All our politicians need is love: Biti

Sunday Independent 

By Peta Thornycroft

28 September 2011

When Tendai Biti quips that he is a finance minister without any “finance”, his audience in a church hall in Harare nodded and smiled. They knew that when Biti went into the treasury for the first time as finance minister in 2009 he found his Zanu PF predecessor had left him little more than petty cash to run the country and about R50 billion in foreign debt.

Labourers, clerks, domestic workers, vendors, activists, artisans, a handful of mostly middle-aged, shabby whites and many unemployed people understood Biti’s joke because they too were demolished by hyperinflation, the lynch pin of Zanu PF’s decade long tsunami – they too have no ‘finance.’

Biti was reporting back to his constituency last week after months of failing to get police permission to hold the meeting. So he went ahead anyway, but without advance publicity the audience was small, more intimate town-hall conversation than grandstand report back.

He explained for the first time some of the hazards of being in government with Zanu PF, why he and cabinet colleagues found it so difficult to get the country moving again.

Biti told the meeting his party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) ‘saved’ Zimbabwe by going into the inclusive government with Zanu PF which it defeated in elections a year earlier.

He told constituents that during negotiations he had opposed MDC joining an inclusive government but that he can say now, 31 months later, it was the right decision because it gave Zimbabweans “time out, time out (to recover from Zanu PF violence) as we were being scorched.”

As dusk became night around Northside Community Church in upmarket Borrowdale, someone lugged a generator to light up the hall and it tut-tut-tutted into action as an accompaniment to Biti’s heartfelt accounting to his supporters of life in government with Zanu PF.

Biti said the MDC now understood “the levers of power in government. And now we know the myths too.”

The levers of power, Biti says, are not vested in policy makers such as he but in the bureaucrats. It’s public information these days that Zanu PF ministers who nod off during Tuesday morning’s cabinet meetings spend only a few hours per week attending to ministry business. They are either working for Zanu PF or attending to the farms they have been given since 2000.

The permanent secretaries in jobs-for-life run their ministries and are as important to Zanu PF’s political survival as the security forces.

“The bureaucrat who is unelected but who is so powerful that if you are not clever he keeps you busy without being busy,” Biti said.

Many insiders in government say that Biti’s permanent secretary is particularly obstructive.  Mugabe ignores much in the three-year-old multi party political agreement he signed under mediation by former South African President Thabo Mbeki and unilaterally appointed most top civil servants. He is supposed to consult MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai before making any senior appointments.

Biti was speaking to his audience in Shona and English and sometimes interweaving the two and surprised some when he said that that it no longer mattered to him that Zanu PF controlled the security ministries.

He said: “I learned that the secret of good governance is not constitutions, it’s not about the army or the police, it is about love and caring. It is better to run the social ministries.

“It is better to be in charge of health and education than the police.

“We had a vision to democratise our country when the MDC was formed in 1999. We wanted to put an end to 20 years of cruelty, 20 years of theft, of fear, and this has been a long and tortuous road.”

And it is not over yet and the struggle goes on each day often within the ministries. David Coltart, the Education Minister from the other MDC faction, is regularly obstructed by his permanent secretary.

Biti, somehow more physically frail as minister than he was as activist, said: “I turned 45 three or so weeks ago but I feel I am 87 years of age.” And there was muted amusement among the crowd because everyone in the hall knew that President Robert Mugabe is 87.

“My life and yours has been compressed with pain and suffering. So even though you may be young in age you are old because of the experiences, the exposures that all of us have gone through at the hands of Robert Gabriel Mugabe and his acolytes in Zanu PF,” said Biti, a lawyer by training.

“We have been beaten up, we have been tortured, we have been raped, we have been killed they have called us names — dogs, puppets of the west, you name it. I think the only thing we have not yet been accused of is incest.

“Each one of us knows someone killed by Zanu PF. We are not normal. You, we, are candidates for psychiatric treatment. Because we have been traumatised by Zanu PF and Robert Mugabe. We pretend to be normal but this is a society that functions on the culture of impunity.

“If you look in the eyes of Zanu PF, and I sit with Mugabe often, they have the glassy eyes of a dead person.

“We grew up in a nice Christian background, we are very spiritual, so we don’t need the Bible to tell us it is wrong to kill or rape. We are an unbelievable society for the kinds of things we tolerate.

“All my life I have known only one leader, Mugabe. It’s been a long road and people are tired now.”

An evicted white farmer among the audience asked Biti what he would do about compensation. “We did a rough estimate and your properties should be worth about US$3bn (R21 billion), but we can’t pay that although there must be compensation.”

He said the debt to white farmers for their homes, businesses, equipment etc. would best be solved by becoming part of sovereign debt to be settled one day and he jeered at continuing land invasions 11 years after they began and references made by Zanu PF to “new” famers so long after they took the land.

“So,” Biti said with his land-mark giggle, or perhaps it was a snigger, “we have ‘new’ farmers who are 87-years-old” alluding to a clutch of at least four prime farms 60km north west of Harare which Mugabe helped himself to and which were, for years, secretly funded by taxpayers’ money.

He said that the journey to democracy in Zimbabwe was not over. “We are down to the last two stages of the struggle: to ensure power transfer (after the next elections) and to protect the vote.”

Days before Biti’s marathon report back to his supporters in a corner of Harare, Industry Minister Welshman Ncube drove to Bulawayo to address a meeting designed to boost the city’s collapsed productive sectors.

Even mega rich and controversial Mines Minister Obert Mpofu, who addressed the meeting, saying nothing much, failed to attract punters. So the meeting was cancelled after lunch while Ncube was en route from Harare. Bankrupt Air Zimbabwe was grounded.

Ncube, the MDC’s founding secretary-general and a top lawyer before politics overtook his career, at the bar spoke about the largest single foreign investment into Zimbabwe since independence 31 years ago.

He persuaded Mugabe, the “glassy-eyed” final arbiter to accept an Indian bid above a Chinese offer for Ziscosteel.

Ncube, who says elections can only be held in 2013 if Zimbabwe stays within the SADC time lines for reform, came under enormous scrutiny setting up the deal. His landlines and mobile phones were bugged, so was his Harare home and for months he was impossible to find as be worked through the mechanics to get the Essar/ZISCO deal on the road.

“Mugabe preferred the Chinese. That’s his policy. Eventually he met with Essar executives privately and then said ok.”

Without Biti, Energy Minister Elton Mangoma or the MDC’s Health and Education ministers, Ncube and perhaps one or two Zanu PF ministers who want to rebuild the country they wrecked, Zimbabwe would have disintegrated even further.