6 July 2004

PRESIDENT TSVANGIRAI’S TUESDAY MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE OF ZIMBABWE

We completed our provincial consultative meetings on Zimbabwe’s electoral standards in Chinhoyi on Sunday.

Unlike the violence that marked the end of the Mashonaland Central meeting on Friday, the Chinhoyi gathering ended without incident.

There is a broad acceptance countrywide that once a dictatorship starts to yield to popular pressure, the people must push it further towards full political reform for the sake of a lasting solution and peace. Deceit is a recipe for long-term national instability.

Political transformation is a comprehensive process of change, as was the case in Eastern Europe and in South Africa. We are prepared to maintain the pressure for a total package. Zanu PF has run out of options. Zimbabwe needs the guidance and leadership of the people.

I am happy that all the senior leaders of the MDC, right down to our provinces and districts, are united on the need for a radical revision to our electoral standards before we embark on another national plebiscite.

The Mashonaland assemblies vowed to reject any cosmetic changes to our electoral framework. Our successes at the weekend exposed the myth and unmasked the falsehoods and perceptions that Mashonaland provinces are no-go areas for the MDC. Our party is as strong in those areas as in other parts of the country. Against all odds, our structures are still visible and our membership is increasing daily.

At our meetings, we worked out ways to revive the spirit of 1999. We designed strategies to intensify our campaign for free and fair elections and to curb violence. There is so much political confidence in the three provinces – sufficient confidence in the MDC to deal with any attempts to repeat the horrors and experiences of the past five years.

Starting today, we are taking the campaign to individual districts. We shall liaise with all the communities and share our vision for the future. We have to reach out to millions of people in the next few months, even if it requires us to conduct our meetings at night.

Our country is hungry. Our country is bleeding. Our country desperately needs help. The MDC has to do its best to consult and search for solutions from the people.

As I drove through Mashonaland at the weekend, it became impossible to ignore the highly visible knock on agriculture in an area whose previous production levels helped to earn Zimbabwe the term the breadbasket of the SADC region.

From the Mazowe Valley to Mvurwi, from Concession to Bindura, from Mt Hampden to Chinhoyi, vast tracts of prime commercial farmland lie fallow and abandoned. In some places, I noticed strings of smoke trickling out of a few pole-and-thatch shacks dotted around, usually near the roadsides, in scenes similar to what can be seen in remote areas normally occupied by shift cultivators. All these people are need of food aid.

The restoration of order onto our land is a national priority. We aim to introduce an efficient distribution mechanism, accompanied by a comprehensive land use programme in order to clean up the mess in the former commercial farming areas. We are committed to land reform. We are committed to ending the crisis in agriculture through a democratic, transparent and lawful process. We are committed to food security and prosperity.

Zimbabwe will have surplus food as soon as we implement our programme, based on need and ability to work on the land.

Agricultural recovery will be rooted on a non-negotiable return to the rule of law, restoration of private property rights and a strict adherence to the fundamental rights enshrined in a people-driven Constitution.

What I witnessed on the former commercial farms in the Mashonaland prime agricultural districts is too much for anybody to conclude that claims of bumper harvest and food security this year are mere political statements from a cornered regime that is keen to cover-up a failed populist experiment.

For an economy largely dependant on agriculture, what happened here in the past four years is unfortunate. If you tamper with the land, you destroy your revenue base. You blow life out of all essential services: health, education, taxation, public services and employment. We must restore sanity in agriculture to use that industry to revive education, to repair our health services, to restart the economy and to create jobs.

Food security is a basic human right. The MDC policies and programmes seek to observe that fundamental right as a social and legal obligation, on the part of the state, to ensure that all Zimbabwean citizens get sufficient food. Because of our abundant resources, full employment can be a reality within a short space of time.

We wish to make it clear that Zimbabwe will never experience food shortages again, given the lessons confirmed by the current wave of carelessness. Zimbabwe has enough agriculture resources to steer us from starvation, economic deprivation and poverty. We have all it takes to reassert our previous position as a net exporter of food.

Surviving on handouts either from the state or from international donors diminishes the people’s dignity and their influence and choices over what and how they are being fed. The situation gets worse when the little that is available is distributed along partisan lines.

Access to food and food availability affect the protection and promotion of human dignity.

One of our values as a party emphasise the concept of equity and solidarity. Since we recognise adequate food as a fundamental right, we shall deploy considerable resources to dealing with the concerns of weaker communities and vulnerable groups.

The concept of human rights refers to the manner in which our human dignity is respected and recognised. Merely feeding people degrades them, especially when they know that they are capable of looking after themselves.

What Zimbabwe needs is a comprehensive political programme that creates conditions for the nation to feed itself, to achieve self-sufficiency and to export. Agriculture is an economic asset – a national resource that must be within the reach of all who wish to take up farming as a way of life.

We need to meet without hindrance and to express ourselves without restrictions. We need an atmosphere in which mechanisms exist for us to question and to remedy developments that infringe on our sovereignty.

The MDC believes the right to assemble and to speak out provides essential solutions to food deficits. That is the only way we can shape our destiny because we will be in control of the conditions in which we live.

Food production and access to food have strong links to our crisis of governance. What I observed in Mashonaland explains why politics is the main factor in our failure to assure Zimbabweans of adequate food as a human right.

After our consultations in Mvurwi on electoral standards with the grassroots leadership of the MDC from Dande, Kanyemba, Guruve, Mukumbura, Mt Darwin, Dotito, Shamva, Bindura and Chiweshe, the subject of access to food cropped up.

Hundreds of MDC supporters, whose property was destroyed in political violence, complained about discrimination in the allocation of food in their wards. Some had their granaries burned down; others were denied seed.

The issue was raised again on Saturday by delegates from Uzumba Maramba Pfungwe, Hwedza, Chikomba, Murehwa, Mutoko, Marondera West and Goromonzi. Officials from Zvimba, Msengezi, Chegutu, Chitomborwizi, Makonde, Mhangura, Banket, Hurungwe, Karoi and Kariba made similar submissions, protesting at the use of food as a coercive political weapon. The levels of abuse are so open and so deep that only a truth and justice commission can assist in healing our nation.

At the centre of this Zanu PF tragedy is political intolerance. Unless Zanu PF accepts multi-party democracy and advises its supporters about the diversity of Zimbabwe’s political thought, we shall always run into problems with our election process. It became clear from the attack on our meeting in Mvurwi that our political system is still too primitive and too raw for comfort. It could be unthinkable in other societies that a stone, or a brick, is still a useful political weapon, to Zanu PF, in modern politics. The hooligans who disturbed us used Zanu PF and government trucks, indicating official collusion in the scheme to destabilise a lawful meeting.

Instead of creating conditions for debate and discussion where consensus and disagreement are possible outcomes, our opponents in Zanu PF still believe that whenever we meet, notwithstanding the police clearance and monitoring, they should start to organise violence.

The society we seek to build has no room for such behaviour. In concert with civil society, we shall search, promote and establish a Zimbabwe that is open to all. We shall strive to develop communities that recognize our historical, traditional and cultural diversity. The need for a new, tolerant society is long overdue in Zimbabwe. That explains why we have a serious food deficit.

Our people shall be encouraged to get down to work. The rationalization of land allocation will reconcile the MDC’s policy principles with on-the-ground realities. We shall resolutely apply the principles of justice to the letter to rectify the anomalies created in Mugabe’s land reform process.

Total agrarian reform, covering the whole country including the communal lands, must be one of our top priorities. With an impartial, independent and well-resourced Land Commission to determine the legal status of all land holdings through a comprehensive land audit, our aim is to rationalize ownership and land use patterns as a precursor to a properly planned resettlement programme. Zimbabweans must never be hungry again.

Together, we shall win.

Morgan Tsvangirai

President.