CNN reporter should have quizzed the President on why friendly countries like China have committed such huge resources to Angola, the DRC and even Sudan and yet remain relatively reticent about dealing with Zimbabwe.

But to get back to the sanctions, and at the risk of be-labouring the point, it was palpably disingenuous of Amanpour, resident as she is in the United States, to insist that Zimbabwe only faces individual ‘restrictive measures’ and not the full gamut of economic sanctions.

The CNN Correspondent would have to be suffering a bad case of dementia not to be aware that the United States House of Representatives and Senate enacted the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA) in 2001 which then President George W Bush duly signed into law.

The Act states that “the secretary of the treasury shall instruct the United States executive director to each international financial institution to oppose and vote against (1) Any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe, or (2) Any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution.”

The international financial institutions specifically named by the Act are “the International Monetary Fund the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Development Association, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Investment Corporation, the African Development Bank, the African Development Fund, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Multilateral Investment Guaranty Agency”.

Therefore, anyone who remains adamant that ZIDERA is not an economic sanction deserves to be sectioned and committed to a mental institution.

In addition, the matter of some designate Deputy Minister called Roy Bennett continues to come up as if he was the only member of the MDC team yet to be appointed to the inclusive government.

Quite how and why CNN and other western media deliberately ignore the fact that several governors, permanent secretaries and ambassadors put forward by the two MDCs have still not been appointment to the GPA as well is baffling.

Yet, if madam Amanpour and her employers want to make ‘journalistic fools’ of themselves by regurgitating discredited opposition talking points; that is their choice and they are fully entitled to such lunacy.

However, what Zimbabweans justifiably find aggravating is this unending fixation with the matter the 4,000 or so former white commercial farmers who, despite their alleged ‘dispossession’ remain relatively well-off wherever they are.

There is not a single white former commercial farmer begging on the streets of Harare because they were disposed of ‘their’ land.

Again hands up any former white commercial farmers living off menial jobs and or as illegal immigrants in South African or the United Kingdom after losing ‘their’ farm to Mugabe’s so-called ‘land grab’?

Still, instead of repeating the silly claim that Zimbabwe’s agricultural productivity collapsed because of the land reform programme, CNN could have done a better job of the interview by putting it to the President that beneficiaries of the land reform programme, particularly influential individuals are not making productive use of the resource.

Many of the seized farms lie derelict or are only used as trophy assets and weekend braai spots.

The Zimbabwe government has also acknowledged the problem of multiple farm ownership by key regime figures but still fails to decisively deal with the problem.

The interviewer only needed to look through RBZ Governor Gideon Gono’s various monetary policy statements in which he bemoaned the diversion of resources made available by the bank to support the new farmers, especially those in the A2 zones.

Dr Gono also railed repeatedly against the vandalisation of irrigation equipment on acquired farms which could have helped mitigate the impact of the droughts the President blamed for the fall in agricultural output.

The CNN interviewer also failed to substantively engage the President on the many sticking points undermining progress in the power sharing government such as the lack of movement on constitutional and media reforms, when and how to bring back the Zimbabwe dollar and the inordinate delays in the appointment of statutory commissions.

These are among the many issues that dominate public discourse among Zimbabweans today, not the ‘dead’ matter of whether or not the disposed former white commercial farmers, ‘citizens by colonisation’ as Mugabe called them, were treated unfairly.

The West and its subordinate media need to accept that land reform, however haphazard and or ill-planned, can now not be undone. Neither should it be.

What can now only be discussed with regard to the land issue is the matter of restitution for those who lost farms to the resettlement programme and everybody knows whose responsibility this is.

Above all; and as far as the land issue is concerned, Zimbabwe has moved on; and so must the world.

First things first. ML Cremer, it is alleged, is a farmer in Chegutu, some 110km west of Harare. He has lost a lot of his De Rus Farm to the land reform programme launched in 2000. The last thing he wanted to see, it is suspected, was someone waving a piece paper called an “offer letter” claiming for somebody ownership of his remaining 60 hectares. No matter how well-connected such a personage was.

As it turned out, the bearer of the bad omen was a sister of American Dr Arikana Chihombori, said to be a relative of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai or his late wife, Susan. The good lady, a pastor, asked a lands officer to accompany her to claim possession of Cremer’s farm.

Cremer, like any law-abiding citizen, exploded into a white hurricane. He allegedly called her “a cold stupid kaffir”. Cremer is said to have also told her he didn’t “take instructions from a kaffir” to vacate his farm. He employs 300 blacks to whom he gives instructions everyday.

My vocabulary in both Shona and Ndebele is very shallow. I can’t find the equivalent adjective for kaffir to refer to a white man in our vernacular languages. Ibhunu is a corruption of boer or “farmer”. He was always fearsome.

We probably didn’t need any such words. I grew up knowing only words of endearment for the white man — ikhiwa. We say ikhiwa to refer to someone who is very light in complexion. Ikhiwa can also mean beautiful. It can refer to a man who exhibits financial independence, or someone who doesn’t bother others, a gentleman who minds his own business.

The word kaffir was especially rare for some of us who didn’t live on farms. When it was used, even in colonial times, it was a sign that the white man was very angry. It is a very derogatory term for a black African. With independence, and now with the land reform, ikhiwa or murungu, refers to anybody with money and political power. It means even a potential employer or anyone from whom you need favour.

Mugabe has tried to demystify the white man through land reform regardless of his other human foibles. Blacks should control their natural resources. They should be employers: that’s the way to be a white man. That’s at the core of European and US economic sanctions.

The policy of reconciliation in 1980 was meant to appease the white man, for it would have been awkward for Mugabe to call for reconciliation with Joshua Nkomo or between Zanu and Zapu when the two were fighting a common enemy — the white man or the Rhodesian system.

The independence Lancaster House Constitution also gave the white man 20 “reserved seats” while blacks went onto the “common roll”. The white man was given a moratorium on the land while freedom fighters received “demobilisation” money. That was in 1980.

But the white man never reciprocated our adoration which didn’t diminish with self-rule. A straight dealer is still “a white man”. If you want a second-hand item, be it a vehicle or fridge or television set, a white man is your best bet. Any deal with a white man is value for money. Yet after more than a century, few whites deign to speak local languages while we are told English is your passport to life.

While this might be true for the educated elite who can land good jobs in Europe and beyond, it has not yielded as much bounty as the gun did the semi-literate horse riders who invaded Zimbabwe at the end of the 19^th century and continued to grab land from Africans until as late as the 1970s.

Is it then possible that after 30 years of “reconciliation”, and 10 years of land reform, a black man is still a kaffir – a low caste citizen?

My worry is that this mental attitude about kaffirs could in fact be more pervasive than is acknowledged. The meaning of reconciliation was never fully articulated.

We were a slave race. If we could now walk along First Street Mall, even if our pockets were empty, we had “arrived”. Apart from the political leadership, nothing had changed. The white man remained a god perched up there, followed by the Indian, then the Coloured while the kaffir bore the burden of all productive labour from the farm to the factory floor.

To the extent that the policy of reconciliation legitimised property relations which obtained prior to 1979, it emptied the liberation war of all content beyond political power, and was a negation of the spirit of the revolution. It once again weakened the kaffir who had been empowered through war and revolutionary consciousness.

The land reform has only helped to underline this. The racial undertones in the fight to defend Zimbabwe’s “international citizens” from their uncivilised government is self-evident, yet the moral weight implied in these property rights is absent in a generalised human rights discourse anchored on the munificence of an employer race.

It hawks itself as the donor race. It is the same race which maintains sanctions on Zimbabwe which have become as indefensible as rape whatever the perpetrator’s defence.

LAST week, I watched on TV a debate on land reform between South Africa’s four main political parties contesting next week’s presidential and parliamentary elections.

Those represented were the Democratic Alliance, Freedom Front Plus, the Pan African Congress and Congress of the People.

Listening to the DA and the FFP’s arguments, I was dismayed that they reject even the principle, not just the methodology, of land reform. They believe they represent the chosen race to save the continent as farm owners. To them, land reform means Zimbabwe, another word for disaster.

They cannot draw positive lessons from Zimbabwe’s failure to plan, and adopt a full spectrum response infused with a creative empathy. This would entail a programme of gradual skills transfer and training, provision of capital and infrastructure and abundance of inputs such as seed and fertiliser.

Instead, they are stonewalling and raising the bogey of investor flight, reduced productivity and hunger. One can’t miss the implied racial slur about Africans’ innate “unfitness” to govern. That is why poor “Africans” can see a Moses in a badly flawed character like Zuma.

Many whites in South Africa own land by right of colonial conquest. The government seeking restitution must pay full market prices.

The debate exposed one thing: away from his personal legal woes about corruption, money-laundering and racketeering, a Jacob Zuma presidency faces resistance from resurgent, combative right wing forces; the same forces which last year celebrated the removal of Thabo Mbeki for “abusing power” and undermining state institutions. This was despite Mbeki, for all his black economic empowerment drive, leaving white capital’s enclave economy virtually intact since 1994.

These forces remain rooted in the colonial mould. It is possible Zuma misread their motive in his battles with Mbeki; they had their own bigger war with Mbeki for not dislodging President Robert Mugabe. He either feared or actively protected Mugabe, they charged, and Mugabe was setting a bad example by seizing white farms.

The truth must be dawning on Zuma. Whatever other grievances they had against Mbeki, this had nothing to do with love for Zuma or poor blacks.

But now that Mbeki is out of the way, they must confront Zuma and his leftist alliance partners, Cosatu and the South African Communist Party. The alliance poses two threats for whites: land seizure and a destabilising encroachment into the enclave white economy whose architecture qualifies South Africa as a democracy under Western eyes.

It is these fears which now feed the virulent attacks against Zuma. This is the real war for Zuma and South Africa, not tribal animosities being fomented to undermine the ANC’s focus on land reform.

To remain friends with the neo-liberal, Zuma would have to jettison the ANC’s alliance partners and, by extension, the foundation of his political legitimacy — poor South Africans for whom the 15 years of “majority” rule have been a “dream deferred”. That option is not only suicidal but almost impossible given the cross-party leadership linkages of the alliance.

As happened in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, South Africa today faces the dilemma of political liberation — failing to amicably resolve the colonial property ownership conundrum because of the hypocrisy of those who preach property rights only after they finish looting.

Rights derived from colonial conquest are elevated to the level of inalienable rights even as we are being told to forget about the past. Nobody deigns to explain just how white farmers came by this disproportionate land ownership to which liberation veterans like Zuma are a constant bugbear. Should I ascribe this to the “native intelligence” of colonists?

Whites seized land by conquest. The principle is that possession is 90% ownership. Let it not be forgotten that it took the force of arms for the colonialists to acknowledge black political rights in the teeth of red-clawed resistance. But the new ideology is to disparage those who provided the guns and promote the fantasy that many of those who opposed our political independence are the selfless custodians of our human rights. That is why we are being made to feel that the concept of national sovereignty is anathema in a global village.

We have had a lot of crocodile tears shed here in Zimbabwe about the rights of farm workers. Yet not all white farmers wanted to share land or any of their fabulous wealth with those who produced it. The black person, it may be argued, is still viewed exclusively as a provider of labour just as in the poor southern states of the United States before 1865, and never as a potential entrepreneur on the land.

A British journalist wistfully summed up the anxiety of whites after Zuma won the ANC presidency in Polokwane in December 2007. He said the cheap lifestyle British tourists were used to in South Africa “was under threat”. Zuma was a communist and going to “Africanise the country”, wailed the journalist. What’s the reverse of Africanise?

Will Zuma have the courage to give to the poor 30% of the land by 2014 as promised by the ANC? I hope he does.

But make no mistake about it, the day of independence remains a national occasion. It is a national day, one that cannot and should not be privatised by individuals.

We may differ on the politics, the economics and many other indices but the day of the nation’s founding must not be denigrated. It is to that day to which we must return to recover the values and aspirations that have been eroded over the last 29 years.

It might seem odd to be in celebratory mood at a time when Zimbabwe is literally on its knees, begging from whoever cares to listen. Indeed, at the time of our independence, one of our great supporters, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, then President of Tanzania is said to have remarked to President Mugabe, “You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way.”

To be sure, the liberated Zimbabwe was far developed than most of its neighbours, except South Africa. It was the envy of most of Africa. But looking at it now, it seems Mwalimu’s words went unheeded.

It is not too difficult to understand those who view the day of independence with scepticism. Indeed, one ironic circumstance is that in Ian Smith’s jails, President Mugabe and his comrades gained several academic degrees yet in present-day jails, even a petty thief is literally condemned to die a slow and painful death. Such is the gap in the way the colonial state and the post-independence state treats the weakest members of society.

Yet, to my mind, the failures of individuals should not be allowed to overshadow the sacrifices of the many men and women who gave life and limb to overcome colonialism. It was a fight that needed to be pursued given the circumstances of the time and they fought the good fight.

Indeed, it’s a shame that they had to fight at all and in the process cause more pain and suffering – the wounds of which have yet to heal. That their surviving comrades have trampled on their sacrifices is cause not to denigrate their efforts but to reflect on what needs to be done to fulfil their dreams.

In my view, perhaps the biggest shortcoming is that Zimbabwe has never gone through a process of what may be referred to as ‘national healing’. National healing defies easy definition; indeed, it is one of those phrases that are used so often on the assumption that everyone knows what it means but upon asking, no one can actually give a coherent answer! It could mean so many things to so many people. I suspect there are many doctoral theses on the subject!

To my mind, however, it symbolises a process, not a single event. At independence, politicians gathered at Lancaster House in London, made a political deal which they called the Constitution and exchanged seats, with the new replacing the old and no more.

Although there was a lot of rhetoric about reconciliation, it never quite translated into practice. There was nothing concrete done to heal the wounds of the past. Too many things were swept under the Lancaster carpet.

Our politicians got back home and locked skeletons in the cupboard hoping that no-one would discover them. In doing so, a bad precedent was created. Over the years, more and more skeletons have been added into more and more cupboards. That’s because perpetrators have long known that there is no accountability for wrongful actions or omissions. They have the mentality of the jungle creature which survives simply because it is the fittest and can trample upon the weakest, with no reason whatsoever to account for its actions. Not surprisingly, over the years, the house of stones has become a house of skeletons.

It is for this reason that the new inclusive administration needs to seriously begin a process of national healing. How shall that be done? National healing has to begin with the acknowledgement and acceptance that there exists what may be termed a ‘national wound’. This symbolises the wrongful acts (or omissions) that have been committed against individuals and communities over the years.

There has to be a process of identifying this national wound – these wrongful things that have happened in the past. Some are obvious and well-known such as the Matabeleland atrocities, others less so and perhaps forgotten such as what happened during the colonial era and the war years.

This, therefore, raises the question of time-frames. At what point do you begin to identify these wrongful acts? To my mind, this identification process has to be extensive and comprehensive. It is not for me to set a time-frame but it is plain that some of the problems that we have faced more recently, around the land question for example, are manifestations of these attempts to redress what are considered to be wrongs of the colonial era. Clearly the government has for the past decade been guided by this memory of the wrongful acts committed during colonialism.

Lancaster did little to address this matter. Instead it sought to maintain the status quo, which was always going to be unsustainable in the long run. The result has been disastrous, given the farm seizures that took place in the last decade to the detriment of agricultural production. Yet what has happened has also opened new wounds, upon those whose property was forcibly taken this time around. This too, is a wound that will not go away. It has to be attended to.

The liberation struggle of the 1970s was a valiant effort but it also brought untold suffering among the people. Lives were lost and limbs were broken on either side. But these wounds were not dealt with at independence and they have continued to fester over the years.

Indeed, the atrocities committed against the people of Matabeleland opened up a great wound upon the body of the nation. The memory of those atrocities will not simply evaporate with time. It is a deep wound on the national psyche and one that needs attention.

Likewise, the wrongful acts visited upon citizens under the guise of Operation Murambatsvina in 2005. Then there is the violence, the killings and torture, loss of property and various other wrongful acts committed against individuals, especially during election periods.

Independence is as much about freedom as it is about putting minds to rest. Zimbabwe is plagued by too many restless souls it’s not surprising that it continues to be mired in difficulty. The skeletons in the cupboard will continue knocking.

I hope there will come a day when it will be universally recognised that each one of us, that each tribe and race, despite our differences and difficult past, has played a part in building Zimbabwe.

Each one of us, black or white has left an imprint on the body of the nation. It is not because we choose to be Zimbabwean; it is because we are Zimbabwean and can never be anything else however much we travel the world and find new homes.

Many will testify, black or white, that however beautiful the grass appears elsewhere, there is only one place we call home. It is the place that carries our umbilical cords. It is the place to which we were joined at birth.

Alex Magaisa is based at, Kent Law School, the University of Kent and can be contacted at wamagaisa@yahoo.co.uk

Let me from the start ask for Biti’s indulgence. My comments on his budget statement are based on assumptions and, as the British Council wisely counsels in its leadership training programmes, we should hold our assumptions lightly in case there is need to discard them in the light of new information. Mine are borrowed assumptions based on his alleged relationship with Gono.

So here I go. The fight in Zimbabwe’s crisis is not with Gideon Gono. The fight is against low productivity and hunger. What is needed is an urgent economic turnaround.

But I have failed to rationalise Biti’s appointment as Finance Minister with Gono as Reserve Bank governor. This was soon after Biti likened Gono to an al-Qaeda who deserved to stand before a firing squad. It is as if somebody endorsed the view that Gono was the enemy of the state and only Biti could tackle him.

Biti appears to have taken the post with a lot of relish, ready for a fight, either to get rid of Gono or to humiliate him. First, he left him out of his delegation to South Africa to explain Zimbabwe’s financial situation.

I don’t know what South Africa’s Tito Mboweni made of it but it must have been awkward trying to deal with a Finance Minister who is at war with the man in charge of his nation’s financial intermediation; the man who not only understands better the depth of the crisis but will also determine how the debt is repaid once the political rhetoric is over. Why wash your dirty linen on a neighbour’s yard?

Second, it was Gono who announced the use of multi-currencies in his monetary policy statement on February 2. He, however, said the Zimbabwe dollar would remain legal tender “to safeguard our national identity and sovereignty” after lopping 12 zeros, and an immediate end to quasi-fiscal activities by the Reserve Bank. This signified a reduced role for Gono in the economy.

Biti rammed it in through his “revised” statement, declaring the Zimbabwe dollar “dead”. There would be “no more printing of money”, he announced enthusiastically. He got a round of applause. You would have thought there was a chance of Gono printing the Rand and US dollar.

Yet Biti makes an important point, whose import he unfortunately misses. He says in his statement he had learnt three lessons in the four weeks since he assumed office. “The first (lesson) being high levels of demand on the fiscus, the second being huge expectations, and the third being limited capacity to deliver on the part of the fiscus.”

He is Finance Minister in a new government. Previously, in a broke government with limited options under sanctions, those demands fell on Gono at Reserve Bank. He didn’t have the optimism of a minister expecting donor funds.

In his optimism, Biti has removed the 7,5% “surrender requirement” for miners which Gono had progressively reduced from over 45% when he took over at the RBZ in 2003. Thanks to Biti, I am also a beneficiary of his decision to raise the tax free band from US$125 to $150. Cutting the budget by US$700 million is no more than showmanship if it doesn’t relieve the load on the poor by reducing the executive payroll.

I would assume that the Mercs which the freshmen have appropriated to themselves were also purchased with proceeds of Gono’s printing press! It was naive of him to even dream of winning the senseless battle against inflation.

But then Biti, when you rely on the promise of others to finance your requirements I think it is prudent to allocate what you have “gathered” according to need than to get a round of business applause.

Similarly, while money printed by the RBZ might have been open to abuse, by instantly killing the Zimbabwe dollar, Biti has burnt all bridges behind him in the hope that there will be a lot to “kill” and “eat” in the forest ahead.

To raise the tax free band in an economy with a claimed unemployment of 90% might be a stimulus package for consumers and business but smacks of too much faith in the promises of donors. Biti might live to rue these impetuous decisions.

Yet, on matters of substance, Biti’s “reality check”, like Gono’s in the past, is strong on the obvious aspects of our crisis, giving us a litany of the problems just like Gono removing zeros from the local currency, but leaves the crux of solution in the realm of political speculation – whether potential donors can be sufficiently humoured to coax money from taxpayers lately hit by the plague of irresponsible laissez faire.

The difference between the two is that while Gono looked to our politicians to work out a deal and printed money to fill the deficit gap, Biti has opted to destroy the mint and instead prioritise the begging bowl, apparently oblivious of the “global” financial crunch or too confident of the bounty of the MDC’s “friends” despite their setting conditions which would be too embarrassing to accept.

Some have made it clear they won’t release any money so long as Robert Mugabe is president. They (donors) want to be in charge of the government because, they dare say, “Tsvangirai is too weak”. He is not as strong as Kenya’s Raila Odinga.

The point about Mugabe leads me with trepidation into the hallowed sphere of that breed of our citizens called “remaining” white commercial farmers. I almost avoided mentioning them, because they are a protected species.

In our inclusive democracy, it has become risky to be different, to say the unpopular truth. But I was relieved when Professor Ken Mufuka added to my limited ken by indicating that part of the reason we should not expect aid from, or the lifting of sanctions by the US any time soon, is because for Democrats to be seen to be giving money to Mugabe is a sure way to lose elections.

“The anti-Mugabe propaganda war (in the US) can only be assuaged by some arrangement satisfactory to (Zimbabwe’s) white farmers …,” Mufuka wrote in his column.

One such farmer who has relocated to Mozambique wrote boldly on her web site two weeks ago that there would be no peace in Zimbabwe “until Mugabe is dead”.

My feeling is that Mugabe and Zanu PF have become victims of their own half-hearted measures in the fast-track land reform. It is those farmers who were left on the land who have become Mugabe’s relentless nemesis.

Their number changes everyday from 72 to 100 to 500. If they were left on the farms because they were viewed as “friends”, that was a huge mistake. They have become the coalition government’s most implacable enemy. Touch any one of them and before the end of the day news portals are clogged with reports of “fresh farm invasions”, “threats to property rights”, “human rights violations”, travel warnings to Zimbabwe and investor flight.

A single white farmer’s eviction poses a serious threat to food security. Then you wonder why we ever needed 4,500 of them. Are these genuine farmers or a decoy for a sinister project?

Given the pernicious influence of these “remaining” white farmers, it is easy to see why a key “pillar” of Biti’s STERP, the short-term economic recovery programme launched last week, is “democratisation”. This is the “pillar” which will open the floodgates of foreign financial aid to Zimbabwe, and its components are listed with telling boldness about their origin:

Rule of law;
A new people-driven Constitution;
Restoration of property rights;
Restoration of political legitimacy;
Freedom and liberties;
Restoration of personal measures;
Opening up of the media; as well as
Restoration and re-integration of Zimbabwe into the community of nations.

There is nothing wrong with these concepts per se. In fact their realisation should be every nation’s ultimate goal. What worries me is their prioritisation in a short-term programme, in the specific case of STERP, about 10 months.

Biti is aware that the GPA and the MoU before it are unequivocal that the land reform programme “is irreversible”. This raises questions about repeated references to “restoration”. To whom? From whom? By whom? Covering what historical period?

This “pillar” is inextricably tied to the begging bowl than the long-term interests of the nation. While its components are a vital indicator of a nation’s democratic well-being, to place it as the top priority in our emergency is misplaced. It’s like the Fire Brigade coming to rescue people from a burning house demanding that “all women should be decently dressed first before we can come in”.

It is not a condition set by someone who wants to help you. The aim is to settle a score. The West has never disguised its distaste for the coalition arrangement. In fact it is now demanding that the AU and SADC, which guaranteed the initial agreement between Zanu PF and the MDC and the coalition government which followed, should fund it.

In short, to take Biti’s democratisation “pillar” as a priority ahead of food, health, water and security is to stand Maslow’s hierarchy of needs on its head.

Joram Nyathi is deputy editor of the Zimbabwe Independent. He writes here in his personal capacity

Susan Tsvangirai died in a car accident, a victim of what can safely be called the “human factor”, while former Army Commander General Vitalis Zvinavashe succumbed to natural causes.

It is often difficult in our polarised political environment to see a commonality of purpose and mission between the two. Indeed, there are those who would want to emphasise to us how impossible it is for a diehard Zanu PF cadre and the wife of MDC-T leader to have anything in common. To such people, the two are as different as day and night or good and evil. We must be wary of such holier-than-thou distinction which seek to disjoin our history between a past best forgotten and a present with no past but only a utopian future.

To me, the two symbolically represent phases in a continuum in the struggle for ’s freedom – whether from colonial bondage, poverty or oppression.

Zvinavashe stands tall in the primary phase of the armed struggle while Susan Tsvangirai was in the tertiary tier striving to actualise the nation’s dreams of political independence.

In the past few years, and especially the period since 1997, veterans of ’s liberation war have been cast in disparaging light, giving the impression that our independence was not worth the sacrifice.

The wayward acts of a few have been magnified to denigrate all of them as a violent lot who have betrayed the noble cause of those who perished in the war. In short, the only good war veteran was the dead one. We flinch to state what it was they died fighting for, just as much as our cynical youths today sneer at the word “patriotism”.

This is most regrettable. It points to national failure more than simple cultural alienation among the youths; it points to disappointed hopes, failed aspirations and frustration with a noble but badly-executed land reform programme which went awfully wrong.

Opportunists with a vested interest have pounced with a vengeance. To them, the only way forward is back to the pre-2000 racially-skewed property ownership rights despite their clear negation of the principles of social justice.

Today, as we mourn the passing on of Zvinavashe, we must reflect as a nation on what our independence means. As we mourn Susan, we must ask whether human rights and our dignity as a people would have been possible without political independence.

The truth is that the political independence for which liberation heroes such as Zvinavashe sacrificed so much has made it possible for the succeeding generations like Susan to continue the fight from a higher plane. And for that fight to be meaningful, it cannot be divorced from economic independence.

It was therefore edifying to see our political leaders this week acting in concert following Susan Tsvangirai’s death. The MDC was quick to reciprocate this gesture following news of Zvinavashe’s death. Not only did the leaders of both parties demonstrate maturity, they also thwarted Mark Anthony-type mischief makers whose conspiracies about the cause of Susan’s death flew faster than the reality at the scene of the accident.

Both Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and President Robert Mugabe were quick to scotch the rumour of “assassination” and “perfect targets”. This left the “plotters” high and dry, for this had come as a perfect opportunity to kill Tsvangirai’s “sell-out deal” which produced the unity government. What further proof did Tsvangirai and the MDC need to show that Zanu PF was not sincere about the deal and that his very life was in danger? They must have wondered.

A visit to the scene quickly embarrasses this assassination theory. Apart from the deadly hump on the road, the stretch of the road is too open a veld for anyone to plot such mischief. The deadly hump is just 40m away from busy Mhondoro turnoff where people are either sitting there selling vegetables or waiting for transport.

There is no doubt it was these vendors and wayfarers who were the first eyewitnesses to the accident. Apparently despite their huge numbers and the ubiquity of the cellphone, black MDC supporters in the area did not have resources or could not be trusted to do a good job.

Instead, who were the “first” on the scene? White commercial farmers who had been alerted by Eddie Cross who started “filming” and “climbing on the vehicle” even before police arrived. They had the nerve to complain about police “questioning” them.

Imagine what we would hear had a police officer or a soldier been “found” by the farmers climbing on the vehicle and filming it to protect evidence!

As a colleague eloquently put it, “if only a military or government vehicle had been involved in the accident, Mugabe would be finished”. There would be no need to investigate whether it was a “genuine accident”. In the event, the vehicle was engaged in USAID activities.

Despite his evident grief, statesmanship prevailed in Tsvangirai. Resisting the herd instinct, he refused to indulge this dangerous recklessness. He was able to look, even through tears, beyond the emotional response of party supporters and focus towards the greater national good.

For me, grief and misfortune this week gave us a façade of unity so perfect among our leaders it looked real. This demonstrates one thing: that with sufficient desire, with determined leadership and a common purpose, we can overcome our differences, real or imagined.

President Mugabe played the veritable father-figure. I wish he had been a disinterested but concerned counsellor coming out of retirement to console and stabilise a grief-stricken nation. It sounded insincere to hear him counsel against political violence he is routinely accused of fomenting and fanning. Age might just be a number but 85 years has a peculiarity about it for one to keep indicating an interest to take part in to future elections.

Let me end with a few revealing comments from the late Susan Tsvangirai about how she envisaged her role as ’s First Lady. Most Zimbabweans, like myself, never heard her speaking. She rarely spoke in public although she always stood by her husband like his shadow, which is why she will be so sorely missed.

In a rare interview published ahead of the 2002 presidential election, which her husband Morgan controversially lost to Mugabe, Susan told the Sunday Telegraph:

“There is a lot of work to do. I am looking forward to being not only the mother of my own children but the mother of the nation as well.”

Regarding the political violence which was going in the campaign, she remarked prophetically: “Despite all the intimidation and the security, there is no need to live in fear, because we are all going to die one day, violently or otherwise. There is nothing any of us can do about that.”

She is gone and there is nothing any one of us can do about it. She has been taken away at the very hour when she should have begun her role as the mother of the nation.

I can only pray that as a nation we have learnt a lesson from this grief: the need for unity and a realisation that we share a destiny. Prime Minister Tsvangirai needs our support in his hour of greatest need. It is ’s darkest hour.

*Joram Nyathi is deputy editor of the Zimbabwe Independent. He writes here in his personal capacity

Two weeks ago I was a guest of the British Council in Surrey, just outside London, on the final part of a leadership development programme called “Interaction – Trust the Difference”.

It was an exhilarating learning experience. We visited a virtually deserted Trafalgar Square, just a short walk from Buckingham Palace, where we took a dozen or so pictures.

At the seminar, I was one of 157 people from several countries in Africa, Asia and Britain itself, all booked in at Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon, west of London. We were eight from Zimbabwe from the original 18 members. I understand others couldn’t make it because of stringent visa requirements. I got mine on Friday, February 6, a day before departure! Like everybody else, I had lost hope.

The programme itself is simple but its impact profound. Its emphasis is on ubuntu. We learn to cherish and value the richness humanity derives from its diversity.

Cultural and political tolerance and conflict resolution are key result areas.

It challenges our assumptions in our personal lives and in our relationships, showing that our prejudices are largely a result of ignorance and arrogance. There is so much intolerance in society because we refuse to be the other person. It stresses the need to learn about and understand better those things or people with whom we disagree than to condemn and pass value judgements — all this under a broad concept called appreciative inquiry.

There was a lot of interest in Zimbabwe, where prejudice and misconception vied for attention. I soon learnt how hard it is to fight prejudice, especially from the I-know-it-all type about “the problem with Africa”. To them, we are a doomed continent solely because of political leaders who won’t leave power. Democracy is no more than a ritualistic cyclic change of leaders without any fundamental improvements in people’s lives.

To some of them, Zimbabwe is a tourist resort for visitors to enjoy while poor blacks watch over from the periphery. They talk glibly about wonderful infrastructure such as roads and hotels and ask when you will “return” to “your former glory”. I told them we were not “returning” to anything.

“We are not moving backwards. We are building a better Zimbabwe on the foundation of the resources we now control than foreign charity could ever achieve,” I told them.

Many were shocked. Was I a government spy, they inquired? I am used to these accusations. To them only lunatic Zanu PF supporters can see anything positive in Zimbabwe and discern a principle behind land reform other than Mugabe’s imperialist rhetoric. They can’t see the “bigger picture” on the land and our “full spectrum response” to the nagging problem of rural poverty and congestion.

To them, it is all about Mugabe “using white farms” to buy black votes. They imagine all the 140 000 resettled families as Mugabe’s “cronies” who have ruined Africa’s fabled “former breadbasket”.

I was supported mainly by three guys: one Zimbabwean, Thula Dlamini, working for SABC in South Africa, a young writer from South Africa who told me of former Zimbabwean farmers who have constructed a “laager of Rhodesians” in Port Elizabeth, and a Briton, Michael Holdgate who said he had lived in Zimbabwe for 14 years until 2002 and married in Murehwa. He liked to call himself Mhofu. He volunteered to chair a lively panel discussion on Zimbabwe with excited contributions from Zambian and Namibian delegates.

The highlight of the programme was an address by chairman of the British Council, former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, and a presentation by Monica Sharma, a strong proponent of the “full spectrum” theory and senior UN official.

The British Council’s mission, Kinnock explained, was to help increase understanding between the United Kingdom and other nations. Britain also wanted to improve “interaction” among other nations, hence the grouping of so many nationalities at one venue.

Britain is responding in a practical way to its own localised experience. There are growing communities of ethnic minorities in the UK from India, Pakistan, Jamaica and Africa. There are fears of racial prejudices coalescing into xenophobia as happened recently in France, and in South Africa last year. British media are playing their part in fighting racial prejudice through a voluntary, non-political version of our JOMIC called the Society of Editors.

My belief was reaffirmed that the “chalk and cheese” imagery about the MDC and Zanu PF is hyperbole, for there are neither ethnic, cultural, linguistic nor ideological differences between the two parties. Ideologically, the MDC is still rudderless.

Globally, Kinnock waxed about his country’s cultural victory against rivals, the United States and France. France, he said, had lost the battle given that English was the most widely spoken language in the world, while the US’s Public Affairs section was 50 years behind the British Council.

Back home, I was greeted with news that Britain was planning to “evacuate” its elderly and other “vulnerable” citizens from Zimbabwe because of deteriorating social and political conditions. Some of the elderly had lost their farms and their pensions had become worthless due to inflation.

I wondered if this was a welcoming present for Prime Minister Tsvangirai for joining the coalition government. Was this plain racism? You impose sanctions on the natives, and airlift your own to safety! Have the black elderly who have suffered equal if not worse deprivation under these sanctions lesser human rights than their British counterparts?

And what message was being sent out to the wider world about the situation in Zimbabwe at the very moment of its rebirth, a time of our “finding each other”?

For it is Britain which sets the cue for the other nations which only imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe in sympathy with the UK’s private grievance over land reform. This political act doesn’t in any way reflect the values of mutual understanding and respect which the British Council seeks to spread across the globe. To me, this is schizophrenia.