EDITORIAL COMMENT: We need political will

With President Robert Mugabe’s administration enjoying a clear majority in the National Assembly, railroading amendments to either the national charter or existing laws would be as easy as abc. What might, however, be lost to government is whether it is prepared to live with the consequences.

What is giving rise to this warped thinking doing the rounds in party corridors is this misplaced belief that ZANU-PF could use its legal minds to end the current wave of protests against government’s ineptitude in handling the country’s socio-economic crisis.

We are already seeing desperate attempts to clampdown the social media, which has become a medium of choice for millions of Zimbabweans who were being denied space to air their views in the public media, through the Cyber crime Bill. To supplement the obnoxious Bill, we may soon witness serious efforts towards tightening constitutional provisions that give citizens the right to demonstrate; assembly and speak freely.

By taking away citizens’ freedoms as enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, ZANU-PF apparatchiks are digging a grave for themselves by turning the hands of time back to colonialism.

The solution should never be to turn a country with a modest Constitution that only became law less than three years ago into a pariah State because capital, which the governing party is desperately looking for, will not flow into an economy that does not respect property and human rights.

For many years, government has been tinkering with the symptoms of the problem instead of tackling its root cause(s).

Our statute books have an oversupply of laws that repel investors, among them the notorious Public Order and Security Act and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Despite attempts to put a human face to the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act, it is still replete with clauses that make Zimbabwe hostile to investors. The Land Reform Act is also blocking funding into agriculture because it denies title to the very indigenous farmers who were resettled on the land expropriated from the former white commercial farmers. The by-products of these toxic laws are there for all to see in the form of collapsing industries; a spike in unemployment; a shrinking fiscal purse; poor disposable incomes and a worsening cash crisis in a country that has been operating without a currency of its own since 2009.

Faced with these frightening challenges, it is only natural for citizens to raise their grievances with their government and take to the streets to vent out their frustrations within the confines of the law.

But to respond by bludgeoning the suffering masses into silence does not solve an iota of the issues confronting the country.

Zimbabwe has never been short of solutions to ride out of its challenges as it has produced several high-sounding blueprints over the years that have been left to gather dust by our bureaucrats.

The missing link has always been the lack of political will to implement these solutions.