Author: TSA Press

Many Zimbabweans have turned to hawking to keep the wolf from the door as the economic crisis in the country deepens.
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Tapiwa Chagonda, University of Johannesburg

Zimbabwe is going through its worst socio-economic and political crisis in two decades. Crippling daily power outages of up to 18 hours and erratic supply of clean water are just some of the most obvious signs. Meanwhile, an inflation rate of over 500% has put the prices of basic goods beyond the reach of most people.

Hopes that the end of President Robert Mugabe’s ruinous rule in November 2017 would help put the country on a new path of peace and prosperity have long dissipated. Efforts by his successor President Emmerson Mnangagwa to attract foreign investors, who are critical in reviving Zimbabwe’s ailing economy, have also largely failed.

The situation has not been helped by the rejection of the 2018 presidential election results by the main opposition party. The Movement for Democratic Change Alliance (MDC-A) claims the governing Zanu-PF stole the elections even though the results were endorsed as free and fair by the African Union and Southern African Development Community (SADC). Only the European Union observers were somewhat circumspect in their assessment.

The opposition alliance has been calling for Mnangagwa’s government to relinquish power, and a national transitional authority appointed to run the country for at least two years, or until the 2023 general elections.

How individuals who will sit on the national transitional authority will be chosen and by whom, is not clear. But the party and some academics believe such a transitional authority would normalise Zimbabwe’s highly polarised political situation and help it revive its relations with the West.

The opposition may have a point on re-engagement with the West. This is key to helping end the investment drought that started in earnest between 2000 and 2003 under sanctions imposed by Western countries for human rights violations linked to Zanu-PF’s violent land reform seizures and election rigging.

But the transitional authority idea is doomed to fail because of lack of buy-in by Zanu-PF. So, it’s time to consider a more viable alternative path to peace for Zimbabwe.

Clamping down

For now, the government has dismissed talk of a transitional authority as unconstitutional. Instead, in May it launched its own platform, called the Political Actors Dialogue. The forum comprises 17 small political parties that participated in the 2018 elections.

The main opposition party is boycotting the process on grounds that Mnangagwa is an illegitimate president. Recently, it attempted to embark on public protests in the hope of bringing the government to its knees. The protests fell flat after being blocked by the courts and the police.

It boggles the mind why the MDC-A, led by Nelson Chamisa, insists on marches when previous attempts were crushed with brute force. These led to deaths in August 2018 and January 2019.

The Zanu-PF regime has always clamped down heavily on perceived threats to its rule since 1980. Why then does the MDC-A continue to endanger people’s lives through this deadly route as a way of resolving Zimbabwe’s socio-economic and political crises?

I firmly believe that the opposition needs to change tack and focus on entering into dialogue with the government.

Dialogue and unity government

Zimbabwe’s ongoing crisis requires the two leading political protagonists – Mnangagwa and Chamisa – to enter into serious dialogue. Both leaders need to soften their hard-line stances towards each other and put the people of Zimbabwe first.

There’s a precedent for this. Ten years ago, then South African President Thabo Mbeki managed to bring then President Mugabe and Movement for Democratic Change opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to the negotiation table.

The talks culminated in the formation of the government of national unity that ran Zimbabwe from February 2009 to July 2013, with Mugabe as the President and Tsvangirai as the Prime Minister. The unity government was fairly successful and managed to stabilise the economy.

Two decades of suffering have shown that it is not the threat of protests or sanctions from the West that can move Zanu-PF to change, but neighbouring countries under the aegis of SADC. South Africa is pivotal in this regard as the region’s strongest economic and military power.

It’s time to experiment with a second government of national unity for Zimbabwe. But for this to happen, SADC and South Africa must have the appetite to intervene in Zimbabwe. This is currently lacking.

Dialogue in Zimbabwe’s history

Historically, dialogue has moved Zimbabwe forward as a nation during its darkest hours.

• A year before independence in 1980, battle-hardened guerrilla commanders agreed to talk to the then Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, to end Zimbabwe’s liberation war even though they were convinced that they were winning.
• In 1987 Joshua Nkomo, who was the leader of the main opposition party, the Zimbabwean African People’s Union, agreed to talk to his political nemesis, then Prime Minister Mugabe. Yet before this, he had been hounded out of the country by Mugabe in the mid-80s, and thousands of his supporters killed.
• More recently in 2009, Morgan Tsvangirai agreed to enter into a unity government with Mugabe, despite winning the first round of the 2008 elections. The unity government briefly resuscitated and stabilised Zimbabwe’s fragile economy. Hyperinflation was tamed, basic commodities became available again and people regained purchasing power.

The way forward

Given the MDC-A’s positive contribution during its brief stint in the 2009-2013 unity government, the party should be expending its energies on dialogue. The main opposition party can enter into a second government of national unity, but continue building and strengthening its own support.

In the same vein, Zanu-PF also needs to realise that without the involvement of the MDC-A, its attempts to revive the economy and end the strife in the country, on its own terms, are destined to fail.

Tapiwa Chagonda, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Johannesburg

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Post published in: Business

Robert Mugabe, a hero of Africa’s independence struggle whose long rule in Zimbabwe descended into tyranny, corruption and incompetence, has died at the age of 95, president Emmerson Mnangagwa has said.

In a statement early on Friday, Mnangagwa called Mugabe “an icon of liberation, a pan-Africanist who dedicated his life to the emancipation and empowerment of his people. His contribution to the history of our nation and continent will never be forgotten. May his soul rest in eternal peace.”

The passing of the former president, who ruled Zimbabwe for close to four decades before being ousted in a military takeover in November 2017, marks the definitive end of an era in the history of the former British colony.

Mugabe is believed to have died in Singapore, where he made frequent visits to receive medical care in recent months as his health deteriorated. As far back as November 2018, Mnangagwa, who took over from him as president, told members of the ruling Zanu-PF party that Mugabe could no longer walk.

Though once widely celebrated for his role in fighting the white supremacist regime in his homeland, Mugabe had long become a deeply divisive figure in his own country and across the continent.

His final years in power were characterised by financial collapse, surges of violent intimidation and a vicious internal power struggle pitting his wife Grace, 41 years younger, against Mnangagwa, his former righthand man.

The rivalry was resolved when Mnangagwa, a Zanu-PF stalwart, took power when Mugabe reluctantly resigned after a military takeover. The news of his decision prompted widespread rejoicing.

 President Emmerson Mnangagwa, at a rally in Murombedzi, a town in the Mashonaland West province of Zimbabwe, in November 2018. Photograph: Jekesai Njikizana/AFP/Getty Images

In the decades since Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980, power had concentrated in Mugabe’s hands. Before Mnangagwa took over, an entire generation of Zimbabweans knew no other leader.

After his fall, Mugabe was granted the status of a respected father of the nation and a generous pension by the new government. The move angered his many opponents and upset many of the victims of his regime.

But Mugabe’s own frustration and sense of humiliation over his ousting were clear, however, and voiced with typical rhetorical force at an extraordinary press conference in the grounds of his residence in Harare, the capital, days before elections in July 2018.

Mugabe, flanked by his wife, suggested he would vote for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, a party he had brutally suppressed before co-opting it in 2008 to form a supposed unity government that he still dominated.

Until the end he retained friends on the African continent but increasingly became an international pariah. Mugabe was stripped of an honorary knighthood by the British government in 2008.

Educated at Catholic missionary schools, Mugabe became a teacher in Ghana then returned to Rhodesia in 1960 to fight white minority rule. He was jailed for 10 years and fled to neighbouring Mozambique, where he became one of the leaders of the guerrilla forces fighting Ian Smith’s regime.

 Then a leader of Rhodesian fighters, Robert Mugabe attends a meeting in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, with George Silundika, deputy secretary of information in the African National Congress, and Joshua Nkomo, the leader of the Zapu party Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Eventually freedom was won and Mugabe promised to embrace the country’s white population. He led the country through a golden period of economic growth and educational development that was the envy of Africa.

The international community turned a blind eye, however, to human rights abuses, most notably the 1980s ethnic cleansing of at least 20,000 people in Matabeleland province that crushed opposition from his rival Joshua Nkomo, the leader of the rival Zapu.

Opposition rose again in 1999 as the economy floundered and trade unions organised around the Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe rigged elections and began a programme of land reform in which white farmers were forcibly evicted to make way for Zanu-PF party cronies or black Zimbabweans who lacked the skills and capital to farm.

This helped throw the economy into disarray, leaving Zimbabweans to rely on foreign food aid to avoid starvation. Hyperinflation ran riot and supermarket shelves were empty. The once-proud school and health systems began to crumble.

 Mugabe election posters of are covered in opposition MDC slogans, in Harare, 2008. Photograph: EPA

The political environment also became increasingly hostile, with activists and journalists persecuted, jailed or murdered. More than 200 people died in political violence around the 2008 election, which Mugabe was widely seen as having stolen from the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai.

The late John Makumbe, a politics professor at the University of Zimbabwe, said: “He’ll be remembered as a villain. His legacy was destroyed by his staying, his violence, his imposing his own political allies and rivals.

“Robert Mugabe always had the seed of bad governance, cruelty, selfishness: ‘It’s only me who matters.’ He came in 1980 and donors flooded in; Mugabe looked angelic, he took on the colour of his surroundings. But by 2000 he had to rig elections and the rot had set in.

“The chameleon has its own colour: when it’s frightened, it takes on its original colour, and it’s ugly. He showed his true colours. His true colour is a killer. He killed his enemies.”

 Robert and Grace Mugabe. The former president’s second wife remains a controversial figure in Zimbabwe. Photograph: Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters

Mugabe’s second wife, Grace, became known for her lavish lifestyle, and joined the Zanu-PF politburo by virtue of her leadership of the party’s influential Women’s League in 2014.

She became a political liability for the ageing autocrat, however, and her outspoken criticism of Mnangagwa was one of the triggers for the military takeover that ousted her husband.

Mugabe remained devoted to his wife, calling her “my Grace” in his last press conference and demanding better treatment for his spouse from Zimbabwe’s new rulers.

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