zimpolitic

National Healing and Reconciliation in Zimbabwe: Challenges and Opportunities.

2010-05-18T07:21:00.003+02:00

The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa has published a monograph by a Zimbabwean, Mrs Pamela Machakanja of the Institute of Peace, Leadership and Governance at Africa University titled,"National Healing and Reconciliation in Zimbabwe: Challenges and Opportunities". The paper highlights the importance of instituting transitional justice mechanisms including truth seeking and truth telling if Zimbabwe is to close a sad chapter in its history and open a new chapter that instills durable and sustainable peace for all Zimbabweans. Indeed there cannot be durable peace in Zimbabwe unless the historical prejudices and imbalances are remedied as the victims will always seek revenge at personal level thus making it difficult to have a stable and peaceful nation. The paper is worth reading for those in the field of peace, justice and human rights and can be accessed here .

High Court Judge Hungwe's Life in Danger

2009-11-03T07:58:00.002+02:00

Honourable Justice Charles Hungwe is now living in fear for his dear life after an attempt on his life last Saturday, 31 October 2009. Available information points out that his vehicle was crushed into by unknown persons who were driving an Isuzu Double cab without number plates as his car was just coming out of his residential house. Fourtunately or unfortunately the car was being driven by his son and the judge was not in the car when the incident occured. It is reported that the assailants sped off soon after the incident raising the suspicion that this could be a plot to eliminate Judge Hungwe who has in the past been perceived a staunch apologist and sympathiser of the Movement for Democratic Change. It is interesting to note that Judge Hungwe is one of the few Judges who have exuded the charismatic qualities and interpretive role of the proper fucntion of the judiciary in a democracy. He is one of the few judges in Zimbabwe who have rendered progressive judgements upholding the rule of law and human rights respect in many instances and cases involving accused MDC officials and supporters. Judge Hungwe recently granted bail to the MDC T Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Roy Bennet accused of bantitry and plotting an insurgency in the country. He further barred the State to appeal against his decision. Observers point out that this may be one of the instances as to why there is an attempt on his life considering the high political interests surrounding the case as shown by the fact that the Attorney General himself and the senior staff in his office personally went to Mutare Provincial Court to oppose the bail appplication on the ground that this was a high profile case which required the AG himself to be present so as to bring finality to the case. Why such an interest, one can wonder? It is unfortunate that one of the few progressive and independent judges is being targeted and this is very inimical to the guarantees of the independence of judges in the country and also to the proper administration of justice as judges will be forced to be compliant with the dictates of the most powerful figures in society.

DEMOCRATISATION AND CONSTITUTIONALISM THROUGH CONSTITUTION-MAKING PROCESS IN ZIMBABWE

2009-07-09T10:22:00.002+02:00

The cries and aspirations of Zimbabweans at this juncture is to see the country becoming more and more democratic, that is, one in which the sovereign power resides in and exercised by the whole body of free citizens directly or indirectly through a system of representation. In order to achieve this, there has to be a conducive legal and institutional framework, that allows, ensures and guarantees that there is true representation, regular free and fair elections, freedom of expression both before and after, freedom of the people to participate in the governing process, rule of law, respect for human security and human rights, transparency of government, accountability, separation of powers and political tolerance. These essential elements have to be provided for and the Constitution is the rightful place to have these properly entrenched. Therefore, a democratic Constitution is the one that truly enshrines these principles and the extent and content of that particular Constitution should emanate from the people themselves.

We leave in an era of Constitution-making. It must be underscored that writing a Constitution is part of the many peace processes as history from other jurisdictions at varying historical episodes clearly demonstrates. New nations and radically new regimes that seek democratic credentials make writing a Constitution a priority. It is, therefore, generally agreed nowadays that the process of making a Constitution is as important as the final document itself. Put differently, it can be said that any Constitution is as good or as bad as the process through which it is made. The Zimbabwean High Court Judge, Ben Hlatswayo succinctly summarized the point thus, “modern ideas on Constitution making place emphasis on popular participation and widespread consultation in order to produce a Constitution that will endure and which the people feel is truly their own” The idea of political leaders bringing a Constitution to the people has been thrown into the dustbin of history. Thus the days of leaders evoking the image of the biblical Moses coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments carved in the stone for the benefit of the children of Israel is long gone! Today, people do not want Constitutions privately negotiated by “people’s leaders” and imposed on the rest of society. People want to participate actively in the making of their own supreme law. As part of entrenching peace democracy and human security the Zimbabwean government, therefore, needs to take this issue seriously as the Constitution making process is a basis for a consensus in nation building.

It must be noted that genuine public participation requires social inclusion, personal security and freedom of speech and assembly. A strong civil society, civic education and good channels of communication between all levels of society facilitate this process. Only considerable commitment of time and resources will make genuine public participation possible. The Constitution of new constitutionalism is a conversation conducted by all concerned, open to new entrants and issues, seeking a workable formula that will be sustainable rather than assuredly stable. Indeed, it is in such an environment of conversational constitutionalism that the issue of a right to participate in making a Constitution arose.

A democratic Constitution is no longer simply one that establishes democratic governance! It is also a Constitution that is made in a democratic process. There is thus a moral claim to participation according to the norms of democracy. A claim of necessity for participation is based on the belief that without the general sense of “ownership” that comes from sharing authorship, today’s public will not understand, respect, support and live within the constraints of constitutional government. In other words, participatory Constitution making has become a criterion of a legitimate process and therefore the norms of democratic procedure, transparency and accountability that are applied to daily political decision making are now also demanded for constitutional deliberation.

A right to public participation in Constitution making creates a stronger ground on which to stand. Major international human rights instruments and national Constitutions do grant a general right to democratic participation, although one that is lacking legal teeth and effective enforcement. The right to participate in Constitution making might logically be derived from the general meaning of “democratic participation” in the UN Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 in Article 21 and especially Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 25 establishes a right to participate in public affairs, to vote and to have access to public service. Regional and transnational declarations such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (1981, Article 13.1), the Asian Charter (1998, Article 5.2) and the Inter-American Democratic Charter (2001) all declare a general right to political participation. This therefore underscores the point that it is now universally accepted that a democratic Constitution-making process is critical to the strength, acceptability and legitimacy of the final product.

As Zimbabwe has just embarked on journey of negotiating and promulgating the supreme law of the land it is imperative that the inclusive government take cognizant of the right of the people to decide what they really want. The SADC Guidelines on Constitutionalism and Constitution Making of 2005 encapsulates the point that the process must be people driven. It is the duty of the incumbent government to facilitate the process without seeking to control and dominate the exercise. The composition and functioning of the Constitution making bodies should aim at maximum inclusivity and the broadest informed participation.

Public participation in the whole exercise must be facilitated by concerted efforts at raising public awareness (just as what obtains in pre-election times), encouraging and assisting the public to have its views registered and fully engaging the public in an open and free atmosphere and also taking into account the needs of other special interests groups like children and those with disabilities. Experts can assist by ensuring that the views of the public are faithfully reflected during the whole process while jealously guarding against real temptation of imposing their own views under the guise of “technical input”.

It must not be underplayed that the task of writing a Constitution is a mammoth, arduous and complex task. But it is a necessary and important process in achieving the dreams of Uhuru. This is a golden and classic opportunity for the Zimbabwean society, both local and Diaspora, to assert their democratic right as part of peace building and democratization. Any attempts by the politicians of the day to hijack the process must be jealously guarded against.

Innocent Mawire is a Human Rights Lawyer and writes for Peace and Justice Support Forum. He also co-authors International Law Observer (www.internationallawobserver.eu). He can be contacted at i_mawire@yahoo.com

Building True, Durable and Sustainable Peace in Zimbabwe.

2009-05-16T14:01:00.003+02:00

The challenge confronting Zimbabwe today since the signing of the Global Political Agreement that gave birth to the inclusive government and the political transitional discourse obtaining in the country today is how to extricate the nation from a past that continues to weigh down and haunt the entire population. Many organisations and individuals in this country have made a call that to leave the past alone is the best possible panacea and the only way to avoid a delicate process of transition or to avoid a reversion to the horrendous past that was characterised by extensive repression and gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law.

As the political transition is unfolding in the country after a decade period of violence, our society is now confronted with a moribund legacy of abuse, which requires concerted efforts of all the stakeholders to map the best way to democratise the country and build sustainable peace. Questions are being raised with regards how best our nation can be healed. It is our view that society has to come together and deliberate on these issues. In order to promote justice, peace and reconciliation, government officials and non-governmental advocates alike should consider both judicial and non-judicial responses to violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that occurred during the preceding years. Such responses, inter alia, include prosecuting individual perpetrators, offering reparations to victims of state sponsored violence, establishing truth seeking initiatives about past abuses, reforming institutions like the police and the courts and also lustration, that is, removing perpetrators from positions of power.

It cannot be assailed that transitional justice is an essential ingredient for any society emerging from an abusive and repressive past tainted with a horrific and brutal human rights record to a democratic country imbued with principles that guarantee human rights respect. Surely victims and survivors need to know the truth as a means of bringing closure to their suffering.

The Oxford-based historian, Timothy Garton Ash, once reminded us that while victims are cursed by a good memory, perpetrators are blessed by an ability to forget. Thus the failure by the government to acknowledge the horrendous human rights violations it visited upon the Ndebele ethnic group in the early 1980s has to date increased the tensions and rift in our society. To date, many people in Matebeleland and Midlands provinces still lament that the then ZANU PF government has never done justice to them. Justice demands that perpetrators be brought to account for their heinous misdeeds in order to bring a measure of closure on the past and to be a kind deterrent that is needed to avoid the repeat of such sad chapters in the history of our country. Prosecution of those who violate people’s rights with impunity is a minimum ingredient for the rule of law and an essential requirement for the protection of human rights.

It is important that our country has, at this juncture, been given the opportunity to lay a firm and durable foundation for building sustainable peace and a culture of human rights respect. The transitional period has paved the way for the Constitution-making process- the much-venerated issue anticipated by the wide section of the society since independence from the colonial yoke. It must be underlined that the Constitution to be born out of this process must provide a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society, characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all Zimbabweans regardless of political affiliation. South Africa is a classic example of a country that used a similar golden opportunity to instigate a smooth transition from the apartheid regime to a constitutional democracy that is obtaining today in that country. As a logical corollary, the lessons learnt from South Africa must also guide and inform us in our Constitution-making process but also taking into account our own national values and ethos.

The pursuit of national unity, the well being of all Zimbabweans and durable peace requires reconciliation amongst the people and reconstruction of society, which hitherto, has been damaged by the repressive and oppressive environment in the preceding years. Bust such reconciliation can only be attained, not by sweeping the past atrocious history under the carpet as mere aberration but by pursuing various profound processes of transitional justice mechanisms.

Undeniably, the adoption of a people driven constitution (the content of which must be agreed upon by all citizens) lays the secure foundation for all the people of Zimbabwe to transcend the divisions and strife of the past, which generated gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge. These challenges should now be addressed on the basis that there is need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation and not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu and not for tyrannical victimisation.

This invariably is a delicate process which essentially means that the Constitution as a supreme national document founded on the will and aspirations of Zimbabweans seeking to close a sad chapter and opening a new chapter in the history of our nation, must be imbued with the values, principles and aspirations that identify with Zimbabweans in accordance with international human rights norms. It is against this background then that Zimbabweans can enjoy durable peace established by the rule of law and supported by strong accountability systems.

Each and every one of us, individually and institutionally, has a responsibility therefore to establish processes for consensus building of our nation and to facilitate transitional justice and reconciliation in our nation that has been (and still is) extremely polarised and antagonised on political and ethnic lines to the detriment of international human rights norms and standards. In these we firmly believe that a prosperous and democratic Zimbabwe, where all people across the political divide and from different ethnic backgrounds can live peacefully and in harmony with each other, can be realised if the current transitional process is handled competently.

Innocent Mawire is the founding Director for the Peace and Justice Support Forum (Zimbabwe)

Court Orders The Rearrest of Zimbabwe Peace Project Director

2009-05-05T14:35:00.002+02:00

The political seduction of state institutions in Zimbabwe has yet again manifested itself today when the Zimbabwean High Court has ordered the rearrest of Jestina Mukoko, a human rights defender and peace activist, and the other MDC activists who have recently been granted bail for the alleged crime of planning acts of terrorism against the Mugabe administration. The Zimbabwe Peace Project Director, who was released on medical conditions had come for routine remand only to be remanded in custody without reasons being proferred by the judge. Civil Society organisation in Zimbabwe will meet later today to discuss the way forward with regards the contemptous disregard and flagrant violation of human rights against the spirit and tenor of the Global Political Agreement signed by Tsvangirai, Mugabe and Mutambara late last year.

This is a clear indication of the fact that the ZANU PF administration is not interested and has never been interested in the inclusive government which, if it is abided by, will result in them losing all the levers of the political power they were enjoying before the inclusive government regime. This is an attempt to frustrate the opposition MDC-T for them to withdraw from the fragile and loose power-sharing arrangement brokered by the then South African President, Thabo Mbeki.

The arrest of human rights defenders is a common phenomenon in the country used by the Mugabe regime to silence its critics. It is unfortunate that the judiciary, which traditionally has to dispense and be an arbiter of justice has been politicised and become synonymous with the tyrrant and ruthless regime which has done much to pauperise its own citizens under the guise of guarding against neo-colonialism but at the same time arrogating to itself all the wealth and national resources at the expense of "we the people!" The world needs to act now!!!

Mugabe At It Again!

2009-04-30T07:22:00.002+02:00

Mugabe's flagrant disregard and violation of the Global Political Agreement continues unstopped which goes to indicate that the GPA was just a marriage of convenience which the old man wanted to use to galvanise his legitimacy which was in doubt without necessarily recognising the role of the MDC as a partner in government administration. First it started with the appointment of Permanent Secretaries and the MDC raised its concerns which were shortlived but nothing changed.

Now the available evidence is that the old man is ready to appoint four judges, two Deputy Attorney Generals and four Senior Presidents of the Labour Court and Administrative Court. It is interesting to note these appointments are without consultation with the office of the Prime Minister yet they are key appointments. It is an unfortunate aberration representing the seemingly MDC's mollification in the face of Zanu PF's unpreparedness to be confined within the provision of the GPA. It remains to be seen whether this cosmetic facade of a unity goverment will stand these trying times. But as the Head of Government it just naturally follows as a logical corollary that Tsvangirai must have a say in the appointment of judges, governors and other key government officers. Only then should we expect to see real change in government administration.

Zimbabwe: Engaging the Inclusive Government

2009-04-22T07:43:00.004+02:00

This is the title of the report from the International Crisis Group detailing the positive signs emerging in the socio-economic and political set up in Zimbabwe since the signing of the Global Political Agreement. It is really encouraging to note that the international organisation has a positive attitude and hope for the new administration. The detailed report can be read here. Indeed what is now needed is for the international community to rally behind Zimbabwe and support it in all possible ways.

Sudanese President’s Indictment: Justice or Neo-Colonialism?

2009-03-10T07:20:00.002+02:00

On the 4th of March 2009, after seven months of deliberation, the International Criminal Court charged President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan with war crimes and crimes against humanity in the violence that has engulfed the Darfur region in recent years. But he escaped the charge on genocide at least for now, as the ICC has made it clear that the charges could also be amended to include genocide if relevant evidence subsequently comes to light. This is remarkable because it is the fisrt time the court has sought the arrest of a sitting head of state since it opened in 2002. Reactions have been characterized by outrage, apprehension, and celebration. To his immediate supporters, this reeks of neocolonialism in which the insufferably haughty and hypocritical Western powers target Africa and seek to humiliate its leaders. Thousands of furious demonstrators took to the streets of Khartoum and attacked the ICC, Western countries, the UN, and chanted their support and love for their beleaguered president. Larger demonstrations are expected in the days to come.

Some concede that President al-Bashir may be culpable, but worry that this will destabilize the country and make the situation in Darfur worse. It might even re-stoke the older north-south conflict whose settlement under the the Comprehensive Peace Agreement adopted on December 31, 2004 is quite fragile. They prefer peace to justice. This purported trade off is the basis of some of the opposition to the court's action in the African Union and the Arab League. In the words of the Chairperson of the AU Executive Council in his address to the Council on January 29, 2009: "The greatest challenge facing the peace process in Darfur is the request made by the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC on the 14th June 2008, for the indictment of the President of the Republic of the Sudan, General Omar al Bashir. While in principle the African Union has no objection to bringing, perpetrators of human rights violations to justice, the reality remains that President al-Bashir remains a critical stakeholder in the search for peace in Darfur. Accepting the request for the issuance of a warrant to arrest [him] at this time will most likely derail the peace process in the Sudan." At the end of its recent summit held in Addis Ababa at the beginning of last month, the Assembly of the AU endorsed the call made months earlier by the AU's Peace and Security Council for the UN Security Council to "defer the process initiated by the ICC."

The need to defer justice in pursuit of peace also informs opinions and concerns among some relief agencies. In the words of Franklin Graham, president and chief executive of Samaritan's Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, writing in The New York Times: "I want to see justice served, but my desire for peace in Sudan is stronger. Mr. Bashir, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, is hardly an ideal peacemaker. But given all the warring factions in Sudan, there is no guarantee that his replacement would be better....Now, his arrest could threaten the south's elections and referendum, and hurl the country back into civil war. His removal could also spur retaliation by Bashir loyalists and other forces against civilians, United Nations peacekeepers or international aid workers."

Such vacillations cut no ice with human rights activists who welcomed the indictment of President al-Bashir last June and the issue of the arrest warrant on 4 March 2009. There have been television and newspaper pictures of demonstrators celebrating outside Sudanese embassies in various countries. For them peace and justice are inseparable, the perpetrators of impunity should not be absolved of their crimes by fears of more impunity from them. This merely serves to perpetuate the cycle of impunity by allowing the architects of war crimes and crimes against humanity to go scot-free. These sentiments are expressed with characteristic moral clarity by emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in an impassioned an op-ed essay entitled "Will Africa Let Sudan Off the Hook?", in which he argued that the issuance of the arrest warrant "presents a stark choice for African leaders - are they on the side of justice or on the side of injustice? Are they on the side of the victim or the oppressor? The choice is clear but the answer so far from many African leaders has been shameful. Because the victims in Sudan are African, African leaders should be the staunchest supporters of efforts to see perpetrators brought to account. Yet rather than stand by those who have suffered in Darfur, African leaders have so far rallied behind the man responsible for turning that corner of Africa into a graveyard."

He eloquently dismissed charges that the ICC and the indictment of President Bashir merely is nothing but legal cover for western imperialist machinations. "I regret that the charges against President al-Bashir are being used to stir up the sentiment that the justice system - and in particular, the international court - is biased against Africa. Justice is in the interest of victims, and the victims of these crimes are African. To imply that the prosecution is a plot by the West is demeaning to Africans and understates the commitment to justice we have seen across the continent. It's worth remembering that more than 20 African countries were among the founders of the International Criminal Court, and of the 108 nations that joined the court, 30 are in Africa." I wholeheartedly endorse the views of the venerable archbishop.

For human rights advocates and campaigners who have spent the last few years calling for the indictment of al-Bashir and his accomplices at the highest level of the Sudanese political establishment, the warnings about the possibility of a collapse of the peace process and a reversion to conflict in the south of the country are nothing but a red herring. These warnings are reminders of the old arguments that have been bandied about when nations have had to make choices between holding perpetrators of gross violations of human rights accountable and pursuing peace and national reconciliation at all costs. Such calls have been part of the debates about how to rebuild societies in post-conflict situations, from post-apartheid South Africa and East Timor to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Aspects of these arguments have been echoed in more recent times in both Kenya and Zimbabwe in the wake of the post-election violence in both countries and the soul-searching that has gone on about the underlying issue of decades-old violations of human rights, especially in the latter: should the imperative of securing peace and national reconciliation trump the need to punish impunity and bring justice to victims of egregious human rights violations? For many human rights campaigners, this is a false choice. Both can be achieved, if the right conditions and mechanisms are agreed and put in place. Peace without accountability for impunity would be a false and fragile peace.

Moreover, for supporters of the emerging international criminal justice system and human rights advocates alike, allowing al-Bashir to escape the ICC's indictment on the grounds of political expediency would set a bad precedent that his supporters in the AU and the Arab League may celebrate but the wider world may come to regret. Such a development would compromise the authority of the new international tribunal, weaken attempts at strengthening human rights protection around the globe, derogate from the global effort to punish impunity while giving succor and hope to downtrodden and vulnerable populations in places like Darfur and beyond. It would also give legitimacy to the false claim that the ICC is part of a Western-led neo-colonialist plot aimed at targeting and harassing African political leaders and their countries while leaving other alleged perpetrators of violations of human rights, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity untouched. Proponents of that claim conveniently fail to point out that three of the four cases currently pending before the court (Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda) were initiated at the request of the African governments themselves, and that the indictment of Bashir is not the outcome of a mindless personal campaign by the ICC prosecutor, as it is sometimes presented in the al-Bashir-friendly media, but a result of a request for investigation into the alleged violations in the Darfur region by the United Nation's Security Council.

The indictment of President Omar al-Bashir and the issuance of a warrant of arrest by the ICC marks an important milestone in the quest for justice for the people of Sudan as a whole, and not only the immediate victims of the violations in Darfur. To characterize this as evidence of neo-colonialism is to invoke a dubious, albeit popular, canard. Africa which has suffered more than most from human rights violations at the hands of outsiders and its own vicious leaders should be at the forefront of establishing a global culture that promotes and protects human rights, peace, and security. Playing such a role enables Africa to criticize others with integrity. I am sure many Africans would have wished an ICC existed in the days of slavery and colonialism to bring the perpetrators of those crimes to justice. I also think many look forward to bringing other contemporary perpetartors of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide ensconced in some of the world's most powerful countries to justice by the ICC. They include the engineers of the devastating war in Iraq, provoked and waged under utterly false pretences, as well as those who orchestrate the recurrent vicious wars and humanitarian disasters in Palestine. We will be in a stronger position in the struggle to create a more humane world if we do not exonerate our own political criminals and serial human rights abusers. The causes for peace, security, and justice are indeed interrelated, indivisible, interdependent, and universal.

Waiting for the Mugabe-Tsvangirai Dividend: The future of Government of National Unity in Zimbabwe.

2009-02-25T12:09:00.001+02:00

Zimbabwe has been delirious with excitement and great expectations following the recent formation of a government of national unity between the major political parties-ZANU PF and the two MDC formations- after almost a decade of sharp antagonism. But the celebrations are now giving way to the hard realities of political normalcy. Many observers from within and without Zimbabwe wonder what the unity government will bring to Zimbabweans beyond the hope and pride, whether there will be any positive significant changes in the socio-economic and political conditions in the country.

For many Zimbabweans, the unity government is a milestone because it has forced Zimbabweans to graduate from mere political jargon, wounded pride, emotional shock and trauma into rationally confronting the details of the problems that were (and still are) bedeviling the country for the past decade and also what they actually did to each other in the aftermath of the 29 March 2008 harmonised elections running past the second elections of 27 June 2008.

While it is laudable that these conflicting political parties have finally agreed to form a unity government, the devil is in the details, in the implementation. The rhetoric is compromised by the weight of history and the inherent problems of the security sector, the persistent incongruence of MDC and ZANU PF interests. The Mugabe-Tsvangirai administration would go a long way in transforming the socio-economic and political environment in Zimbabwe if the following is agenda is adopted:

First the newly formed government needs to set up a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to look into and investigate the various gross human rights violations, torture, rape and the murders that occurred during the past three decades and which intensified in the last ten years. The recent wave of violent conflicts that occurred in some parts of the country, in Bindura and Mutoko districts, notwithstanding the calls for forgiveness by the new unity government indicates that there are inherent and deep rooted problems that require the need to set up TRC to look into the issues and bring to book all the perpetrators of these crimes and where possible prosecutions to be initiated. These conflicts clearly indicate that if this transition process is not handled properly, the country can easily degenerate into conflict due to the lingering problems carried on into the new government and unresolved and these may set new sources for future conflicts.

Secondly, the overhaul of all government structures and systems has to be implemented as a priority. It cannot be assailed that ZANU PF has permeated all segments of government institutions to the extent that it is now difficult to draw a demarcation between government and ZANU PF. Consequently it becomes difficult for the newly formed government to work properly, effectively and efficiently outside party politics.

Thirdly, there is need to look into security sector reform of all public institutions. The Mugabe administration was, during the last decade, preoccupied with militarisation of government institutions. Recall that at one time the Attorney General’s Office was hit with a mass exodus of personnel after it emerged that the Mugabe government was filling all high offices with retired personnel much to the chagrin of many civilian officers. This is the position that is still obtaining in many government departments. This also has a negative impact on the functioning of the new unity government hence the need to revamp these institutions so that they become public service oriented. It must be noted that militarisation has been the bane of African politics in general and Zimbabwe in particular and development and policies predicated on more militarisation, whatever justification, are counterproductive.

Fourthly, the government must embark on educational programmes to educate security sectors, i.e., the police, army and intelligence personnel of their proper roles and functions in democratic regimes and especially on issues relating to human rights respect. This follows as a logical corollary from the banal and trite fact that a litany of the human rights atrocities in Zimbabwe especially in the last decade were instigated at the hands of the security forces.

Fifthly, the constitution making process ought to be put into motion as a matter of urgency. The debate on this subject has been on the wall for quite some time now and it is the aspiration of many Zimbabweans that for Zimbabwe to graduate into a full democracy, there is need for a constitution that guarantees the civil liberties and human rights of all Zimbabweans-some form of document that identifies with their aspirations and not the archaic, anachronistic, obsolete and transitional Lancaster House Transitional document. A home-grown Constitution is therefore a priority.

These are some of the issues that the new government should take cognisant of if it were to make a positive impact on the political landscape in Zimbabwe. However, this list is by no means exhaustive as there are so many important other areas that need to be addressed.

Zimbabwe Justice System Suspect as AG Johannes Tomana Declares Allegiance to Zanu PF!

2009-01-14T10:50:00.005+02:00

I was flabbergasted yesterday when I was listening to the interview broadcasted on the state run television between the Herald Reporter and the recently appointed Attorney General of Zimbabwe, Johannes Tomana. In an earlier post I indicated that the opposition MDC was not happy with the appointment of Tomana as the AG on the premise that the appointment decision was based on partisan politics and not in accord with the spirit of the September 15 2008 power sharing deal. Sadly, Tomana, has come out in the open about his love for the Zanu PF government. He declared that, “I am Zanu-PF and I am proud to be of that party. Nothing bars me from being a Zanu-PF supporter. Our law protects that right and that is why in society, public offices are occupied by people who are free to belong to their political parties” Clearly such sentiments shouldn’t be coming from an individual who was sworn to be an objective, impartial and non partisan arbiter of justice.

The MDC cannot expect to receive justice within the now laughable Zimbabwean justice system where one's allegiance to Zanu PF is synonymous to innocence as shown by this man! This is an unfortunate aberration from the underpinning aspects of the rule of law where those who are sworn to hold such public offices much be persons who are apolitical. It now explains why the AG’s Office has been categorical and trenchant in its denial to grant MDC human rights activists, including Jestina Mukoko (Director for the Zimbabwe Peace Project) bail pending trial. Surely, the justice delivery machinery cannot be expected perform to the expectations of the Zimbabwean citizens where high offices are manned by decision makers who are Zanu PF apologists. Political decisions will surely prevail over public reason under such circumstances. And much to the chagrin, Tomana is supportive of the roles given to the security and military agencies by the Mugabe administrations, especially the Zimbabwe Security Council and the Joint Operations Command yet these very same institutions have wrecked havoc to the generality of the Zimbabwean populace. Zimbabwe cannot resurrect from the problems besetting it if we continue to allow Zanu PF to permeate all segments of the society like this! Something needs to be done beyond talking!

Mugabe Has No Intention to Cede Power to Tsvangirai

2008-12-19T13:19:00.002+02:00

Octagenarian President Robert Mugabe has unilaterally continued to make key politica decisions that are in flagrant violation of the spirit and letter of the power-shiring deal signed between his party and the opposition MDC led by Tsvangirai. On the 17th of December 2008, Mugabe appointed Mr Johannes Tomana to be the Attorney General of Zimbabwe, a post that was left vacant after the ouster of Gula-Ndebele who was alleged to have committed a serious breach of corruption by failing to inform the police of the where abouts of one fugitive banker. The appointment of Mr. Tomana has been met with severe criticism from different sections of the civil society who aver that Mugabe's acts admit of no other interpretation other than that he does not want to cede any power to his main rival, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai of he MDC. And to much of the chagrin, Tomana is well known staunch supporter of the Mugabe administration since the days of Professor Jonathan Moyo, the then Minister of Information and Publicity.

The MDC avers that the appointment of Tomana is a key political decision by Mugabe to make sure that all criminal allegations against Zanu PF officials are swept under the carpet whilst opposition supporters will not access justice. It cannot be assailed that Mugabe is now surrounded by the most corrupt people the world has ever seen hence the appointment of Tomana as the new AG, and a fortiori, without consultation of the Prime Minister elect is categorically meant to give a shade to Mugabe's cronies to continue with thier corrupt tendencies without fear of prosecution. All that can be said is that this is an unfortunate aberration representing Mugabe's intransigence in honouring the power sharing deal brokered by the then President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki.

Call for the African union Intervention in Zimbabwe

2008-12-09T10:31:00.002+02:00

While addressing an international press conference in Nairobi over the weekend, Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga called on the African Union (AU) to oust Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and end the oppression the Zimbabwean people are being subjected to. Odinga specifically called on the current AU chair Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete to take the lead in formulating an urgent solution to save Zimbabwe that is faced by a the triple crises of humanitarian catastrophes due to food shortages and an outbreak of cholera; a political stalemate due to the failure to implement a deal reached in September; and an economic meltdown with a record inflation rate.

Zimbabwe is going through what is termed as a “complex emergency.” According to the United Nations agency OCHA, a complex emergency is “a humanitarian crisis in a country, region or society where there is total or considerable breakdown of authority resulting from internal or external conflict and which requires an international response.”

What we are witnessing in Zimbabwe can in fact be described as a “complex political emergency”. The humanitarian and economic crises in Zimbabwe are linked to the disastrous politics and erratic governance of its leader. Mugabe’s politics have led to extensive violence and loss of life, massive displacements of people, widespread damages to social and economic systems, acute food shortages, and overall calamitous threats to the livelihoods of the Zimbabwean people. Since Zimbabwe is not an isolated island, the consequences of Mugabe’s reign of error and terror are reverberating in the Southern Africa region and the African continent.

When the AU was launched in 2002 to replace the ineffectual Organization of African Unity (OAU), it was wildly acclaimed for adopting a radical “principle of non-indifference,” as opposed to the “principle of non-interference” that had characterised its predecessor. The OAU had been generally despised for turning a blind eye to egregious human rights violation by despicable dictators such as Uganda’s Idi Amin, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Central Africa Republic’s Jean-Bedel Bokassa, and Equatorial Guinea’s Marcias Nguema on pretext that it was barred by the “principle of non-interference” in the internal affairs of member states. Mordantly, it condemned President Julius Nyerere when he stood up against Amin’s aggressive and brutal regime.

The AU was the only organization, until September 2005, with the mandate to intervene in member-states where “grave circumstances” are taking place. The AU Constitutive Act defines “grave circumstances” as “war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” The AU can intervene on two grounds: when a state has collapsed and its citizens’ livelihoods are gravely threatened or when invited by a state that is too weak to protect the livelihoods of its people.

There are grey areas in invoking this audacious “principle of non-indifference.” Although one of the motivations that influenced the AU founding fathers was what happened in Rwanda in 1994 and never to let it happen again, the nascent organization seems to have been caught off guard when the crisis in Darfur happened. Its reaction could provide us with pointers to how it will handle Zimbabwe.

When the AU was called upon to invoke Article 4(h) in September 2004 to stem genocide in Darfur, it hesitated to act on the grounds that it had yet to carry out research to determine that genocide was taking, or had taken, place. This was a clever way avoiding taking action as the AU lacked the capability and capacity to undertake such a highly technical process. If the AU had undertaken research and concluded that indeed there were “grave circumstances” in Darfur, the matter would have been brought before its supreme decision-making body, the Assembly of the Heads of State and Government, to invoke Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act. Likewise, it could have invoked Article 4(j) had Sudan invited it to intervene. This would have been awkward, as the AU would have actually gone to Darfur to boost the capacity of the Sudanese government to undermine the livelihoods of its civilians!

Furthermore, the AU would also have faced a tough time to intervene in one of the powerful member states that adamantly insisted that as far it was concerned it was capable of protecting its own citizens and the AU could only come in to support it and on its terms. This is the argument that Khartoum has consistently and persistently used for the past 6 years since the Darfur atrocities came to the attention of the international community.

To complicate matters, the AU not only lacked the political will to make far-reaching decisions that would protect the civilian population in Darfur but also lacked the resources, both human and financial, to implement its feeble decisions. In view of the stark realities facing the AU—particularly its convoluted decision-making process, lack of resources, and lack of political will—it is not likely that it will intervene to protect the livelihoods of Zimbabweans. To further compound the problem of lack of resources, the capacity of the AU is currently exhausted due to its involvements in Darfur and Somalia. It will be unrealistic to expect it to add on its plate another complex political emergency.

What are the other options for external intervention? An intervention could come from the SADC region, similar to the 1998 intervene in Lesotho. However, going by that experience, countries of the region would not be keen, particularly if the Zimbabwean armed forces stand up to external aggression and fight back to defend their privileges. Another intervention could be made under the UN mandate by invoking Chapter VII and the principle of responsibility to protect. All the criteria for such an intervention exists vis-à-vis Zimbabwe—it has lost its sovereignty by failing to protect its civilians from loss of lives and livelihoods; the calamity is rising; and all peaceful efforts to end the suffering of the Zimbabwean people seem to have been exhausted. Force will have to be used as a last resort, as long as it is proportional, and would lead to a restoration of human security in the country. Nevertheless, SADC and the AU must legitimize such an intervention. However, both these organizations would be reluctant to set such a precedent and could insist on applying the cliché of “African solutions to African problems.” This would unnecessarily postpone the suffering of Zimbabwean people and would by default prolong Mugabe’s misrule.

Alternatively, either intervention could be pre-empted by Zimbabwean security forces that could take matters in their own hands and end a disastrous situation. But there is a complication in this solution—the AU ban on coups d’état on the continent. At the moment the AU is in a standoff with the Mauritanian military that in August took over from a democratically elected government. The question to ask is: if the AU allows a military take-over in Zimbabwe, would that set a precedent and contradict its policy against such means of changing governments?

All things considered, and as the international community fudges and gets mired in indecision paralysis, it is upon the people of Zimbabwe to take to the streets, and to use other means, to end the nightmare they are experiencing. It is only the Zimbabwean people who can liberate themselves from their “liberator.” The best that the international community can do is to support and supplement their noble “second liberation struggle.” Let us hope that when the AU Heads of State and Government meet in late January 2009, they will take a decision to support such efforts and lead the international community in providing the Zimbabwean people with all the support that they need to free themselves.

Conflicts in Africa: Causes,Effects and the Way Forward

2008-12-04T11:09:00.001+02:00

I had not thought much, or rather systematically, about the causes and costs of Africa’s conflicts. To be sure, I was only too aware that violent conflicts—from wars to revolutions—are the midwives of historical change, some of it progressive. Indeed, the wars of national liberation were inevitable and indispensable for African societies to regain their humanity and historical agency so cruelly seized by European colonialism. But besides the anti-colonial wars I don’t see any redeeming value in the other wars that have afflicted twentieth century Africa—the imperial wars, intra-state wars, and inter-state wars. I have become more convinced than ever that as individuals committed to Africa’s recovery, renewal, and yes, renaissance, from the ravages and legacies of colonial terror and postcolonial tyranny our contribution goes beyond designing ever more intricate development models or fancy policy prescriptions.

Africa’s development impasse is not a technocratic problem that can be overcome through technical tinkering by development specialists or better theories from academics, let alone by the idiotic carnivals of western self-indulgence. Rather, African policy makers, civil society, and intellectuals need to appreciate more keenly the horrendous costs of Africa’s violent conflicts, to focus squarely on the causes and costs of these conflicts and devise effective mechanisms of conflict resolution and strategies of post-conflict reconstruction. Africa’s yawning developmental and democratic deficits, I believe, can in large part be attributed to the continent’s violent conflicts.

Many of these conflicts reflect and are spawned by the lingering structural deformities bequeathed by colonialism, some are fueled by postcolonial Africa’s staggering failures to achieve the enduring dreams of uhuru, and others are fanned by new forms of imperialism, often cloaked in the giddy rhetoric of globalization, that are engendering new contexts and excuses for imperialist adventures, which are stoking local and regional conflicts across the world. A particularly egregious recent example of this is the so-called U.S.-led “war on terror,” a crusade that has already left a trail of wanton destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and shattered the shaky scaffolding of global order.

The intersections of local, national, regional, and international factors instigating, facilitating, aggravating, or prolonging violent conflicts of course vary from one conflict to another. The national and transnational linkages and complexes that spawn, sustain, or shape Africa’s conflicts are obviously multidimensional. It is certainly the case that many of Africa’s dictatorial regimes, whose very existence has often been a source of conflict, in so far as the closure of political space tends to channel opposition into armed revolts and rebel movements, are sometimes sponsored and supported by foreign powers and interests. This was especially true during the Cold War. Both states and non-state actors, including the notorious warlords, often use or turn to transnational formations into networks of plunder that nourish civil wars.

The various violent conflicts that have afflicted Africa for the past century have exacted an incalculable toll on the continent’s societies, polities, and economies, robbing them of their developmental potential and democratic possibilities. The causes of the conflicts are as complicated as the challenges of resolving them are difficult. There can be no singular explanation for or solution to Africa’s conflicts because these conflicts are rooted in the complex constructions and conjunctures of Africa’s political economies, social identities, and cultural ecologies as configured out of specific local, national, and regional historical experiences and patterns of insertion into, and engagement with, an ever-changing world system. In so far as the causes of the conflicts are multiple in their dynamics—internal and external, local and transnational, economic and political, social and cultural, historical and contemporary, objective and subjective, material and ideological, concrete and emotive, systemic and symbolic, real and rhetorical—the strategies for managing and resolving them can only be multidimensional.

But the immense costs of these conflicts cannot be in doubt, or the need, indeed the urgency, to resolve them if the continent is to navigate the twenty-first century more successfully than it did with the twentieth. Violent conflicts exact a heavy toll on society, the economy, and the environment, both directly and indirectly through deaths and injuries, sexual crimes and intimidation, population dislocations within and across national borders, the damage they cause to human and physical capital that undermines production and leads to economic stagnation, insecurity and distortion of state expenditures, and the disruptions they engender for societal networks and the fragile social capital of trust and interpersonal associations and intergroup interactions, not to mention the devastation of the ecosystem, agricultural lands and wildlife, the destruction of society’s material and mechanical infrastructures, the outflow of resources including “capital flight” and “brain drain,” the proliferation of pathological and self-destructive behaviors, and the deterioration in the aesthetic quality of life.

One of Africa’s key developmental challenges, therefore, centers on how best to manage and resolve violent conflicts. Effective and sustainable conflict management and resolution require, at the very least, dealing with the root causes of the conflicts, as well as the consequences left behind by the conflict in question, which may set new sources of future conflict. Of course various institutions and instruments have been developed at local, national, regional, and continental levels to regulate and resolve conflicts of various types, but many have not worked as well as they should because of their underdeveloped institutional frameworks and structures, weak early warning systems and risk assessment capacities, and lack of integrated processes and methods to deal with issues related to human rights, democracy, and good governance.

In the end, the most powerful antidotes to violent conflict are sustainable development, social equity and justice, and democratic governance. The pursuit of these objectives entails profound transformations in a country’s political economy and social ecology, in the prevailing structural conditions and subjective consciousness that engender conflicts; in short, changing the realities and rhetoric of power and poverty, and the terms of economic development, social differentiation, political discourse, cultural demarcation and difference, and the social contract of common citizenship.

The majority of postcolonial African conflicts have been intra-state rather than inter-state, although of course they often have a regional context or consequences so that neighboring countries have a vested interest in ensuring that they do not spill over or that they are resolved. Clearly, the greatest physical threat to most Africans is not from neighbors or governments in foreign countries but neighbors or governments in their own country. In this context, ‘security’ conceived in terms of enhancing the military capacity of the state makes little sense. High military expenditures represent a waste of potentially valuable resources for development and also enhance state capacity for domestic repression and aggressive adventurism abroad. In short, there is need to rethink the concept of “security” tied to militarism, which at best creates the negative peace of deterrence, rather than the positive peace and security that can only arise from the elimination of the causes of war and violence and the protection of human rights and social justice within and between countries. What is needed is ‘democratic security’: enhancing and ensuring the security of people, not just states. Africa’s regional organizations ought to adopt this conception of security more aggressively—incorporate collective regional security with social and economic development
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The magnitude and impact of Africa’s violent conflicts is often lost between hysteria and apathy—the panic expressed among Africa’s friends and indifference exhibited by its foes—for a continent mired in, and supposedly dying from, an endless spiral of self-destruction. The distortions that mar discussions and depictions of African conflicts are rooted in the longstanding tendency to treat African social phenomena as abnormal, beyond the pale of humanity or rational explanation. We need to be wary of the many orthodoxies circulating in academe and the daily mills of oversimplification and sensationalism—the mass media: the apocalyptic view that depicts African conflicts as senseless madness, the culturalist view according to which conflicts are culturally encoded, that is, ‘natural’ to Africans (remember the ‘inter-tribal’ lore of colonial conquerors and anthropology), or the neopatrimonial perspective that attributes conflicts to the self-destructive logic of Africa’s proverbial patron-client politics.

Particularly seductive but worrisome is the rational choice paradigm of some economists—the ‘looting model of rebellion’—that violent conflicts are primarily motivated by the desire to loot resources. Many of the propagators of this view are affiliated with the World Bank or work for donor agencies that have done so much to damage African economies and development prospects thereby generating or exacerbating violent conflicts in parts of the continent. Obviously economic factors are crucial to understanding the causes and consequences of conflict, but economic determinism from the new triumphalist right is as facetious as from the old vanquished left, and conflating political rebels with common criminals, enabling with causal factors, and individual and collective rationality is too reductionistic.

Our analyses of Africa’s violent conflicts need to go beyond the conventional and fashionable analyses of Africanist scholarship, often inflected with, if not infected by, Afropessimism, or the dismissive and demeaning stereotypes conveyed in the western media infused with Afrophobia. Certainly, African scholars should not ignore examining the developmental and democratic costs of violent conflicts seriously and soberly because of misguided analyses by others who hail from societies that, historically, have never wished Africa well, and indeed have contributed to the creation of many of the conditions that either spawn or sustain these conflicts.
In my view, there is a compelling case to be made for seeing violent conflicts as a major source of Africa’s development impasse, whatever the explanations of the causes and trajectories of these conflicts. While we must resist racist smears of all Africa with conflict, there are, at any one time, significant zones of violent conflict in various parts of the continent. Comprehensive and comparative studies of violent conflicts across the continent, covering all five regions, would yield important lessons. Understandably we tend to be concerned about contemporary conflicts, but as a historian I cannot help but think that analyses over a much longer period, including the colonial era, would deepen our understanding of the history of violent conflicts in Africa. Temporal depth needs to be matched by thematic breadth on conflict dimensions that tend to be relatively invisible. For example, there can be little doubt that these conflicts are gendered in their causes, courses, and consequences. They are also differentiated in the way they involve and impact different generations, from the youth to the elderly. The role of religion as a source of conflict, in objective and subjective terms, institutionally and ideologically, and at local, regional and transnational levels cannot be overemphasized.

And when discussing the global forces and transnational networks behind violent conflicts the tendency is to examine the imperial and neo-colonial agendas of the major powers. More attention ought to be paid to the activities of other transnational actors, such as business enterprises, advocacy organizations, and even academic establishments. In this context, the role of diaspora communities needs to be accorded specific attention as diaspora networks have become increasingly critical in not only fanning, facilitating, and financing conflicts in Africa, but sometimes in resolving them and assisting in postconlict recovery and reconstruction.

The challenge is to ensure that African conflicts are analyzed in their own multifaceted contexts, while avoiding seeing them as manifestations of some unique African cultural compulsion, political pathology, social sickness, or moral malady. Violent conflict in Africa is indeed part of the human drama and world history, but the tendency to impose universalist models of conflict driven from stylized Western experiences or faddish theorizing must be resisted if only because such paradigms lead to poor analysis and bad policy. The subject of violent conflicts in Africa is too serious a matter, and their developmental costs too grave, for glib modeling or lazy journalistic speculation uninformed by the histories of, and unmindful of the concrete conditions in, the societies under scrutiny. Ending violent conflicts, I submit, is a prerequisite for transcending Africa’s development impasse.

Mugabe' Securitisation of Government Institutions Backfiring

2008-12-02T11:13:00.003+02:00

When Mugabe formed the Zimbabwe Security Council (ZSC) and the Joint Operations Command (JOC) three years ago in a way to appease and gain favour of the security forces in Zimbabwe, he did not know that he was creating a recipe for disaster for himself and his autocratic regime. These two organs have been formed to oversee all the operations of government activities and are staffed by members of the security forces and the intelligence sector. Today Mugabe witnesses the negative aspects of militarisation of state instititutions as his soldiers are protesting against his government over the economic crisis that is wrecking havoc to the already fragile country. As the socio- economic and political crisis continue to plummet, there has been discontent in the uniformed forces who now feel that they were being used as political condoms to defend the joys of a chosen few in the Zanu Pf circles to the exclusion of many Zimbabweans.

The members of the Zimbabwe National Army have gone on rampage since Monday the 24th of Novermber 2008 accusing the Mugabe administration of taking them for granted. The soldiers have been raiding the foreign currency dealers who are alleged to be receiving large sums of money from the Reserve bank of Zimbabwe Governor, Dr Gedion Gono, to buy foreign currency from the black market. Many soldiers have since escaped from the barracks to their homes as they allegedly said that they are dying from hunger yet their bosses are being swarmed by looted wealth. Many have vowed not to go back to the barracks for fear of being murdered by the ruthless regime. The soldiers are calling the masses of the Zimbabwean populace to join them in thier protests against the Mugabe administration and especially the RBZ Governor, Gono who has held the entire population to ransom because of his failure to handle the financial crisis bedeviling the country at the moment.

This is a heavy blow to the Mugabe government which was, hitherto, putting too much reliance on the security forces to continue with his erstwhile grip to power. His failure to contain these demonstrations, the first of their own kind in the history of this country since independance, is a clear indication that Mugabe has lost control of the country now. The country is fast sinking into a the doldrums and with the rate at which the spontaneous upheavals are taking place, the country might find itself in a conflict situation at any moment from now. It is my hope that the two political factions should find a solution to the crisis as the developmental costs of conflict are too gusty to contain as evidence from many post conflicts countries in Africa clearly demonstrates.

Kenyan Commission Recommends an International Crimes Tribunal

2008-10-28T11:45:00.001+02:00

The Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence (CIPEV) established to investigate the violence witnessed after the 27 December 2007 elections in Kenya officially presented its much-anticipated report to President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga on 15 October 2008. The CIPEV, or Waki Commission, was vested with a mandate to ‘investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding the violence, the conduct of state security agencies in their handling of it, and to make recommendations concerning these and other matters. Read more at www.internationallawobserver.eu.

Zimbabwean Humanity Under Seige: The World Needs to Act Now!

2008-10-08T14:30:00.000+02:00

The euphoria that gripped the nation when the major political parties in the country (Zanu PF and the two MDC formations signed a power sharing pact that was earmarked to put a full stop to the economic, social and political quagmire which has bedeviled the country for almost a decade has dissipated merely four weeks after the date of the signature. The snail’s pace with which the political events are taking place has caused a lot of furor amongst ordinary Zimbabweans who can no longer continue containing themselves against the man made tsunami that has been created by the Mugabe administration during his catastrophic reign of almost three decades.

Three weeks after the signing of the power sharing deal, Mugabe and Tsvangirai have failed to agree on the allocation of different ministries. Available evidence indicates that Mugabe wants to retain the Ministries of Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance and Local government. This is not surprising since these ministries are among the key ministries that are deemed to be the fulcrum of control of government activities. The fact that Mugabe is keen to retain the Home Affairs ministry should be viewed against the backdrop of the calls from the international community that the octogenarian should be tried for a labyrinth of human rights violations which he inflicted upon ordinary Zimbabweans during his tenure as President of this country- one often quoted episode being the “quasi genocide”, as referred to by some academics, against the Ndebele ethnic group in the early years of independence. It cannot be assailed that Mugabe fears that the possibility that he and his cronies may be liable to prosecution once a new institutional framework is put in place.

The ordinary people have all lost hope for prospects of a better Zimbabwe amid reports that the Mugabe regime has renewed its decibels of insanity in some sections of the country where some rogue Zanu PF elements have began to unleash an orgy of violence against the generality of the population. This flies in the face of the power sharing arrangement where it was categorically underscored that violence should be condoned in its entirety. The renewed violence put into question the credibility and faith with which Zanu signed the deal and if viewed against the kaleidoscope of the reluctance by Mugabe to put in place a Cabinet and also his insidious adamancy to cede meaningful power to the Prime Minister, then the prospects for a better Zimbabwe are at most a remote possibility. This has led to Zimbabweans to ask what then is it that these political players agreed on especially in view of the fact that the situation has exacerbated and humanity now in a precarious position. More so because of the unruly and unscrupulous attitude of the Reserve Bank Governor, who also has put the lives of the people in detriment because of his unfathomable economic policies cum Zanu PF political decisions, devoid of any shred of economic fundamentals.

It is unassailable that Zimbabwe is burning and that the world should intervene on humanitarian reasons. The lives of ordinary persons are now in danger. The variegated problems range from the unavailability of food, lack of water (even the unclean one), unavailability of cash, resources, medicines- in fact the hospitals are now just empty buildings without medicines and health workers, no transport. The list is just inexhaustible! The ordinary Zimbabweans are bearers of an avalanche of problems experienced at the behest of the Mugabe administration. Zimbabwe ratified all the important international covenants, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most of the rights enunciated in these covenants are also part of the Bill of Rights of the Lancaster House Constitution which Mugabe took oath to uphold. Yet the on the contrary it seems as if he has redrafted there right and interpret them in a negative direction! Much to the chagrin of the Zimbabwean, Mugabe is turning the language of these covenants upside down and inside out with his self-centered attitude- all for the sake of money and power! The unruly behavior in Mugabe has left many Zimbabwean in agony yet he offloads the blame to the countries of the global North. Ironically, he left the country at the eleventh hour in the company of forty lieutenants to attend a summit with an address, which lasted only a quarter of an hour! And more surprisingly in a country headed by his ultimate anathema, Bush. Wouldn’t it have been wise if that money were used to buy maize that will have benefited 15 million people?

In contrast and at the same time the man of the people, none other than Tsvangirai (Prime Minister designate) was touring the nation to get first hand information of the challenges and problems that have come characterize the life of Zimbabweans and in a sense find a way forward. Dead BC did not bother to even inform the nation about this important mission and decided to wait for the return of the now mentally challenged octogenarian to give us that boring episode of his so called address to the UN! Shame for you Gushungo, one day I will prosecute one of your men at the Hague and only on that occasion will they realize how we “the people” who voted for you in 1980 and also voted you out on the 29th of March 2008 should be accorded their space in society at any given time.

Its high time the international community should come in and alleviate the plight of the Zimbabweans especially in the wake that the rogue and cunning elements in Zanu PF have put humanity under siege. The docile and impotent African Union organisation should rejuvenate itself and tell the autocrats in Harare that they have outlived their usefulness. The AU should not just criticize and condemn the rampant human rights abuses taking place in Zimbabwe, it has to go further and take practical steps that will give leeway to individuals who put the interests of the people first before ordaining themselves as the untouchables. Zimbabwe is not a cash cow for Zanu PF but its resources exist for exploitation for the benefit of all Zimbabweans. There is need for urgent intervention before the crisis degenerates into a civil strife otherwise the situation is now palatable for people to resort to self-help! Mugabe and his cronies appear to be deriving sadistic pleasure from the litany of problems that have reduced Zimbabweans to mere inanities and Stone Age scavengers!

Justice and Peace in a New Zimbabwe: Transitional Justice Options.

2008-09-19T11:43:00.001+02:00

Monday the 18th of September 2008 has been described as the historic day in the political circles since the inception of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in 1999. This is the day when the two major political players in the country (Zanu PF) and both factions of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)) came together and signed a power-sharing deal to end the crisis that has rocked the country for almost a decade. There has been a marked increase in state sponsored violence since the first round of the harmonized elections in March 2008, coming after almost a decade marked by violence, intimidation and impunity for which the state has been primarily responsible. One of the principal issues for any future political transition will be whether – and how– to formally and publicly deal with past systematic and widespread human rights abuses. This is moreover a core political issue now, not simply a collateral legal or moral one to be left until later.

Part of the challenge is to map a way between sheer moral and legal principle and mere political pragmatism. One transitional justice option is to now flag, and then later establish, a truth and reconciliation commission which might give incentives to people at various levels to denounce violence and cooperate in peace building, but which need not rule out criminal prosecutions where appropriate. Against the backdrop of an international legal and normative framework which may shape justice options, the first question to be addressed is ‘why a truth commission?’ I suggest that Zimbabwe’s particular experiences necessitate a national truth commission as a viable or necessary option in providing sure conditions and foundations for a peaceable and stable future.

Engagement on this topic raises a litany of difficult questions: in any interim phase, how will negotiations on ‘transitional justice’ persuade the powerful and prosecutable that it is safe to cooperate? Does a ‘restorative justice’ approach have stronger credentials than the moral claims for criminal accountability and punishment? If there is ‘no peace without justice’, who gets to decide what constitutes justice? How far back does ‘the past’ really go: should any commission deal with abuse allegations arising from the 1980s violence in Matabeleland or restrict itself to the period after 2000? What is the legal and political status of various presidential pardons and amnesties? What is the relevance, utility or propriety of calls for international prosecutions? What is the best role for local civil society? Does the international community have a role to play in transitional justice, or should this be wholly ‘locally owned’? How would such a process deal – if at all – with any process on land claims or property disputes: can many of the acts of violence be separated from an enquiry into such questions? With an economy in freefall, what priority of resources and national attention should a backward-looking process have? Overall, in going forward (if and when they can), to what extent should Zimbabweans be concerned with looking back?

The International Crisis Group’s view in their most recent report is that while ‘Zimbabwe will need a transitional justice mechanism at some stage,’ the practical necessities of the immediate crisis (and indeed longer term reconciliation) require that ‘guarantees’ be given to political leaders and the security forces (‘modalities for ensuring military loyalty’ and promises of non-retribution) (ICG May 2008:2). However, it is clear that these issues will be directly shaping political negotiations now in the interim period –questions about what kind of justice strategy can secure the conditions for a transition to take place at all, and then to take place peacefully. The ICG report seems to suggest that justice issues are not of immediate significance. But it is difficult to see how ‘justice’ issues can be separated from ‘political’ issues during this stalemate, since fear of prosecution partly explains hardliners’ resistance. In this light, my intention is to stimulate more explicit discussion on transitional justice issues and options for Zimbabweans in the quest to establish peace and stability.

The context: violence and impunity in Zimbabwe
The suggestion that a truth commission may be one valuable ingredient in facilitating a sustainable national peace for Zimbabweans proceeds from two related premises:

a). That human rights abuses in Zimbabwe’s modern history have been serious, widespread, persistent, deliberate, systemic, and conducted largely with impunity

b). That it is both right in principle and prudent for peace building prospects that these issues and events be formally and publicly acknowledged and addressed in a way that arrests the pattern of impunity, enables a measure of justice and affords victims due redress, but that does not threaten the possibility that a legitimate transition may occur without serious resistance and conflict now or at a later date (see Prime Minister Designate, Morgan Tsvangirai’s speech during the signing of the power-sharing deal)

On the first premise, human rights abuses perpetrated, encouraged or tolerated primarily by the state and its agents since at least February 2000, and which continue to this day, have constituted criminal and civil wrongs and have in any event led to loss, pain, grief, distrust, uncertainty, suspicion, grievance, anger and dislocation. The abuse of human rights and the culture of impunity in Zimbabwe have been fairly well chronicled (see www.hrforumzim.com. Of course, one point about a truth commission is that there is much that is unknown or misunderstood: the state has been hostile to scrutiny for many years.

While formal denials, secrecy and the difficulty of cataloguing cases prevent a full assessment, there is little doubt that the ZANU-PF government has been directly or indirectly responsible for murder, kidnap and disappearances, rape, torture, beatings and other humiliating inhuman or degrading treatment, arbitrary detention, denial of due process rights, group punishment including use of food as a political weapon and selective non-distribution of famine relief, mass displacement and forced removal, and other human rights abuses in violation of Zimbabwean law and falling within well recognised ‘categories’ in international law. One fundamental issue for any transitional justice strategy confronting human rights abuse is to define what relevantly constitutes ‘the past’:
-There is almost a decade of political violence, intimidation, displacement and destruction beginning roughly with the February 2000 constitutional referendum, rising with the elections of June 2000, and which has continued since, being most marked around elections including the recent March 2008 election and its aftermath. Beginning in October 2000, legal impunity for violators has purportedly been assured through a number of clemencies, amnesty and indemnity orders.
- There are the acts of violence, displacement and property loss associated with spontaneous as well as state-sponsored invasions of mainly white-owned commercial farms that began in 2000.
-There are the many human rights abuses associated with Operation Murambatsvina (Clean-Up) in 2005 which led to the forcible displacement of about 700 000 people (UN 2005).
- These three ‘categories’ roughly describe the immediate past in relation to which a truth, justice and reconciliation commission might be constituted.

Of course, state human rights abuses have occurred in earlier periods of Zimbabwe’s history. However, for reasons given below, any future strategy might not attempt to substantially or initially address Rhodesian (pre-1980) or colonial era (pre-1965) abuses. More difficult is the question of whether any formal strategy or mechanism ought to attempt to deal with allegations of grave crimes and massive human rights abuses arising from political violence throughout the 1980s in particular the Zimbabwean army’s gukurahundi campaign in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces in 1983-4. As discussed below, this period in Zimbabwe’s past is arguably unresolved and ‘unprocessed’ – neither truth nor justice, reconciliation nor redress has been attempted or obtained – and represents a possible future source of demands and disunity. However, including this period within the initial mandate of a new commission carries the risk, in a still fragile setting, of reopening this ethnic fault-line.

The situation is acutely balanced at present in terms of attempting to ensure justice for past wrongs without imperiling the possibility of a relatively peaceful transition. Members of the security apparatus and militias lack confidence about the consequences of any change in regime, including exposure to prosecutions and retribution. In addition, state institutions for protecting or remedying abuses are weak or directly implicated in past and ongoing violence. Various elements of society may be marginalised, indifferent, unaware, insecure, afraid of discovery, suffering directly, desiring answers, accountability, or simply practical relief. There may also be high levels of denial or inability to know the truth, and especially if there is a change, there may be a desire for self-help retribution and settling of scores, where the truth of the violence is well known, its doers identifiable. The possibility also exists that the legacy of decades past unresolved violence might rise and manifest. What is to be done?

‘Transitional justice’: some preliminary considerations
In reaching or embedding a new political dispensation, there exists a range of ‘transitional justice options’: ways to deliberatively and formally deal with any systematic and large scale past human rights abuse. Most modern responses to large-scale violations tend – mainly for reasons of internal political expediency, with occasional international pressure – to adopt a position somewhere between the two extremes of comprehensive criminal prosecutions on the one hand, and blanket amnesty or collective amnesia on the other. Strategies include selective criminal trials, truth-for amnesty commissions, and a hybrid of these.

A central factor in the transitional justice debate is the importance of balancing the need for ‘restorative justice’ with solemn principles pointing to criminal trials and ‘retributive justice’. In the former, the focus is beyond simply ensuring formal accountability for wrongs; the focus is on the vindication of the victim, not the punishment of perpetrators. Restorative justice approaches also emphasise a need to focus on ‘bottom-up’ processes founded in ordinary people’s experiences and concerned with taking steps that they feel would set things right. This is to be contrasted with processes involving only some elites – whether peacemakers, truth commissioners, prosecutors, or indicted persons.

A restorative justice approach does not, however, discount the value and effectiveness of criminal punishment, including as a means of affirming the dignity of victims and preventing vengeance. Trials in criminal courts in transitional settings cannot easily be dismissed as merely backward-looking: they may be essential to ensuring a sense of ‘justice’, avoiding self-help measures, and to deterring future abuses.

In considering general matters of approach, there are certainly real-world tensions between pursuing both ‘peace’ and ‘justice’. In some cases the price of peace is accepting that justice might need to be stayed against important stakeholders, although some aggrieved parties will simply not be able to contemplate peace without justice being seen to be done. However, it is necessary to move beyond polarised debates presenting these two ideals as incompatible objectives: this obscures efforts to consider the potential for approaching these issues in a more integrated mutually reinforcing way (Simpson 2008), and can be an abdication of the duty to seek imaginative, tailored solutions. To simply place prosecutorial justice and the attainment of peace ‘into opposed, abstract categories’ comes at the expense of ‘informed analyses of where tensions do, and do not, exist on the ground’.

Before considering truth commissions as a possible vehicle for transitional justice in Zimbabwe, it is necessary to bear in mind that what is possible by way of institutionalised response – how robust and intrusive and prosecutorial it might be, for example – is heavily dependent on the balance of political power at the time of the transitional agreement (ICG May 2008). The background of a truth commission ‘is invariably [a result of] stalemate in a political power play’. Criminal prosecutions might be too provocative given the residual power in elements of the previous incumbent regime (who may be part of a transitional government).

Strategies of reconciliation are affected by political constraints since imposing justice can have a disruptive potential so that it may be crucial ‘not to provoke still-powerful elements in the armed forces that retain political veto power during a fragile democratic transition...the parameters of publicly acknowledged truth can be deepened as the peace increasingly proves its resilience’. For example, in South Africa’s transition, the white minority controlled the police and military and so wielded serious negotiating power; in Chile and Argentina the enduring influence of the military leadership meant that it was unthinkable to commence criminal actions against the main culprits. In Solomon Islands, by contrast, the preference was to strengthen courts and pursue prosecutions, leaving reconciliation mechanisms to informal, church-based and community processes. Talk of a formal truth commission and amnesties was thought to send mixed messages about future responsibility for ethnic violence. But this choice of strategy was possible because of the high degree of political control and a regional military stabilisation force.

Discussions on the specifics of any comprehensive formal truth and justice response in Zimbabwe probably need to wait until some form of legitimate transition is underway and sufficiently consolidated. However, the broad shape of any future justice mechanisms and process is something that will determine – and be determined by – present political machinations.

A Zimbabwean truth commission: Why?
The term ‘truth commission’ encompasses a broad range of possible features and purposes. Such institutions are normally ad hoc, official (state authorised or sponsored), temporary non-judicial fact finding bodies with a limited mandate. They are victim focussed and investigate or receive information on a pattern of human rights abuses over a certain or determinate period of time. They normally produce a report with recommendations for reparation and redress and for prevention of future abuses. Since 1974 numerous truth commissions have been established by states – with or without the assistance, encouragement or say-so of international actors – either to support ongoing peace processes or promote democratic progress in post-conflict societies (see the experiences of South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala and Timor-Leste). There is no unique formula or prescription for implementing effective transitional justice: a truth commission is only one option and ought not to be resorted to automatically as part of a conflict resolution ‘first aid kit’ Before addressing what features a future truth, justice and reconciliation commission (TRC) might adopt, it is worth debating the considerations for and against such a mechanism for Zimbabwe.

The case against a TRC: moving on, leaving the past alone.
Suggestions for a formalised TRC process assume that it is not sufficient to simply leave the past unresolved. However, a deliberate decision not to pursue any formalised process is also one possible option for Zimbabwe. Some have argued that one ought to generally ‘curb the enthusiasm’ about truth commissions. For one thing, it is necessary to attempt to ‘centre peacebuilding efforts in the will of the people’: it is quite possible that the overwhelming view in society might be that the past ought simply to be left alone. Some societies such as Spain after General Franco simply drew a ‘thick line’ between past and present and moved on, apparently successfully, without any particular structural mechanisms for reconciling with the past. Shaw R. (Rethinking Truth & Reconciliation Commissions: Lessons from Sierra Leone: Special Report 135. Washington DC: United States Institute for Peace) challenges the purportedly universal benefits of verbally remembering violence, arguing that ‘social forgetting’ may be an equally valid strategy. Shaw’s research in Sierra Leone revealed that despite pressure from NGOs and human rights activists for a truth commission, most ordinary people – who were tired, afraid and too well acquainted with ‘the truth’ of the violence – appeared to prefer a ‘forgive and forget’ approach.

There are other problems too. A TRC could squander precious time, money and (if handled poorly) perhaps a once-only opportunity. Depending on its timing and tone and the prevailing political balance, a truth commission (and the process of designing it) could actually create a new venue of dispute and itself become a source or focus of renewed conflict, fragmentation and disintegration in the way that a constitution-making process in transitional societies can sometimes do (see Murphy W. in Constitutions, Constitutionalism & Democracy: Transitions in a Contemporary World. Oxford University Press, 1993). A TRC could be used as a political tool to disproportionately allocate blame to one side; it could threaten or antagonise powerful influential persons upon whose cooperation a fragile national unity depends. It could partly redeem and legitimise the previous regime by enabling its representational portrayal in an ordered institutional process.

Some see the notion of reconciliation as already compromised in Zimbabwe. Archbishop Pius Ncube has said that cycles of abuse and impunity in Zimbabwe are ‘cancerous’ so that there is a need to avoid amnesties and simply prosecute persons in future, including to educate future generations. Just two years ago the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum’s report expressed an opinion that Zimbabweans are ‘cynical’ about reconciliation or that the concept has been ‘widely devalued, perhaps irrevocably’ and ‘remains polluted as a result of its expedient political manipulation and its failure to deliver meaningful results’ (Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum 2006:7,21; Zimbabwe IDEA 2003:34).

A further problem is that there is a tendency to concentrate on internal political factors shaping any peace institution, reflecting assumptions that truth commissions result from and reflect local demands. However, this overlooks the significance of external political concerns, demands or expectations, which may be crucial in shaping the choice or form of institution. There is a need to be careful that ‘transitional justice options’ and institutional models (such as a TRC) are not selected for reasons that have more to do with appeasing international expectations or following rule of law ‘prescriptions’ than what is really needed – and wanted – on the ground. Truth commissions are not an end in themselves, to be pursued formulaically and regardless of the circumstances. Some argue that it ought to be established whether such an exercise has popular support among ordinary persons (not just local or international NGOs or other elites) ( see Shaw above).

South Africa’s experience has been hugely influential and generated an enormous amount of literature. But foreign experts or donors in particular may not see that South Africa’s experience is not necessarily apposite to Zimbabwe’s very different history. Certainly, no model of TRC can be simply transposed directly from one situation to another. ‘Reconciliation’ in particular is something that needs to be defined within a specific historical and cultural context.

There is the risk that such institutions are foreign models ‘lost in translation’ or are cosmetic only, giving a false sense of resolution: while a great deal of any TRC process is understood as symbolism and ritual, to fulfill their function new institutions dealing with common experiences need to reach and be reached by the grassroots level. World Bank studies on institutional designs in 2002 note unsurprisingly that ‘supplying’ institutions is not enough: people must want to use them. These experiences suggest that a TRC would be meaningless without a concerted (and expensive) public engagement and education programme, which with other priorities, may not be viable in the near future.

Thus where there is a relatively high level of awareness about the state’s responsibility for abuses (accompanied by power balancing issues, the need to avoid creating new sites of friction, general fatigue, fairly widespread communal implication in violence, legal complications from past pardons and amnesties, and resource shortages), it is at least arguable that Zimbabweans may legitimately indulge in deliberate ‘social forgetting.’ Victor de Waal’s (The Politics of Reconciliation: Zimbabwe’s First Decade. Cape Town, 1990) characterisation of Zimbabwe’s first decade after 1980 is that the society as a whole decided to simply move on, at least in relation to the Rhodesian era, leaving the past behind.

Most experience in other societies, however, points the other way, especially where there are concerns about who gets to decide what is ‘forgotten.’ In any event, this passive form of response to Rhodesian-era abuses left many legacies still affecting Zimbabwe today, including a prevailing culture of impunity. Even if it could be proven empirically that most Zimbabweans were ‘cynical’ about reconciliation, this does not preclude a TRC. Instead, it depends on the actual form and practice of any such institution, the possible positive community response to any visible international sponsorship of a process (rather than more ‘government business’), and the prevailing political situation at the time.

The case for a TRC: addressing the past for the future’s sake
A number of general factors commend the establishment of a truth, justice and reconciliation commission as an element of a comprehensive approach to transitional justice. While there is probably no ‘right to truth’ in international law, one principled issue suggesting some formal justice mechanism is the well established international legal duty on the Zimbabwean state (whichever regime is then its custodian) to not only refrain from violations but more positively to afford remedy and reparation to victims of human rights abuse, including through at least attempting investigations (see Art 2 of the ICCPR and also the UN Basic Principles & Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Violations of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law [UN Commission on Human Rights. E/CN. 4/Sub.2/ 1993/8). The ordinary criminal courts in any country that has experienced oppressive rule are likely to be severely weakened if not entirely compromised. There may be such a degree of complicity by members of society generally that it is impossible to conceive of attempting to prosecute all possible offenders. In any event, mere prosecutions, even if politically possible, do not necessarily achieve reconciliation or reduce tension. By their nature, trials moreover paint an incomplete picture of the past or even distort history. The most obvious objective of a TRC is that through an official truth body, an accurate record of the country’s past will be established, uncertain events will be clarified, victims will be assured of recognition, and the silence and denial regarding human rights violations will be dealt with. Such processes can achieve a measure of symbolic closure through memory enabling a corrected history more on one’s own terms, and an institutionalisation of the memories of the abusive time (for therapeutic as well as principled reasons) (Catholic Commission, 1997. Breaking the Silence: Building True Peace). Part of the point of the process is to reach an institutionalised common memory or national consensus on how the past is to be remembered and represented. This is in contrast to denial and deliberate or non-deliberate forgetting.

The 2008 MDC policy on justice is that ‘the right to know’ extends from victims to the rest of society ‘to become a collective right. This is meant to ensure that violations are recorded in history so as to prevent their recurrence’ (MDC 2008:1,36-37). For many victims no new ‘truth’ will emerge, but formal acknowledgment of their truth can be vital in individual and group healing, forestalling division, and enabling peace building. However, knowing the truth of what took place is a necessary condition for forgiveness, but not a sufficient condition of reconciliation and peace.

In addition to its truth-seeking function, such a commission can be a platform for a range of processes, aimed at both addressing matters of principle and ensuring grievances do not undermine the prospects for sustainable peace. Such commissions can become the focal point for efforts going beyond the establishment of truth – efforts at reparation – by which is meant not merely financial or other economic or in-kind compensation, but broader notions of restitution, rehabilitation, satisfactions and guarantees of no repetition.

Victims’ needs are individual and communal, structural and psychological Truth commissions allow a forum for forgiveness to be given, and for formal recognition of victims, so helping them reclaim their dignity. Perpetrators are afforded a formal mechanism to renounce their violent deeds and to rejoin society in some fashion. ‘Reconciliation’ may mean many things – but is essentially about the (re)-building of civic trust and shared commitment to certain normative values, including by putting some past differences aside. There is already arguably this consensus on fundamental moral norms in Zimbabwe, even if they have been breached for some time. A TRC can set the parameters of possible political action during the transition and serve to civilise and channel the energies and tensions in a way that can reduce the potential for violence. It can describe institutional responsibility for human rights abuses and propose specific reforms. The work of institutions such as truth commissions can thus be cathartic and promote reconciliation, lifting the lid on human rights abuses, ending denial that might persist in certain sectors of the community, creating visible distance from the abusive era and enabling forward movement. It can also help to focus on the wider patterns and move away from attempting individual guilt where this is paralysing peace.

There are also some more specific factors particularly commending a TRC for Zimbabwe (and which suggest that these issues need to be at the forefront of negotiation now, even if a TRC is only established later). In my view the following factors in particular suggest a possible need for a formal mechanism such as a truth commission in Zimbabwe:
• the consistency and level of state intimidation and brutality
• the use of legislative instruments to sanction state violence
• the politicisation of the judiciary and the prosecution service
• the partly covert nature of both direct state abuses and indirect state-instigated action
• the large number of low level perpetrators especially among the youth militias
• Secrecy and denial on the part of the regime
• a culture of impunity reinforced by pardons and general amnesties over many years
• the lack of remedial and redress options

Moves toward a TRC and current MDC justice policy
In this context, there have been a number of calls for any transition in Zimbabwe to be marked by a TRC process as one component of a comprehensive approach. The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum’s 2006 study of transitional justice options appears to lean in favour of a trials strategy, opining that ‘there is considerable support in many quarters for perpetrators of gross human rights violations to be brought to trial’
(Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum 2006:11). Nevertheless, and while discussions about a transitional justice mechanism including a TRC have been largely confined to a small group of local NGOs and lawyers, the idea of a TRC has featured consistently in debate in Zimbabwe since at least August 2003, when over 70 civil society organisations met in Johannesburg. That symposium expressed preference for a ‘Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Com-mission’ as the main mechanism for redress, while not discounting the possibility of prosecutions.

The symposium declaration condemn-ed the pattern of amnesties and culture of impunity and expressed the view that gross violations should never be the subject of an amnesty; it noted that victims of all past human rights abuses have a right to redress and to be consulted about the nature of mechanisms what will be established to address their needs. The declaration also called on civil society and churches to have a role in the formation of such mechanisms. The symposium drew on an earlier event, and has been followed by a number of initiatives and networks attending to the needs of victims including torture victims, recording reports and allegations, instituting civil actions against the state, and considering future justice options (see also the Amani Trust ‘Truth and Justice Conference held in 2001’).

The 2001-2 draft alternative Zimbabwean constitution of the unofficial National Constitutional Assembly had provided in its Chapter 9 for a ‘Truth, Justice, Reconciliation and Conflict Prevention Commission.’ The proposed institution would sit for five years (renewable). It would be responsible for investigations of past violations, provision of remedies, the promotion of reconciliation, and conflict prevention. Further details were left to a future non-constitutional instrument.

On the government’s part, there have obviously been no official signposts about future transitional justice. In March 2006, Cabinet approved plans for a ‘Human Rights Commission’ to ‘counter the large scale orchestration of alleged violations’ and the ‘falsification, exaggeration, orchestration, and stage-managing of human rights violations by detractors.’ The announcement was widely treated with derision. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has in the past received generic advice on transitional justice options (for example, general advice received from International Centre for Transitional Justice in 2001-2002) The MDC has consistently followed a fairly conciliatory (but often ambiguous) line on future justice issues. Since at least its 2003 Congress the MDC has mentioned the intention to establish a truth commission. At that time, the position adopted was that ‘general provisions of amnesty for prisoners will continue’ although the party would nevertheless ‘ensure that due legal process is applied to all human rights abuses’ (MDC 2003). In its latest (2008) policy statement the MDC says it will ‘make a clean break with that past and establish a strong human rights culture’ but that it ‘will be necessary to deal with all past abuses.’ It proposes a ‘Truth and Justice Commission’ to hear, in public formal recorded sessions, ‘the stories of the victims and to identify those responsible for human rights abuses and any associated criminal acts’, as well as mechanisms to prevent future abuses and ‘re-orientation programmes for all those affected’ (MDC 2008: 36-7).

The MDC’s formal justice approach is said to be based on four principles: the communal right to know, the right to justice and a remedy, the right to reparations, and the ‘right’ to non-recurrence. It purports to deal with all episodes of political violence in Zimbabwe since 1980. It states that the MDC is committed to ‘dealing with the needs of the victims’ of all post-1980 abuses ‘in a holistic and comprehensive way’ by giving ‘those affected by the abuse of their rights the satisfaction of knowing that the truth about what happened has been revealed and that the culprits have been brought to justice in some way.’ If anything, it is suggestive of a preference for criminal trials: ‘all victims will have an opportunity to assert their rights and receive fair and effective remedy, ensuring that the perpetrators stand trial and that the victims obtain reparations ... [this reflects] an obligation on the State to investigate, prosecute and punish the guilty’ (MDC 2008:1,36-7).

The proposed mandate of the commission includes ‘to determine who was responsible for the incidents being considered, and to decide whether or not to recommend further investigations by an appropriate authority and possible prosecution.’ The current policy does not set out a policy on past (existing) amnesties given by the Mugabe regime, and mentions the possibility of future amnesties only in the negative and obliquely, offering little firm assurance to perpetrators: ‘in the event that those identified as being responsible...do not themselves, on a voluntary basis, offer to come before the Commission to tell their side of the story, the Commission may, at its discretion, [direct the matter for investigation for possible prosecution]’ (MDC 2008:37). The MDC policy appears to attempt – perhaps wisely – to structurally distance justice measures from the vexed issue of property losses, land seizures and land reform. The policy does not, however, mention a role for the international community in any justice process.

In any event, this policy is of course subject to whatever political realities exist after June 2008. Whatever their policy, the MDC is faced with a hostile and nervous (albeit susceptible to multi-level fracturing) security apparatus, and has already made overtures to reassure in particular the security leadership and to guarantee their ‘security’ (ICG May 2008:4). It is not clear whether this pledge consists of an undertaking to engineer a formal amnesty from any prosecution, or something more political by way of a guarantee not to pursue legal actions. As a result of the 2008 election stalemate and violence, the leader of the main MDC faction, Morgan Tsvangirai, told the BBC that while he had long espoused the notion that Mugabe himself ought to be allowed to retire with dignity rather than face prosecution, that issue might need to be revisited given the events following the elections in March 2008.

The relevance and role of international justice and the ICC
It is relevant to briefly address whether international or foreign criminal tribunals might in any way overlap with any Zimbabwean commission’s mandate or amnesties it might offer (that is if one is established). Since at least 2003, a number of actors including the International Bar Association have called for the ICC to examine the Zimbabwe situation. The August 2003 Zimbabwe civil society symposium’s Declaration appeared to support the use of ICC mechanisms by any new government. In their most recent report, the ICG suggests that if the current regime (with or without Robert Mugabe) retains power by illegitimate means, a Security Council commission of inquiry ought to be established to investigate reports of torture and human rights violations and ‘to recommend appropriate accountability mechanisms, perhaps including referral to international legal authorities [the ICC]’ (ICG May 2008:2).

The ICC has limited jurisdiction, however. It can investigate and hear only the most serious crimes of concern to the international community, committed after July 2002. Zimbabwe is not presently a party to the ICC Statute. It is not open to another State Party to refer abuses by Zimbabwean nationals of other Zimbabweans inside that country to the Court. The Prosecutor moreover has no power on his own accord to initiate an investigation. Even if Zimbabwe was in the near future to accept the Court’s jurisdiction over specific crimes for the period that it was not a party to the Statute, the ICC would only have limited (2002 onwards) jurisdiction. A final possible source of ICC
jurisdiction is the UN Security Council’s power to refer country situations to the Court. Political consensus would be required, and care taken over precedent setting: unless the situation in Zimbabwe were to deteriorate significantly, it is somewhat unlikely that the ICC will receive a Security Council referral on this matter.

Technical issues aside, there are other concerns about the appropriateness of an international prosecution strategy here. ICC action might represent ‘select trials of demonised individuals that exonerate the collective’: selective prosecution can send the signal that whoever is not charged is innocent (Braithwaite J.2002: page 204, Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation. New York: Oxford University Press). An ICC investigation might undermine local peace efforts (see also the Sudan debacle after the ICC prosecutor’s unvailing of a warrant of arrest against the Sudanese President), while also purporting to be the single comprehensive treatment of the problem, leaving many matters unresolved: stories untold, hurts unhealed, deeds unaccounted for. The ICC scheme is simply one element in a continuum of possible options. Certainly at this present stage, the prospect of an ICC dimension ought to be flagged to senior elements – but so as to induce cooperation now, not in such manner as to frighten these still powerful actors into bunkering down. If no legitimate transition arrangement is reached, whether ‘escalating’ the matter then by Security Council referral to the ICC will actually help with engagement is still highly debatable.

Perhaps more likely than ICC involvement in transitional justice in Zimbabwe is the prospect of prosecutions, before foreign national courts applying international law, of Zimbabwean offenders for crimes in Zimbabwe, where these persons come within the territorial jurisdiction of such foreign courts. Nothing would require a foreign court to recognise any amnesty granted by any Zimbabwean institution (Dugard J 2002:page 699, Possible Conflict of Jurisdiction with Truth Commissions: The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court- A Commentary Vol. 1 Oxford University Press). For example, in May 2008 the names of 18 Zimbabwean officials accused of authorising or committing torture were forwarded to South African prosecutors, who could proceed under South African law should the accused be found in South Africa. The possibility of national level prosecution (and certainly any ongoing or completed prosecutions at the time) ought to be factored into considerations of ‘transitional justice’ options and might impact on a future commission’s work (action filed by the South African Litigation Centre: LegalBrief Africa, Issue 279, 5 May 2008, pursuant to the Implementation of the Rome Statute of the ICC Act (Act 27 of 2002).

Provided we do not see mere deals between elites – or even perhaps if we do – the international community might need to drop calls for high profile prosecutions and learn to live with any local political compromise that works for all Zimbabweans themselves. As Chesterman (2004: 156 You, The People: The UN Transitional Administration and State Building) has said, ‘[a] central problem is that commentators with an international perspective often view such internal transitions through the lens of international criminal law: either the wrongdoers are held accountable, or they enjoy impunity’. It is however possible to have a more nuanced, practicable – and just – approach.

Conclusion
Where will Zimbabweans place themselves in relation to the politics and principle of justice issues in the current interim phase – and who gets to decide for Zimbabweans on these issues? Once some legitimate transition is in place, what is the correct balance between forward momentum and adequate pause on past injustices? If a legitimate transition is accomplished in Zimbabwe, the ‘singularity’ of truth commissions– one-off, limited purpose and lifespan institutions carrying a ‘never again’ message – commends them as a highly visible and powerful mechanism to break with past troubles. The past is comprehensively and publicly examined not so much for its own sake, as for the sake of the future society. South Africans understand that deep wounds sometimes need to be cleaned and aired, not simply bound up and forgotten: out of sight is not out of collective mind (Dugard, above) One must bury the hatchet, not the past. At the same time, the focus ought not to be blindly on ‘a truth commission’ or its forms, but on what process and strategy best secures justice, reconciliation and repair in society. Moreover, formal processes such as truth commissions can catalyse but are only one part of wider social processes: these channels need to be further encouraged and enabled.

The prospect of a truth commission is not something to be postponed while ‘politics’ runs its course: what it offers by way of compromise can assist; now, in ensuring a legitimate transition is possible. Of course, any choices about the features of a Zimbabwean commission will necessarily reflect the political compromises and stresses that accompany a transition from autocracy to democracy. There needs to be a more public participatory dimension to the justice debate now, to the extent that this is possible: one risk is that political actors might by consensus opportunistically ‘drop’ the issue of transitional justice as too hard. On the other hand, it is naive to deny that formal justice mechanisms require some stability: there still may need to be some privileging of ‘peace’ over ‘justice’ in the way those involved in negotiations choose to deal with past abuses. In appropriate circumstances this ‘compromise on justice’ should be understood as itself being a morally valid and defensible choice, not simply a pragmatic (unprincipled) one.
The abduction, torture and murder in May this year of people like Gibson Nyandoro and Tonderai Ndima (to name just two opposition supporters) – the effect on families, the mystery surrounding the perpetrators or their superiors – properly situates policy debate about transitional justice options in Zimbabwe.

Discussions of such transitions are often attended by a high degree of optimism and idealism about the possibility of clearing a place in society where truth, justice, mercy and peace [can] meet. This can obscure how very difficult it is in practice to reconcile various considerations (political influences, community expectations, resources, time, security, etc). However, it is possible to translate such ideals into particular institutional and procedural manifestations in order to address identified problems that left unresolved can engulf a new society – or prevent its emergence at all.

The MDC-ZANU PF Deal:Herald of a Bright Future?

2008-09-13T11:54:00.006+02:00

Thank you guys for the comments you are sending me, unfortunately I am not able to reply to you all by way of e-mails. First of all let me point out that I am not a political scientist nor am I an academic as many of you presumed. I am just an ordinary person who is pretty much interested in the events that take place in my beloved little country which hitherto has been held hostage by a bankrupt political class and has never known even a spectre of the democratic notions of government dating to the precolonial era. However I must hasten to say that I am aspiring to be an academic so that one day I will find myself contributing in no small measure to the entrenchment of democratic values in my society. So much for that, that is not my intention today to preach to you my aspirations in the future to come under the new political dispensation beginning Monday the 15th of September 2008

Thursday the 11th of September 2008 is a historic day in the political history of Zimbabwe in the past dacade. The day saw the signing of a pact to form a government of National Unity between the two major political players in the country, Zanu PF (the ruling party) and the opposition MDC. However the contents of the pact are not yet in the public domain as the official signing will take place on Monday the 15th of September 2008, presumably in the prsence of other African leaders. Whether the government to be formed is the answer to a litany of the woes that hound Zimbabwe today remains a key question. The power-sharing deal faces a tough credibility test to determine whether it is enough to kick start the country's emergence from catastrophic economic collapse.

There is a labyrinth of key questions that have to be examined with regards the deal. It is an open secret that the military junta is not happy with the whole arrangement especially when one goes down the memory lane to the history just before the first round of the harmonised elections. The chefs in the security forces publicly professed that they will not just allow Tsvangirai to take the thrones at the State house. Could they have changed their minds over this aspect, no one knows what they are really up to. If they still maintain such a hard line of thinking it will be a mammoth task to the government to be formed

The more contentious issue is the sustenance of the Cabinet to be formed. From the concessions that culminated in the signing of the agreement it was pointed out that the new Cabinet will comprise of 31 ministers: 15 from Zanu Pf, 13 from MDC Tsvangirai and the other 3 from MDC Mutambara faction. It is ironic that Tsvangirai who, for the past years was against Mugabe over this big Cabinet would find himself as a party to that same Cabinet which in addition would include four Deputy Vice Presidents! This is an unfortunate aberration representing his surrender or mollification in the face of Zanu PF's unpreparedness to relinguish power to the opposition. This has been viewed by political analysts as an indication of Tsvangirai's cunning for power. One will wonder how such a huge Cabinet will be financed especially in view of the fact that there are more pressing needs that have to be addressed as a matter of urgency: the food crisis being the major issue requiring urgent intervetion.

Political analysits have exprssed dismay in the whole process that led to the signing of the agreement. The non-inclusive character of the negotiation process has been hightlighted as a serious departure from the tenets of democratic governance. Various political actors and the citizenry as a whole were excluded from the whole process and in the final analysis they are not in a position to ascribe legitimacy to the whole process. It is now trite and banal that the success and legitimacy of any governmental process is a product of a participatory approach by a cross section of the society.

More important is the issue of bringing back the economy to a recovery path. The problems that are bedevilling Zimbabwe are of an economic character and therefore require an economic solution. It will be a Herculian task for the new goverment to be to convince and instill investor confidence that Zimbabwe will be palatable for business operations taking into account the fact that Zanu PF elements will still be part of the new government.

Corruption which is now endemic in the country will be another aspect that will have to be confronted by the new government. It is generally accepted the world over that the stemming out of corruption in a country is the fulcrum of any successful economy. The Zimbabwean populace is now generally corrupt, both in public and private sectors and including the generality of the population. It will be a daunting task for the new government to come up with successful initiatives that will invariably reduce the incidence of corruption.

So in a nutshell it is too premature I presume for Zimbabweans to celebrate the signing of the pact as this will not in any way turn around the economy in in moment. There is a lot of vapour that has to cleared so as to chat a clear and defined way otherwise we might find ourselves in a more precarious position than before after the realisation that this may be only the transfer of political power without concomitent developments beneficial to the ordinary persons in the street.

No to Power Sharing, Yes to a Government that Works.

2008-09-10T10:28:00.001+02:00

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Eddie Cross. Much of the time I find his optimism entirely frustrating. However this week he lays bare the litany of abuse that Zimbabwe is experiencing courtesy of Mugabe and his cabal and reminds us that “what we need is not power sharing – that is the least of our worries, its simply a government that will work and start to get the country stable and onto the pathway to recovery.

All the debates taking place regarding the SADC sponsored talks to bring about an agreement to resolve the crisis in Zimbabwe center on the issue of political power. In fact that may be the most important issue to some, but its not the main issue at all. The main point of the talks is to secure a workable solution to our economic, political and social crisis.

The basic facts that underlie the crisis is that we have a military Junta running the country that cannot be overthrown by violence or armed insurrection, the political leadership has lost control of the State to this Junta and is now totally discredited, was in fact defeated at the last election but refuses to leave office, spurred on by the Junta.
The regime has totally mismanaged the economy and now it teeters on the edge of disintegration and collapse. This morning the RTGS rate for the local currency was hovering about 10 000 to 1USD. This dramatic collapse in a few days points to a number of other forces at work – the flight of capital, the reckless creation of money by the Reserve Bank and the severe shortage of cash with which to make daily transactions.
The collapse of the dollar by 700 per cent since the new currency was issued a month ago, means that while there might have been enough cash to meet needs at that time, the availability of cash notes has simply been decimated by inflation – I would guess that we probably only have the equivalent of US$5 million in cash in circulation in new notes – a drop in the ocean when we probably need US$3 billion. When you think that the new currency cost us Euro 35 million to print – now it has a face value of only US$5 million and next week probably half that again.

Our economy is literally teetering on the edge of collapse – the major retail stores are empty and unable to finance their operations. Parastatals cannot pay their staff let alone other costs. The urban councils are without fuel, chemicals, spares and tyres for vehicles. Their administrations are no longer able to produce accounts or manage their finances. The basic needs of life are not available or unaffordable – the great majority of the population is seriously considering flight to the nearest country they can go to under any conditions.

The government must be in dire straights – they can create money by simply passing credits from the Reserve Bank to local financial institutions that will then pay out salaries to the civil service and the armed forces – if they can get in the door of a bank and then along a queue perhaps 500 to a 1000 people long. When they get there they are paid out in small amounts(maximum Z$500 worth US10 cents today) and in coins, old bank notes and bearer bonds.

The parallel market – always an immediate and accurate indicator of real market conditions will no longer accept the old currencies for their deals – only the new notes and these are now as scarce as hen’s teeth. In December the regime is committed to withdrawing the old notes from circulation – and then what? No wonder the Reserve Bank Governor, Gono, wants to retire when his contract comes up for renewal in November.

And then there is the social and humanitarian crisis. Half our population has no food and no means of earning a living. They must be given their entire requirements for survival. Our hospitals and clinics are run down and dirty, they have no drugs and no blankets and few staff. If you are admitted to a State run facility you must provide everything you need, even food and any medical supplies you might require.

Our State run schools have just opened – 70 000 teachers short of their establishment. Hostels have no food, students no books or writing materials. Teachers cannot even pay for transport to school. Buildings are dilapidated and in most school rooms there are no lights. Children come to school hungry and cannot study because they simply do not get enough food at home.

I was at a meeting of our City Council yesterday – the head of the Cities medical services told us she couldn’t dig graves fast enough to bury the dead. She said they could not get labour to clean the streets or handle waste or dig graves. This situation is repeated across the whole country – the City Engineer said they have 4 days chlorine left in stock, after that, we drink unpurified water, 1,3 million people at risk.

We have the shortest life expectancy in the world, the highest ratio of orphans to population in the world, staggering infant and maternal mortality rates. In a country where we once had one of the fastest growing populations in the world – our death rates from all causes is now so high that our population is shrinking rapidly. In line with this, our economy has also shrunk – every year since 1998 and will decline again this year by at least 10 per cent.

So what we need is not power sharing – that is the least of our worries, its simply a government that will work and start to get the country stable and onto the pathway to recovery. For that we need the following: -
-A return to a democratic government that is accountable to the people.
-New leadership that is honest, capable and caring.
-A government team that will work together and put the country first.
-A basic agreement to bring about these conditions that is acceptable to our development partners who are essential to the stabilisation and recovery process.

Any agreement that does not meet the simple criteria listed above will simply not work. It will not be worth the paper it is written on. Mbeki must know this; it may not be acceptable to the Mugabe group or to Mutambara but it is the only way forward.

Zimbabwe Burning: Africa Needs to Act by Imposing Sanctions

2008-06-24T15:46:00.001+02:00

Zimbabwe is burning with unprecedented levels of violence intended to intimidate the population into voting for the octogenarian dictator, President Robert Mugabe, in this week's elections who lost the first round of presidential elections last March to the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai. I just got off the phone with friends and relatives in and around Zimbabwe who report that gruesome forms of brutality including wanton murder and destruction of property are being inflicted on the opposition and the general population especially in the rural areas away from the prying eyes of the local and international media.

Africa needs to act quickly and firmly by telling the autocrats in Harare that their time is up. It is encouraging, finally, that leaders in several African countries from Angola to Tanzania, Botswana to Zambia, and even in Rwanda and Kenya are raising their concerns and condemning the atrocities in Zimbabwe. The biggest disappointment remains the indefensible silence of South Africa's lame duck president, Thabo Mbeki, mandated by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to mediate in the crisis. President Mbeki's insane 'quite diplomacy', which amounts to an unconscionable connivance with the Mugabe dictatorship, is a sad testimony to the contemporary bankruptcy of Africa's nationalist liberation generation, their inability to come to terms with the demands of the twenty-first century, to heed their people's deep yearnings for development and democracy and human decency that transcends the objectives of political nationalism for state sovereignty.

Africa needs to do more than just condemn, criticize, and censure the ruthless Mugabe regime determined to steal electoral victory at all costs. It needs to state, uncategorically, that free and fair elections are now impossible, that a Mugabe victory this week will not be recognized. Above all, it needs to impose sanctions, comprehensive sanctions on this now historically bankrupt tyranny. The imposition of sanctions should not be left to sanctimonious western governments who used to unabashedly support settler colonial regimes and resist sanctions against them. Remember how we all used to be so exercised about the vacuous arguments of the western supporters of the Rhodesians and apartheid South Africa who opposed sanctions on the grounds that they would hurt the ordinary people of these beloved countries.

We cannot turn to the same arguments now, that the ordinary people will bear the brunt of the suffering, for they are already suffering, reeling from daily violence and the unimaginable pain of deepening poverty and aborted dreams. To use those arguments would be to express our support for the murderous Mugabe dictatorship. We cannot allow the tables to be turned on us and let cynical western powers who have never been interested and invested in the welfare of African peoples to become the default champions of our people's freedom in Zimbabwe and elsewhere on the continent. We must speak out and act boldly and unapologetically against postcolonial dicatorships as we did against colonial autocracies, against both black and white tyrannies of power.

Below is a statement signed by some of Africa's leading statesmen and women, activists and thinkers, which needs the endorsement of all progressive pan-Africanists across the continent and in the diaspora:

It is crucial for the interests of both Zimbabwe and Africa that the upcoming elections are free and fair.

Zimbabweans fought for liberation in order to be able to determine their own future. Great sacrifices were made during the liberation struggle. To live up to the aspirations of those who sacrificed, it is vital that nothing is done to deny the legitimate expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe.

As Africans we consider the forthcoming elections to be critical. We are aware of the attention of the world. More significantly we are conscious of the huge number of Africans who want to see a stable, democratic and peaceful Zimbabwe.

Consequently, we are deeply troubled by the current reports of intimidation, harassment and violence. It is vital that the appropriate conditions are created so that the Presidential run-off is conducted in a peaceful, free and fair manner. Only then can the political parties conduct their election campaigning in a way that enables the citizens to express freely their political will.

In this context, we call for an end to the violence and intimidation, and the restoration of full access for humanitarian and aid agencies.

To this end it will be necessary to have an adequate number of independent electoral observers, both during the election process and to verify the results.

Whatever the outcome of the election, it will be vital for all Zimbabweans to come together in a spirit of reconciliation to secure Zimbabwe's future.

We further call upon African leaders at all levels - pan-African, regional and national - and their institutions to ensure the achievement of these objectives.
Here is a partial list of the signatories:
Abdusalami Alhaji Abubakar, Former President of Nigeria (1998-1999)
Kofi Annan, Former Secretary-General of the United Nations (1997-2007), Nobel Laureate and member of The Elders
Professor Kwame Appiah, Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Former Secretary-General of the United Nations (1992-1997)
Lakhdar Brahimi, Former United Nations Special Representative for Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq and South Africa, member of The Elders
Pierre Buyoya, Former President of Burundi (1987-1993, 1996-2003)
Joaquim Chissano, Former President of Mozambique (1986-2005)
John Githongo, Former Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics in Kenya
Richard Goldstone, Former Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
Mo Ibrahim, Founder of Celtel International and Founder of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation
Sam Jonah, Former Chief Executive of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation
Angelique Kidjo, Musician and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador
Wangari Maathai, Founder of the Green Belt Movement and Nobel Laureate
Graça Machel, President of the Foundation for Community Development and member of The Elders
Ketumile Masire, Former President of Botswana (1980-1998)
Moeletsi Mbeki, Deputy Chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs
Benjamin William Mkapa,,Former President of Tanzania (1995-2005)
Festus Mogae, Former President of Botswana (1998-2008)
António Mascarenhas Monteiro, Former President of Cape Verde (1991-2001)
Elson Bakili Muluzi, Former President of Malawi (1994-2004)
Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Former President of Tanzania (1985-1995)
Kumi Naidoo, Secretary General of CIVICUS
Babacar Ndiaye, Former President of the African Development Bank
Youssou N'Dour, Musician and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador
Njongonkulu Ndungane, Former Archbishop of Cape Town and Founder of the African Monitor
Moustapha Niasse, Former Prime Minister of Senegal (1983, 2000-2001)
Loyiso Nongxa, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand
Karl Offmann, Former President of Mauritius (2002-2003)
Mamphela Ramphele, Former Managing Director of the World Bank and former Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town
Jerry John Rawlings, Former President of Ghana (1993-2001)
Johann Rupert, Chairman of Remgro Limited
Mohammed Sahnoun, Former UN/OAU Special Representative for the Great Lakes region of Africa and former Assistant Secretary-General of the OAU
Salim Ahmed Salim, Former Prime Minister of Tanzania (1994-1995) and former Secretary-General of the OAU (1989-2001)
John Sentamu, Archbishop of York
Nicéphore Dieudonné Soglo, Former President of Benin (1991-1996)
Miguel Trovoada, Former President of São Tomé and Príncipe (1991-2001)
Desmond Tutu, Nobel Laureate and Chairman of The Elders
Cassam Uteem, Former President of Mauritius (1992-2002)
Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions
Joseph Sinde Warioba, Former Prime Minister of Tanzania (1985-1990)

The Zimbabwe 29 March 2008 Harmonised Elections: Holding a Nation Hostage to a Bankrupt Political Class

2008-05-29T15:17:00.005+02:00

Disputed results from the 29th of March 2008 Presidential elections have left Zimbabwe in deep political crisis. The opposition reluctantly and grudgingly accepted the results, which have been questioned by local and international observers. Although the country was relatively calm before, during and immediately after the elections, there has been (and still is) widespread politically motivated violence throughout the country orchestrated on the masses of the people. The frustration and fear gripping the country in the run up to the second election scheduled for the 27th of June 2008, is almost unprecedented in the 28 years of independence. A proud country that was envisaged as an oasis of stability (at least in the euphoric early post independence days) in a volatile region is being held hostage by a bankrupt political class. Many Zimbabweans are filled with a sense of shame and anguish, as well as fortitude to salvage their country’s fortunes and future.

Lost in the electoral shenanigans and post election turmoil has been a historic opportunity to consolidate the country’s short-lived democracy, to confirm its democratic credentials in the region and on the continent. Instead, Zimbabwe now faces a prolonged period of political uncertainty that will play itself out in unpredictable ways from the streets to parliament, severely testing the fragile fabric of public order, social cohesion, intergroup relations especially those structured around the complex inscriptions of ethnicity, class, gender and generation. Some worry that Zimbabwe might turn into East Africa’s Kenya or even Cote d’ Ivoire, a once stable and relatively prosperous post colony in Africa that descended into chaos and civil war because of its failure to manage combustible politics of democratic transition.

In April 1980, President Mugabe was inaugurated as the new President for the supposedly nascent democratic Zimbabwe, before an ecstatic multitude of a million people at the Zimbabwe grounds. The intoxicating euphoria of 1980 has given way to widespread anger and anxiety. In 1980, the masses brutalized by decades of one party white minority rule under the Smith regime rediscovered their voices and will, the nation was united in its hopes for the future, believed fervently in the possibilities of productive change. Now, many feel betrayed and disempowered, robbed of their votes and voices.

Whatever the future holds for Zimbabwe and its tortured journey from dictatorship to democracy, underdevelopment to development; the present crisis has a complicated history rooted in the political economies of colonialism, neocolonialism and neoliberalism that characterized the country for decades. This is to suggest that the current political crisis is rooted in complex historical forces that go beyond the “authoritarianism” and human rights abuses beloved by western media in discussing African politics or explaining its proverbial crises, or the excessive obsession with personalities in African media itself.

The March 29 2008 elections promised to achieve an extraordinary development in African politics: unseating an incumbent President through the ballot box! This would have been unprecedented in Zimbabwean history and is rare in Africa where incumbents typically leave office through the use of force. Nicephore Soglo of Benin is one of the rare Presidents to suffer the fate of the ballot box; elected in 1996, he lost the 2001 elections to the former dictator, Mathien Kerekou. This is a tribute to the power of incumbency, to win and rig elections, the inordinate advantages enjoyed by ruling parties to use the sanctions and seduction of state power.

The manipulation of electoral processes and results by ruling parties is of course not confined to Africa: remember the US elections of 2000, and President Putin’s recent attempts to prolong his rule? It is not uncommon for ruling parties in many so-called mature democracies to call elections opportunistically, redraw electoral boundaries in their favour, or bribe the electorate with contrived economic goodies. However, it can be argued the national costs of electoral malpractices are much higher in Africa (and other countries in the global south) that are struggling against challenges of internal underdevelopment and political and cultural subordination than for the more hegemonic western societies. Imagine the costs involved in electioneering Zimbabwe’s second election especially within the context of the food insecurity that is bedeviling the country at the present moment- the funds could have been channeled towards the procurement of food for the poverty stricken country were the elections done above board!

The Mugabe led government suffered a political tsunami as himself and a number of his Cabinet Ministers lost in the elections; more so that it failed to garner a parliamentary majority which is an historic event in the elections of post independent Zimbabwe. Hitherto, Mugabe has never been “defeated” in any previous election. In a sense, the election signified a rejection of leading politicians associated with Mugabe. The opposition painted Mugabe and his party as old men leading a corrupt regime to the detriment of the masses of the people.

Thus the contest between the octogenarian President Mugabe and Mr. Tvangirai pitted a generational struggle for power. It is one of the ironies of contemporary Africa that countries that enjoyed relative political stability since independence such as Malawi, Zimbabwe and Senegal are still ruled by the nationalist generation that brought independence, while the countries with more turbulent histories have long made the generational transition. In this sense the Zimbabwe March 2008 Presidential election was a referendum between the older and younger generations, between the Mugabe generation in power since independence and the Tsvangirai generation that come off age after independence.

Impoverished and exhausted from 28 years of authoritarian and corrupt rule by the Mugabe administration, the country was hungry for a clean government that would bring to justice corrupt officials and lead a transparent and accountable government capable of reviving the economy pursuing development. Much of the discontent and disaffection came from the retrenched and decapitalized public sectors, which have been under assault since the days of the structural adjustment in the 1990s. In Zimbabwe, as in much of Africa and indeed the wider world since the onset of neo-liberalism the gap between the rich and the poor has widened, the sense of economic insecurity has increased among large numbers of people even as their countries’ economies grow. This partly helps explain the tightness of the vote and the prospect of a government losing elections in times of rapid economic growth.

Zimbabwe politics exhibits familiar African trends. The country started its independence with a hurriedly negotiated multiparty system between the nationalists and the departing imperial power that could not withstand the homogenizing imperatives of nationalism and the intoxicating and intolerant demands of uhuru: nation building, development, and democratization. Before long, Zimbabwe joined the African bandwagon towards the one party state. It became a defacto one party state as PF ZAPU folded into the ruling ZANU PF in 1987 after the violent disturbances in the Matebeleland region in the early years of independence. As in much of Africa, from the late1980s and through the 1990s, the unproductive power of one party rule faced growing popular opposition. The struggles for the “second independence” by the restive masses and organized civil society scored limited victory in the 2000 referendum and parliamentary elections.

The current trials and tribulations facing Zimbabwe will not be resolved without the emergence of a leadership that is truly up to the challenge, a leadership that pursue a national project of profound social transformation, that eschews narrow shortsighted exclusionary politics and neo-liberal economic growth. Zimbabwe and Africa have no historic alternative from building truly democratic developmental states if they are to chart the twentieth century more prepared and empowered than they did in the disastrous nineteenth century marked by colonialism and neo-colonialism and their depredations that were simultaneously economic and existential, cultural and cognitive, political and paradigmatic.

The current leadership, both as “victors’’ and “losers”, seem keen to retain or gain power at all costs. The power struggle is as sinister as he differences among the leaders are small. But often it is the very narcissism of minor differences that breeds gratuitous violence and viciousness as histories of genocide demonstrate. The leading Zanu PF politicians engaged in combat whose followers are tearing their lovely country apart are members of the same recycled political class committed to neo-liberal growth that offer no real solutions to Zimbabwe’s enduring challenges of growth and development, choiceless democracy and transformative democracy. The recycling of the same politicians time and again without any positive changes in policies that helps the generality of the populace has become the norm in many African states. As this has become evident the lure of elections as engines of fundamental socioeconomic transformation has dimmed in many countries and the search for new forms of politics is underway.

Zimbabwe’s current political tragedy is party of a much larger story. The absence of articulated and organized institutional and ideological alternatives under neoliberalism is at the heart of the political crisis facing contemporary Africa and much of the world.. It has led, thus far, to the ossification of politics, and in some countries, the premature abortion or aging of elections as instruments of transformative change. The specter of choiceless democracies is not confined to countries in the global South, for in many parts of the global North including the United States the ideological divide between the major parties is often indecipherable, the result of which is political apathy as nearly half the population has exited the electoral process. For more fragile societies, the danger is not apathy, anarchy. As a keen observer of Zimbabwe, my beloved home country since my birth in 1980 (the year of independence from the colonial yoke), I hope the country can avoid such a fate. Perhaps the ferocity of the reaction to the botched 29 March 2008 elections will serve as a wakeup call to the political class and the troubled citizenry to chart a more productive future for their beloved country. A good beginning would be for the contending parties to agree to a binding independent and internationally monitored second Presidential election scheduled for the 27 June

The Agony of Zimbabwe

2008-04-21T09:36:00.002+02:00

For many of us from Southern Africa, Zimbabwe evokes conflicting memories and emotions: the heroism of the liberation struggle against settler colonialism, the hopes of reconstruction and social transformation in the early post-independence years, and the descent into tyranny and economic decline from the late 1990s. Today, Zimbabwe is in deep economic and political crisis, a once proud country held to ransom. Risky-Business by a bankrupt and authoritarian regime whose revolutionary credentials look ever more tattered from the ravages of unproductive power and the ills stalking the land from widespread food and fuel shortages, to high levels of unemploymentWall-Street-Layoffs and inflation, to general discontent and even despair. Tens of thousands of Zimbabweans vote with their feet to the neighboring countries or overseas, a development unimaginable in the early euphoric years of independence. What went wrong?

There are no shortages of explanations for Zimbabwe’s current agonies. To the ideologues of the regime and its ardent external supporters Zimbabwe is a victim of an orchestrated plot by Western countries—led by the devious Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister—bent on frustrating African progress. Charges of western and British complicity and duplicity in the Zimbabwe crisis are not entirely without merit. Some have pointed out that the vitriol poured on Zimbabwe in the western media has less to do with the country’s state of governance—which is far from the worst in Africa—than lingering western empathies for settler colonialism that the Mugabe regime is ostensibly trying to dismantle through the radical land reform program of forcible land seizures from former white settlers.

To its critics, the Zimbabwe government uses the rhetoric of nationalism, of an unfinished revolution, to cling on to power, as a mask to hide its political intolerance and economic incompetence. Again, there is a lot of truth in this indictment: the regime became more autocratic and adopted a more radical land reform program as it faced a growing and credible political opposition, coalesced around the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and as its capacity to manage let alone rescue the economy from its structural deformities declined.

A more comprehensive accounting of Zimbabwe’s economic and political crises would have to consider the contexts and conjunctures, processes and patterns of Zimbabwe’s trajectory and transition from settler colonialism to a developmental postcolonial state, the challenges and constraints of late decolonization. The country’s current crisis is rooted in the failures of that transition todate. As any postcolonial state, the new Zimbabwe government in 1980 was confronted with the complex challenges of turning the triple dreams of Uhuru—nation building, development and democracy—into reality. And having waged a protracted war of liberation, which entailed the mobilization and politicization of the peasantry, these dreams went beyond the aspirations of the urban elites and working class for neo-colonial transformation that had bedeviled decolonizations elsewhere on the continent.

But unlike many countries that got their independence in the 1950s and 1960s, Zimbabwe attained its independence during a period characterized by global economic crisis and the ascendancy of neo-liberalism. The first severely limited primary commodity and export driven economic growth Trillion-Dollar-Experiment enjoyed by many of the newly independent countries in the 1960s, while the second entailed the “rolling back” of the state and severely curtailed the developmentalist ambitions of the new government. To be sure, in the early post-independence years Zimbabwe’s record of achievement in the provision of social services especially education and health was very impressive. But it was unsustainable following the imposition of structural adjustment programs, which, as in much of Africa, took a heavy toll on the economy particularly social services and formal and public sector employment. In fact, the austerities of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) galvanized the increasingly pauperized urban middle classes and the rural masses still awaiting their fruits of Uhuru into the wave of protests and agitation that crystallized into struggles for democratization, for the “second independence.”

If structural adjustment dented the revolutionary credentials and developmentalist capacities of the Zimbabwean state, the struggles SAPs engendered diluted the state’s democratic claims and exposed its authoritarianism. The monopoly of power enjoyed by the liberation movement, notwithstanding its fierce internal conflicts, began to crack in the 1990s as the working and professional classes in the cities, the weakest link for the liberation movement, turned into a noisy civil society demanding the full rights of political citizenship to promote civil liberties and protect their declining economic fortunes. However, structural adjustment was not the source of all the problems for the political class and the state they had inherited from the Rhodesians.

The liberation movement had inherent spatial and social contradictions that became increasingly evident. The spatial divisions were between the rural and urban areas as well as regional in nature between Matabeleland and Mashonaland and within each region. The merger of Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) into Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front) in 1988, after a five year violent campaign in Matabeleland, sought to defuse the regional tensions, although they did not disappear. In fact, they mutated into new forms. No less critical were the urban-rural divisions in so far as it was the rural peasants who had largely fought in the liberation war but the leadership and immediate beneficiaries of independence were the urban professional elites. The latter had a class interest to consolidate their power by promoting their own accumulation, to fashion an economic base for the political power they had acquired.

The biggest opportunities for accumulation were in land—real estate in the cities and farms in the countryside. Land was of course central to the peasantry, the backbone of the liberation struggle, and to the nationalist memories of violent dispossession by the forces of settler colonialism, and the imaginary of independence. But land resettlement for the peasantry especially for the poor peasantry was not pursued aggressively until the late 1990s. This has often been attributed to the constraints imposed by constitutional safeguards of the Lancaster House Agreement that favored market-based land transactions and resettlement. Also, shortage of resources and the failure of the British government to provide sufficient funds to honor its pledges have been faulted. It would seem that at stake were the accumulative interests of powerful segments of the political class. They wanted the land for themselves.

This balancing act—land for the masses and for the aspiring national bourgeoisie—found succor in the increasingly empty ideological language of socialism, a rhetoric that was not only out of touch with the realities in Zimbabwe and the interests of the political class itself but also with the intolerant demands of neo-liberalism and structural adjustment and the unfolding demise of global socialism. By the late 1990s the comrades in power could no longer fool their beloved masses in the rural areas, the restive armies of unemployed educated youths in the cities, and the workers flexing their industrial muscles and discovering a new political voice through mushrooming civil society organizations and the MDC.

It was in this context that a radical land reform program was embarked on from 1998 and especially after the government lost the constitutional referendum in early 2000. Its aims were multiple and varied: to resettle more peasants and rekindle ZANU-PF’s revolutionary credentials both locally and regionally, locally with a new generation including the unemployed youths who were too young to be war veterans—in whose name the land seizures were undertaken—and in a region now dominated by a reformist post-apartheid South Africa where the governing ANC coalition had abandoned any pretensions to a project of revolutionary socioeconomic transformation. The radical land reform program sought to bolster ZANU-PF and weaken the MDC ideologically and operationally by undermining the nationalist claims and character—still a compelling card in a post-settler society—of the MDC and its rural appeal where the bulk of the population lives.

These measures, augmented by violence, intimidation, and voting irregularities enabled ZANU-PF to win the parliamentary elections of 2000 and 2005. Predictably, monitors from SADC pronounced the elections “free and fair”, whereas western monitors cried foul. The elections of 2000 were more violent than those of 2005, an indication to some of the continued popularity of ZANU-PF. More likely, it reflected the effectiveness of ZANU-PF political terror and the ineffectiveness of the MDC, its inability to articulate a credible message of national transformation.

All this raises difficult questions as to the forces and strategies that can effectively bring Zimbabwe’s nightmare to an end, that can facilitate a transition from the commandist politics of the liberation movement to the democratic politics of a post-liberation society, from Mugabe in power now for twenty-eight years to a new leader. Clearly, elections are not enough, but street action provokes violent retribution from the state. And concerted regional pressure seems unlikely. The regime’s strength and Achilles heel is in the rural areas, and the opposition must find ways of mobilizing the rural population, of bridging the rural-urban divide, linking urban and rural struggles. The generalized economic crisis that has become more severe since the recent elections might offer a new opening.

A little remarked aspect of the farm invasions is that they led to the displacement of tens of thousands of workers from the neighboring countries, especially Malawi and Mozambique, some of whom had been in Zimbabwe for more than a generation. In effect, the rural areas were being emptied of both European and African settlers. The urban areas also boast large populations who can trace their origins to the neighboring countries, which may partly drive the attempts to disenfranchise urban residents, who constitute the backbone of the MDC. A new form of Zimbabwean citizenship was being constructed based on autochothonous rather than residential claims. This underscores what is at the heart of the Zimbabwean conundrum: how to restructure, develop, and democratize a former settler colony that relied on migrant labor from within and without, which necessitated massive land alienation and left behind legacies of high structural unemployment, racial disenfranchisement and dispossession, and militarism and the use of political violence as weapons of both control and liberation. In short: how to construct an inclusive citizenship and subject state power and the political class to democratic accountability.

Zimbabwe attracts intense political emotions as a former settler colony in search of a viable future and for the mirror it holds for South Africa. Both countries capture most poignantly, indeed painfully, the highly racialized, exploitative, and abusive encounter in modern times between Europe and Africa spawned by European imperialism and colonialism. It is not surprising that both the foes and friends of the Mugabe regime look to South Africa to provide international leadership on the Zimbabwe “question.” To some in South Africa the Zimbabwe crisis serves as a warning to the dangers of African nationalist demagoguery, to others an impetus for the country to undertake extensive land reforms and socio-economic transformation if it wants to avoid Zimbabwe’s fate.

It is arguable what motivates President Mbeki’s “quite diplomacy”—Zimbabwe as an ally in the liberation wars of the region or as an alibi for accelerated reform in South Africa. What is clear is that the agony of Zimbabwe continues to deepen and profoundly affects the entire Southern African subregion. South Africa, the SADC countries, and the rest of Africa have a responsibility to help the country chart a more productive future. Solidarity does not entail collaboration with or sanitizing the brutalities of the corrupt and self-serving autocrats in Harare who have obviously outlived their historical usefulness. Rather it requires principled support for the ordinary people of Zimbabwe struggling for a democratic and developmental state, for a society worthy of their protracted struggles against settler colonialism and postcolonial misrule.

The Struggle for Human Rights in Africa

2008-04-12T10:19:00.000+02:00

The contexts, challenges and prospects for human rights in Africa have changed quite considerably in recent years. Human rights discourses find favor in both political and popular circles, among the ideologues of the state and the interlocutors of civil society, a tribute to the enduring and unfulfilled yearnings for more humane societies deeply rooted in African collective memories and social psyches, and to the remarkable changes that have already taken place in Africa’s human rights landscapes. Contemporary Africa is a complex tapestry of contrasts in which human rights, as rhetoric and reality, has never been more pronounced and yet remains precarious as claims for and contestations over these rights persist and take new forms.

Today, more people enjoy more rights than ever before, but more people are also more aware of the limitations of Africa’s human rights regimes. Indeed, as the promoters of human rights have proliferated so have the perpetrators of abuses among state and civil society actors. The state no longer has a monopoly on vice, if it ever did, no more than civil society has a monopoly on virtue in the protection of human rights; both are as likely to undermine human rights as to uphold them. Similarly, the international arena is as much a source of inspiration and support as of much sorrow and grief. And the prospects for human rights in Africa remain firmly latched to the wobbly ox-cart of development.

My presentation seeks to explore the recent changes that have occurred in Africa’s perennial struggles for human rights. It is divided into three parts. First, I discuss the changing contexts of human rights regimes that have structured African political economies since the 1990s. Second, I examine the question of in human rights discourses in and on Africa by revisiting some of the debates about the generations and hierarchy of rights. Finally, I look into the role of the state and society in developing or undermining human rights norms.

Contemporary African politics is marked by many complex and contradictory dynamics, four of which can be singled out for particular attention, namely, democratization, globalization, regionalization, and militarization, whose impact on human rights is equally complex and contradictory. Singly and collectively these factors have simultaneously facilitated and forestalled the growth and pursuit of human rights and development in Africa.

For the purposes of this presentation democratixation can be examined from three dimensions, the empirical, legal, and theoretical. There is ample evidence that since the turn of the 1990s the number of states following and abiding by features of democratic governance—principally elections and multi-party politics—has increased, notwithstanding reversals, blockages, and manipulations by Africa’s wily dictators, many of whom have learned to maneuver democratic politics to their advantage, and despite the fact that in many countries the new democracies amount to little more than the recycling of fractions of the same bankrupt political class, and elections are often marred by harassment and intimidation of the opposition, violence, vote rigging and human rights abuses, not to mention third term campaigns to allow incumbent presidents to stay beyond the constitutional limits of two terms.

The growth of democratically elected governments and governance has been accompanied by the expansion of legality as more domains of public life are governed by the rule of law established by democratic procedures. The tentacles of authoritarianism and arbitrariness have been withering as new rules are set establishing term limits for presidential office and stricter separation of powers between the various branches of government, and as demands for accountability are translated into public policies and popular opprobrium against corruption. To be sure, corruption remains endemic in many countries and the rule of law is still observed more in the breach than in compliance, but the political costs of doing so have risen.

More difficult to decipher and quite contentious in the literature is the impact of democratization on human rights. It is generally agreed that democracies are less repressive than autocracies. The positive correlation between democracy and respect for human rights is based on the assumption that democratic leaders are more accountable to their citizens and that coercive agents within democratic states not only wield less power than other competitive groups, but the availability of less coercive means of conflict regulation (such as elections) provides both a constraining factor and a preferable option. But the effects of democratization (the moment of transition from autocracy to democracy) on political repression are more complex. It has been demonstrated in many instances that repression may actually increase in new democracies because of lagging repressive tendencies from the past and the propensity for protest behavior to increase at such times. Some call this the “more murder in the middle hypothesis.”

Many of these analyses tend to focus on the state as the progenitor of human rights terror and repression. The role of civil society in engendering human rights violations is quite critical and even more so during democratic transitions when centrifugal pressures can intensify as long suppressed group conflicts and identities find release in the newly opened political spaces where they sometimes proceed to produce and perform their chauvinisms and antagonisms, both real and imagined. Keen to shore up its power and authority the state often becomes embroiled in the volatile vortex of conflicting group claims and struggles, in the process of which repression can increase that may ultimately abort the democratization process itself or threaten the very integrity of the nation-state.

Africa offers numerous examples of escalating conflicts and human rights violations since the recent wave of democratic transitions began in the 1990s. Ethnicity has proven particularly salient as the most lethal social cleavage engendering conflict and repression. Since colonial times, ethnicity has embodied both moral and political imperatives; moral ethnicity constitutes a complex web of social obligations, loyalties and belonging, whereas political ethnicity is manifested in the mobilization of ethnicity—the proverbial “tribalism”—in intra-elite struggles for state power. In the formulations of Peter Ekeh and Mahmood Mamdani ethnicity is integral to Africa’s bifurcated civil society; it serves as a primordial public for the masses estranged from the civic public of the elites, a sanctuary that extends its comforts and protective tentacles to the victims of political disenfranchisement, economic impoverishment, state terror and group rivalry.

As the suffocating lid of state tyranny is lifted during moments of democratic transition the suppressed voices and expectations of civil society surge, but the stresses and strains arising from the competitive grind of democracy often find articulation in the entrenched identities, idioms, and institutions of ethnic solidarity. The case of Nigeria is quite illustrative in this regard. The democratic opening of 1999 has been accompanied by the resurgence of ethnic identities and proliferation of regional and local struggles over the entitlements of citizenship expressed in the language of “indigenes” and “settlers.” These struggles have increasingly spilled into the formation of ethnic militias that have wrought havoc on Nigeria’s civil society, unleashing periodic convulsions of inter-communal violence. Long a country with a militarized state, the militias are militarizing society and helping to expand the culture of violence that is inimical to human rights and development. Religious conflicts have also periodically erupted into communal violence.

Democratization seems to have given a new lease on life for renewed regional integration, which has had largely positive effects on human rights in so far as the new institutions have incorporated principles and protocols to advance human rights. Also, many new human rights bodies have been established at the continental, regional and sub-regional level. No less critical are global forces and movements including those among the African diaspora that have emerged and are supportive of human rights struggles and agendas on the continent.

The African Union (AU), launched in July 2002, which supplanted the Organization of African Unity, is perhaps the most significant regional integration initiative in decades. The Constitutive Act of the AU clearly stipulates that one of the objectives of the Union shall be to “promote and protect human and peoples’ rights in accordance with the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights and other relevant human rights instruments.” A series of principles related to human right are stated in Article 4: “promotion of gender equality ; respect for democratic principles, human rights, the rule of law and good governance; promotion of social justice to ensure balanced economic development; respect for the sanctity of human life, condemnation and rejection of impunity and political assassinations, acts of terrorism and subversive acts.”
Specifically the AU has created a number of organs that are critical for the human rights, principally the Pan-African Parliament, the African Court of Justice (ACJ), the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSCC), and the Peace and Security Council. Another critical organ of the AU that is fundamental to its ambitions to promote development and human rights is the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and its African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). Adopted in July 2001, NEPAD is an ambitious strategy and program for Africa’s renewal. It focuses on four key objectives: democracy and good political governance; economic and corporate governance; socio-economic development; and the implementation of the African Peer Review Mechanism. Human rights are supposed to feature prominently in the pursuance of the first objective. While few would quibble with NEPAD’s objectives or many of its plans, some regard its expectations of massive international donor support as unrealistic. Critics have also accused it of pandering to and sanctifying the same neo-liberal prescriptions of the international financial institutions that have done so much to wreck African economies. The lack of civil society involvement in the drafting of NEPAD has been another bone of contention for many scholars and activists.

In addition to NEPAD and APRM there are numerous other human rights organizations that have emerged recently. The proliferation of African human rights instruments is a sign of the growing importance of human rights on the continent, but also a source of concern, contends Shadrack Gutto, in that many share the same mandate and “the multiplicity of mechanisms leaves ordinary victims and survivors lost and sometimes without effective and appropriate remedy,” which is itself a recognized form of human right abuse. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) adopted in 1981 and entered into force in 1986 remains the continent’s premier human rights body, whose work is in need of urgent reform and improvement. Among the new bodies are the African Charter on Rights and Welfare of the Child and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (its protocol was adopted in 1998 and entered into force in 2004), not to mention the truth and reconciliation commissions and special courts that have been established in some countries.

At the international level, there are the two international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and Sierra Leone prosecuting genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the two countries. The establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002, in the teeth of U.S. resistance, has rightly been hailed as a milestone in international human rights law and enforcement. The African diaspora, both the historic and contemporary, have also become increasingly vocal in protesting against human rights abuses in Africa. TransAfrica’s campaign against Sani Abacha’s dictatorship in Nigeria shows this clearly. In recognition of the progressive role that people in the diaspora can play, diaspora representation and participation will be included in ECOSOCC.
Globalization constitutes an important dynamic that has significantly transformed the discursive and material contexts in which human rights ideas, policies and instruments are articulated and implemented. There is little agreement in the literature on what globalization actually means as a process, project and period in world history. To its advocates—the hyperglobalists—globalization is seen as a new phenomenon involving a fundamental restructuring of the global system, whereas to its antagonists—the skeptics—there is really nothing new about globalization. The ambivalents—the transformationalists—straddle the two positions arguing that the contemporary wave of globalization surpasses that of earlier epochs in terms of the extensity of global networks, the intensity and impact of global interconnectedness, and the velocity of global flows.

For me globalization as a process refers to growing and deepening transnational flows among continents, countries and communities of materials, practices, peoples, ideas and symbols, from commodities to capital, images to information, labor to leisure, rights to reflexivities, viruses to visions. It has different dimensions—technological, economic, political, and cultural—each of which has its own internal particularities and propensities. As a project it is an ideological construct for global capitalism and neo-liberalism specifically designed to promote the liberalization and integration of world markets.
The relationship between globalization and democracy is especially complicated. The number of “democratic” states has increased as globalization has spread, which would seem to suggest a conjunctural, if not causal, connection between the two. In fact, there are those who attribute the spread of democracy in Africa in the 1990s to the demonstration effects of communism’s extinction in central and eastern Europe and to the examples of western democracies, transmitted to Africans through CNN and the BBC, and the conditionalities of the international financial institutions, leading some to even call them “demonstration democracies” created to please international donors.

Such characterizations betray ignorance of Africa’s long histories of struggle against the tyrannies of slavery, colonialism and the postcolonial perversions of power. Nonetheless, it is true that many of these democracies, like the older and truncated democracies in other parts of the world, including the global North are minimalist, in which democracy is reduced to periodic electoral contests, unencumbered by any developmentalist and distributive objectives. Many can be termed “illiberal democracies” or “choiceless democracies” characterized by rising corporate control and electoral disenfranchisement.

In so far as globalization represents an increase in the power of capital over other social classes, it contributes to the shrinkage of democracy. Repression of labor is seen as essential for attracting multinational corporations and direct foreign investment. As is quite evident in Africa, the austerities of structural adjustment programs not only increase poverty, but also require authoritarian governance. In short, as capital and neoliberal ideology have become more dominant, the sphere of private and unaccountable decision-making has expanded while that of public and accountable decision-making has diminished. The power of people to influence policy democratically at the national level is reduced by globalization, yet at the global level there are no democratic institutions to enable people to effectively control or influence their destiny. The “old geographies of democracy” have been shifting as the scales of political representation and economic organization have become increasingly incongruous.

In this context, the expansion of democratization appears less a bequest of capitalist globalization than its nemesis. Democratization has emerged in the cracks of the mismatch between capital and labor, in the dialect of new repertoires of power engendered by globalization itself and its vulnerabilities that facilitate workers and other subaltern social classes to develop their own local and global networks of resistance and empowerment. This is to suggest that analyses of globalization must pursue a dual analytical agenda, mapping out the capital logic of globalization and the logic of struggle by the powerless, disenfranchised, dislocated, and immiserated working peoples of globalization.

The democratic and human rights dividend of the end of the Cold War remains to be realized. A study by David Cingranelli and David Richards examining the extent to which respect for human rights had improved after the Cold War covering 79 countries found that governments’ respect for the four physical integrity rights—torture, extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and political imprisonment—remained the same as before for the first three and only improved for the last one, most dramatically in Africa. In fact, there was more torture globally in 1996 than there had been throughout most of the Cold War. The data showed that states in intermediate levels of democracy—undergoing democratic transition—did not “show significantly better respect for physical integrity rights than those with no democracy.”

The policies of the major powers have not always helped in the promotion and protection of human rights in Africa. The European Union countries and the United States are the most critical players in this regard. In the 1990s the official rhetoric of western governments put a premium on the promotion of democracy as a necessary condition for development, and economic assistance was increasingly tied to political conditionalities for good governance and respect for human rights. Notwithstanding these declarations, the argument seems compelling that the conditionalities were imposed “to ensure a continued minimum of popular support for aid, since development assistance had lost most of its political rationale with the ending of the Cold War.” It could be added that conditionalities were also a means of currying favor and co-opting African pro-democracy movements that often called for the suspension of foreign aid to accelerate the collapse of the besieged dictatorial regimes.

It is tempting to see western rhetoric about democracy and human rights as part of the discursive arsenal of neo-colonialism in the post Cold War era, invoking earlier discourses of “civilization” and “modernization” and wielded as weapons of mass deception for voting publics in the global North and the victimized peoples of the global South. The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, removed the rhetorical gloves and exposed the primacy of the naked fist of national security for the world’s self-proclaimed champion of democracy.

The changing contexts of militarism have serious implications for democratization and human rights in terms of the impact of military expenditures in general and its effects on people’s security in particular. For contemporary Africa, militarism manifests itself primarily through internal conflicts and wars and the U.S. led war against terrorism, both of which are deleterious for building and consolidating cultures of democracy and respect for human rights.
Military expenditures have been expanding worldwide, all in the age-old names of national security and independence. Total global military expenditures grew by 18 percent between 1994 and 2003, from $742 billion to $879 billion, 2.4 percent of the world’s total gross domestic product. Although no African country was among the world’s 15 largest military spenders led by the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and China, in that order, four were among the twenty with the highest military burdens as a share of GDP, led by Eritrea 23.5 percent, Burundi 7.6 percent, Liberia 7.5 percent, and Ethiopia 5.2 percent. Not surprisingly, the expenditures on health and education were much lower in these countries.
High military expenditures undermine economic well-being by diverting invaluable human, material, and financial resources. The trade off between defense and growth is well-established: “It has been estimated that for every 1 percent of GNP devoted to military spending, overall economic growth is reduced by about 0.5 percent.” “The result is a diversion,” contends William Felice, “of resources away from the collective human rights of education, health care and subsistence. The implementation of basic economic and social rights depends upon a shift in scare resources away from militarism and towards these areas of human need.”
As for warfare itself, of which Africa has suffered its fare share, it has a dreadful impact on people through direct and indirect deaths and injuries, sexual crimes and intimidation, population dislocations within and across national borders, the damage and distortions caused to societal networks and the fragile social capital of trust and interpersonal associations and intergroup interactions, not to mention the devastation of the ecosystem, agricultural lands and wildlife, the destruction of society’s material and mechanical infrastructures, the outflow of resources including “capital flight” and “brain drain,” the proliferation of pathological and self-destructive behaviors, and the deterioration in the aesthetic quality of life.
This offers a compelling reason for rethinking the concept of “security” tied to militarism, which at best creates the negative peace of deterrence, rather than the positive peace and security that can only arise from the elimination of the causes of war and violence and the protection of human rights and social justice within countries as well as between countries. Unfortunately, after September 11, 2001, with the U.S. led war against terrorism the world, including Africa, entered a particularly dangerous phase in the promotion and protection of human rights and development.
America’s sanctimonious crusade against terrorism including its illegal invasion of Iraq on the false premises that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction has caused grievous damage to international law and human rights principles and standards in the United States itself and worldwide. Many people around the world see the U.S. administration, to use the words of the Council on Foreign Relations, “as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and contemptuous of others.” To many the U.S. behaves as much of a rogue state as the states it condemned as the “axis of evil.” The imposition of a stringent homeland security regime at home threatened the civil liberties of U.S. citizens and the rights of immigrants especially Muslims and people of “Middle Eastern” appearance.
The scandals of the “legal black hole” at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba Abu Ghraib in Baghdad with its pornographic images of torture, primal degradation, and gratuitous humiliation of Iraq prisoners unleashed a wave of worldwide dismay, contempt, and anger against the United States. These actions threatened to undermine the counter-terrorism measures by invoking the very instrumentalities of terrorism in their disregard for human rights, in ostensibly pursuing security at the expense of respect for human dignity. They also provided alibis for governments including many in Africa, as well as international agencies, to violate or vitiate their human rights commitments and to tighten asylum laws and policies.
Many governments rushed to pass broadly, badly or cynically worded anti-terrorism laws and other draconian procedural measures, and set up special courts or allowed special rules of evidence that violate fair trial rights, which they used to limit civil rights and freedoms, and to harass, intimidate, and imprison and crackdown on political opponents. This helped to strengthen or restore a culture of impunity among the security services in many countries. Amnesty International has issued reports critical of new draft anti-terrorism laws in several countries from Kenya to Tunisia that threaten to undermine international human rights standards. African friends and foes of the United States have been basking in the new climate of intolerance and impudence. The war on terror had another collateral damage for Africa: it has inflamed, as the Human Rights Watch 2002 report noted, “pre-existing political tensions between Muslim and Christian populations in a number of African countries” from Côte d’Ivoire to Ethiopia to Kenya to Nigeria to South Africa and to Tanzania.
The contexts and conditions examined above make it quite difficult for the promotion and protection of human rights. The problematic nature of human rights is of course not confined to the practice of human rights, but is inherent in the very definition, the discourses of human rights. The tendency has been to divide human rights, to valorize some and dismiss others. I believe, quite strongly, that it is futile and unproductive to seal rights in strict confinements, to sequester them in dichotomies and polarities, for all forms of human rights are ultimately interrelated, interdependent, and indivisible.
As I have noted at length elsewhere, human rights discourses often suffer from four analytical traps. They tend to be idealistic, legalistic, dualistic, and ethnocentric; idealistic in that human rights are reduced to ideas abstracted from social history, so that they are seen as the outcome of concepts not conflicts, insights not instigations, philosophy not politics; legalistic in that their provenance is primarily located in the courts not culture, procedure not practice, rhetoric not reality, codes not contingency; dualistic in that they either polarize or prioritize civil and political rights against economic and social rights and vice-versa; and ethnocentric in that their source is usually located in the West by both the universalists and relativists. The simple truth of the matter is that human rights have evolved out of concrete historical conditions and struggles, not simply textual or legal disputations, and they will continue to do so as human societies and needs change and new challenges and threats emerge, and there is no intrinsic reason that one set of rights—political and civil or economic and cultural rights—is inherently superior in promoting and protecting human dignity. In short, the internationalization and universalization of human rights is an ongoing process to which all world regions and cultures will continue to make contributions.
Particularly unfruitful has been the debate between human rights universalism and relativism. The advocates and proponents of the two positions, whether framed in North-South oppositions or among radicals and conservatives within specific regions and countries, are essentially engaged in the production of ideological hegemony, each providing alibis for their respective governments and movements. It is well to remember that during the Cold War relativist interpretations of human rights suited western interests in dealings with Third World dictatorships. It was only after the end of the Cold War that the West became uncompromisingly universalist, now in pursuit of its global capitalist agenda, which it was prepared to defend at the cost of violating the same freedoms and democracy it purported to advocate. In the meantime, leaders in the South, boxed between western pressures and popular struggles for democratization and human rights reacted by espousing more and more relativist positions. Thus, different groups have supported the relativist and universalist perspectives at different times, rendering each one of them a potential tool of both oppression and liberation depending on the context.
Contestations of human rights are not new even within specific regions, including in the so-called western world where different ideological and political traditions and perspectives—religious vs. secular, liberal vs. Marxist, nationalist vs. internationalist, philosophical vs. pragmatic—have battled for supremacy for a long time. Indeed, it is ultimately counterproductive to turn the idea of human rights into “Western”, “Asian”, “African” or “Islamic”, for that would turn the language of human rights “into a rhetorical weapon for intercultural competition…. What is needed…is a critical defense of universal human rights in a way that gives room for different cultural and religious interpretations and, at the same time, avoids the pitfalls of cultural essentialism.”
Certainly human rights are not organic to or a natural result of a fictive western tradition going back to ancient Greece, a teleological narrative of retrospective appropriation that is fundamentally ahistorical and intellectually flawed. An international human rights regime will only emerge out of what Heiner Bielefeldt calls “a cross-cultural ‘overlapping consensus’ on basic normative standards in our increasingly multicultural societies.” The idea of “human dignity”—ridiculed by some as characteristic of societies that have yet to develop a concept of “human rights” is the only thread that connects the world’s different religious, philosophical, and cultural traditions. And human dignity for the human person with his/her multiple dimensions must surely encompass multiple rights.
The division and hierarchy of rights emerged out of international ideological struggles after the end of the Second World War, many of them played out in the confines of the United Nations (UN). In the early years of the UN, the U.S. and its allies were dominant and they succeeded in splitting the proposed human rights covenant into two, one for CPR, which they championed, and the other for ESCR, which found loud support in the Soviet Union and among its allies and the emerging Third World, despite a resolution by the UN General Assembly that the two groups of rights were “interconnected and interdependent.” In the 1960s many of the organs of the UN, including those involved in the institutionalization of human rights norms such as the UN Commission for Human Rights (UNCHR) were increasingly dominated by Third World countries organized around the Non-Aligned Movement. The early 1970s were the heydays of Third World militancy and demands were made for the restructuring of the international system. It was in this context that in 1972 a Senegalese jurist, Kéba Mbaye, proclaimed the right to development (RTD), which was adopted seven years later by the UNCHR. Soon other rights, for example to peace and a protected environment were added to the repertoire of what came to be known as solidarity rights (SR).
This gave rise to the notion that there were three generations of rights, a loose analytical construction proposed by scholars that soon acquired a rigid ideological life of its own that has been unproductive for human rights discourse. According to this schema, CPR are first generation rights apparently rooted in eighteenth century bourgeois revolutions in France and the United States (never mind that in the U.S. many CPR rights like the right to vote only came in 1920 for white women and in 1965 for racial minorities); ESCR then constitute second generation rights and their paternity was awarded to the socialist revolutions of the early twentieth century (forget the strong commitment to these rights by the Roosevelts that was overtaken by anti-communist paranoia in the U.S. in the 1950s); and development rights are supposedly part of third generation solidarity rights that emerged from anticolonial revolutions after the Second World War (how about earlier nationalist struggles in nineteenth century Latin America and elsewhere also motivated by the desire for national independence and development?).
It is often said the first generation rights are negative rights (requiring states to protect individual autonomy and freedom), while the second and third are positive rights (requiring states to promote collective well-being). These distinctions are not entirely false. Certainly western countries have been the chief proselytizers of CPR, while ESCR found particular favor among socialist countries, and RTD is deeply cherished by many in the global South including Africa. Their implementation also entails different things, in the case of CPR limiting state intrusions while in the case of ESCR and RTD expanding state interventions. Broadly stated the former are freedom claims the latter resource claims. But there is really no Chinese wall that separates these claims in terms of their spatial provenance, let alone in their import for human dignity and security.
The search for hierarchy among rights is not only driven by ideological contestations, but also by the fact that, as Theodore Meron has argued, “national legal systems are characterized by a well-established hierarchy of norms.” It is extremely difficult to create widely accepted criteria or standards to choose between what some see as fundamental human rights and other rights and select the fundamental human rights. More often than not, the characterizations of fundamental rights pander to subjective preferences based on national traditions and aspirations. This is one more reason for jettisoning regional ethnocentricities and developing bases and processes of norm setting that involve as much of the international community as possible.
This is what is sometimes called an interpretive approach that valorizes cross-cultural dialogue as the most viable means of constructing an international human rights regime. Some believe that the proliferation of human rights instruments makes it necessary to establish a list of nonderogable rights and ranking such rights ahead of derogable rights. But Abdullahi An-Na’im argues forcefully that “to affirm the full human rights quality of ESCR, it is necessary to abandon any classification of human rights, and approach the implementation of each specific right on its own terms, instead of limiting it to what is deemed appropriate for one purported class of rights or another.”
The state has a responsibility to ensure the promotion and protection of human rights principles, norms, and instruments. Civil society also has a role to play through its struggles and participation in building a human rights culture. In examining the nexus between the state and human rights we can look at the articulation of human rights in terms of recognition and enforcement, the levels at which the norms are articulated from domestic to the regional to the continental and the global, and the coordination between the forms and levels of articulation.
There is a high level of human rights norm recognition in African constitutions including a distinctive emphasis on duties and social economic rights. According to Christof Heyns and Frans Viljoen, “most African states have ratified many of the six most important United Nations human rights treaties,” with rates of between 21 percent and 29 percent of global ratification totals. As for regional instruments, Africa together with Europe and the Americas are the only regions with regional human rights protection systems. The African regional system is anchored on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which recognizes both civil and political rights and social and economic rights as well as rights and duties.
But enforcement is relatively weak. The enforcement mechanism through the Commission on Human and Peoples’ rights, for example, remains problematic. Charged with promoting and protecting the rights in the Charter, the Commission has been particularly slow in implementing its protective mandate, partly because of its rather low funding and staffing levels, and the difficulties of guaranteeing effective regional diversity and independence of the Commissioners. Above all, the Charter itself needs to be revised to reflect new circumstances and improve its enforceability. Also, the development of subregional institutions and an indigenous African human rights jurisprudence and enforcement system are crucial.
The domestic level is the most important in the protection of human rights, followed by the regional and global systems. The domestic level has the benefit of direct enforcement and the regional has the advantage of peer pressure that the global often lacks. The sub-regional economic associations such as ECOWAS, SADC, the Maghreb Union, and the Common Market of Southern and Eastern African States (COMESA) tend to be quite weak in their human rights norm recognition and enforcement. As we noted earlier, the AU is trying to strengthen its human rights promotion and protection mechanisms through the creation of various instruments. The effectiveness of these mechanisms and their capacity to facilitate the coordination of human rights norm recognition and enforcement among its member states have yet to be proven.
The interface between civil society and human rights raises many complex issues about the nature of African civil societies, the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as the most developed forms of civil society engagement in human rights discourses and practice, and the question of popular participation as mediated by the social inscriptions and hierarchies of gender, class, religion, and language. Even if one does not agree with Eke’s and Mamdani’s characterization of African civil societies as bifurcated, the fact remains, whatever measures are used, civil societies have expanded; the ties that bind the multicultural societies of African nations together and the tensions that tear them apart are extraordinarily complex requiring deft strategies of community and conflict management in which respect for human rights must rank high indeed as a powerful adhesive of common citizenship and a dissolvent of communal conflicts.
In the last two decades human rights NGOs have emerged as powerful instruments in Africa’s drive for the promotion of human rights and development. The proliferation of NGOs is one of the truly remarkable stories of African social and political transformation. The NGO movement is both a progenitor and product of Africa’s democratization. But the euphoria that once greeted NGOs has been replaced by more sober assessment of the challenges they face. Makau Mutua is particularly critical of human rights NGOs. He charges that many of them are replicas of their northern counterparts in their organization, objectives, tactics and strategies. Indeed, they are largely dependent on Northern resources and support.
While the international human rights NGOs have made positive contributions to, and some have worked in partnership with, African NGOs, Mutua believes that the relationship has been characterized mostly by paternalism and dependency which limits the capacity of African NGOs to undertake independent initiatives, address the human rights needs of their societies in an integrated manner by going beyond the obsession with their civil and political rights and incorporating violations and promoting economic, social and cultural rights, developing more fruitful South-South cooperation and networking, and cultivating local sources and structures of support, without which their long term future is doomed.
Claude Welch is more sanguine about the nature of North-South NGO relations. He thinks there is a growing solidarity of purpose between indigenous and international NGOs and between some NGOs and members of society. He shows, for example, that the International Commission of Jurists—once headed by Senegalese Adama Deng—played a critical role in the preparation and ratification of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. Similarly, Amnesty International—also once headed by Senegalese Pierre Sané—and the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch have moved increasingly toward cooperation with indigenous NGOs in their investigations and reporting. On the whole, he stresses, human rights NGOs have made significant accomplishments, although he concedes that they tend to be small in size, limited in budget, cluster in urban areas, concentrate on civil and political rights, and are dependent on external sources.
The two positions find echoes in many other studies of human rights NGOs. Clearly, the missions and roles of NGOs change with new circumstances. This is no better illustrated than in South Africa where NGOs played a crucial role in the country’s tumultuous transition from apartheid to democracy. During the 1980s, when their numbers expanded, NGOs were not merely non-governmental, but anti-government, and were an integral part of the mass democratic movement. With the demise of apartheid in the 1990s, the NGOs found themselves in uncharted waters: donor support dwindled, some of their leaders joined the state bureaucracy, the new constitution adopted extensive human rights provisions, including a Bill of Rights, and the government established human rights monitoring and enforcement agencies, including a Human Rights Commission. South African NGOs had to redefine their role.
The question of popular participation goes beyond formal associations such as NGOs of course. The mediations of gender, class and religion and other similar social registers are quite important. Given the limitations of time, it would not be possible to discuss fully the ways that class, gender, religion, age and generation have affected and been affected by struggles for democratization, human rights and development in contemporary Africa, except to underscore that they are essential for a comprehensive understanding. It might be pointed out, for example, that the growth of the women’s movement has been critical to struggles for human rights in many African countries, but as the women’s movement has expanded it has become more differentiated in its composition, objectives and tendencies, incorporating within its ranks associations of presidents’ wives, middle class professionals, women traders, peasant women, working class women, income generating activities and cultural organizations.
Similarly, African class formations have been drastically altered by the recessions and reforms of the last two decades that have implications for human rights struggles. Public sector employees have witnessed retrenchment and pauperization, while new entrepreneurial classes have emerged tied to new sectors from information and communication services to private education and health provision. Ordinary workers in particular have faced considerable difficulties as their real wages have fallen or stagnated, but African labor movements have remained at the forefront of the struggles for democracy and progressive social change. With democratization, the conditions for labor organization have improved in law as the corporatist chains of state control have loosened, but become more difficult in practice as employment security has declined thanks to economic liberalization.
Religious movements have also been a crucial part of Africa’s changing cultural and political economies. As noted earlier, the fallout of America’s war on terror has affected Christian-Muslim relations in several countries. No less important, religious groups, both Christian and Muslim, were critical to struggles against state tyranny in the 1980s and 1990s, as they were often the last public spaces to be directly confronted by the state, even if they might harbor their own intolerant visions of reordering society. And the youth—the majority of the African population—have embodied in their restlessness, rebelliousness, apparent delinquency and cosmopolitan affectations the failures and reconfigurations of the postcolonial project, suggesting in their behaviors, actions and pleasures new expressions of political action both violent and non-violent, formal and informal, and desperate desires to escape the bankrupt political and moral discourses, the increasingly sterile obligations of state and gerontocratic power that has robbed them of the long-jaded promises of independence, and to fashion new patterns of socialization and sociability, associational and political commitments, and new aesthetics and idioms of empowerment, living, belonging and citizenship.
At the heart of the drive for human rights in Africa is a linguistic conundrum, the continued supremacy of European languages and the relative marginality of local languages in official human rights discourses. Two issues are at stake, the language of law, that is, the language of politics, the courts, and human rights instruments and documents, and the question of linguistic rights—the rights of languages and to languages—that are crucial for the exercise of freedom of speech and the import of that freedom. Alamin Mazrui has deplored the fact that the entire discourse on human rights is trapped in a European linguistic idiom, which has grave consequences for African human rights culture and consciousness. The imperial languages were introduced to Africa as media of command, not of rights, and after they had shed that role they remained languages of a middle class minority patronized by the West and well attuned to its liberal or neo-liberal doctrines.
Barred from this middle class linguistic enclosure, the ordinary masses, proficient in their own languages that are not languages of the law, government and business, are prevented from influencing the reconceptualizing of the dominant human rights discourse. Indeed, they are excluded from full participation in public affairs, whether parliaments or the courts, and African languages are denied the opportunity to develop a robust legislative and human rights register. Linguistic alienation from the law, Mazrui concludes, may be a major cause of the failure of democracy and human rights culture to take deep roots on the continent.
The challenges of expanding and deepening human rights cultures in Africa are as multifaceted as the contexts that shape them. In this paper I have tried to argue and demonstrate that while considerable improvements have been made in many parts of the continent in terms of democratization, which has improved the prospects for human rights in general, the constraints against human rights and their realization in all their indivisible multiplicity—civil and political rights, economic and social rights, cultural and development rights, and solidarity rights—remain daunting. But we cannot allow ourselves as progressive academics, as activist intellectuals, to be daunted by the challenges of demystifying and defining, explaining and enabling the struggles for human rights in our beloved Africa.

2008-04-08T16:01:00.001+02:00

Zanu PF Power Politics and the Political Seduction of the Electoral Commission

2008-04-08T12:37:00.002+02:00

It is a sad development chapter in the political history of the country that the incumbent ruling party, holding all levers of power, has failed the electorate in all material respects. This comes in the wake that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), the so-called “independent” body has; to date; not announced to the electorate the outcome of the Presidential Elections that were held 11 days ago. Their reason for the delay is that they were and still are meticulously perusing the results. It is baffling and mind boggling if one appreciates the amount of time that has lapsed by now and one still wonders when the so-called verification process will come to an end. The masses of the people are now troubled and bedeviled as to why the issue is taking so long to be finalized.

Today the 8th of April 2008 the Zanu PF mouthpiece, The Herald, reports that ZEC officials have been arrested for rigging the Presidential elections in favour of the opposition. It is not surprising that this comes in the wake of a pending case that has been lodged at the High Court by the Opposition MDC seeking an order to compel ZEC to release the results for the presidential election. The idea of coming up with such frivolous and vexatious allegations is to circumvent the Judge to pronounce judgment in favour of the opposition thereby facilitating the machinery of rigging by the ruling party to the detriment of the opposition MDC. It is not surprising that the Judge had to postpone the ruling to today to enable him to “consult” with Zanu PF on key political considerations. While I am not yet privy to the outcome of the MDC petition it is my prediction that the outcome will be in favour of the ZEC.

It cannot be assailed that Zanu PF is determined to continue in office notwithstanding the outcome of the electoral results. Elections in Zimbabwe are just a moralistic window dressing gimmick that is designed to hoodwink the international community that the country has democratic credentials yet in actual fact it is presided over by tin pot dictators who do not want to relinquish power notwithstanding any defeat at the electoral contests. The 29th March 2008 election was a classical opportunity for the opposition to take the reigns of this country but because of the machinations of this greedy rapacious rich elite in the Zanu PF circles it is a missed opportunity. And the failure by ZEC to be accountable to the Zimbabwean populace is evidence of the underhand dealing of Zanu PF in the supposedly independent Commission. This is a classical case of pure political seduction of state institutions so that they save the interests of the ruling elite that has continued to plunder Zimbabwean resources from 1980 to date without genuinely ploughing back to the communities that they allege to have elected them into office.

Is there a way forward for the people of Zimbabwe to claim their right? Obviously the opposition and its masses should be aware of the limitations of putting their trust in state institutions like the Judiciary at this momentous epoch in the constitutional history of the country. It is now trite and banal that there is no instance in which the Judiciary can protect our rights to the fullest because it has got its own limitations. The ramparts of defence against tyranny ultimately lie in the hearts of "we the people." During the colonial era the liberation struggle was fought to reclaim our birthright and not to allow a chosen few to plunder our heritage. What then fails us to rise up and reclaim our rights against this elitist class that has reduced the once vibrant economy into such doldrums? Freedom comes with a price!It therefore needs the Zimbabwean populace to stand up and rise against the tyrant.

Zimbabwe's Political Watershed: Is Mugabe's End Nigh?

2008-04-07T10:02:00.000+02:00

As of now, results for the presidential elections in Zimbabwe have not yet been declared, five days after the elections were held last Saturday, March 29. In the meantime, the results of the parliamentary elections, which had been announced at snail's pace by the Electoral Commission over the past few days are now complete. They show that President Mugabe's ruling party, ZANU-PF, has lost its parliamentary majority. The opposition party, MDC, has won 99 to ZANU-PF's 97 out of 210 parliamentary seats. Eleven other seats were won by an MDC splinter group, and one by an independent candidate. Thus the opposition has won 110; three seats remain to be contested in by-elections because they were postponed following the death of opposition candidates. The ruling party's loss of its parliamentary majority represents a shockwave in Zimbabwe's post-independence political history.

But the real earthquake would be President Mugabe's downfall. Thus, as crucial as the parliamentary elections are, it is the results of the presidential elections that everyone is waiting for with mounting anxiety. The Electoral Commission is appealing for patience and blames logistical problems in releasing the results. But all the evidence including the very delay in the announcement of the results indicates that the irascible octogenarian dictator, President Mugabe, is, at the very least, trailing the veteran opposition leader, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai. In previous presidential elections (which were held separately from parliamentary elections) the predictable (the opposition would say predictably rigged) outcome was announced with a lot more alacrity and fanfare. Even more likely is the probability that President Mugabe has lost and his regime is trying to rig the elections. Outright rigging of the results will be difficult, but not impossible, because of a pre-election agreement among the parties that results should be posted outside each polling station: the opposition insisted on this to avoid blatant rigging that it suspected robbed it of victory in previous elections.

In the immediate ecstasy of the elections, the MDC claimed outright victory, that Mr. Tsvangirai had decisively beaten President Mugabe by 60% to 30%. Perusal and sampling of 435 of the 9,400 polling stations by the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of civic groups, projected a more modest victory by the MDC leader. It indicated that Mr. Tsvangirai would receive between 47-51.8 percent to President Mugabe's 39.2-44.4 percent. In its latest announcement the MDC claims its leader has won 50.3 percent of the vote to President Mugabe's 43.8 percent. This is crucial figure: to avoid a runoff, the winner has to garner more than 50 percent of the popular vote. While conceding that the President failed to win 50 percent of the vote, for the first time in his twenty eight year reign, the government mouthpiece, The Herald, insists neither did Mr. Tsvangirai, thus making a runoff election later this month inevitable (according to the law, a runoff election has to be held in 21 days).

Zimbabwe and the wider southern African region, not to mention the rest of the continent and the so-called international community, are watching this unfolding political drama with intense interest and growing trepidation. In the absence of the presidential results, rumors are rife: about the shock and tensions within the ruling party with some of his lieutenants reportedly ready to ditch him, that there are negotiations between the opposition and the embattled president's advisors to ease him into resignation and retirement, and about the unpredictable machinations and loyalties of the security chiefs.

Expectations that the despised autocrat was too humiliated to stay are now giving way to fears that he will hang on and fight in the runoff election. Many political commentators believe that he will be trounced in a new election that is free and fair. That is the big question: will the mortally wounded tyrant be allowed by his security forces and political cronies who are running scared of losing their ill-gotten wealth built on the carcasses of deepening poverty of millions of workers and peasants, not to mention the immiseration of significant sections of the middle classes, to unleash the wrath of state power to terrorize the opposition into defeat?

Whatever happens next, it is not hard to explain the defeat of ZANU-PF and President Mugabe in the recent elections. A government that has impoverished its population as spectacularly as President Mugabe's inept dictatorship has done cannot maintain popular support. Zimbabwe's descent into the economic abyss has been staggering for a country not at war: inflation has apparently risen to a mindboggling rate of 164,900 percent, life expectancy has nearly been halved, and between a quarter and a third of the population has fled to neighboring countries and overseas. In this election Zimbabweans have shown that they have had enough of the Mugabe government's bankrupt stewardship of their well-being.

Predictable as it may seem from afar and in hindsight, what explains the opposition's victory is that support for President Mugabe's government finally collapsed in the rural areas, its political backbone since the liberation war from settler colonialism. It was in the enduring interests of repossessing land stolen by the European settlers under colonial rule and in the endearing name of the peasantry that the liberation war was fought and the violent land seizures embarked upon from the late 1990s after the British government reneged on the Lancaster House agreement and as the Mugabe government lost became increasingly unpopular thanks to its embrace of structural adjustment and abandonment of radical development policies including land reform. Yet, the peasantry benefited little from either, whose principal beneficiaries were functionaries of the political class. The urban working classes had long grown disenchanted with the tired socialist rhetoric of ZANU-PF which promised broad-based development but delivered unfettered neo-liberalism that benefited the elite that fragrantly flaunted its affluence as the country has sunken deeper into economic decline.

The rural peasantry did not simply catch up, as it were, with the urban working classes. Rural discontent has been growing. Indeed, the rural areas bore the brunt of economic decline and political terror as the regime sought to shore up its dwindling legitimacy and tattered revolutionary credentials by tightening its grip on the peasantry, its symbolic and substantive basis of power. The costs of the economic crisis, as manifested in food shortages and the politicization of food relief efforts, finally broke the proverbial patient backs of the peasantry.

Connecting the two, the peasantry and the working classes, the rural and the urban areas, and the country's other spatial and social divides, including the ethnicized divisions between the old Mashonaland and Matabeleland, which the Mugabe regime had manipulated to weaken the opposition and maintain its iron grip on power, was the draconian "Operation Murambatsvina", officially translated as "Operation Clean Up", but literally translated as "getting rid of the filth", through which the government sought to drain the cities including Harare, the capital, of political opposition. The operation was launched in 2005 and affected more than two million people. The bulk of the MDC's parliamentary seats from previous elections were located in the cities. This criminal evacuation program, which was widely condemned within Zimbabwe and internationally including by the United Nations, led to the destruction of the informal sector in the cities and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people many of whom flocked to the increasingly destitute rural areas. This not only exacerbated rural poverty, but also helped dissolve some of the social and political boundaries, both real and imagined, between the rural and urban areas and dwellers, which raised national consciousness and reinforced opposition to the former liberation heroes turned into predators in power.

If we are indeed witnessing the death throes of the Mugabe dictatorship, the full credit for this goes to the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe, not the so-called international community, neither feeble regional organizations like SADC nor imperious western powers such as Britain or the United States who have little moral credibility in Africa's protracted struggles for democracy. It is also a testimony to the transformative power of the ballot box. But as we have seen across Africa and elsewhere where dictatorship have fallen, the electoral process offers, at best, minimal conditions for democracy; full democracy, which is still a work in progress globally notwithstanding the conceit of the so-called mature democracies, must entail political and economic enfranchisement for all that goes beyond ritualized certifications of fractions of the political class every four or five years. And that requires eternal vigilance by civil society, continuous struggles against the self-serving political class. This is to suggest that sustaining and expanding democracy in Zimbabwe will be as hard as getting rid of the Mugabe dictatorship. Given its social composition and the present regional and global conjunctures, the MDC will not, if and when it takes power, magically turn Zimbabwe around into a developmental democratic state and society: that will require building and sustaining cultures and communities of accountability.

DEMOCRACY

2008-03-04T13:33:00.000+02:00

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

~ Langston Hughes

Zimbabwe: A Failed State

2008-01-10T15:58:00.000+02:00

Once upon a time there was country called Zimbabwe. It was a country that was born out of the ruthless and brutal white minority Rhodesia. Like that biblical Canaan, it was a land flowing with honey and milk. Like many other countries in Africa Zimbabwe as we know it today is still regarded as a developing country. The term ‘‘developing usually denotes a situation where a nation is posting a positive growth in the GDP. It also entails a qualitative development in the lifestyles of the people of that nation. A question to be posed at this juncture is: Can Zimbabwe still be regarded as a developing country at this point in the history of this country? To any disciple of the events that have taken center stage in the last decade the obvious and unassailable response will be a big NO. It will be doing gross injustice to the conscience of humanity to continually ascribe the term ‘‘developing” to present day Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe as we know it today is a pale gloomy shadow of the same post colonial state which was characterized by relative economic growth notwithstanding the violent disturbances that took place in those early formative years. For the past decade the country has been falling tremendously into the conundrums of economic doldrums. These economic difficulties instigated the flight of capital, massive migration of both skilled and unskilled labourforce to other countries both regionally and internationally, and also a daunting deterioration in the standards of living of the generality of the population due to poor service delivery from various sectoral institutions of the state.

It is interesting to note that Zimbabweans have come up with sarcastic yet intriguing acronyms due to the myriad of economic challenges bedeviling the country. The very first one is derived from the name of the country itself. The name ZIMBABWE has been coined to mean Zero Income Mainly Because Able Bodied Workers Emigrated. The short of this is that there is no development taking place in the country in terms of output from different sectors of the economy due to lack of labourforce which is a direct effect of rampant emigration. Another interesting word, MONEY, has been regarded as the abbreviated form to mean Mugabe Organizes Nothing Every Year. This is a direct castigation of the Mugabe regime for the propagation of unworkable policies that have brought more harm than good to the country. ZESA (Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority) has been crafted to mean Zimbabwe Electricity Sometimes Available indicating that on many occasions Zimbabweans are living in the darkness due to the erratic supplies of electricity hence the country has been duped the ‘‘dark country”. The list of these acronyms is endless and abound. Underlying this sarcastic ‘‘acronyms” is the unquestionable gloomy picture of the little southern African country that for the past decade has and still faces a receding economy due to the engineering and implementation of economic policies that are devoid of any economic fundamentals for the development of the country.

Many theories have been put forward in regard to the downfall of Zimbabwe which until the inception of the land reform in the late 90s was regarded as the leading example of a successful nascent and developing democratic country destined for greater heights in Africa south of Sahara. Today Zimbabwe is a country that is riddled in grand corruption, economic meltdown, shrinking democratic space and also poor service delivery in terms of health, education and other services. This has resulted in untold suffering of the masses of the people who have had and are still bearing the burden of this. A labyrinth of state institutions has been reduced to a sham. Take for example the justice delivery system. Litigants will have to wait for months if not years to have their cases finalized. Justice itself is not being done not only because of delays in justice administration but also because of systemic corruption which has taken center stage in the system as judicial officers accept bribes to augment their paltry salaries.

The educational and health sectors have been hard hit by large scale migration of labour to greener pastures in the region in particular South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. Universities and colleges are now being manned by less qualified lecturers and in some cases other departments and faculties have been closed down due to lack of qualified personnel. The health sector apart from the loss of skilled workers also suffers from lack of drugs and equipment due to poor budget allocations as large sums are channeled towards security issues.

The fast track land reform programme has proved to be a national disaster. Zimbabwe, which was once venerated as the breadbasket of Africa, is now leading the whole of Africa in begging for food. It cannot be overemphasized that the individuals who seized the farms are only ‘‘professional land occupiers” who do not possess the technical know how and expertise to put the land into productive use for the benefit of the nation as a whole. More so, the readily available farming inputs from the government are always channeled into informal markets instead of being used for farming.

It is therefore unassailable that the problems that beset Zimbabwe today primarily stem from misgovernance, grand corruption on the part of those who wield political power, self-aggrandizement and poor economic policy planning. The resultant effect has been the downward spiral at unprecedented levels of the Zimbabwe economy. This has resulted in the decline of quality service delivery in terms of health, education, finance, justice administration and a whole lot of other services. And who suffer? Obviously the majority of the ordinary people are the ones who are reduced to mere inanities.

Zimbabwe is now in a class of its own. It cannot be regarded as a developing country as all pointers indicate that all sectors of the economy are moving albeit in a negative direction. Zimbabwe therefore categorically fits in a class of failed states. There is no possibility of resurrection under the present leadership that has proved itself to run out of ideas to rejuvenate the country to a path of economic recovery. They view the country as a private limited that exist to generate profits for themselves at the impoverishment of the majority of the plebiscite.

2008-01-09T18:00:00.000+02:00

RULING PARTY AND OPPOSITION POLITICS IN ZIMBABWE: CHALLENGES FOR DEMOCRACY.

Diderot, the great French encyclopaedist of the 18th century once said that every age has its dominant idea. In African political systems in general and in Zimbabwe in particular, democracy is the dominant idea of this 21st century. That Zimbabwe is in a serious political, constitutional and socio-economic quagmire cannot be assailed. It has been noted the world over that the acid test for democracy in a country at any given time can only be measured in a situation where the socio-economic and political conditions of that country are in the doldrums.

Since the Harare Heads of State meeting of October 1991, fostering democracy in the Commonwealth countries has been the dominant preoccupation of different States (Zimbabwe by then had not yet ex-communicated itself from the Commonwealth). How to consolidate democracy and make it durable has been and still is the greatest challenge facing many African countries, especially Zimbabwe which, to say the least seems to be regressing in that respect. The Harare Heads of States meeting of October 1991 was very clear on the merits of democracy as a system of government. From the deliberations of that meeting, it was also equally clear that democracy could not take a standard or uniform format in all African countries but that it has to take different forms to reflect national circumstances in different regions.

However, the point must be stressed that whatever national variations, a true democracy would be judged and recognized by the presence of a number of essential universal ingredients. These include the right of a people to choose freely the men and women who would govern them and to cashier them, the primacy of the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary; freedom of expression and association and the continuing transparency and accountability of the government. At the heart of any democracy lies accountability. Where there is no accountability there is really no democracy. It is society’s insurance against abuse of office on the part of those who form government at any given time. Accountability can only be enforced if the governed have the power to make and unmake governments.

Democracy is essentially about choice – choice of policies articulated by parties and choice of personalities. This freedom of choice is meaningless without free and fair elections. Free elections in turn entail freedom of speech and association. Without freedom of speech, the appeal to reason, which is the basis of democracy, cannot be made. Without freedom of association, meaningful political parties are practically inconceivable because in the absence of freedom of association and assembly it is difficult for people to band together into parties and formulate policies to achieve their common ends. Moreover, none of these freedoms can be secured without the rule of law and the independent judiciary. An independent and honest judiciary has an importance that cannot be overemphasized. Where the judiciary is either corrupt or incompetent; elections, accountability fundamental human rights and all other rights guaranteed by the constitution become in effect illusory.

A situation in which the activity of politics is devalued is inimical to democracy. Democracy after all is about debate. It is also about the right to dissent in a civilized manner. Political parties provide the necessary platform for constructive criticism of government policies. Genuine political opposition is a necessary attribute of democracy, tolerance and trust in the ability of citizens to resolve differences by peaceful means. The existence of an opposition without which politics ceases and administration takes over, is indispensable to the functioning of efficient political systems.

The division between government and opposition is as old as political democracy itself. In Aristotle’s Athenian polity, the essence of self-government was that citizens were, in turn, both the rulers and the ruled. Government could alternate among different groups of citizens, and the minority could seek to persuade the majority of its point of view by peaceful (i.e. Political) means. In the age of mass politics, direct citizen democracy has been replaced, with rare exceptions, by representative systems providing for periodic elections. In turn, these electoral contests are usually dominated by a small number of political parties, which select their candidates and leaders. What has not changed, however, in our modern liberal democratic society is the hallowed principle that government must rest on the consent of the governed – which means, inter alia, that the minority accepts the right of the majority to make decisions provided that there is reciprocal respect for the minority’s right to dissent from these decisions and promote alternative policies.

It therefore follows as a logical corollary from the above that there can be no genuine or durable democracy without genuine political parties. This prevails notwithstanding the surviving school of thought which underscores that genuine political parties in the present conditions in Africa in general and in Zimbabwe in particular are practically inconceivable and that the foreseeable future ought to lie in a no party or one party system of government of all talents. According to this school of thought in the absence of social and economic conditions of the type which exist in the old democracies in Europe and North America, African political parties (especially opposition parties) are invariably either tribal coalitions or religious groupings or western puppet formations with little or nothing to do with national interest. In short, this means that political parties under prevailing conditions in Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular will make for division and national retardation.

It is my submission that I do not share the same underlying fear and pessimism as expounded above. A no party system can easily degenerate into a no party dictatorship, very much akin to the way the old one party professed democracies quickly degenerated into one party dictatorship. It is my sincere belief that it is possible for agreed national constitutions of pluralistic states to proscribe the formation of political parties based on potentially divisive factors as ethnicity, race or religion. A viable democracy has to evolve organically- it has to evolve through civic education and no institution is better placed to perform the task of civic education than a political party. Inter party rivalry within the law also contributes to the growth of freedom. Modern political parties provide the channels for peaceful competition between one set of ambitions and another. Political parties are then central to democracy and since this has now been accepted in practically the whole of Africa, what needs to be looked at are the respective positions of ruling parties and opposition parties for the advancement of democracy in their respective countries.

In any democratic order or environment, the ruling party derives its mandate to govern from its success at free and fair elections. For a defined term, it has the exclusive responsibility for governing the country but within limits, some defined and enshrined within the provisions of the constitution and related legislation, others subsisting by convention. Because electoral majorities do come and go, no ruling party can plausibly claim to be the sole conscience and sole embodiment of the will of the people, let alone their own prophet and Messiah. Neither does a ruling party claiming to be co-terminous with the state champion the cause of democracy. If these and other excesses are to be avoided, the restraints provided by the Constitution will have to be supplemented by self-restraint on the part of the political parties. Majority parties must be allowed to govern but they must not govern in such a way as to appear to be gathering to themselves all power and influence within the state, thereby denying the rights of the opposition parties. However, the way the opposition parties oppose is equally important.

An opposition political party is part of the institutional machinery for democracy. A loyal and credible opposition is a boon to a country in a number of ways. As a party with an alternative programme for government, an opposition party serves as a peaceful channel for popular discontent. An effective loyal opposition is an effective argument against illegal and extra-constitutional means of gaining power and therefore a force for stability. To be effective and to remain true to the national interest, a government needs the stimulous of constructive and disciplined criticism to perform, and in sustained way, that can only come from a loyal opposition.

But no opposition will confer legitimacy on the government of the day and the other institutions of the state, or make for national stability, if it is not an opposition that is loyal to the interests of the country and the generality of the citizens. And it cannot be a loyal opposition if its manner of opposing is utterly unprincipled or if it seeks to couple constitutionalism with a readiness to exploit unconstitutional means to gain power. If in their respective roles ruling parties and opposition parties were to contribute to the greater good of their nations, they would need to cultivate a relationship based on mutual confidence. That confidence will enable them to agree on what aspects of the national interest transcends the party divides and, therefore, be legitimately withdrawn from inter party strife and brawls; the locus classicus being the British government policy over the Northern Ireland.

It is therefore unassailable that like constitutions, judiciaries and other related institutional frameworks; opposition political parties are also vital for the functioning of democracy. But in the end the point can never be stressed enough that democracy is no more than a system of government by men and women over men and women and, as such requiring for its smooth functioning more than inter party rivalry. Sir Winston Churchill once said that the best way of governing States is by talking. The fact that Zanu PF and the MDC have finally agreed to come to the negotiating table is in itself significant. In a sense, it is in recognition of the different roles each party plays on the political landscape in Zimbabwe. What remains to be seen is how the two parties are to resolve the problems that have bedeviled the whole nation: it being recognized that whatever they agree on, it has to be centered on the legitimate interests of ‘‘we the people’’- the conferers of that political power.

The ouster of the top government lawyer: the AG

2007-12-17T12:59:00.000+02:00

Zimbabweans from all walks of life woke up on Satarday the 15th of December 2007 to meet with the sad news that the Attorney General Sobuza Gula-Ndebele has been suspended by President Mugabe and that a 3 member inquiry comprising 2 judges and a lawyer in private practice has been set up to investigate him and report the findings to the President.The allegations of miscoduct stem from the fact that the AG failed to make a report to the police that he had seen one fugitive banker who was on the police wanted list since the banking blitz of 2004, Mr James Mushore who was wanted by the police for allegedly externalising large amounts of foreign currency through his bank NMB.

The suspension comes in the wake of the battle lines that had been drawn between the AG and the Commissioner of Police after the AG had said that he will not allow unprofessional fingers to run his office . He said that he will only stop to discharge his duties if only he has been relieved of doing so. Ironically, the President the following day temporarily relieved Gula of his duties by way of suspension as if in answer to Gula's sentiments. To students of history the ouster of the top government lawyer should not come as a surprise especially when one looks at the relations that existed between Gula and Chinamasa,the Justice Minister. They were and probably are still raged against each other in sharp antagonism following the prosecution of Chinamasa for obstruction of the course of justice in the Mutasa case and also over the final responsibility of the AG's office with regard the prosecution of offecnces.Gula has been receiving a modicum of respect to all those who are committed to the restoration of the rule of law and respect of fundamental rights and freedoms in Zimbabwe. He attracted the fury of Mugabe because ha had taken a tough stance against abuse of power and authority by many of Mugabe's cronies in the Zanu PF party. This has been evidenced by the high profile cases against Zanu PF heavy weights that he directed to be prosecuted. It is against this background that Gula's fate can be explained. Of late, Gula has been sympathising with his staff who are failing to make ends meet because of the paltry monthly salaries they are getting that cannot cushion them for more than 3 days.

Whatever the reasons Mugabe has for the suspension of the top government lawyer the position is that this is a serious infraction to justice as it flies in the face of the rule of law.Mugabe is well known for disregarding the principle of separation of powers many a time. At one point he once invited judges of the High Court and the Supreme Court to step down or else face the political consequences. This has been instigated by the petition that they had addressed to him to assure the nation that the government was still commited to the rule of law and the respect for the fundamental freedoms of the people. This followed the arrest and torture of two journalists, Mark Chavhunduka and Ray Choto when they reported of the alleged coup story in 1998. the same President who invited the Judges to resign is the one who today has suspended the highest prosecuting authority in the country for alleged miscounduct.

The suspension of Gula Ndebele can only be explained more in political terms than on any other planery. This is buttressed by the fact that Zanu Pf does not want any persons who stands in its way to achieve its goals, moreso if that person is a threat to its continued hold on political power. It remains to be seen what the appointed Commision of Inquiry will come out with and what the fate of the chief Government Legal Advisor will be. Only God knows and not the suffering masses of the majority of Zimbabweans who now spend more time in ques than in the comfort of their homes due to the deepening economic crisis.

Judicial Officers Strike and Human Rights Implications

2007-11-22T14:06:00.000+02:00

Prosecutors and magistrates Zimbabwe have entered the third week with the collective job action. They have petitioned the responsible authorities so that their grievances can be addressed. However the parent ministry, ie, the justice and legal ministry seems complacent of the plight of these officers' right to a just and fair remuneration, as outlined in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Zimbabwe, with an inflationary figure hovering around 8000% has drastically failed to come up with vibrant, economically sound policies to address the fundamental problems that are facing the entire population.

These judicial officers are earning less than a dollar a month yet they are expected to discharge their work efficiently and judiciously. The government has sought to ignore and indeed rubbish the legitimate concerns that are being raised by these officers. This has instigated the fury of the officers due to government insensitivity to their legitimate expectations to be awarded just and fair remuneration. In the process a whole lot of human rights violations are taking place. Prisoners are not being afforded a chance to have their cases completed as magistrates nd prosecutors are continuosly remanding cases. Arrested persons are not being afforded the opportunity to be broughts forward to the courts to have their cases heard. This is a serious burden to the prison service which is already grappling with overpopulation in relation to its capacity. Zimbabwean prisons do have prisoners capacity of around 16 000 yet presently it is reported that they carry around 23 ooo prisoners. This is a serious problem as this brings an array of problems with regards the criminal justice delivery system in Zimbabwe.

Another challenge that faces the prison system is the outbreak of diseases due to overpopulation and lack of medicines and medical personnel to attent to the prisoners. Shortages of foodstuffs that have taken centre stage have also not spared the prisons notwithstanding that they also benefited from the so called land reform programe. From a human rights perspective it is unassailable that Zimbabwe really faces a crisis due to the nationwide strikes which have resultantly brought down the wheels of justice.

Officials from the government have responded by saying that the officers who are not happy with the moneys that they are getting should resign. This is a serious insensitivity that characterises and reinforces that the powers that be are not even concerned with the plight of the workers but are only interested in their wellbeing. They are ignorant or to say the least lack foresight as regards the implications of the ripple effects the strike has not only to the justice system but also to a range of issues including inverstor confidence in the government's policies and willingnessto enter into business ventures and also corruption implications.

It remains to be seen how the government will react in view of the fact that the judicial officers have vowed not to return to work if their concerns are not addressed.