Lawyers for
incarcerated human rights defender Beatrice Mtetwa, have launched a fresh bid to
have her released by lodging an application at the High Court on
Thursday.
The application will
be heard by Justice Joseph Musakwa on Friday morning, after Mtetwa’s lawyers
filed an appeal asking the higher court to set aside the dismissal of an earlier
bail application by Harare Provincial Magistrate Marehwanazvo
Gofa.
On Wednesday, Gofa
dismissed Mtetwa’s bail application on the basis that if granted bail she would
interfere with police investigations.
According to
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, Mtetwa’s legal team argued that Magistrate
Gofa was wrong to refuse the human rights lawyer bail and that her ruling must
be set aside on appeal.
Mtetwa was arrested
while attending to her clients – Thabani Mpofu, Felix Matsinde, Mehluli Tshuma
and councillor Warship Dumba, who are being charged with contravening a section
of the Official Secrets Act for allegedly receiving or communicating secret
information; and sections of the Criminal Law Codification and Reform Act for
alleged impersonation and for possession of articles for criminal
use.
They are being
accused of running an NGO and impersonating police officers in order to compile
corruption and criminal dossiers against government officials, such as Local
Government Minister Ignatius Chombo and Attorney General Johannes
Tomana.
Meanwhile,
Zimbabweans across the world have launched a series of petitions calling on
Zimbabwean authorities to release Mtetwa. These include the “Free Beatrice
Mtetwa Now” started by Kibhohere.
Another US-based petitioner, Lorie Conway, is calling
on President Robert Mugabe to release the fearless Mtetwa.See here
In Zimbabwe,
Sokwanele is urging people to call Rhodesville Police Station (where Mtetwa is
being held) on these numbers: +263 (4) 495753; +263 (4)
481111.
Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition director McDonald Lewanika
said it was important for Zimbabweans to rally together and do everything
possible, through campaigns, petitions and other initiatives to get Mtetwa
released.
“What is at stake here is everyone’s liberties, not
just those of Beatrice Mtetwa,” Lewanika said.
Two more people were taken into police custody on Thursday, as part
of a crackdown on the communications office of Prime Minister Morgan
Tsvangirai.
Spiwe Vera and Elizabeth Banda, who work as caretakers in the
Avondale based office, were picked up by police on Thursday morning and
taken to Harare Central Police Station. They were detained and questioned
throughout the day.
According to lawyer Dr. Tarisai Mutangi, the two
were released without charge late on Thursday afternoon.
It is
understood they were interrogated as part of investigations launched by the
police, which saw the arrest of four others linked to the communications
office on Sunday. Thabani Mpofu, Felix Matsinde, Mehluli Tshuma and former
Harare City councillor Warship Dumba, remain in police detention after being
remanded in custody until April 3rd.
Mpofu, Matsinde and Dumba are all
members of staff in the research division of the Prime Minister’s office,
while Tshuma is believed to have been assisting the research team. Police
also arrested another member of staff in the communications office, Anna
Muzvidziwa, but she was released on Sunday night.
Mpofu’s lawyer,
Beatrice Mtetwa, was also arrested after asking the police to produce a
search warrant. She too remains in police detention.
Mpofu, Matsinde,
Tshuma and Dumba have been formally charged for allegedly impersonating
police, possession of articles for criminal use and breaching the Official
Secrets Act.
There are no further details about what prompted the police
crackdown, but there are suggestions Mpofu and his three co-accused were
compiling a dossier on large scale corruption by some senior government
officials.
A statement from the Prime Minister’s office on Thursday said
this “attack” on his office is “an affront to democracy and to the rule of
law.”
“It is an attack not only on the members of staff but also on the
institution of the Office of the Prime Minister,” the statement
read.
Numerous attempts to get comment from the Prime Minister’s
spokesperson, Luke Tamborinyoka, were in vain as his phone went unanswered
on Thursday.
President Robert Mugabe is required by the
country’s statutes to dissolve parliament before proclaiming an election
date, an MDC-T cabinet minister said on Thursday.
Eric Matinenga, the
Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs minister, said laws governing the
conduct of elections in Zimbabwe stipulate that a general election shall be
held within a period not exceeding four months after the issue of a
proclamation dissolving parliament.
‘The current parliament’s life comes
to an end on the 29th June…that is the day the presidential term comes to an
end because he was sworn in on June 29th 2008.
‘What it means in
terms of the law is that after he (Mugabe) dissolves parliament he must then
appoint a nomination court date and a polling date which should be within
four months of the dissolution of parliament. So the last day Zimbabweans
can expect to go for an election is 29th October,’ explained
Matinenga.
The minister was reacting to a statement attributed to the
Justice and Legal Affairs Minister Patrick Chinamasa who said the country
will hold harmonized elections by 29th June this year.
But Matinenga
emphasized that if Mugabe insists on 29th June as election date as
pronounced by Chinamasa, ‘then he has to dissolve Parliament tomorrow or
next week.’
‘He can do so tomorrow (Friday) but that that will be
foolhardy of him to do so because we have a lot of work to do before we can
go for an election.
‘When you look at the practical realities which
relate to what we need to do in terms of the new constitution—aligning the
various laws of the current draft—and when you look at where we are today,
which is nearly towards the end of March, I cannot see how we can have an
election on 29th June.’
The draft constitution, which will be published
in the government gazette on the 28th March, will be forwarded to parliament
on the 7th May for debate, less than two months before the poll date
suggested by Chinamasa.
‘Contrary to what the minister said, we have four
months after June 29th to hold elections and that is within the laws of the
country,’ Matinenga said.
Political analyst and lawyer Gabriel Shumba
said any electoral proclamations should be governed by the new constitution
that was overwhelmingly approved by millions of Zimbabweans during
Saturday’s referendum.
‘Any attempt therefore to declare a poll date
under the Lancaster House constitution, with its Amendment No 19, will be
futile or an attempt to negate the power of the new
constitution.
‘It’ll also be an attempt to silence the voice of millions
of Zimbabweans who voted for the new constitution. Don’t forget that as we
speak we are still being governed by the GPA, but the next election must be
governed by a new constitution which parliament is going to debate in May.
So there will be no short cut in this process,’ said
Shumba.
Meanwhile Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai on Wednesday briefed
President Jacob Zuma’s facilitation team about the escalation in violence
and intimidation against MDC supporters and officials in the last few
weeks.
The SADC facilitation team has been in Zimbabwe since last week,
observing the referendum.
Recently President Zuma called for a SADC
team to be stationed in Zimbabwe as the country heads for make-or-break
elections this year.
In a report to a SADC Troika meeting in South Africa
last week Zuma said the regional bloc needs to be more robust and to ‘be
based in that country to make follow-ups and deal with issues as they
arise.’
‘Differences over the role of observers need to be resolved and
the SADC guidelines, as well as the laws of Zimbabwe, should be the
baseline. Observers should be on site well before the elections and for some
period thereafter,’ he said.
Zimbabwe will hold elections by June 29 to end a shaky
unity government formed four years ago between President Robert Mugabe and
his rival Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, state media reported on
Thursday.
"It is imperative to have the elections by June 29 because we
will no longer have a parliament by then, and a country cannot run without a
parliament," The Herald newspaper quoted Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa
as saying.
"As the minister of justice I am not entertaining the holding
of elections after June 29 unless circumstances beyond my control
happen."
His remarks came days after Zimbabweans endorsed a draft
charter, one of the key preconditions for new elections to choose a
successor to the power-sharing government that was negotiated by regional
mediators after the 2008 disputed elections.
Both Mugabe and
Tsvangirai back the draft, which curtails the president's powers and sets a
limit of two five-year terms.
Over three million Zimbabweans voted last
Saturday in favour of the draft constitution.
Many said they had not
seen, read or understood its contents.
The charter is expected to be
gazetted next week before being submitted to parliament and then given the
seal of approval by Mugabe.
Tsvangirai earlier this week welcomed the
referendum result, saying it "sets in motion a new and democratic paradigm
for the country".
WASHINGTON DC — The announcement that national
elections should be held by June 29 this year has further exposed the unity
government as disagreements continue to rock the shaky coalition of
President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
Justice
Minister Patrick Chinamasa on Wednesday said preparations were well under
way for the crucial polls.
But one of the unity government principals,
Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, was quick to shoot Chinamasa’s
statement down saying the justice minister was too junior to announce the
date of the elections, adding unity government principals were still to
agree on a date.
Chinamasa told the state-controlled Herald newspaper
from Rome, where he had accompanied President Mugabe to the inauguration of
Pope Francis, that the current parliament’s tenure cannot go beyond June
29.
President Mugabe weighed in saying it was impossible to stretch the
lifespan of the current parliament, adding that only the executive’s stay in
office could be extended.
But speaking from North Carolina in
America, Mutambara said President Mugabe and Mr. Chinamasa were not above the
unity government.
Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs minister Eric
Matinenga says it is impossible for Zimbabwe to hold elections by June 29th.
With a new constitution approved, Zimbabweans are now
looking toward a fresh election, while wondering whether the polls will be
free and fair.
The overwhelming nod for the charter at a weekend
referendum raised much optimism for democratic changes in a country long
regarded by the West as a pariah state.
The new supreme law protects
against all forms of violence and torture and guarantees freedom of
expression. But observers say there is little in it that directly affects
the way elections are run.
"The constitution does very little to affect
electoral conditions," said Zimbabwean legal and political analyst Derek
Matyszak.
"If people are thinking the new constitution is going to create
conditions for free and fair elections they are going to be very
disappointed."
The scars of election chaos are still fresh in
Zimbabwe.
Disputed 2008 polls claimed nearly 200 lives and forced
President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai into a
regionally-brokered power-sharing government to prevent a full blown
conflict.
With a major hurdle toward fresh polls cleared by Saturday's
vote, Zimbabweans are expected to return to the ballot box later this
year.
The adoption of the new text, which curtails the president's powers
and sets a limit of two five-year terms, left both leaders of the compromise
government beaming.
"That's the type of constitution we want,"
Mugabe, who has been in power since 1980, told Zimbabwean state media in
Rome where he was attending Pope Francis's inaugural mass.
His rival
Tsvangirai said the new supreme law "sets in motion a new and democratic
paradigm for the country".
Political scientist at the University of
Zimbabwe Charity Manyeruke said that the draft did give Zimbabweans a new
impetus to respect laws despite little change in the way elections are
carried out.
"What the draft constitution does is to give confidence ...
new energy, new commitment to follow the rule of law, to follow the dictates
of the constitution in the conduct of the elections."
Confident of a
peaceful vote, she said: "People are tired of violence."
The constitution
dictates that the security sector, which is currently staffed with mainly
Mugabe's sympathisers, must remain impartial.
But without provisions to
enforce this, questions have been raised.
"There is no doubt that without
the proper security sector reforms the forthcoming plebiscite would not be
free, fair and credible," said an editorial in NewsDay on
Wednesday.
The paper said that if Mugabe "is sincere about his persistent
calls for peace, then he should spearhead the chlorination of the security
sector".
This had been acknowledged by the Southern African Development
Community, the curator of the coalition government, as needing "urgent
attention".
The referendum weekend saw police raids and the arrest of
Tsvangirai aides and his party's attorney. There were also isolated violent
incidents against both political sides in the vote run-up.
Repeated
calls by Mugabe and Tsvangirai to shun violence bring hope that "we are
likely to have a credible election", said Joseph Kurebga, a lecturer at the
University of Zimbabwe.
While politicians up their rhetoric around peace,
there is a resurgence of intra-party violence as members jostle for spots in
party primaries, said Thabani Nyoni, a rights campaigner in
Bulawayo.
Such tensions could escalate across rival parties, he
said.
"All those are clear signs that the ghost of violence of 2008 could
repeat itself," said Nyoni of Radio Dialogue, a civil society
organisation.
University of Johannesburg professor of development studies
David Moore said levels of violence will likely escalate in the run up to
the high-stakes elections.
"But I don't think they will be as high as
in 2008 because that was a catastrophe," he said.
The election is
likely to be close amid growing disillusionment with Tsvangirai's Movement
for Democratic Change.
The party "will have to work as hard as [US
President Barack] Obama did against the Republicans" to remain competitive,
said Moore. – Sapa-AFP
HARARE - A Zanu PF legislator yesterday stunned the
court when she said the president’s office plays a hand in imposing
candidates to represent the party in elections.
During the on-going
trial of businessman-cum-politician Temba Mliswa in Chinhoyi yesterday,
Hurungwe East legislator Sarah Mahoka told the court that although her party
had not yet asked aspiring candidates to submit their nomination papers, the
president’s office had already asked them to do so for vetting
purposes.
She was under cross examination from the defence counsel team
by Mike Mutsvairo, who is representing Mliswa’s other
co-accused.
Asked if she was aware of any other candidates vying to
represent the party in Hurungwe West Constituency currently held by Prime
Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC, Mahoka said she got information from the
President’s Office that Mliswa and one Patrick Mabonga were aspiring
candidates.
“The party has not yet called for submission of CVs but we
have already done so through the office of the president because they asked
for the names for vetting. He is the president of both this country and the
party and that is how we do it,” said Mahoka.
Mahoka, who constantly
deviated from her original evidence-in-chief, accused the police of not
properly capturing her statement when she was asked to explain the
inconsistencies in her evidence.
She claimed that the defence counsel
could have tampered with the statement.
“Ask the police why they did not
capture everything that I told them because I signed several papers but they
were never read to me. Maybe it is you who have tampered with the papers
because I can see they are torn,” said the lawmaker, who on Monday told the
court that she was an illiterate Grade 2 dropout.
This prompted
Mutsvairo to request for the original statement from the State, which showed
that nothing had been doctored. Asked if she knew what appending a signature
to a document meant, Mahoka said she was in the dark.
“I don’t even know
that putting my signature means I agree with the contents of the document,
the police never explained that to me. They are not dead you can always ask
them,” she said.
It is the State’s case that on February 22 this year at
Zimonja Business Centre in Hurungwe West Constituency, Mliswa and his
co-accused persons acted in concert with others who are still on the run and
attacked Mahoka and her entourage.
They allegedly used bricks, fists,
booted feet to assault the legislator and her driver before deflating two
wheels of her car.
Mahoka claims she sustained a broken leg and lost $1
223, an iPhone valued at $800, a digital camera, a Zanu PF beret and
identity documents.
Mahoka, who is the Zanu PF women’s league chairperson
in Mashonaland West Province, is reportedly pushing to block Mliswa’s
candidature in favour of her ally Dorcas Bere.
She, however, denies
the allegation and she has told the court that she does not know Bere. -
Mugove Tafirenyika
WASHINGTON — After Zimbabweans voted overwhelmingly
for the adoption of a draft constitution, the South African facilitation
team is back in Harare to push for further democratic reforms ahead of
national elections expected sometime this year.
South African
president Jacob Zuma is the Southern African Development Community-appointed
mediator in Harare and his team is expected to calm rising political
temperatures ahead of the polls.
Mr. Zuma’s envoys met Wednesday with
officials from the Joint Monotoring and Implementation Committee, a
mechanism to see that power sharing unfolds as agreed under the 2008 Global
Political Agreement.
With a new police clampdown on opponents of
President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party including politicians and rights
groups, there is little unity in the coalition government.
JOMIC
co-chaiperson, Energy Minister Elton Mangoma, told VOA that they met Mr.
Zuma's three envoys and discussed the issue of strengthening the
organization by seconding three people from SADC as recommended by the
regional bloc.
Two officials from Zambia and Tanzania who have been
seconded by the SADC Troika on Politics and Defense were formally introduced
to JOMIC officials in the meeting. A third member will come from
Tanzania.
Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, in a press statement, accused
the police of becoming an “appendage of a political party,” in reference to
the former liberation party.
Mr. Tsvangirai said his formation of the
MDC is trying to promote an environment conducive to a free and fair
election despite the crackdown.
Sources in SADC and Pretoria told VOA
Studio 7 that Mr. Zuma’s envoys will increase visibility on the ground as
the nation prepares for what observers say will be an historic general
election.
Political analyst Philip Pasirayi, Director of the Centre for
Community Development in Zimbabwe, told VOA that Mr. Zuma’s envoys must
adopt a hands-on approach to ensure the situation in Harare does not
spiral out of control.
CHIVI – Two MDC youths are lucky
to be alive after thwarting an abduction ploy by suspected Central
Intelligence Organisation (CIO) operatives at Ngundu Business Centre on
Monday.
Masvingo Province Youth Chairperson and Gutu Central MP Hon
Oliver Chirume The two youths Timothy Matutu (29) who is the MDC youth
chairman for Chivi South Constituency and Lovemore Machanja (33) who is the
youth vice chairperson for the same constituency were abducted by two men
suspected to be intelligence operatives while coming from a local party
programme.
According to Machanja, the incident happened around 5pm when
the youths boarded a commuter omnibus at Dare Business Centre to Ngundu
Business Centre.
“We were coming from ward 28 where we were
conducting party business. We were desperate for transport so we decided to
go Dare Business Centre since it is situated near the Masvingo –Beitbridge
highway.
“As we were looking for transport to travel to Ngundu, a Toyota
sprinter vehicle pulled up and we immediately jumped into the vehicle. As we
were travelling two men suddenly pulled me to the back seat of the vehicle
and demanded to know why I was wearing an MDC shirt.
“One of them
produced an identity card with the Zimbabwean flag while the other one
produced a cell phone with Robert Mugabe`s picture as the screen saver. The
two men said Tsvangirai anokuuraisa and iwe tavakutonokuuraya (Tsvangirai
will drive you towards your death and we are going to kill you –they also
said tinoda kukusasa petrol (we are going to pour petrol on you),” said
Machanja.
He added: “When we arrived at Ngundu Business Centre they began
to slap me on the face accusing me of being a sellout. Matutu managed to
jump out of the vehicle and he tried to grab the keys .The driver pushed him
and the vehicle took off at high speed.
“We beckoned a police officer
who was at the scene but he ignored. Everyone at the scene encouraged me to
jump out of the vehicle. I managed to jump out of the vehicle but one the
men grabbed my legs and my shirt was torn into pieces.
“Although I
got injured in the process, I am happy because I am alive. I suspected the
two men connived with the commuter omnibus crew in a well calculated move to
eliminate us. I have received numerous death threats from Zanu PF supporters
in the area-the situation is very tense, “said Machanja.
The youths then
made a report at Ngundu Police Camp –case number RR1427855-but the police
were deeply reluctant to investigate the matter. The vehicle`s registration
number is ABZ 3799.
“We went to Ngundu Police camp to report the matter
but a female officer on duty accused me of being provocative by wearing an
MDC shirt. The police took too long to react and they seem to be reluctant
to investigate the matter.
“They took a long time to record the
details-We only identify one burly fellow wearing a blue t-shirt. We hope
the police e will quickly act on the matter.
MDC provincial youth
chairman Oliver Chirume condemned the incident adding that Zanu PF mandarins
were keen to shed blood as a way of intimidating MDC supporters ahead of
elections.
“We are dealing with a group of unrepentant people and this
shows Zanu PF will use any means at their disposal to crush opposing voices.
It all shows panic stations within Zanu PF. The state security agents are
still very much determined to eliminate MDC members and supporters,”said
Chirume.
Zimbabwe’s Anti Corruption Commission (ZACC) has said it will still
pursue efforts to probe the alleged corrupt activities of some government
ministers and parastatals, despite attempts to block its work.
The
ZACC was last week stopped from investigating the Zimbabwe Mining and
Development Corporation (ZMDC) and the National Indigenisation and Economic
Empowerment Board (NIEEB), amid reports of serious corruption within both
groups. The ZMDC is linked to Mines Minister Obert Mpofu, while the NIEEB is
linked to Indigenisation Minister Saviour Kasukuwere.
The ZACC
investigation into the two groups was signed off by a High Court Judge last
Monday, but both parastatals filed an urgent interdict to stop the probe.
Since then a group believed to be aligned to Kasukuwere has used the Sunday
Mail newspaper to lash out at the ZACC, accusing it of being involved in
corruption.
ZACC spokesperson Goodwill Shana told journalists in Harare
on Wednesday that his organisation was operating above board and attempts to
discredit the group had no basis. He explained that the Commission did not
challenge last week’s interdict stopping their investigations because
commissioners wanted to regroup and strategise a way forward. This could
include applying for fresh warrants.
Shana also denied the
allegations of corruption within the Commission, calling it a “desperate
attempt to cast aspersions on the image of ZACC.” He also dismissed the
claims that the ZACC had secured search warrants from the High Court to
“pursue underhand and malicious investigations against certain
organisations, their officials and respective ministries”.
“ZACC
wants to put it on record that it exhausted all prescribed procedures and
avenues for obtaining search warrants, including the police and magistrates’
courts,” Shana said. He listed the details and dates that ZACC had
previously, unsuccessfully, approached the magistrates’ courts, the police
and the Attorney-General’s Office before they finally approached the High
Court.
“This was unusual. Search warrants are ordinarily given without
much ado, as the record shows, even as recently as the past two weeks.
Search warrants do not indicate the commission has declared a person or
party guilty, it is merely an attempt to establish facts based on
documentary or other evidence,” Shana said.
Shana added: “As ZACC,
we are not prompted by political considerations, but by reasonable suspicion
that a crime has been committed . . . the individual and political diversity
of the commission would make a political sectorial agenda difficult to
pursue or achieve.”
Commentator Precious Shumba said the work of the ZACC
will not be successful until the body is completely separated from the
state. He said the commission was the result of a “compromise” between the
three parties in the unity government, and this is why it “has no teeth” to
root out corruption.
“The composition of the commission needs to be on
merit alone and not based on partisan placements. The commission need to
have the power to independently conduct investigations, without its work
being compromised,” Shumba said.
Some youth groups in Zimbabwe are protesting what they see as
efforts by the youth ministry to meddle in their operations, by compelling
them to register.
The youths are particularly unhappy with new
provisions in the Zimbabwe Youth Council Act, issued by Youth Minister
Saviour Kasukuwere, which they say violate their right to freedom of
association.
Speaking at the Bulawayo Press Club Wednesday,
representatives of three youth groups said the ministry now requires them
to, among other things, to register with a quasi-government body which
advises government on youth matters – the Zimbabwe Youth Council
(ZYC).
Speakers included Taiona Tsanangurayi, of Harare-based Young
Voices Network and Nqobani Tshabangu of the National Youth Development
Trust, based in Bulawayo. Godwin Phiri, director of Bulawayo-based
intsha.com, a group which focuses on developing leadership skills amongst
the youth, told SW Radio Africa that membership of ZYC should be voluntary
rather than mandatory.
He said: “The ZYC should entice membership by
developing programmes relevant to youth groups rather than using legislation
to compel groups to join.
“The ZYC is also empowered to interfere with
the daily operations of our organisations. For example, we are now required
to first seek permission from the council before we can seek financial
support from donors.
“The council now has the power to de-register any
organisation it deems non-compliant, and our argument is that we don’t need
to register with the ZYC as most youth groups are already registered either
as trusts or private voluntary organisations.”
Youth groups are also
now required to disclose their sources of funding, and to pay an annual
subscription of $3.
“At the beginning of each year we now have to submit
our budgets and action plans for approval and this is serious interference
which robs us of our independence,” Phiri said.
Although some of the
measures, such as those relating to levies have existed since the Zimbabwe
Youth Council Act was enacted in 1997, questions are being raised as to why
they are being brought into effect now, a few months before an important
election.
Phiri said that there are fears that ZANU PF realises that the
youths have become a game-changer in Zimbabwean politics and are trying to
use all means possible to control them.
SW Radio Africa’s Bulawayo
correspondent, Lionel Saungweme, said there was also a feeling that
Kasukuwere had failed through his indigenisation programme to lure youths to
ZANU PF and was now using legislation to beat them into line.
“More
importantly, the board of the youth council is appointed by the minister,
and all the appointees come from ZANU PF which shows that the youth council
as a party project cannot be impartial,” Saungweme said.
The disgruntled
groups said they had already raised their concerns with Kasukuwere’s
ministry and would approach the courts if they felt these were not being
satisfactorily addressed.
Birds of a feather ... Morgan Tsvangirai
and Robert Mugabe both backed 'Yes' vote
21/03/2013 00:00:00
by Staff Reporter
MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai is a dictator who has
lost the moral high ground to complain about being cheated by Zanu PF, says
former ally Lovemore Madhuku.
Madhuku, leader of the National
Constitutional Assembly (NCA) pressure group, was the figurehead of the
ill-fated campaign to get a draft constitution rejected during a referendum
last week.
In the end, the draft – supported by the three parties in the
ruling coalition including Tsvangirai’s MDC-T – was adopted by a 95 percent
public affirmation.
Figures released by the Zimbabwe Electoral
Commission showed 3,079,966 voted “Yes” while 179,489 backed the “No” vote.
A total of 56 627 votes were spoilt.
Madhuku said the outcome was a
“fraud” as he accused the ZEC of inflating the numbers. “To claim that there
was close to a million more voters in the referendum than in the March 2008
general elections is to take the public for fools,” he insisted.
But
Madhuku reserved most of his invective for Tsvangirai, with whom he has
shared platforms in the past to campaign for constitutional
reforms.
Tsvangirai had helped create conditions, Madhuku said, which
made the playing field uneven. The NCA had drip funding and had been denied
access to the media – conditions which Madhuku said favoured the ‘Yes’
vote.
The notice period of less than a month between the completion of
the draft and the referendum was too short, Madhuku complained, and copies
of the draft were unavailable to more than 80 percent of eligible voters.
Police had also proscribed rallies for the ‘No’ vote campaign while the NCA
and its allies in the trade union movement and smaller opposition parties
were victims of “hate speech” by Tsvangirai, who described them as “nhinhi”
in Sunningdale and as having “mamhepo” (evil spirits) at a Bulawayo
rally.
“It’s a very sickening sense that we get,” Madhuku told reporters
on Wednesday. “We’re very disappointed by what has happened [to the MDC-T].
But we realise that Morgan Tsvangirai himself as a person is the one who is
responsible for providing leadership to that movement. He has not provided
leadership.
“He has allowed the movement to completely copy what Zanu
PF believes in. The basic belief of Zanu PF is people don’t matter – what
matters is what the leadership thinks. That’s what they have decided to
do.
“So we’re very disappointed but that’s their choice to have taken
that route. We’ll work hard for the people not to follow the
MDC-T.”
Madhuku says the party is now afflicted by a personality cult
– just like Zanu PF – where Tsvangirai was treated as beyond
reproach.
“The MDC-T is the only party that has a bad name. It’s
unfortunate that we don’t have laws regulating political parties, but you
can’t have a party named after a person and use his face as the party’s
symbol,” Madhuku said.
The “T” in the MDC-T refers to Tsvangirai, to
differentiate the party from the break-away MDC led by Welshman Ncube, while
the party intends to use the open palm emblazoned with Tsvangirai’s face as
its symbol in forthcoming elections.
He said Tsvangirai would rue his
decision to consent to a political competition where the NCA was not given
access to the media and state resources.
“The MDC-T has lost the
moral ground to complain about the same issues they presided over during the
referendum. The MDC-T consented to that. That means those are the same
conditions which will apply to them in an election. We don’t expect them,
for all morality, to start complaining,” he said.
“I’m sure those are the
rules they want to operate in an election. We’ll hope they just go through
an election now under the same conditions that they gave to us. And
thereafter, we will have to be definitive.
“We don’t mind whoever wins
the election. We now know that we’ve a dictatorship in place. And the choice
between the MDC-T and Zanu PF is a choice between two
dictators.
“Because we have two dictators, we shouldn’t be really saying
this dictator is more useful than the other. These are just two dictators.
Let the two dictators fight within a dictatorial environment and let’s get
one we will then confront.”
Madhuku, socialist and former MDC MP
Munyaradzi Gwisai, Progressive Teachers’ Union secretary general Raymond
Majongwe and MDC-99 President Job Sikhala are believed to be on the verge of
forming an opposition party – but only after the elections.
MASVINGO - Roman Catholic-run Bondolfi Teachers’ College has
stopped 500 students from doing their attachments at various schools for
allegedly refusing to pay a controversial teaching practice fee.
The
move has raised eyebrows as Bondolfi is the only teachers’ training college
to charge the $484 teaching practice fee, a few months after students paid
their tuition fee for the term amounting to over $300.
Students told the
Daily News they refused to pay the fee as it was illegal. They said they
felt the institution wanted to dupe them of the paltry monthly salaries they
are paid by government while on teaching practice.
“We have been served
with letters announcing our suspension with immediate effect and we have
been instructed to stop teaching practice. They are demanding over $400 from
the paltry allowance we get from government. We are broke because we have
just paid our school fees for the term,” said a student who declined to be
named for fear that college authorities will victimise her.
The move
will strain students and their parents as they will be forced to pay about
$800 per term, some of the students said.
College principal Kumbirai
Chitsama on March 12 signed the letters suspending the students.
The
Daily News is in possession of one such correspondence sent to an affected
student.
The students said what irks them most was the fact that they are
forced to pay the teaching practice fee when the college receives their
cadetship allowances from government.
“In actual fact we are being
made to pay thrice as we have cadetship from government going straight to
the college coffers, then we pay our normal tuition fees plus this mystical
fee called teaching practice,”said another student.
Militant
teachers’ representative body, Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe
president Takavafira Zhou expressed shock and said the fee was unheard of
and illegal.
“This development is unfortunate and ill-conceived. The
college is behaving like feudal lords bent on extracting every cent from
poor students. Never in the history of education have we heard of a teaching
practice fee paid by students,” said Zhou, whose group also represents
trainee teachers.
Chitsama refused to comment.
“I am not allowed
to comment to the press please call the church officials,” Chitsama
said.
Efforts to get a comment for the Roman Catholic Masvingo diocese
education secretary Father Mutsvangwa were fruitless. - Godfrey Mtimba
Posted on Thursday 21 March 2013
- 11:10 Walter Wilson Nana , AfricaNews Reporter in Harare,
Zimbabwe
Stakeholders in the Information & Communication
Technology, ICT, revolution across the African continent have been told ICT
is at the epicenter of the continent's growth and development.
At the
opening ceremony of the International Conference on ICT for Africa 2013 in
the Cresta Lodge, Harare, Zimbabwe’s Deputy Prime Minister, Prof. Arthur
Mutambara mentioned that the ICT revolution is a game changer, adding that
things cannot be same again in Africa. “ICT affects every sector of our
life.
Africa must be competitive in all its facets of life and
how we can use ICT to drive Africa’s competiveness, attract investors via
ICT, develop it, customise it and stop being consumers of ICT,” the
government executive officer said.
According to Mutambara, Africa
must be participants in the construction and not observers in the process of
ICT, especially ICT that is relevant to us.
He told the delegates
that came from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Cameroon, Mali, Ghana,
Malawi, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia and the USA that Africans should use the ICT
to close the gap between the poor and the rich, the north and the south,
making it the tool that turns the education, banking, agriculture, the
economy and more. “We can’t fight technology, we’ve to catch-up,” he
advised.
Mutambara called for a change of mentality in all that is
done across Africa, citing reasons why certain laws have to be revised, so
as to be on the edge of new technology, which is now revolutionalising the
world. “How are we going to be in 10 years vis-a-vis the ICT? Let’s use it
to drive agriculture, move up the value chain by leveraging ICT, science and
technology,” he noted.
He challenged ICT practitioners,
academics, students, government officials, members of the industrial sector
to make the lessons from the south to the north, saying the mental poverty
in the south should be the unique opportunity to highlight the hindsight
that is not known of Africa.
utambara cautioned that the conference
should not end up in another talk shop, but entreated participants to take
their responsibilities and work in synergy for a defined timeline. “Africans
must work together and develop their countries, with the use of data being
at the fore in all we do thanks to the ICT revolution.”
The
Minister of ICT in Zimbabwe, Nelson Chamisa said Africa should no longer be
importing computers, “we should make them. We should consolidate and
strategies on more ideas,” he added.
Chamisa invited government
across Africa to move very fast on the ICT developments as they do in other
sectors.
The Director of the International Centre for Information
Technology & Development, ICITD, USA and President, ICT University,
Yaoundé, Cameroon, Prof. Victor Mbarika talked about the need for more PhDs
to be trained in the ICT revolution.
Prof. Gabriel Kabanda of the
host university, the National University of Science & Technology,
Zimbabwe, found the conference to be an enrichment exercise that goes beyond
the classroom to the society and the industrial sector.
He
enjoined African researchers to pursue dialogue on the ICT
affairs.
Earlier, the chair of the Local Organising Committee, Prof. Yati
Naik joined his voice to the view that it is up for Africans to provide
their own ICT solutions.
Keynote Address
In his
discourse, Prof. Sammy Beban Chumbow, Vice Chancellor of the ICT University
in Yaoundé said today’s world is in the ICT era, which is another stop that
Africa cannot afford to miss out after the Agrarian and Industrial
Revolutions respectively. “Therefore, Africa must catch up with the
knowledge economy, which is knowledge production, knowledge management,
knowledge dissemination and knowledge appropriation.”
According
to Prof. Chumbow, African countries have the obligation to create knowledge
economy, which has in focus national development. “The context of
development must have at it centre language and communication. These are
crucial since knowledge is power and a sine qua condition for national
development,” he said.
The varsity don posited that communication
is important to get people aware in the process of a new idea and
appropriation of knowledge. He found in knowledge and communication the
ingredients of development, saying ICT must know development
communication.
The erudite Professor cited participative development
and some graphic examples to demonstrate how they are part of the component
of development communication.
Other speakers in the conference
presented papers in the areas of; ICT & Development, ICT in Education
& E-learning, ICT, Development & Poverty Reduction, ICT, Media &
Journalism, Innovation, Open-source & Software Development and ICT in
Healthcare.
The ICT for Africa conference is an annual initiative
that brings together stakeholders of the educational and industrial sectors
in Africa, with the aim of reflecting on how to transfer, diffuse and adopt
the ICTs within the African context.
From Harare, 2013, the ICT
for Africa caravan moves to Nairobi, Kenya in 2014.
WASHINGTON — The World Food Program (WFP) says it is
currently providing food assistance to more than 1.4 million Zimbabweans as
hunger worsens in provinces affected by a two-year drought and heavy rains
this year.
WFP deputy country director Abdurrahim Siddiqui told VOA
Studio 7 food insecurity in Zimbabwe for the 2012/2013 consumption year is
comparatively worse than the last three years.
He said WFP will
continue providing help to the needy under the current seasonal targeted
assistance program until the end of this month.
According to the Zimbabwe
Vulnerability Assessment Committee, 1.6 million Zimbabweans were expected to
be in need of food assistance during the peak hunger period between
September last year and the end of this month.
Villagers in some parts of
the country say current harsh weather conditions such as drought and heavy
rains have devastated their crops. They say they need urgent food aid.
Zanu PF is guilty of many things – the collapse of the economy, the
genocide of Gukurahundi and the wholesale destruction of homes in
Murambatsvina. Everybody recognises these as gross human rights abuse and
crimes against humanity.
But when their outlandish actions are
associated with, not only the ruthless pursuit of their political ends but
also with wholesale theft and lawlessness; then we need to sit up and take
notice.
In 2000 they recognised that they faced a serious threat to their
hegemony in the form of the MDC and that the balance of electoral power lay
in the hands of 600 000 farm workers and their families on 6000 large
commercial farms.
So they decided to eliminate them and in the past
decade they have done so. In doing so they destroyed the agricultural
industry, displaced millions of people, triggered the consequential collapse
of the industrial and commercial economy and wiping out billions of economic
value.
What people do not see is that this process was basically driven
by greed and avarice. Like pirates of old in the West Indies, they were told
by their King that they could keep what they could take.
They walked
into homes, took over hundreds of thousands of cattle, 20 000 tractors,
combine harvesters, irrigation equipment capable of watering 280 000
hectares. They took furniture, vehicles and left thousands of farmers and
their workers homeless and destitute.
All for nothing: a reward for doing
their masters business.
When we thought we had seen it all, genocide,
mass relocation of populations, systematic destruction of value and theft of
private assets on a massive scale, Zanu PF showed us that they still had
reserves of evil and ingenuity in them and they invented
indigenisation.
It started innocuously enough in 2007 when they
introduced the Indigenisation Act into Parliament. MDC did not have enough
votes in the Lower House to block the new Act but they fought it and
eventually when it came to the vote the MDC legislators walked out rather
than be associated with the Act that we recognised would have a profound
impact on the economy, freeze new investment and engineer a massive transfer
of value from shareholders to a politically selected minority. It was the
industrial and commercial version of the farm invasions.
They sat on
the Act until December 2010 when Zanu PF recognised a new electoral threat
from the MDC in the form of the rapidly recovering economy. Economic
activity expanded by nearly 400 per cent in 2009, then doubled again in
2010.
Suddenly Zimbabwe was no longer a basket case, food was in free
supply and a new optimism was seeping into the fabric of our society. Major
new investments were being planned – $30 billion of new investment in
mining, $10 billion in the steel industry, billions in projects to generate
power, rehabilitate roads and railways.
Zanu PF recognised that none
of this was being attributed to them, all the credit was going to the MDC.
If this was not stopped the electoral consequences were obvious. So they
launched their “indigenisation” drive. They took the Act passed in 2007 and
drafted new regulations that were designed to give legs to the Act.
A
young, ruthless politician, Savior Kasukawere was put in charge of the
project and he took to the streets with enthusiasm. MDC reacted by saying
that the whole exercise was illegal and that business should ignore the
threats.
But despite this, in the past two years not a single company
has taken the Minister or the Act or the regulations to Court. We have no
doubt that had they done so they would have been successful. But business,
cowed by years of Zanu PF bullying and threats simply took reactive action
and capital fight accelerated and inward investment stopped. The liquidity
crisis escalated over night. Suddenly the upsurge in economic activity and
optimism vanished.
Kasukawere marshaled his troops – formed an
indigenisation Board and wrote to companies throughout the country saying
that if they did not comply they would lose their licenses to operate, if
they did not respond they would deny them work permits and generally make
life impossible.
Companies large and small worried about how to respond,
they all feared the arrival of thugs at the door, major international firms
convened emergency Board meetings and hired expensive lawyers. The stock
market fell back to the lowest levels in our muddled history and stuck there
for three years.
Some organisations rushed to “comply”, they found
“indigenous” individuals and engineered arrangements to bring them in as
shareholders without disrupting the normal operations of the company. Others
simply said that if “they” wanted 51 per cent, they would have to take 100
per cent and that their price was “$X”.
Others sent emissaries who
were acceptable to the thugs in Zanu PF to ask, “OK, what is it that you
want?” The answer to that question came in many guises, but always involved
money. Most recently the duplicity of both the companies and the
indigenisation gang has become evident and plain.
I have seen two
indigenisation deals for major Companies. They are very revealing – they
talk of complying but give nothing away, they give Kasukawere a piece of
worthless paper that he can wave in the air and claim victory.
In
return Kasukawere instructed the firms to deal with his “consultants” and
they in turn produced an invoice for millions.
Who benefits from this
mayhem and blatant corruption? Not the people, not the poor and marginalized
or the unemployed. In fact it just made every ones lives more miserable and
difficult.
But in return it froze the economic recovery (the real
objective), denied MDC the claim to have put Zimbabwe back on its feet and
opened the door to opportunities for enrichment for a small Zanu PF
connected elite.
What more could you ask, achieve your political
objective and get rich in the process! Kasukawere is in the process of
building a 2400 square metre luxury mansion in Harare at a cost of millions
of dollars when just a few months ago he could not pay his
bills.
What astounds me is not just the ruthless nature of these
operations but also the near complete absence of any moral content or
ethical considerations.
Despite its Marxist roots, Zanu PF has
evolved into a Khmer Rouge movement that has destroyed the economy, stolen
its accumulated wealth and impoverished the people they are supposed to
govern.
Our people are poorer, less educated and healthy than they were
30 years ago and all this collection of thieves and pirates can do is gorge
themselves on the carcass of the country they have so nearly destroyed. As
Tony Hawkins said the other day “indigenisation is just a Ponzi
scheme.”
It’s time for change and the future is in our
hands.
SHE occasionally ventures into deep waters
where few lawyers dare to tread, but the nightmares that accompany such
sojourns have tested her resilience, character and faith in her chosen
profession.
Following her arrest on Sunday while representing staffers
from Prime Minister (PM) Morgan Tsvangirai’s Office, police continued to
detain Beatrice Mtetwa, even though the High Court had issued an order for
her release, raising questions as to the true motive of her detention.
Yesterday she was denied bail and remanded in custody to April 3 by a Harare
magistrate.
“People who do things under the cover of darkness are
afraid of light. So, if you come at midnight I’ll be there with my
headlights glaring,” the top lawyer says at the beginning of a new film she
features titled: Beatrice Mtetwa and the rule of law.
And for sure
for more than a decade since concerns about failure to adhere to the rule of
law in Zimbabwe started emerging, her headlights have been
glaring.
Mtetwa has defended dozens of journalists, in the process
frustrating those working against freedom of expression and access to
information.
She has also successfully defended PM Tsvangirai and hordes
of other officials from his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) party,
saving them jail time and crushing hopes of a one party
State.
However, her quest for justice has come at a price.
In May
2007, Mtetwa was unlawfully detained and severely assaulted by the police
after participating in a demonstration called by the Law Society of Zimbabwe
(LSZ).
There have also been attempts to break her spirit in the State
media through hate speech.
She has been labelled ugly, the belly of
the beast among other names meant at public derision.
“They’ve called
me ugly, dull, lonely and dejected. It’s discriminatory. I can’t imagine
they would have done the same thing to a male Law Society president,” she
told The Lawyer magazine in 2007 when she was the head of the
LSZ.
Despite the persecution, her efforts have not gone unnoticed
locally, regionally and internationally.
Within the Southern African
Deve-lopment Community region, Mtetwa was awarded the 2009 Sydney and
Felicia Kentridge award from South Africa’s General Council of the Bar,
while internationally she has been awarded the 2008 Lifetime Achievement
award from the Committee to Protect Journalists and the 2003 Liberty/Justice
and Law society Human rights Lawyer of the year award, among
others.
Mtetwa received her Bachelor of Laws from the University of
Botswana and Swaziland in 1981 and spent the next two years working as a
prosecuting attorney in Swaziland.
In 1983, she moved to Zimbabwe,
where she continued working as a prosecutor until 1989.
That year,
she went into private practice, and soon began specialising in human rights
law.
In one of her more notable cases, she successfully challenged a
section of Zimbabwe’s Private Voluntary Organisations Act which allowed a
government minister the authority to dissolve or replace the board members
of non-governmental organisations. She also challenged the results of 37
districts in the 2000 parliamentary elections.
In a PBS documentary,
Mtetwa described her motives for her activism as “not because there is any
glory or cash to it and not because I’m trying to antagonise the
government... I’m doing it because it’s a job that’s got to be
done.”
Mtetwa is particularly noted for her defence of arrested
journalists, both local and international.
In 2003, for example, she
won a court order preventing the deportation of Guardian reporter, Andrew
Meldrum, presenting it to security officials at Harare International Airport
only minutes before Meldrum’s plane was scheduled to depart.
She also
won acquittals for detained reporters Toby Harnden and Julian Simmonds from
Lon-don’s Sunday Telegraph, who had been arrested during coverage of the
April 2005 Parliamentary election on charges of working without government
accreditation.
In April 2008, she secured the release of New York Times
reporter Barry Bearak, who had been imprisoned on similar charges. She
also defended many local journalists arrested in the run-up to the 2008
presidential election.
To practicing lawyers in Zimbabwe, she
re-mains a prized family treasure and there has been consolation in her hour
of trial or during times of relentless tribulation, such as this
week.
“For every Beatrice Mtetwa that these State agents and institutions
put behind bars and attempt to embarrass, humiliate and punish without
lawful cause, there are 10 other human rights lawyers waiting to take up the
mantle,” said Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights deputy head, Precious
Chakasikwa on Monday.
Mcdonald Lewani-kwa, the director of the Crisis
in Zimbabwe Coalition, described Mt-etwa as “our gallant protector” while
John Chita-kure, a political activist, said she was “the conscience of the
nation, the voice of the voiceless, the advocate of the downtrodden, the
dehumanised and the subjugated people of Zimbabwe.”
Prominent
Zimbabwean human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa was arrested for allegedly
obstructing the course of justice. She is pictured here exiting a police
vehicle as she arrived at the Harare Magistrate’s Court on Mar. 20. Credit:
Nyarai Mudimu/IPS
HARARE, Mar 21 2013 (IPS) - Heightened political
tension between the major rivals in Zimbabwe’s coalition government and
increased clampdowns on civil society have left questions about the
country’s readiness for a true democracy just days after people voted to
adopt a new constitution.
Just over three million Zimbabweans voted on
Sunday Mar. 17 in support of the draft constitution, which paves the way for
elections later this year, while 179,489 rejected it. There were 56,627
spoilt ballots.
However, on the day of the referendum, prominent local
human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa was arrested for allegedly obstructing
the course of justice. She is said to have requested that police show her a
search warrant when they raided Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s support
staff offices on Sunday Mar. 17. Four staffers were also
arrested.
“The government clampdown on individuals and organisations that
support democracy… clearly demonstrate that there are forces that are not
yet ready to welcome the democratic dispensation that will come with the new
constitution,” Nixon Nyikadzino, a human rights activist with the Crisis in
Zimbabwe Coalition, a grouping of more than 350 civil organisations in
Zimbabwe working together to bring about democratic change, told
IPS.
President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National
Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), and the opposition Movement for Democratic
Change led by Tsvangirai (MDC-T), entered a Global Political Agreement (GPA)
for a power-sharing government in 2008 after political violence marred the
election. Mugabe has been in power for the last 33 years and his time in
office have been plagued by allegations of corruption, abuse of power,
political intimidation and human rights abuses.
The draft
constitution that Zimbabweans just voted for limits the president to only
two five-year terms of office, but it also has clear provisions that require
security forces to be politically neutral and not to interfere with
electoral processes.
Mtetwa and her co-accused are facing charges of
impersonating the police, possessing articles for criminal use, breaching
the Official Secrets Act and obstructing the course of justice. The act is
vague and says that any matter that the state may allege to be “prejudicial
to the safety and interests of Zimbabwe” breaches it, but it does not define
what “interests” mean.
They are also accused of unlawfully compiling
dockets about government officials, including members of Zanu-PF, who are
thought to be corrupt.
On Wednesday Mar. 20, Mtetwa and her co-accused
were denied bail in the Harare Magistrate’s Court. This is despite a Mar. 18
Zimbabwe High Court ruling that ordered police to release Mtetwa. Police
defied the order and she was held in custody and appeared this week in the
magistrate’s court.
The move has been condemned by activists
here.
“We do not know how a junior court has nullified a senior court’s
order. The High Court ordered that she be released but police defied that.
Now a junior court has just defied the order again. How the court arrived at
that decision is still a surprise to us. We are still studying the
decision,” the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights spokesman Kumbirai Mafunda
told IPS.
Nyikadzino said he was not surprised by the court’s decision to
deny bail to the five.
“That is their style: to keep you under their
custody for as long as they can, because they know they don’t have a case. I
know of cases where the police have had to resort to evoking section 121 of
the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act, which allows them to hold
suspects for longer periods before they appear in court,” he said. In
January international rights organisation Human Rights Watch said the
justice system still remained “extremely partisan” towards
Zanu-PF.
Nyikadzino added that the tension between Zanu-PF and MDC-T
suggested that the coalition government was not ready to embrace
democracy.
However, police have insisted that the arrests are legitimate.
National police spokesperson assistant commissioner Charity Charamba told
IPS that Mtetwa’s co-accused were not staffers in the prime minister’s
office.
“These four people are not civil servants. You have to be a civil
servant to be deemed a staffer in the prime minister’s office. The people
work for a non-governmental organisation, the Institute of Democratic
Alliance in Zimbabwe. They had no right to pretend to work in the PM’s
office,” she said.
But HRW criticised the government in a Mar. 19
statement, and listed a number of “politically motivated abuses against
civil society activists and organisations.”
Zanu-PF spokesman Rugare
Gumbo scoffed at and dismissed the accusations of a clampdown on civil
society.
“We know this sensationalism is a ploy by (Prime Minister)
Tsvangirai and his handlers to push for a SADC (Southern African Development
Community) summit before we hold our general elections. Let the police and
the courts do their work. We have become more aware of their (MDC-T)
machinations,” Gumbo told IPS.
Tsvangirai warned his supporters to
expect more violence from Zanu-PF.
“History has recorded that when change
is about to happen, there are certain elements who are bent on diverting it.
In 2000 we rejected the draft constitution, and a few weeks later, there
were land invasions and widespread violence. In 2008 when we signed the GPA
how many people were arrested?” he said at a press conference in Harare on
Tuesday Mar. 19.
Meanwhile, Mugabe, who is currently in Rome for Pope
Francis’ inauguration, is reported to have said that the draft constitution
will now be gazetted for 30 days and then tabled in parliament for debate.
It will not be amended.
Zimbabwe is probably unique among
nations in having not just one but three government ministers responsible for
“national healing”. This should be a hopeful indicator that wounds suffered
will not be left to fester any longer –but the “organ” which they administer has
so far failed to find a viable means to make progress to that end. Even the
mandate of the Organ of National Healing was subject to acrimonious political
dispute, as there was no genuine agreement on how recent a wound needed to be to
qualify for healing. This situation of stalemate was to be expected, as long as
major perpetrators of abuses continued to hold power as part of an imposed and
artificial “Government of National Unity”. Experience from elsewhere teaches us
that only when perpetrators have been dislodged from control of state power can
justice and healing take place.[1] However, the situation in Zimbabwe is
complicated by the fact that those very abusers themselves claim also to be the
victims of historical violations of their rights.
Confusing and complex as it may be, the need for healing
intensifies and at some point in the future it must be met. The fact is that
Zimbabweans have suffered many injuries over the past hundred and twenty-five
years – a time spanning at least five generations. And the truth is that most
of these injuries have created wounds - physical, material and spiritual - which
have never properly healed. The cataclysm of conquest during the last decade
of the 19thcentury affected
all Zimbabweans in one way or another – through loss of family members, loss of
access to a livelihood, loss of sovereign control and loss of collective and
individual dignity. Land seizures continued almost throughout the colonial
occupation, with the majority of families being evicted from the land which they
considered theirs, some as late as the 1960’s. The Tonga people of the Zambezi
Valley experienced the bitterness of removal late in the day, but the total
destruction of their traditional environment and their livelihoods was more
precipitous, complete and traumatic than for many others.
These injustices created wounds which gradually faded for some but
the dream of restitution remained, and eventually, in the absence of any
peaceful resolution, the response of Zimbabweans was to launch a war of
liberation as an instrument to correct injustices. It eventually succeeded in
its goal of regaining sovereignty for Zimbabweans, but on a completely different
basis from which it had been exercised three generations earlier. Inevitably
with violence being used to try to correct injustices, more wounds were
inflicted and suffered during that war, on all sides, some at the hands of
comrades. And in the aftermath, instead of peace and healing, ZANU PF in power
has inflicted further wounds - during Gukurahundi, during Murambatsvina, during
election violence in every election it has contested, and during land seizures
which purported to correct dispossessions, often violent, of the colonial
period. Violence has been perpetrated throughout our history and it remains in
the consciousness of adults and children, and is passed from one generation to
the next.
How have Zimbabweans survived with all these festering wounds?
What happens when a person or a people with a collective identity is wounded,
either physically or metaphorically? A wound may remain open – in such a case
the individual victim who does not die will continue to live with an extreme
disability. Or, a wound may close – the skin regrows to cover the damage, but
the pain and some debilitating consequences remain, hampering the full recovery
and the enjoyment of life; the person lives with the effects for the rest of his
days. Or, a wound may heal. In such a case scars will certainly remain, but
the deep pain is overcome by the growth of healthy tissue to replace the damaged
one, and the individual will be capable of living a productive life. Those with
unhealed wounds – whether open or closed, physical or spiritual – may be bitter,
resentful, filled with hatred and a desire for revenge, or alternatively
completely disempowered, victims, unable to direct their own lives in productive
ways. Whichever the outcome, the potential of the people and the nation is
hobbled, bound by chains, and the propensity for retaliatory violence remains.
We must then raise the question: can we as a nation heal such wounds to prevent
them becoming a negative force leading us towards a violent
future?
The healing of physical wounds is only the beginning. The healing
of the material and spiritual is a much more complex matter. The loss of
livelihoods, the loss of control over one’s life and pride in one’s identity and
self-expression are not so easily mended. But with determination it is
possible, even if it is going to be very difficult.
Three critical processes are necessary to bring healing : first, a
public recognition that wrong has been done – an acknowledgment by the
government and / or the individuals who perpetrated the offences of their guilt.
Second, some form of punishment of the offender is required, or at least an
accounting to the victims or survivors, an explanation or apology for the
wrong-doing. Finally, compensation or restitution for the material damage
suffered is necessary. For survivors of wounds inflicted, it is often not the
physical wound that becomes most significant, but the spiritual wounds. And the
spiritual wounds will not be healed without some form of justice meted out to
the perpetrators and some balancing of the material losses.
But what about those who suffered their losses generations ago?
Some would not take the descendants’ grievances seriously, but it is important
to pay attention. The governments which inflicted them no longer exist. They
never acknowledged their wrong-doing, individuals and institutions have not
apologised or been punished. In accordance with the Lancaster House agreement,
the independent government did not attempt to deal with this in their early
years in office; nor did they treat it as urgent a decade later. The
restitution of material loss was not fulfilled for the vast majority. The highly
partisan compensation funds for war victims were so corruptly administered that
this form of restitution has unfortunately lost all credibility. Eventually,
rather than handling it as a matter of healing, government allowed and
encouraged the forces of resentment and bitterness to dominate in bringing a
measure of material restitution through the seizure of land from the owners of
what was appropriated by others generations ago. The majority of those thus
deprived were not even descendants of the original appropriators, even though
one might claim that they had benefited nevertheless from the political economy
of the colonial period.
Unfortunately, during this land appropriation,
political motives overtook any aim to heal, to correct the historic injustices
by providing restitution. Instead, lingering grievances were cleverly
manipulated to serve politicians’ desire to retain power. There are several
reasons why the seizure of land can hardly be considered to have contributed to
restoring that balance of justice and material losses and healed the nation:
firstly, the manner in which it took place enabled only a small minority of
those who originally suffered losses to gain restitution[2], thus leaving out the vast majority; secondly, those from whom
land was taken were not the original perpetrators, even though they may have
been indirect beneficiaries; thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the
violence with which it took place created more victims with open wounds;
furthermore, the destruction of the entire economy which ensued erased the
livelihoods and social supports of literally millions, producing a nation of
impoverished destitutes. Evidence from the redistribution patterns shows that we
have in addition perpetuated the social divisions between those with more land
and those with less,[3]and inevitably those with ZANU PF
connections were the main beneficiaries.
Those who still claim that national healing must take account of
wounds suffered as far back as the 19thcentury must explain what
wounds they want to heal, and how, if their stance is not simply to be dismissed
as political posturing. Those who insisted that all appropriated land must be
reclaimed have shown no interest in the wounds of the Tonga people; their lands
cannot be reclaimed, but surely some material restitution could have been
considered. In addition to those crimes of colonial expropriation, atrocities by
both sides in the liberation war have never been dealt with, and yet they left
deep spiritual and material wounds. If anyone has a workable plan for the just
handling of these problems, and the genuine healing of those wounds, let them
come forward.
What we all know is that far more recent wounds are still
festering and need attention if we are to progress as a nation. These are the
wounds inflicted over the past thirty years by our own sovereign government and
its party and security institutions, against fellow citizens who sought to
exercise their constitutional right to hold a different political allegiance.
Many of the perpetrators as well as direct victims are still alive, and healing
can indeed be achieved if we have the moral and political will. For years,
survivors of the atrocities committed during Gukurahundi have been denied any
form of healing by the flimsy excuse that to talk about their pain will simply
“open old wounds”. Those who still feel the hurt and the losses thirty years
later would not consider these to be “old” wounds. They are both fresh and
unhealed and hence remain to some extent “open”. Furthermore their perpetrators
are in many cases known, and even prominent within government and its
institutions. Isn’t it ironic that some of the same people who refuse to
acknowledge these wounds want to talk about healing for wounds suffered
generations ago? It is indeed difficult to take them
seriously.
A survivor of Gukurahundi cannot be healed when he sees the chief
perpetrator of those atrocities enjoying high rank in Zimbabwe’s military
hierarchy, completely unmoved by the wounds he inflicted and completely free of
any opprobrium, let alone punishment for his crimes. A survivor of election
violence of 2008 cannot be healed when her torturer or the murderer of her
husband walks free in the community, even taunting his victim’s family about the
impunity he enjoys, being protected by powerful individuals. Both these
survivors face material losses, often having been deprived of property,
employment, physical health, integrity of family and access to any economic
resources, not to mention their civil rights to freedom of expression and
association. And their tormentors even appear to have been rewarded for what
they have done. Healing in our nation can only become a reality when those who
inflicted recent wounds, both government and identified individuals, acknowledge
that what they did was wrong; individuals must be publicly called to account,
and some form of justice must be seen to be done. Murderers, whether of masses
or of individuals, cannot be allowed to remain walking within communities,
enjoying impunity and even affluent lifestyles while their victims’ families
wallow in poverty or languish in enforced exile. And following on from the
acknowledgement and the accounting of the perpetrators must come some form of
material restitution to enable survivors to pursue lives of dignity. Then we
will know that healing is taking place and the wounds will not come back to
create new discords for future generations.
Our national healing organ has never been able, since its
formation after the creation of the Government of National Unity, to promote any
genuine healing. Resistance is created by those who perpetrated much of the
post-Independence violence and who are failing to take the first step of
acknowledging their own wrong-doing, seeking rather to deflect attention to
wounds inflicted before Independence. They believe they will avoid
responsibility because they can, by inflicting more wounds, remain in control of
government for an indefinite period. They could be right, but they may be
wrong. The desperate need for genuine healing may continue, and if it does,
those perpetrators should know that the grievances being nursed by those with
open wounds may generate a new cycle of violence fuelled by hatred and
resentment, in which they themselves will become the victims. They may not all
die in power. It is then to be hoped that those who replace them as the rulers
of this nation do not venture on any new road of revenge violence, but rather
initiate a genuine process, through which all can be healed, both victims and
perpetrators. Only then can we map a road to a future free of more violence and
national decay.
Healing remains a distant dream as we enter an election year which
heralds fear of new atrocities, new wrongs and new wounds which would add to the
already heavy burden of the past. We long for the day when perpetrators will
admit they have offended, when they will be held accountable for their deeds,
and even spiritual wounds can be healed as material restitution takes place.
But that can only occur when perpetrators are no longer in control of
government, are no longer granted impunity, can no longer hide behind state
institutions but are forced to see and admit the horror of what they have done
to their fellow human beings.
[1]For example, in Argentina, where it took
close to thirty years for mechanisms of justice and healing to be put in
place.
[2]Matondi estimates
that 151,000 individuals (and by extension their families) out of a population
of near 12 million gained access to land. Matondi, P, Zimbabwe’s Fast Track
land Reform, Zed Books, London, 2012, p.56
[3]The whole programme of land reform proceeded
with parallel but unequal mechanisms for giving large farms (A2 model) to those
already with means and smaller plots (A1 model) to those without.
A large turnout to endorse a new constitution augurs well for
elections Mar 23rd 2013 | HARARE |From the print edition
BUSINESSMEN
in Zimbabwe like to say that local roads may be terrible but, unlike in some
neighbouring countries, at least they exist. This glass-half-full attitude
may explain the surprising enthusiasm with which Zimbabweans turned out on
March 16th to endorse a new constitution.
The revised rulebook has its
flaws. It keeps the government on a tighter leash, but is still short on
checks. The referendum itself came only weeks after a draft was agreed on,
leaving little time for public debate. Yet more than 3.3m voters (out of an
electoral roll of 6m, bloated by the names of many deceased) turned up and
93% voted yes. All the parties in Zimbabwe’s uneasy governing coalition had
endorsed the document as well.
This paves the way for overdue elections,
perhaps as soon as mid-July. The manner of the referendum, as much as its
substance, gives reason for optimism. The voting went smoothly. Violence was
rare; polling stations opened on time; results were announced within three
days. Unfortunately, the indelible ink used to mark voters poisoned a few
returning officers.
A presidential election is unlikely to be as calm.
Even if monitors from neighbouring countries—others would not be
welcome—were able to prevent blatant rigging, they could not stop the
bullying of voters and opponents of President Robert Mugabe by thugs loyal
to his party, Zanu-PF. The referendum was barely over when four members of
the political team of Morgan Tsvangirai, the president’s main challenger,
were arrested by police on dubious charges. Beatrice Mtetwa, a human-rights
lawyer, was also detained.
Such intimidation of opponents is likely to
increase as the election draws nearer, especially if Mr Mugabe’s supporters
fear he might lose. Recent polls show him and Mr Tsvangirai running
neck-and-neck, even though a large proportion of voters refuse to say whom
they will back. It is likely that many don’t-knows are Tsvangirai supporters
who fear admitting that to opinion pollsters.
The referendum showed a
hunger for participation among Zimbabweans, if not explicitly for new
leadership. Were the high turnout to be repeated on polling day, it would
make it harder to rig the election.
Investors sense that things are
looking up. Zimbabwe’s main stockmarket has risen more than 20% this year.
The recent history of the country may be an invitation to expect the worst.
But some in Zimbabwe are quietly preparing for the best.
The Election Resource Centre (ERC) is a
non-profit making organisation which was established in January 2010 to service
the needs of election stakeholders in Zimbabwe. The Election Resource Centre is
an independent electoral institution which aims at strengthening the capacity of
election stakeholders to meaningfully engage in the election
processes.
Residents of Mbare queue to vote in the Referendum in the early
hours of Saturday 16 March.
Apart from its conventional programming
the ERC establishes domestic observer missions towards every given electoral
event. In this instance the organization has embarked on a mission to monitor
the constitutional referendum which was conducted on the 16th of March
2013.
Purpose of Observer
Mission
To assess the pre-referendum
environment
To observe the actual day of voting in
terms of the voting procedures, counting and transmission of
results
To record and observe any voting
irregularities before and during the referendum
To observe and report on any polls
related violence
Methodology
The Elections Resource Centre (ERC)
deployed 30 accredited observers and voters’ clubs members who covered all the
country’s 210 constituencies. The observers assessed the pre-referendum period,
the referendum and post referendum period.
In addition to the accredited observers,
the ERC also relied on information gathered and supplied by its unaccredited
citizen monitors situated in all the country`s 210
constituencies.
Such citizen monitors would give
constant near-real time updates on unfolding election related events which had
potential to disturb the conduct of the election. Such information was relayed
through SMS or Whatsapp, calls and feeds on e-mail and processed into reports on
the electoral environment.
Pre-referendum
Assessment
The pre-referendum period was largely
peaceful but was punctuated by an upsurge in attacks on civil society
organizations which witnessed raids and searches at the Zimbabwe Peace Project,
ZIMRIGHTS, ZESN, NYDT and Radio Dialogue.
Such attacks on civil society impeded
the ability of the CSOs to freely provide their services to the citizenry, and
can stifle information to the communities especially as it relates to the
referendum.
Key
Findings
Voter Education- the ZEC embarked on a
voter education outreach programme meant to inform prospective voters of the
requirements and places where people were going to cast their
votes.
The outreach meetings started on the 6th
of March and were conducted until the 13th of March 2013 with ZEC deploying 2
voter educators per ward. Clearly the time allocated for voter education
exercise was inadequate and indeed not far reaching.
Consequently the referendum was marred by the following
unfortunate incidences;
i. People bringing unsuitable forms of
identification like drivers` licence, expired passports, photocopies of IDs and
even business cards. This resulted in prospective voters to be turned
away.
ii. The lack of adequate voter education
also resulted into spoilt ballots which could have been avoided had there been
adequate voter information prior to the election.
iii. A significant number of voters did
not understand the difference between a referendum and the general
election.
iv. A number of aliens, who by current
law are not eligible to vote, found themselves in queues intending to vote
before inevitably being turned away.
Voting
-Our observers on the ground reported that
voting proceeded smoothly, with most of the polling stations opening up on time
for voting and closing on time, albeit there were reports of one polling station
opening at 10.30am and closing at 10.30pm at Caledonia.
However the increase in the number of
polling stations widened access to the voting facilities. Voters were taking an
average of 3 minutes to complete the voting process. Generally, the voting
process was easy to navigate and the ERC commends the Zimbabwe Electoral
Commission for conducting a smooth voting process.
Voting Environment
-While voting was widely peaceful and
orderly, there were however isolated reports of violence and arrests in certain
parts of the country. There were reports on acts of coercion in Epworth and
Muzarabani.
Villagers and residents were being
forced to go and vote and threatened with unspecified action if they do not
comply.
In Chakari, our observers reported that
7 ZANU PF youth were turned away from a polling station for attempting to vote
while wearing party regalia, and reportedly assaulted an MDC-T supporter on
their way from the polling station.
There were also reports of arrests in
Harare, Glen View and Kariba. It is however commendable that the referendum was
largely conducted in a largely peaceful environment; but the isolated cases of
violence and intimidation have the potential to dent the credibility of the
referendum.
Administrative Framework
-Our observers reported disorder in the form
of shortage of ballot papers in areas such as Ntabazinduna in Matabeleland North
and Bulawayo East. There were reports of lack of adequate visible signs to
direct voters to most polling stations.
Such administrative oversights are an
indictment on the part of ZEC and its capacity to implement logistics related to
the conduct of elections, especially coming against the background of ZEC having
printed excessive ballot papers for the plebiscite.
Counting
-The ERC received reports of anomalies in the
counting and collation of results processes. For instance, the ERC received
reports from its observers that all observers present at New Hall Command Centre
in Glen View South Constituency were asked to vacate the facility when counting
began.
Mr. Maenzanise, the Returning Officer at
the said counting centre further informed observers that they were not at
liberty to either disclose or display the results as they were being channelled
directly to the national command centre.
The mentioned Returning Officer
reportedly hinted to the observers that it is his exclusive discretion to make
public or not, results from the collation centre concerned. Such utterances are
clearly contrary to the provisions of electoral legislation and
regulations.
It was further reported that at some
polling stations in Nyami Nyami, Seke and Mt Pleasant, results were not being
displayed at polling stations; rather they were being channelled directly to
their respective collation centres.
The ERC notes that such conduct negates
the provisions of the Referendums Regulations (Statutory Instrument 26 of 2013)
together with the Electoral Act (Chapter 2.13) requiring every Returning Officer
to “upon completion of the constituency collation return, affix a copy of the
constituency collation return outside the constituency collation
centre.”
Police presence inside
polling stations– Our observers nationwide noted a worrying
heavy presence of police in and around polling stations. Some reports indicated
that the police officers at some polling stations were actively involved in the
polling processes.
More worrying is the fact that most of
the police details were present in the polling stations – police should be
stationed outside the polling stations to maintain law and order. Their presence
inside polling stations has the potential to cause anxiety amongst the
voters.
Election Officials
–The ERC also observed that some election
officials were not aware of the laws and regulations governing the conduct of
the referendum. This was invariably exhibited at various polling centres as some
polling officials either through commission or omission did the
following;
i. Returning officers chasing away
observers at counting
ii. Returning officers refusing to
display results at the polling centres
iii. Returning officers refusing to give
copies of results to accredited observers at the polling
centres
iv. Some referendum officials did not
understand the role of the observers
Recommendations
The ERC therefore calls upon election
administrators to exercise consistency in the observance of electoral
regulations, which inevitably would limit suspicions of manipulation of the
electoral outcomes.
Call on the state institutions charged
with maintaining law and order to fulfil their mandate impartially and in manner
that instills confidence in the electorate
Urge ZEC to plan more effectively its
administration of the electoral processes so that it is able to confront
unforeseen events like floods and accidents as well as shortage of voting
material
Call on ZEC to make sure that in future
polls, adequate time and resources is allocated to voter education so as to
reduce rejected votes and increase voter turnout.
That all observers willing to observe
future elections must be given accreditation without unreasonable
limitations.
There is need to ensure officials
deployed to polling centres are adequately trained and fully understand the
scope of their work and corresponding laws and regulations governing the conduct
of elections.
In view of the above, the Election
Resource Centre (ERC) considers the March 2013 Referendum to have been conducted
in a largely peaceful, transparent and credible manner.
As the constitutional
referendum took place on the 16th March 2013, both the ruling party, Zanu-PF and
opposition party, the MDC are intensifying intimidation and campaigning before
the elections scheduled in July 2013. One of the most powerful methods of
currying favour with potential voters in a country wreaked with severe drought
and hunger is the issuing of farming supplies and
food.
In this footage,
various meetings are recorded in which both Zanu-PF and the MDC use the promise
of farming supplies to loyal and often desperate supporters in a bid to secure
votes in the scheduled elections in July.
In a country that was
once hailed as the “bread basket” of Africa, many believe the political
influence of the ruling and opposition parties has ironically created the
humanitarian food crisis they claim to be able to solve through the sparse
distribution of farming supplies, particularly maize seeds.
Further questions are
also being raised as to where the political parties are getting the supplies
used in the campaign as there is a huge shortage nationally that has required
humanitarian organisations to intervene by supplying food supplies, some say the
same that the parties are using to gain votes for the upcoming
election.