Saturday Argus
April 11, 2009
By Peta Thornycroft
David Coltart, Zimbabwe’s new minister of education, is becoming a touch irritated at the publicity he has received after he chose not to accept a Mercedes-Benz as part of the trappings of his lowly paid job as a minister.
“The Benz is rather tiresome, one of those issues that makes a good story but which has the potential to drive a wedge between me and my colleagues,” he said on Friday.
When he first refused the Benz he said in more light-hearted vein that, if he had accepted it, he would have been too embarrassed to visit his friend, Paul Themba Nyathi, founding member of the MDC.
He and Nyathi made a pact that neither, if called to high office, would ever accept this widely perceived symbol of Zanu-PF disregard for the plight of the man on the street.
“I have a very nice Nissan 4×4, which may be cheaper to run but that also cost a lot of money which could have been better spent.
‘My decision was not only because of my Nyathi pact but also because it is much better suited for visiting rural schools.
“Can’t you please instead report the means test for school fees rather than the Benz? Please.
“All parents who cannot pay fees can now apply to school heads for relief by completing a means test which requires them to declare income and assets.
“School heads with assessment committees are now given authority to waive fees either in full or in part. Its implementation has been delayed either because of logistical problems or deliberate obstruction within ministry but it is now being applied.
“I am more depressed by the process (inclusive government) than I have been for some time. It it is so much harder to stomach knowing the utter chaos that prevails in every sector. I visited schools in Bulawayo this week and they are in a shocking, shocking state.
“The cunning of those seeking to undermine some of what I and others are trying to do is also staggering considering that it affects Zimbabwe children. I am desperately looking for money for textbooks this week.”
Coltart, like all MDC members in cabinet, tries to temper his public language in the spirit of the political agreement.
The MDC persists in doing so, despite multiple breaches of the agreement by shrinking numbers of Zanu-PF hardliners, as it begins to stabilise some of the worst of the chaos.
“The inclusive government in Zimbabwe is not yet about power-sharing, it is still about the struggle for power”, a Western diplomat said this week, admitting that he was also “delighted” that his cynicism about the unity government was being chipped away.
Another Western diplomat said: “It is still extremely risky, but at least there is a chance, and we are happy to have been proved wrong.”
If all cabinet ministers are paid the same as Coltart, then the Benz issue is irrelevant anyway.
He earned less than R1 000 in February, less than R3 000 in March and had to give up his partnership in a struggling Bulawayo law firm to go into cabinet.
Others must be in the same position, including Zanu-PF ministers, unless there are secret sponsors and slush funds.
All MDC members now in the cabinet who went into existing portfolios are shocked to discover the depth of disintegration.
There is almost nothing left in the social services ministries which the MDC has taken on.
When prime minister Robert Mugabe won power in 1980, despite the bitter war, the education infrastructure was there and it was good. It only needed massive expansion to accommodate all children, not just all white children.
Same with health care.
This time, after another kind of war, there is almost nothing left for anyone.
In 2003 the World Bank estimated it would take 15 years to get Zimbabwe back to its 1997 state and it had already started to decline then.
The ongoing attacks against key white commercial farmers is understated by South African diplomats.
The line is that there are no new land invasions. That all the disturbances at present are about land already gazetted for acquisition. That is true.
Also true is that the constitution says that the owners of more than 4 000 farming businesses taken by the state since 2000 have to be paid compensation, now estimated at R30-billion.
“The MDC seem unable or unwilling to stop what is happening to us,” said one farmer in despair this week.
“Some of us are too tired to go on. Tens of thousands of farm workers will be forced out of work. Tens of thousands of US dollars of tobacco was destroyed by thugs in the last couple of weeks. So what is the point?”
The multi-party Joint Operation and Implementation Committee, JOMIC, mediating violations of the political agreement upon which the unity government is formed, has managed to get all but three detainees released on bail.
There is no reconstruction yet. That is a long way off. This period is about stabilisation economists say.
Hyper-inflation disappeared when people abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar and central bank governor Gideon Gono had to allow US dollars and the rand to become the currency.
Many children have returned to their derelict schools, and Western aid through the ongoing cholera epidemic brought some stability to the health sector.
The West is now able to feed at least half the population without interference.
There are many fewer political arrests, except for the farmers, and the state media is less poisonous than before the unity government.
Most of the political violence has gone.
Finance minister Tendai Biti has clipped the wings of Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono and a process to write a new constitution is beginning.
“It’s about perception” an MDC official said about taking the Benz. “It looks bad to the man in the street.”