Zuma's intervention in Zimbabwe will be futile

South African President and current chair of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) Jacob Zuma heads to Zimbabwe at the end of this month to resolve outstanding issues in the Global Political Agreement that underpins the Inclusive Government between Robert Mugabe's Zanu PF and the two MDC factions.
The outcome of this diplomatic effort is so painfully obvious as to make its undertaking an empty ritual meant only to furnish perceptions that 'something' is being done by the regional group. Mugabe has already dug in, accusing the MDC in the past week of failing to live up to part of their bargain - meaning the removal of western sanctions on Mugabe and his top lieutenants.
It is ludicrous to suggest that the MDC, or any foreign entity for that matter, has the responsibility, let alone the power, to make American or European foreign policy.
Because Zanu PF has sought to monopolise Zimbabwean nationalism and projected itself as its sole and perpetual vanguard, it has come to believe its own propaganda that the MDC is not of itself but a mere spawn of the 'white', 'imperialist' West. Thus, by demanding that the MDC gets European and American sanctions lifted, Mugabe and Zanu PF are effectively pushing the MDC to accept the derogatory, alienating identity that they have sought to pin on it from the day of its inception.
Zuma will hardly throw himself into this task to the point of dismissing Zanu PF's ludicrous demands. Indeed, that the original mediator, Thabo Mbeki, even allowed them to be included in the signed agreement in the first place speaks volumes about the thinking that informs many of our regional leaders and their approach to the crisis in Zimbabwe. So while Zuma might lean a bit less softly on Mugabe on account of Hilary Clinton's recent visit to Pretoria and, perhaps, in deference to the position of his tripartite allies in the ANC - Cosatu and the SA Communist Party, who were both appalled by Mbeki's 'quiet diplomacy' policy - the likeliest outcome is that Zuma's visit will not leave Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF on the ropes.

In fact, in order to milk Zuma's visit to their advantage, Zanu PF and Mugabe have contrived to project the South African leader's trip as a state visit by making him the guest of honour at the country's once-popular Harare Agricultural show. In this way, Mugabe will be seen palling around with Zuma infront of thousands of his compatriots and international media cameras. Any notion in the public mind of him being ostracised by the region's most powerful country for his intransigence with respect to fulfilling his obligations in the GPA will thus wither away.

It does not inspire much confidence, too, that Zuma's successor as chair of SADC in the coming weeks is none other than DRC President Joseph Kabila, who has much to be grateful to Mugabe for and, as he openly admits, regards the Zimbabwean octogenarian strongman as 'my father'.

Mugabe passes on UN trip, sends Mujuru

VICE-President Joice Mujuru is in New York where she will attend the United Nations summit of world leaders on the global financial and economic crisis and its impact on development. I think Mugabe's decision to pass over this meeting has to do with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's trip to Western Europe and the US.

Despite its failure to unlock the vaults of western treasuries, the PM's trip has made one thing resoundingly clear: Morgan Tsvangirai has arrived on the global stage. For whatever he did not get materially, Tsvangirai received recognition across Europe and the US. He was received warmly and in many respects, as a head of state. Mugabe must have calculated that it was not tactically astute to venture onto the global stage and be eclipsed by Tsvangirai's towering shadow which still projects across the western world as we speak.

The symbolism would have been to stark for anyone to miss: yesterday's man now consumed in the shadow of the upstart Tsvangirai, enjoying the warmth of welcome that Mugabe used to bask in only a mere decade or so earlier. Secondly, and in deference to the objective of Tsvangirai's trip, it may spoil any chances of getting financial support should Mugabe choose to demonstrate that he is still very much the head of state and the central man by coming out to the UN as western leaders are still trying to get themselves to warm to Tsvangirai's optimism about Zimbabwe being now poised towards irreversible change.

So better to send a nonentity in international relations, someone who will go out and offer token representation for the country whilst remaining unmolested by the western media. Meanwhile back home, this can be spun as Mugabe having sent yet another of his juniors on an errand on his behalf.

Dinner with Morgan

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai inspects a guard of honour with German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a visit to that country as part of his 3-week European and US tour.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party is holding a banquet for him on Saturday evening. Zimbabwean groups and other interested parties have been invited to come and wine and dine with the Premier – at the not too modest price of £75 per head!

Personally, I strongly feel that it is inappropriate for the Prime Minister, who is on state business, to attend a fundraising dinner for his political party. It is naïve of the MDC’s UK branch to conscript the Prime Minister into a partisan fundraising project in the midst of his very first foreign assignment on behalf of an extremely fragile coalition government. It is not strategic and it causes needless friction.

As a matter of protocol, it seems rather inappropriate for a statesman on an important assignment on behalf of the state, and enjoying such reception as established diplomatic protocol reserves for one carrying the seal of one's state, to detour into private political interests within the course of that same mission. It becomes particularly odious when those private engagements replicate the very objective of his official mission – fundraising on behalf of the state.

Perhaps the MDC UK is failing to appreciate the distinction between Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minister and statesman, and as leader of their political party. More significantly, from our peculiar political context as citizens of a country that has just struck an historic governance arrangement in order to mitigate a long-running crisis, it behoves the Prime Minister to not only address his people on the salient aspects of the political realities now obtaining in Zimbabwe today, but to listen to their perspective of what has transpired in Zimbabwe in the last few months, what their experiences here are, and where all of that situates them with respect to their role in the urgent business of Zimbabwe's reconstruction.

The Prime Minister will address a rally at Southwark Cathedral - it will be a rally, hardly the ideal platform for a dialogical exchange with a constituency that has a key role to play in Zimbabwe’s recovery. This being his first sojourn to these shores after the momentous decision to create the inclusive government, one would have expected the Prime Minister to not only avail himself to his people, through their organised representative groups, but to actively consider it a priority to hold deeper discussions with them about both the agenda of his government and the Diaspora’s role in it.

Much has been said by our politicians about how critical the Diaspora is to the recovery of the country through the repatriation of both skills and capital. Indeed, it has been acknowledged just how crucial remittances from the Diaspora have been in keeping the country afloat and how, through more systematic deployment of the Diaspora dollar, it can play an even greater role in the country’s economic revival.

The Diaspora’s peculiar concentration of some of Zimbabwe's high end skills also makes it a particularly strategic building block for the new Zimbabwe in whose service the Prime Minister has pledged himself. On that account, I would have expected him to have considered a broader platform upon which to engage with this community during his maiden foreign mission.

For a start, there is the small matter of the constitutional reform process which, ideally, should serve as the process that re-engages all of Zimbabwe’s sons and daughters in the national reconstruction project. A plethora of Diaspora civil society groups are dying to engage the Prime Minister and members of his government on this very fundamental issue, not least because the authorities in charge of the process in Zimbabwe have already announced a timetable that does not exactly envisage our direct participation to any practical extent.

Beyond platitudes being mouthed off by officials of the Prime Minister’s government about embassies being deployed to collect the Diaspora’s views, aided by an as yet non-existent website, nothing real seems to be happening concerning facilitation of the Diaspora’s participation in the constitutional reform exercise. There is beginning to emerge in the Diaspora an overwhelming sense that politicians on both sides of the divide in Zimbabwe seem to court us only as a cash cow whilst eschewing formal accountability to us. Direct involvement in the constitutional reform process will no doubt be a perfect elixir for this growing sense of marginalisation.

I'm disappointed that the Prime Minister’s party has sought to privatise his presence in the country in order to cash in on the burning need among Zimbabwean groups in the UK to engage with their leader.

Response to Denford Magora

I tried posting my comment on Denford Magora's blog but an internet explorer error message keeps popping up and aborts the operation. See Magora's latest entry "Biti Stole STERP From ZANU PF, Says Mugabe As Coalition Crumbles".

Denford, what do you make of the possible fate of Zanu PF and Mugabe's own manoeuvres? You have consistently looked at the inclusive government from the perspective of the MDC as the variable and Zanu PF as the constant in the overall grand scheme of things in Zimbabwe's current politics. I mean, you imply that MDC faces the choice of either walking out in frustration in the face of Mugabe's unrelenting obstinacy, or staying put but endure certain humiliation at the hands of Mugabe.

Either way, one gets the sense of an invincible Mugabe and Zanu PF whose immutable role is to be the unyielding constant against which all other variables react and ultimately suffer the inevitability of either of only two outcomes, both of which leave the constant intact. For us to see the whole picture, we need to look at whether or not Mugabe and Zanu's strategy is also viable or sustainable, even in the short to immediate term.

Will the entire party in its various factions rally behind and be identified with another scorched earth, power project reminiscent of June 27? Narrowing it further, are the hardliners themselves prepared to push the envelope on militarised electioneering a la June 27, taking into context regional and international factors and the very tenuous diplomacy that stopped June 27 from getting onto the agenda of the UN Security Council?

And will the economic interests associated with Zanu go along with a plan to railroad the MDC out of government and risk recreating the economic status quo ante? And how is it envisaged that the feeble movements in the economy, from the tentative engagements with the international community to all these other credit facilities being floated, will be sustained going forward should the political map be shaken so radically?

I think some of these issues need to be put at the centre of any analysis of the possible strategies any of the key players in this inclusive government is mulling. I don't know if I'm merely being naive, but it sounds too incredulous to believe that any of these parties would walk away from this arrangement and still be sure of their future outside of it.

For Mutambara, it is the only way his outfit is relevant; for Tsvangirai, this is the only respite from a militaristic assault by Zanu PF; for Mugabe, it affords a modicum of relief within which he may embrace the inevitable end of his long career; for Zanu PF, it pacifies popular anger with its monumental failures over time and also under Gono's outrageous reign and provides a platform to re-devise its power schemes for the future.

Polygamy, patriarchy and the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe

Morgan Tsvangirai arrives for Sa President Jacob Zuma's inauguration in the company of his niece Dr Arikana Chihombori.

This post arose out of a debate with colleagues on the Association of Zimbabwe Journalists UK googlegroup following allegations on The Zimbabwe Times website that Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is believed to have a second wife.

Concerning polygamy, it's beyond argument that this practice is the hallmark of patriarchy. Indeed, the existence of laws that legalise polygamy in Zimbabwe points to the endurance of patriarchal forms of social relations in our society and culture. It is an unequal form of social relations and has grave ramifications on economic and other power relations between men and women. This is why campaigners for women's rights in Zimbabwe and elsewhere take issue with it.

Those who benefit from it want it to stay and tradition is deployed as the justification for its continued existence; but for those for whom it has a harvest of subjection, emasculation and disempowerment, it is a system to be fought and crushed and consigned to the dustbins of history.

In the Black Insider, Marechera said of tradition and custom that they're like parasitic leeches and lice that exist only on account of the lifeblood they suck from their hosts. Denied this opportunity, they are incapable of any independent existence of their own. There are certain cultural practices and traditions, such as polygamy, that are like these leeches and lice whose lives the entrenched interests in society strive to preserve only because they're beneficiaries of such dependent social constructs. And so the vested interests continue to want everyone to venerate these parasitic social constructs as though they're sacred and indispensable to our lives whilst the reality is, in fact, the other way round!

I don't see why or how polygamy should be good for any woman. If I were one, I'd rail against it and want to smash it to smithereens!

The association between polygamy, partiarchy and the subjection of women is indisputably strong. Power relations between a man and his wives are tilted in favour of the patriarch; he stands more than equal to each one of them as individuals and also to all of them as a
collective.

Any struggle to democratise a polity necessarily invokes the democratisation of its society. Recognising and respecting individual rights and freedoms is the basis for a liberal culture and politics. That is contradictory, in principle, to a polygamist's patriarchal lordship over his wives. How he percieves relations between the sexes has a bearing on what social system he dreams of realising in his struggle. His conception of individual freedom in the kind of democratic state that he endeavours for naturally has certain boundaries imposed by his own reality and imagination (in this regard, I seriously doubt Zuma's capacity to advance the interests of women, such as taking South Africa's heinous rape culture to task).

I'm not sure whether MDC MP Timothy Mubhawu is a polygamist or not, but he certainly subscribes to a patriarchal worldview that sees women as unequal to men (a reality that polygamy captures). During last year's heated Parliamentary debate over the Domestic Violence Bill, Mubhawu urged the national assembly not to pass the bill aimed at stamping out domestic violence because women were inferior to men.

"I stand here representing God the Almighty. Women are not equal to men. This is a dangerous bill, and let it be known in Zimbabwe that the rights, privileges and status of men are gone."

There is definitely cause for concern when an MP who represents a party that purports to lead Zimbabwe's campaign for democratic change utters such farcical nonsense.

MDC must be more forthright about its values in this govt

I'm not sure that Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC have a clear strategy to counter the infidelity of Mugabe and Zanu PF in this marriage. Why does the MDC think this arrangement can work only if they are willing to prostrate themselves before Zanu PF in supplication?
I think they're seriously undermining themselves by giving Mugabe and Zanu the semblance of power and authority. I say 'semblance' because even though Mugabe's authority is still constitutionally enshrined, we all know it is worth no more than hot air since his position is really underpinned by nothing other than the GPA and the MDC's willingness to subscribe to it.
In that sense, why does the MDC not at least show themselves to be wielding real political authority as given to it by the voters at the last elections? What is stopping them from confidently and consistently talking up their values and how, in the final victory over the dictatorship, punishment for transgressions against the law and the rights of citizens will be dispensed swiftly? After the March 2008 elections, there is a sense in Zimbabwean politics of things having moved beyond the dictatorship's control. The regional outrage at the conduct of the June 27 elections can only mean there will be no appetite for excusing such egregious conduct again should Mugabe's successors try to repeat the same strategy of retaining power. Why, even this thing after June 27 wasn't salvageable outside of a power-sharing arrangement. The SADC or AU never ventured to entertain any arrangement that only had Zanu PF in power after June 27. In a sense you could say there's now a point beyond which regional diplomacy cannot be expected to cover up violations of electoral conduct. June 27 was one such and Zanu could only be rescued by enlisting the participation of the victims of its violence and treachery.
And so given this scenario, I'm at a loss as to why the MDC does not seek to hammer home to all those so-called hardliners that the major shift in power relations in Zimbabwean politics brought about by the March elections can only be completed rather than reversed in future elections and that their comeuppance will surely come.
It's a pity our politics is always about who gets what; it's about the spoils of power. In my view it would have been infinitely more attractive to have some of the MDC's big guns deliberately stay out of the unity government so that the party remains strong and focussed rather than have its agenda dictated by the imperatives of the power-sharing government. Having every senior figure in the compromise government stunts party policy and party clarity on matters of its own values and principles. having senior figures outside helps to ensure that the party holds its members in the GPA to account on the basis of party policy and principle. As it is, everyone is just drifting in the wind of this inconvenient marriage, to be dumped wherever the draught lands them!

Zimbabwe's false dawn begins to unravel

Well, all that hope and expectation has predictably hit a brickwall with a resounding thud. Never was Robert Mugabe going to share power with the opposition MDC fairly and work towards securing the national interest through concerted economic revival programmes accompanied by far-reaching policy reforms. Mugabe and Zanu PF continue to ridse roughshod over the interests of the majority, prioritising power and control over everything else. Tsvangirai and his team have been marginalised into a corner from which they occasionally shriek vain opposition to Mugabe's unilateral exercise of executive authority with such impunity you would forgiven for thinking he was the outright victor in the last election.
What's more, Mugabe is demanding that the whole world shift its position regarding Zimbabwe without him having moved an inch. Talk about having one's cake and eating it too! If he has succeeded in bullying the MDC into his government and confining them in a corner, at least the rest of the world must not allow him to get away with it. Sanctions against his government must be maintained. Why, even Arthur Mutambara, who regularly fulminates about imperialism and all that Mugabesque balderdash, is quick to admit that Zimbabwe is hurting more from self-inflicted sanctions than any imposed by external forces. Zanu PF simply needs to be shown that being the bully on the block and successfully armtwisting political rivals at home does not wash with the rest of the world. There should be no assistance without real reform.