Techcentral.co.za

11 January 2017

Robert Mugabe’s government has been accused of using new regulated floor prices for telecommunications services as a way of making it unaffordable for Zimbabweans to use social media.

The country’s telecommunications regulator, Potraz, this week began enforcing the new floor prices for both voice and data, arguing the regulations are necessary to protect the sustainability of mobile operators.

A number of African countries, including Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have experimented with similar regulations, also allegedly in an effort to protect against damaging competition.

Zimbabwean technology publication Techzim said that from 9 January, voice tariffs have been set at a minimum of US$0,12/minute (R1,65/minute), while data for all bundles has to be a minimum of $0,02/MB (28c/MB, or R286/GB).

The result is that data bundles have become more expensive in a country where GDP per capita in 2015 was estimated at just $1 688 (South Africa: $7 575).

Potraz director-general Gift Kallisto Machengete justified the move as a way of maintaining a balance between service affordability and the viability of mobile operators, according to Techzim.

“Potraz’s aim is to keep the price of data as low as possible while ensuring sustainability of the sector and protection of consumers,” Machengete is quoted as saying.

But the new regulations have come under fire. Opposition politician David Coltart blasted the new rules on Twitter. “Data bundles have gone up by 2 500% in Zimbabwe, directed by the regime — presumably, and unconstitutionally, to stifle the use of social media,” he tweeted.

Coltart described the action as “unjustifiable economically” and “designed to stifle freedom of expression and access to information”. He said the new tariffs are “unaffordable”.

Last year, Zimbabweans used social media actively to criticise Mugabe’s Zanu-PF regime, under the hashtag “#ThisFlag”. The protests were started by a pastor, Evan Mawarire, who posted a series of YouTube videos in which he expressed his love for Zimbabwe and expressed his frustration with the government.

Newsday

9 January 2017

By Silas Nkala

FORMER Education minister, David Coltart has rapped his successor, Lazarus Dokora, for causing chaos in the education sector by haphazardly introducing far-reaching policy changes without consulting key stakeholders.

Coltart said the newly-launched education curriculum, which comes into effect tomorrow, was likely to throw the sector into disarray, as it was introduced at short notice and without prior consultation with educators.

“I’m deeply concerned about what my successor is doing to education,” he said.

Coltart’s remarks came after Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) last week blasted Dokora for rushing to implement the new curriculum without proper consultations with stakeholders.

His sentiments were also echoed by Zimbabwe Christian Alliance leader, Useni Sibanda, who called for parents and all stakeholders to resist the new curriculum.

“Dokora rushed to implement the curriculum, this needs to be opposed by citizens. These are our children, we need to have a thorough input into what will be taught,” Sibanda said.

PTUZ president, Takavafira Zhou, last week, blasted Dokora over the same issue, arguing the move had put schools in a dilemma, given the little time left before the new term starts.

He argued the new curriculum was complex and involved new technologies for all schools, when the majority of institutions in the rural areas lack the requisite infrastructure and most teachers were not computer literate.

“This move is not only intransigent and callous, but also a monumental injustice, impermeable to reason and facts.
Fundamentally, the syllabi are not readily available in schools. The teaching material or textbooks for the new curricula are not readily available, yet there are completely new subjects that have been introduced such as Heritage Studies and Economic History,” Zhou said.

Parents also berated Dokora, describing him as clueless on how to run a key government department such as education.

John Stewart said Zanu PF ministers always tended to impose their opinions on the general citizenry.

Fortunate Dube described Dokora as “bad news to Zimbabwe’s education”.

“The worst of them all since 1980. Senseless. No textbooks for that new curriculum, no preparation for teachers for that new curriculum. How are they going to implement it effectively? His head needs to be examined immediately otherwise he will drag down the whole education system with him. It’s time to stop him before he becomes a serious fool,” he said.

Dokora is not new to controversy as he caused a storm last year when he imposed the national pledge on pupils.

Bulawayo 24 News

By Stephen Jakes

7 January 2017

MDC-T senior official Job Wiwa Sikhala has related on how the Zimbabwean government resorted to harassing and oppression white Zimbabweans leading most of them to leave the country resulting to the economic crisis currently rocking the nation.

“The incident that made me feel pity for white Zimbabweans, is that it was sometime in the 2000s when the toxic Zanu PF politics of racial discrimination and incitement of hatred against white Zimbabweans was at its peak that I was one of those who sat silently in Parliament listening to Paul Mangwana who was chosen to be the Chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee to investigate on the misconduct of Roy Bennett after his altercation with the then Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Patrick Chinamasa,” Sikhala wrote on his Facebook post.

“The altercation is sometimes reported with exaggerated superlatives to paint a picture of a rogue Boer in Roy Bennett even though Roy is not a Boer. The scuffle having been provoked by Chinamasa’s derogatory answer to Bennett’s question in parliament on how the former white commercial farmers will be compensated for the improvements made in commercial farms and how far the government has gone to complete the investigations on the murder of several commercial farmers such as Stevens.”

He said rather than answering the question Chinamasa went all over the place insulting Bennett and his ancestors that he had no right whatsoever to ask him such a question which Chinamasa described as silly because Bennett’s ancestors were murderers and that this government had no business to protect descendants of murderers.

“Bennett was told by some other MPs seated next to him that Chinamasa’s insults have gone beyond normal expectations that if ever such words were uttered to them they would have long assaulted him. In a blink of an eye Bennett aggressively left his seat charging towards Chinamasa. On his way charging to Chinamasa, Didymus Mutasa kicked Bennett by the buttocks and Bennett pushed Chinamasa and told him off. The push was extremely minimal. The joke of what we used to see in the Sri Lankan Parliament or Indian Parliament or even the South African Parliament since the emergency of EFF,” he said.

“Few days later Chinamasa moved a motion in Parliament for the institution of a Parliamentary Committee to investigate whether Bennett’s conduct had violated the Parliamentary Rules and Orders. Paul Mangwana was appointed the Chairperson of the Committee which was congested with Zanu PF persons. The MDC was represented by Prof Welshman Ncube and the Parliamentary Chief Whip Innocent Gonese.”

Sikhala said Paul Mangwana after a long time of about 8 months came back to present the verdict of his Committee to Parliament where his Committee asked Parliament to sit as a court to pass a custodial sentence to Bennett.

“Mangwana spoke as if Bennett was responsible for all the deaths and violence that took place in the country since 1890 to that day. Bennett was portrayed as the villain of all. Mangwana was in an overzealous and pompous mood on the day in question. He retrieved all superlatives to describe how evil Bennett was and the need of our society to confine him to prison with hard labour so as to send a clear message to would be white offenders of Bennett’s mental disposition,” he said.

“We might hate him or like him, Tendai Biti on this particular gave one of the most polished legal presentation. In his contribution when the debate was brought to the floor Biti presented a long narrative of our history and the position of law when an institution like Parliament is faced with such a problem. It was a refined oral mitigation that brought the best out of the man. His presentation is one of the best I heard from him. When David Coltart came in to give a passionate narration of the history of violence in our country since 1890 through to the Smith regime via Gukurahundi and the 1999 to 2000s violence the House kept quiet for sometimes to ponder. The two lawyers gave memorable defence to Bennett while in the same vein where explicitly exposing Zanu PF hypocrisy.”

He said despite pleas of justice to be exercised in the matter, the hard hearts of Zanu PF could not be turned.

“They wanted the man to be eliminated from the political radar. They wanted him nowhere except behind bars. When we final went for the vote Zanu PF was already singing and ululating. Some where already demanding for his labour in their seized farms. Some were saying he should die. Others started to mock him. I saw and personally witnessed Pauline Gwanyanya, Priscilla Misihairambwi Mushonga and Edith Matamisa crying. We silently moved out of Parliament to our homes in anger and anguish,” he said.

“It was difficult and hard to take. I have never witnessed such anger in my life. Words that were said by Zanu PF against Zimbabwean whites are unprintable to this day. Even their mother ‘s private parts were described in jubilation. They were swearing that they will not rest until all whites were driven out of Zimbabwe. Some were even saying that they will have a good time with Bennett’s wife or rape her while he is in prison. Others said they will never ever allow him to be brought food in prison. Some saying boys will ravage his back in prison. Others urging him to prepare napkins as he will be impregnated in prison. I have never come across such. Even the worst sinner has rights.”

Sikhala said having fought for equality in modern Zimbabwe he wonder where Roy is?

“Is there anyone with information where this brave man is? What is in his mind? Has he paid his back on Zimbabwe?” he said.

My postscript – Roy Bennett is alive and well. He is farming in Zambia with his family and by all accounts is very productive. Zambia’s gain and our loss

The New Statesman

By Martin Fletcher

1 January 2017

Zimbabwe is engulfed, and not only by a political crisis. While its leaders fight, its economy is in meltdown.

With considerable trepidation, I took the lift to the sixth floor of the ministry of justice in central Harare to interview the minister. It wasn’t just that I lacked the accreditation foreign journalists must obtain to work in Zimbabwe – the interview had been arranged through unofficial back channels. The minister, Emmerson Mnangagwa, also happens to be the vice-president, Robert Mugabe’s notoriously brutal chief enforcer for the past 36 years, and the most feared man in the country. “They don’t call him ‘The Crocodile’ for nothing,” said a Zimbabwean businessman who knows him well. “He never says a word but suddenly he bites. He’s very dangerous.”

But Mnangagwa, still powerfully built at 74, proved courteous enough as we sat in deep leather armchairs in his bright and spacious office. It was not in his interest to be hostile – not at this time. He is determined to succeed Mugabe and he will need Western support to rebuild his shattered country if he does, which is presumably why he gave me an almost unprecedented interview.

Aged 92 and the world’s oldest head of state, Robert Mugabe is fading. He falls asleep in meetings, suffers memory lapses and stumbles on steps. He delivered the wrong speech at the opening of parliament in September last year and had to deliver the right one to a specially convened session the following day. As long ago as 2008 a WikiLeaks cable from the US ambassador reported that he had terminal prostate cancer, and he frequently flies to Singapore for unspecified medical treatment – blood transfusions, perhaps, or steroid injections. A diplomatic source talked of Mugabe’s “dramatic deterioration in the last two years”, and said: “He could go at any point.”

Mnangagwa did not admit he wants to be president, of course. Given Mugabe’s paranoia, that would have been political suicide. On the contrary, he was studiously loyal. When I asked which politician he most admired he immediately replied: “The president.” He refused to discuss the possibility of Mugabe dying. “Under British constitutional law you don’t conceive or desire the demise of Your Majesty. Why would you want to conceive or desire the demise of my president?” he asked. He even denied that he would seek Mugabe’s job when, to borrow the euphemism with which some Zimbabweans refer to the coming cataclysm, “the portrait falls off the wall”.

“I don’t see myself doing that,” he said. Of the decades he had worked with Mugabe, he said, “I was not serving to be president. I was serving my country.”

Nobody will believe Mnangagwa’s denial – certainly not close allies such as Christopher Mutsvangwa, a former Zimbabwean ambassador to China and the leader of the “war veterans” who seized the country’s white-owned farms in the 2000s.

I had met Mutsvangwa a few days earlier in the unlikely setting of a coffee shop in the affluent Harare suburb of Mount Pleasant. It was another encounter between a senior regime figure and a Western journalist of a sort that is becoming increasingly possible in the turbulence of Mugabe’s twilight days. Mutsvangwa told me he was “100 per cent” sure that Mnangagwa would be Zimbabwe’s next president. Indeed, he and other allies of the vice-president are already locked in a vicious struggle over the succession with Mnangagwa’s potential rivals in the ruling Zanu-PF party.

Grace Mugabe, 51, the president’s intensely ambitious and avaricious wife, set things going in late 2014 after her husband made her the head of Zanu-PF’s Women’s League and a member of the party’s Politburo. She persuaded Mugabe to expel the previous vice-president, Joice Mujuru, and her supporters from the party for allegedly plotting against the president. Mujuru – who as a teenage guerrilla during Zimbabwe’s war of independence in the 1970s gave birth in the bush, shot down a helicopter with a rifle and earned the nom de guerre Teurai Ropa (“Spill Blood”) – has now set up an opposition party, Zimbabwe People First (ZPF).

Having disposed of Mujuru, Grace and a group of “Young Turks” known as Generation 40, or G40, then turned their attention to Mnangagwa, seeking to oust him as vice-president and purge his supporters from critical posts in Zanu-PF. Grace made no secret of her ambitions, flying round the country in the presidential helicopter to address “meet the people” rallies. “They say I want to be president. Why not? Am I not Zimbabwean?” she asked. To give herself gravitas, she acquired a PhD from the University of Zimbabwe in three months; the degree was presented to her by the chancellor – her husband.

But Mnangagwa has his own cabal of older party members who fought in the liberation war and despise the G40 “upstarts”, who did not – Mutsvangwa calls them “power-grabbers” and “village head boys”. His so-called Lacoste faction (the clothing company’s emblem is a crocodile) has hit back hard, using Mnangagwa’s control of Zimbabwe’s Anti-Corruption Commission to launch high-profile criminal investigations against G40 leaders. For good measure, Mutsvangwa’s war vets have turned on Mugabe himself. In July they issued a communiqué condemning his “dictatorial tendencies . . . which have slowly devoured the values of the liberation struggle”. In November they sacked him as their patron.

A secret Zanu-PF document passed to me by a reliable source shows how sulphurous the infighting has become. Emanating from Mnangagwa’s camp, it accuses G40 of plotting “political euthanasia” against the party’s founding generation and of “coercing the First Lady into a spirited campaign against VP Mnangagwa”.

The document suggests Mugabe himself created G40 because, behind his “feigned love” for his deputy, he “has always felt threatened by VP Mnangagwa and the prospect of his presidency being outshined by that of his protégé”.

The nine-page document then sets out a detailed plan to destroy G40’s leaders through “brutal character assassination”, fomenting “fights and chaos” within the group, and sowing “seeds of distrust” between G40 and Grace Mugabe.

In short, the party that has governed Zimbabwe since 1980 is sundered as never before. Beneath the bright-blue jacaranda and orange flamboyant trees that shade Harare’s broad avenues, vendors hawk newspapers that gleefully proclaim “Crunch time for Zanu-PF factions”, “Zanu-PF implodes” and “Blood on the floor”. “They’re at each other’s throats and it’s not unlikely it will end in a violent confrontation,” Ibbo Mandaza, a political analyst in Harare, told me.

In the 2000s Robert Mugabe destroyed agriculture, the mainstay of the Zimbabwean economy, by seizing farms owned by whites and giving them to his cronies. Now the country’s industrial base is collapsing for lack of investment: it imports twice as much as it exports. The international financial institutions will lend the regime no more money without root-and-branch reforms and repayment of its $1.8bn arrears. Having abandoned its national currency in 2009, when inflation reached 500 billion per cent, Zimbabwe is quite literally running out of the US dollars that it has used for cash ever since.

“It’s a disaster of the worst order. We are in an economic recession that’s fast-tracking itself into an economic depression,” said Tendai Biti, an outspoken lawyer and opposition politician who served as finance minister for the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe’s ill-fated government of national unity between 2008 and 2013. “The regime can rig elections but they can’t rig the economy,” he said, as we chatted in his cluttered office in central Harare.

The government’s response to the liquidity crisis has been to issue bond notes as a surrogate currency – a move likely to make matters even worse. Nobody trusts the Monopoly-type notes, which look like ordinary currency and carry the words “Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe”. They believe the Treasury will print them with the same reckless abandon with which it printed Zimbabwean dollars in the late 2000s. Those who can are rapidly moving their US dollars out of the country, accentuating the cash shortage. Zimbabwe is bracing itself for a return of hyperinflation, fuel shortages and empty supermarket shelves.

The manifestations of economic collapse are already apparent. Driving around central Harare, I saw outside every bank the long queues that form before dawn each day because withdrawals are now limited to $50 or less per person per diem. The industrial estates of southern Harare are full of shuttered and closed-down factories: John Robertson, an economist based in Harare, reckons the industrial base has contracted 65 per cent since 2000. In a country where unemployment exceeds 80 per cent, street vendors, beggars and – at night – teenage prostitutes proliferate. The small number of adults who are employed mostly work in a public sector bloated by “ghost jobs” reserved for Zanu-PF supporters.

In rural areas the situation is even worse. Ben Freeth, a white farmer who was forcibly evicted by the war vets in 2009, sneaked me in to Mount Carmel, his family’s former property 110 kilometres west of Harare. He showed me the barren fields where maize and sunflowers once grew in abundance, and the dying mango and citrus orchards that used to produce 1,200 tonnes of fruit a year. The farm’s 2,400 hectares were commandeered by a then cabinet minister, Nathan Shamuyarira; today they yield nothing.

Freeth now farms 100 acres of rented land, but his former workers have suffered far worse than he has. We met some of them in the ruins of Freeth’s home that the war vets torched. They had no money, no food, no running water or electricity. They could no longer afford to send their children to school. Though it was planting season, they could not afford seeds to grow maize. “It was a good life, but now we’re starving,” Peter Asani, Freeth’s old foreman, said.

We drove on to the nearby town of Chegutu, which is dominated by 12 towering silos, each capable of holding 5,000 tonnes of grain. An employee told us just one was full, though the harvest had only recently ended and Chegutu is surrounded by some of Zimbabwe’s richest farmland. Instead, workers were unloading a goods train bringing maize from neighbouring Mozambique. “This used to be the grain basket of southern Africa, and here we are importing maize to prevent us starving,” Freeth said.

We stopped at the David Whitehead textiles factory, which once employed 4,000 people but closed in 2012. Today a few gaunt men are guarding the premises. They are paid four loaves of bread a day by the owners, and pass the time playing draughts with bottle tops on cardboard. They turn up in the forlorn hope that they will be first in the queue for jobs, should the factory ever reopen, and because there is no other work. “If I don’t do this what else would I do?” one of the men said.

Zimbabweans are mostly gentle, passive people, but even their capacity for stoic endurance has limits. Last spring and summer Harare witnessed protests on a scale the country had seldom seen before. Bypassing the splintered and ineffectual opposition parties, activists used Facebook and Whats­App to harness public anger and channel it into a succession of one-day strikes and street demonstrations, some of them attended by thousands.

“Social media is the government’s worst nightmare. It has completely changed the dynamics,” Promise Mkwananzi, a 35-year-old dissident who leads a protest movement called Tajamuka (“Outraged”), told me over coffee. A few days later he was arrested for the third time this year.

Fearing a “Zimbabwe spring”, the regime has detained dozens of leading activists. It hastily installed a senior intelligence officer as head of POTRAZ, the state agency that regulates the country’s mobile networks. It drafted legislation banning the use of social media to destabilise the country. It has even outlawed displays of the national flag after another protest group, #ThisFlag, co-opted it as its symbol.

The government has also resorted to its default tactic: violence. At 1am on 17 Nov­ember, the security forces abducted Patson Dzamara, an organiser of a protest against bond notes and corruption planned for later that day; at 9am that same morning I found Dzamara lying on a gurney at the Avenues Clinic in Harare with a huge swelling on the back of his head and vivid red weals across his back. He told me how three cars had blocked his own at a junction, two in front and one behind. The occupants then opened fire, burned his vehicle, and beat him for 20 minutes before driving him away – blindfolded – in a van.

“The only thing they said to me was, ‘You didn’t learn from what we did to your brother and now it’s your turn,’” said Dzamara, whose older brother Itai was abducted last year and never seen again. But instead of killing Dzamara, they dumped him naked by a road, telling him: “You’re lucky. You were supposed to die today.” A passing motorist took him to a service station, where he telephoned for help.

I left the clinic to find riot police backed by water cannon occupying the city’s streets. After word of Dzamara’s abduction spread on social media, fear prevailed and the protest fizzled out, leaving activists despondent. “We’re never going to have a successful protest in Zimbabwe again,” said Linda Masarire, a former train driver and widowed mother of five children who was jailed for 84 days last summer.

However, the government faces an increasingly grave problem of its own. It is running out of money to pay the security forces on which it depends for its survival, and the people’s anger is spreading to rank-and-file soldiers and policemen.

In the privacy of my car, one soldier who was hitchhiking near the town of Gutu, 225 kilometres south of Harare, complained bitterly about being poorly fed and paid late, how his family was struggling to survive, and how the army told him how to vote. It was time for Mugabe to go, he said.

Tendai Biti told me how, during one protest last summer, he was chased down by an unmarked vehicle whose occupants told him: “We’ve been sent to arrest you, so please run away.” Biti said: “It’s only their bosses that are eating. They’re not.”

The war veterans’ leader Christopher Mutsvangwa readily acknowledged that one reason why his 30,000 members had rounded on Robert Mugabe was that “there’s nothing to bribe us with any more. The economy is finished.”

I asked Mutsvangwa whether Mugabe should step down. “We need to have a new look at the management of the economy,” he said. “Since he’s the elected president he has to either deliver on that or make it possible for someone else to deliver on it. We would hope it’s the latter.”

He did not name Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa, but it was obvious whom he had in mind.

Over lunch at his charming old home in rural Sussex a few years ago, Denis Norman, a white farmer who served in three of Mugabe’s cabinets between 1980 and 1997, told me of his last meeting with the president after losing his farm and before he left for Britain in 2003.

“I asked: ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ He replied: ‘Has it gone wrong?’ I said: ‘I know it’s gone wrong. You know it’s gone wrong.’ He paused before replying, softly: ‘It’s not going right, is it?’”

The anecdote captures the tragedy of Robert Mugabe – the architect of Zimbabwe’s independence who has reduced it to penury; the guerrilla leader who freed his country from white-minority rule only to subject it to far greater repression.

Mugabe grew up a village 100 kilometres from Harare. His father, a carpenter, abandoned the family when he was ten. The principal of the local mission school, an Irish Jesuit priest named Father Jerome O’Hea, nurtured him instead.

Mugabe trained as a teacher; at Fort Hare University in South Africa he encountered the black nationalism sweeping across Africa. He went to teach in Ghana, which had just won independence from Britain, and there he married his first wife, Sally.

In 1960 the couple returned to Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was called then. Mugabe joined its liberation struggle, became secretary general of the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) and was imprisoned for nearly 11 years. Ian Smith’s government refused to release him even for the funeral of his infant son. He took several degrees through correspondence courses with the University of London and gave lessons to his fellow prisoners. Released in 1974, he fled to neighbouring Mozambique, where he orchestrated the guerrilla war against white-minority rule in Rhodesia.

In 1979 Mugabe attended the Lancaster House peace talks in London that led to independence. He was “secretive, seemed not to need friends, mistrusted everyone. Devious and clever, he was the archetypal cold fish,” said Lord Carrington, the British foreign secretary who chaired those talks.

He returned home from London a hero and duly won Zimbabwe’s first democratic elections in 1980. At first he confounded his critics. He allowed Ian Smith to remain in Zimbabwe, and, learning from what had happened in Mozambique after the Portuguese left in 1975, Mugabe urged white Zimbabweans to stay and rebuild the country, which had been destroyed by 15 years of war and sanctions. He built schools and hospitals for black Zimbabweans and encouraged agriculture.

The new president appeared to display no animosity towards Zimbabwe’s former colonial masters. He sought Britain’s help to forge a new national army. He formed a surprising friendship with Lord Soames, the last British governor of Rhodesia, and rebuked his cabinet for celebrating when Margaret Thatcher was deposed in November 1990. “Who organised our independence?” he asked them. “Let me tell you – if it hadn’t been for Mrs Thatcher none of you would be here today. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

Mugabe was an Anglophile who adored the royal family, and urged Denis Norman to invite Prince Edward to open Zimbabwe’s Royal Agricultural Show. He encouraged Zimbabweans to play cricket because it “civilises people and creates good gentlemen”. He read the Economist, wore Savile Row suits, and upbraided his first cabinet for dressing inappropriately: “If you wish to remain as ministers I expect you to dress as ministers.” A frugal, ascetic man, he rose before dawn, worked long days, ate simple food and neither smoked nor drank.

There was, however, a darker side to this apparently model leader. What the world did not see, or chose not to see, was his crushing of Joshua Nkomo’s opposition Zapu party in the mainly Ndebele-speaking Matabeleland region. Mugabe’s North Korea-trained and predominantly Shona Fifth Brigade razed villages, tortured and raped, killing an estimated 20,000 Ndebele civilians in Operation Gukurahundi (gukurahundi is the Shona expression for “the early rains that wash away the chaff”).

Mugabe’s relations with white Zimbabweans began to sour when they backed Ian Smith’s Republican Front Party in the 1985 parliamentary elections. He sacked Norman as minister of agriculture. “He wrote me a note saying he had no place for me because he had offered the hand of friendship to the farming community, and they obviously didn’t appreciate what he and I had done for them, so he was going to give them a black minister,” Norman told me.

In 1992 Sally Mugabe died of kidney failure. He lost a “great stabiliser and calming influence”, Norman said. “She was the one person he could actually confide in, someone who could keep him on a level plane.” In 2008 I visited her grave in Heroes Acre, a monument to Zimbabwe’s independence fighters on Harare’s western fringe. Fresh flowers lay on the black marble. My guide said Mugabe brought them every week, early in the morning when no one was around.

In 1996 he married Grace, a State House secretary 41 years his junior, with whom he already had two children from an affair that began before Sally’s death. Grace was Sally’s polar opposite, and under her influence the other side of Mugabe’s personality – the African strongman – gained ascendancy. Their wedding ceremony was attended by 12,000 guests. The couple built a mansion set in 44 landscaped acres in the affluent Harare suburb of Borrowdale. Mugabe celebrated his birthdays with increasingly lavish parties costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. His popularity began to fade.

In 2000 the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a new opposition party led by Morgan Tsvangirai, defeated a constitutional referendum that would have increased Mugabe’s powers. He responded by unleashing the war vets, who seized thousands of white-owned farms over the next few years in an orgy of drunken violence and retribution.

The seizures served the president’s political purposes well. They punished the farmers, many of whom had backed the MDC morally and materially, and dispersed and destroyed a reservoir of a million potential MDC voters among the black farmworkers and their dependants.

In every other way they were a disaster. Zimbabwe’s economy, heavily dependent on agriculture, collapsed. Food production plunged. Factories, hospitals and schools closed. The government responded by printing ever more money, fuelling such rampant inflation that prices were doubling every 24 hours. At one point the Reserve Bank issued a note worth Z$100 trillion.

Mugabe resorted to yet greater repression. In 2005 he destroyed the homes and livelihoods of 700,000 restive slum-dwellers in Operation Murambatsvina (‘‘clean up filth’’). He neutered the judiciary and ­independent media. He stole the 2008 presidential election so blatantly and violently that not one other African head of state attended his swearing-in. Britain withdrew his honorary knighthood, and he was forced into a power-sharing agreement with the MDC.

The “government of national unity” restored fiscal sanity but it also allowed Zanu-PF to regroup. By 2013 the world’s attention had moved on. Using subtler methods – bribery, intimidation, control of the electoral roll – Mugabe stole that year’s general election, too, and Zimbabwe returned to one-party rule. An “indigenisation” law requiring majority black ownership of large companies further deterred the investment that Zimbabwe’s struggling industries desperately needed to retool and boost exports. There was no currency to devalue. “We sabotaged our own productive capacity,” said the economist John Robertson.

Mugabe inherited a country that, for all its faults, was blessed with fine infrastructure, functioning institutions, a benign climate and fertile soil. Today it is a failed state in all but name: a nation of hawkers, foragers and scavengers. A quarter of the population has left; in other words, more Zimbabweans now work overseas than at home. The average monthly household income is $62. Life expectancy is 55 years, one of the lowest in the world. Four million of Zim­babwe’s 14 million people survive on food aid, and a quarter of its children are stunted by malnutrition.

The country’s hospitals can no longer afford painkillers for major operations. Its embassies cannot pay their rent and utility bills. Its national airline can no longer fly to Heathrow, because of outstanding debts. It sells its elephants, giraffes and other wildlife to China. Beyond its urban centres, the country has reverted from tractors to ox-drawn ploughs, light bulbs to candles, the wheel to foot, cash to barter.

It is also corrupt from top to bottom, ranking 150th out of 168 in Transparency International’s global corruption index. By Mugabe’s own admission, its leaders have siphoned $15bn from the Marange diamond fields in the east since 2008 – four times Zimbabwe’s annual budget. Several times I was stopped at police checkpoints whose purpose was not to enforce law and order but to fleece motorists. I was fined once for not having honeycomb reflectors on the front of my rental car, and a second time for not coming to a complete stop at a junction. “The whole system is infested with leeches sucking the remaining blood from the rotten corpse of Zimbabwe,” a white businessman told me.

Mugabe no longer mingles with the ordinary Zimbabweans whom he claims to champion. He lives behind high walls in his heavily guarded mansion. A bomb-proof Mercedes carries him to State House along the only well-maintained roads left in the capital. His motorcade includes two decoy Mercedes, an ambulance and truckloads of soldiers. Police outriders clear the traffic and use the butts of their AK-47s to bludgeon dawdlers. Making gestures at the president is a criminal offence.

He survives in office – his sole concern – by playing off one Zanu-PF faction against another. He rents his lieutenants’ loyalty by letting them plunder the country. He uses hunger as a weapon by swapping food aid for support. “Mugabe has an insatiable thirst for power. I’ve never come across another human being who worships power like that man,” Biti told me.

Mugabe has already declared his intention to fight the next election in 2018. Few believe he will ever step down voluntarily. Three times this year he is said to have thwarted efforts by regional leaders to discuss his retirement, abruptly cancelling a visit to Ghana in August when he learned the issue was on the agenda. He rebuffed attempts by his military commanders to raise the matter during the summer protests.

“He has no friends, no hobbies, no in­terests,” said a Zimbabwean businessman who has dealt directly with Mugabe. “The only thing he has is a political persona. Without that, he’s nothing, and for that reason he will not voluntarily surrender his power. He will die with his boots on in his office.”

If that is so, Mugabe’s final legacy to Zimbabwe will be his failure to provide for an orderly succession. Instead, he will bequeath to it an unprecedented and dangerous power vacuum.

Predictions of Robert Mugabe’s imminent death should be treated warily. David Coltart, a white opposition politician, notes that the president’s mother lived beyond 100, and that for twenty years British and American ambassadors have arrived in Harare expecting Mugabe to die on their watch, only to leave disappointed.

He still maintains a punishing travel schedule, and attended Fidel Castro’s funeral early in December. Many Zimbabweans believed that he had died when his plane inexplicably diverted to Dubai in September. “Yes, it’s true I was dead. I resurrected as I always do,” Mugabe taunted the premature celebrants on his return a few days later. It is now widely believed in Harare that he went there to rescue his wayward son Robert, Jr, who allegedly faced drugs charges.

When Mugabe does die, Zanu-PF will have 90 days to convene an extraordinary congress and choose a successor to serve as president until the next election. It is unlikely to be a peaceful or democratic process. Vice-President Mnangagwa is thought to have the support of Constantine Chiwenga, the commander of the national defence forces, as well as most of the military hierarchy, the war vets and the state media, but the burning question is whether Grace Mugabe would dare to challenge him.

Variously named “DisGrace”, “Grasping Grace” or “Gucci Grace”, to reflect her extravagant foreign shopping trips, the first lady knows her power will evaporate once her husband dies, and she needs to protect her three children and enormous wealth. The Mugabes own 14 farms and she is said to take a cut of almost every big deal in Zimbabwe. “If you want anything business-wise here, you have to go and kneel before Grace,” one political analyst said.

She has options. She could flee the country; seek Mnangagwa’s protection in return for her support; back a surrogate candidate; or run herself.

In recent weeks she has ceased attacking Mnangagwa and distanced herself from G40. The vice-president’s allies suggest that the military has given her some sort of démarche. “Army commanders would have said: ‘You’re destroying the party from within. You’re becoming a security threat,’” a member of Mnangagwa’s entourage said.

“I’ve noticed a certain measure of silence. The reckless exuberance of the past is gone,” Christopher Mutsvangwa, the war vets’ leader, said. “Once someone knocks some sense into her about the aftermath of the morrow she will realise you don’t go against the state apparatus.”

That said, nobody is ruling Grace out. Zimbabweans detest her, and she has little standing within the party or the military because she did not fight in the liberation war – but those who know her describe her as “delusional”. As a prominent businessman who supports Mnangagwa told me: “She believes in her heart that the people love her, because in Zimbabwe we have ritual fawning.”

She could yet persuade her husband to undermine Mnangagwa in some way. She could try to whip up Shona clan tensions – the Mugabes are Zezurus while Mnangagwa is a Karanga. She could even announce that her husband had given her his blessing on his deathbed. But Mnangagwa’s supporters have little doubt what would happen if she did. “If Grace runs, the military will step in. They will go and brutalise her supporters,” the businessman said. “It would be nasty, very nasty.”

There are other possible candidates of lesser stature, and there would be a high risk of violence as rival camps sought to coerce local and regional party officials to support them. But for now, at least, Mnangagwa is the front-runner. And that, on the face of it, is bad news for Zimbabwe. “He is associated with all the darkest periods of our history,” Biti told me. A prominent human rights worker in Harare said: “He’s really, really bad. He’s toxic. He’s killed a lot of people.”

Mnangagwa does have a human side. He is a Methodist, a Chelsea supporter (because he adored Didier Drogba), and he has nine children by two wives – the first died of cancer in 2000 and the other is an MP. One son is a popular DJ; another serves in the presidential guard. But he is so hated by Zimbabweans that he twice failed to win a seat in parliament, Zanu-PF’s standard electoral practices notwithstanding. In 2000, thugs poured petrol over Blessing Chebundo, his MDC opponent in Kwekwe, and Chebundo survived only by clinging to one of his assailants. Later they torched his home.

Mnangagwa, who says he was born in 1942 (though many sources say 1946), was inspired to join the black nationalist movement when Mugabe taught in his village after returning from Ghana. He trained as a guerrilla in Egypt and China, blew up a locomotive near the Victoria Falls, and escaped execution only by claiming to be under 21. He spent a decade in prison instead. He was kept in solitary confinement for three years and tortured by the Ian Smith government. Hung upside down and beaten, he lost the hearing in his left ear. “My torture was so bad that if I talk about it I relive it, and my tears come down,” he told me during our interview.

He attended Mugabe’s prison classes, took O- and A-levels, and after his release he trained as a lawyer in Zambia before joining Mugabe in Mozambique. After independence, as the country’s chief of security and intelligence, he was widely believed to have orchestrated the Gukurahundi massacre, allegedly calling Nkomo’s Zapu supporters “cockroaches” and the Fifth Brigade the DDT that would eradicate them.

A UN report accused him of plundering diamonds when Zimbabwean troops intervened during the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s. In 2002 he seized a farm near Kwekwe whose owner, Koos Burger, told me in a telephone call from Florida that he sought political asylum in the US after receiving death threats. Mnangagwa is thought to have masterminded the theft of the 2008 presidential election, from which Morgan Tsvangirai was forced to withdraw in order to halt the slaughter of his supporters. Today he is said to control the lucrative gold industry in his home region, the Midlands, where he is known as “The Godfather”.

Mnangagwa denies such accusations. “How do I become the enforcer during Gukurahundi?” he asked me. “We had the president, the minister of defence, the commander of the army, and I was none of that. My own enemies attack me left and right and that is what you are buying.”

A Mnangagwa presidency might offer Zimbabwe one thing: economic recovery. He is sharp, organised and business-savvy; more pragmatic and less ideological than Mugabe. And, unlike the president, he understands the urgent need for reform, if only so that he can pay the security forces and fill the trough at which his Zanu-PF comrades guzzle. “For all his historical problems he understands the running of the economy better than Mugabe, better than most Zanu politicians,” David Coltart said.

In the course of our interview, Mnangagwa explained his plans for reviving the economy. He declared that “capital goes where it feels comfortable and warm, and if it’s cold it runs to a country which gives it better weather”. Mugabe, an avowed Marxist,
would never make such a statement. Mnangagwa spoke of the need for Zimbabwe to re-engage with the international community, stamp out corruption, revive agriculture and attract foreign investment. He also said that he wanted all the professionals who have left Zimbabwe – black and white – to return. His model is China, which he praises for the “discipline” that has transformed it from the backward country where he once trained as a guerrilla.

A few nights earlier I had listened to Mnangagwa giving the keynote speech at the annual awards dinner of Zimbabwe’s Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, at Harare’s plush Rainbow Towers Hotel. To my surprise, he quoted the New Testament’s parable of the talents, with its overtly capitalist creed.

“Mnangagwa is a brutal man, a hard man,” said the businessman who has extensive dealings with the regime. “He’s been involved in butchery and pillaging and everything else, but there’s no question in my mind that he’s pushing to reform Zimbabwe’s economy, and fighting against the inertia of Robert Mugabe, who believes any change is dangerous.”

Mnangagwa’s problem is that he lacks Mugabe’s aura, and most Zimbabweans know only of his reputation for brutality. As things stand, he could not possibly win a free and fair election. That is why, according to multiple sources, he is discreetly reaching out to Morgan Tsvangirai, Joice Mujuru and other opposition leaders with a view to forming some sort of coalition government after Mugabe’s death, and perhaps postponing the next election.

Such an arrangement would lend Mnangagwa legitimacy, appeal to international donors and buy him time to resuscitate the economy, so that Zanu-PF would not need to rig the next election too blatantly.

Whether Tsvangirai and Mujuru would agree to enter such a coalition is another matter. They might calculate that they could win even a rigged ballot if – a big “if” – they could agree on a single presidential candidate. For all his flaws, Tsvangirai remains Zimbabwe’s most popular politician, and Mujuru still has support within Zanu-PF.

On the other hand, the MDC is fractured, disorganised and short of money, and Tsvan­girai has colon cancer. Mujuru’s ZPF has barely got off the ground and its own senior members question her leadership abilities. Both might be tempted by offers of positions that would give Mujuru a way back to Zanu-PF and Tsvangirai the perks and privileges he cherishes (he still lives in the handsome official residence he occupied as prime minister during the unity government). “They’re not going to get power any other way,” said Derek Matyszak, a Harare lawyer and constitutional consultant.

Opposition activists would demand political as well as economic reforms in order to loosen Zanu-PF’s grip on power: a proper electoral roll, an end to patronage and intimidation of rural voters, a truly independent electoral commission, a free media and votes for Zimbabweans in the diaspora.

They would almost certainly be disappointed. When I asked Mnangagwa whether he saw the need for political reforms he replied that Zimbabweans had long ago secured what the British denied them: human rights and one man, one vote. A Mnangagwa supporter told me he might make token concessions, but “it’s all about the veneer of respectability rather than respectability”. Others invoked the example of President Paul Kagame, who has transformed Rwanda’s economy with the help of international financial institutions that choose to ignore his authoritarian excesses.

To activists such as Linda Masarire, it would be “totally unacceptable” for the opposition parties to join a coalition in such circumstances. “Even if the economy is revived, who will be the beneficiaries? It will be the same old people, the ones with political power who have been looting the country for the last 36 years,” she said.

Biti mocks the idea of Mnangagwa as a reformer of any sort. “No one can name any act of reform he’s ever carried out . . . He can’t start now. He’ll just tell you what you want to hear.” He added: “I don’t think anyone who’s committed crimes against humanity should lead us.”

But Mnangagwa has already won the tacit support of Zimbabwe’s business sector, as well as South Africa and China, all of which want stability. Western donors are also anxious to avoid Zimbabwe’s total disintegration. It’s a fair bet that ultimately they would choose pragmatism over principle and give Mnangagwa the bailout he would urgently need. They would probably ignore his
election-rigging provided it was discreet.

The businessman put it this way: “Maybe you don’t like Mnangagwa and his history, but you’re faced with a choice. Do you allow Zimbabwe to crash and burn and let its people suffer? Or do you try to negotiate a rescue so they have a future?”

Martin Fletcher is an NS contributing writer. His assignment in Zimbabwe was financed by the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting

Newsday

19 December 2016

By Blessed Mhlanga

VICE-PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa has denied accusations he played an active role in the Gukurahundi massacres, which reportedly claimed over 20 000 lives in Matabeleland and Midlands regions in the 1980s.

Speaking in a recent interview with United Kingdom-based magazine New States Man, Mnangagwa said reports linking him to the atrocities were being peddled by his political foes to soil his image.

Mnangagwa, who at the time was State Security minister, seemed to pass the buck to President Robert Mugabe, then Defence minister Sydney Sekeramayi and army commanders for the massacres, which were perpetrated by a North Korean-trained army unit, the Fifth Brigade.

“How do I become the enforcer during Gukurahundi? We had the President, the Minister of Defence, commander of the army and I was none of that. My own enemies attack me left and right and that is what you are buying,” he is quoted as having said.

The late General Solomon Mujuru was army commander, while current Airforce of Zimbabwe Commander, Perrance Shiri was Fifth Brigade commander.

Mnangagwa was the State Security minister then and is often regarded as the face of the massacres.

A recent book by former Education minister, David Coltart also reveals the extent of Mnangagwa’s involvement and alleged hate speech utterances.

In the interview, Mnangagwa also denied leading the Team Lacoste faction or harbouring ambitions to succeed Mugabe.

“I don’t see myself doing that … I was not serving to be President. I was serving my country,” he said.

Mnangagwa scoffed at those praying for Mugabe’s death, as the only leader Zimbabwe has known since independence turns 93 next February.

“Under British constitutional law, you don’t conceive or desire the demise of Your Majesty. Why would you want to conceive or desire the demise of my President,” he reportedly said.

War veterans’ leader, Chistopher Mutsvangwa has insisted that Mugabe should step down and pave way for a new leader.

“We need to have a new look at the management of the economy … since he (Mugabe) is the elected President, he has to either deliver on that or make it possible for someone else to deliver on it. We would hope it’s the latter,” he told the magazine.

Coltart also seemed to endorse a Mnangagwa presidency, saying the Vice-President is business savvy and understands what needs to be done to save the ailing Zimbabwean economy suffering from a blistering liquidity crisis.

“For all his historical problems, he understands the running of the economy better than Mugabe, better than most Zanu PF politicians,” he said.

Financial Gazette

By Andrew Kunambura

15 December 2016

LISTENING to both President Robert Mugabe’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) and Finance and Economic Development Minister Patrick Chinamasa’s 2017 National Budget presentation last week, many were left wondering what to make of the two.

The SONA, presented two days ahead of the budget, was perhaps meant to inform and set the tone for Chinamasa.

Addressing a joint sitting of Parliament, President Mugabe delivered a speech full of hope and pregnant with optimism, never mind a swarm of critics that dismissed it as a fantasy divorced from reality.

Forty eight hours later, Chinamasa strode into the same august House and, in the presence of his superiors; he presented a gloomy economic outlook full of chilling suggestions such as further taxation on airtime vouchers.

The tax was veiled as a health levy.

Where his superior predicted an economic boom, Chinamasa revised downwards the economic growth for 2017 to a 1,7 percent from the 2016 projection of 2,7 percent.

While SONA did not address the contentious issue of civil servants salaries and bonuses, Chinamasa cleverly put it across by simply stating that government was running on unsustainable expenditure, with the wage bill now rising to 95 percent of revenue.

He left it like that, knowing how President Mugabe has on two occasions overruled his decision to stop bonus payments and slash salaries by a good margin of 20 percent.

Not that Chinamasa had the most brilliant budget; far from it.

It was probably more off-putting than SONA, which was good fodder for government critics following its presentation.

The criticisms that SONA received probably summed up Zimbabweans’ general impression towards their leadership — uninspiring.

And, as expected, the usual suspects coming in the form of disappointed political analysts, political opponents and social commentators, dug into the speech in the same manner that hungry vultures dismantle a large carcass.

Although SONA was not a wholesome disaster because it addressed a number of important issues such as improving the ease of doing business, sourcing and distribution of farming inputs and measures to curb gender based violence, critics still found more than enough reason to trash it.

The reactions were wide and diverse, but all collapsing into one common denominator: That SONA was far removed from the actual state that the nation is currently in.

“In the past (President) Mugabe had the capacity to deceive brilliantly; now he is just an emperor with no clothes and nothing to offer,” wrote former Cabinet minister, David Coltart, now an outspoken government critic on micro blogging site twitter.

Another former minister, Tendai Biti, who served along with Coltart in the inclusive government era, also waded in, posting on twitter: “Tired, exhausted, spineless, 45 minute (it was actually 31 minutes) rumbling that did not inspire nor offer any solution or meaningful insight on the State of the nation.”

Such has been the case of Zimbabwe, where anything the leadership tries to do, even in good faith, is met with serious scepticism and has missiles and salvos fired at it from all directions.

The general consensus was that if it was to be fairly analysed, SONA was a huge let-down, which did not address the real state of this nation.

Many analysts described it as a mere collection of what respective ministries were doing, or not doing.

Even so, the address was more about optimistic economic projections that were utterly not in sync with the reality on the ground.

For example, SONA proclaimed that a boom witnessed in the tourism sector continued to grow, adding that government was now expecting arrivals to hit 2,5 million by year end after 902 435 tourists reportedly came to Zimbabwe during the first half of the year.

How is it possible to lure 1,6 million tourists in the dying weeks of the year, when the country only managed a fraction of that in 11 months, is debate for another day.

“The true state of the nation is that our tourism figures are embarrassing, and that if we had any shame, we would just not bother talking about them,” opined political analyst, Alexander Rusero.

“During the course of the year, we saw hotels closing because there are no visitors booking the rooms. If we are receiving those huge amounts of tourists, then where are they sleeping,” he asked rhetorically.

SONA completely ignored the most talked about issue at the moment: The liquidity crisis which today sees citizens spending long hours in winding bank queues for petite withdrawals that are not worthy the endurance.

Nor was there any mention of the contentious bond notes that were ostensibly introduced as an export incentive, but have crept into account holders who hardly know what the whole export hullabaloo is all about.

People generally expected the president to address this ominous issue, but he didn’t.

Instead, the most pressing national issue at the moment was placed under the blanket of “all manner of economic hardships”, with the travailing populace being saluted for enduring such.

This left many wondering if the government truly has an appreciation of the degree of the suffering that the public is enduring.

SONA, thus, melted down into a squandered chance for the ZANU-PF government to pacify the agitated citizens or inspire younger generations who feel their future is in jeopardy.

How, for example, does a state of the nation fail to address glaring social woes such as crumpling State hospitals that have stopped executing some of their most basic duties like carrying out corrective surgeries for lack of equipment and pain killers?

Only this week, the Zimbabwe National Water Authority released damning statistics showing that major dams on which government is pinning its hopes for the success of the command agriculture programme do not have water.

And, in addition to the usual water challenges being faced in all the country’s urban areas, there is a huge possibility that the programme might fail if the dams that provide the much needed irrigation water do not fill up on time.

The forecasted heavy rains that had prompted government to devise the command agriculture maize production scheme have been slow in coming, and the agriculture season is marching on.

Watchers argued that the optimism that was shown so prevalently in the address is a big yawn from reality.

Said political commentator, Rashweat Mukundu: “No critical national issues were addressed. It was just a repetition of Zim-Asset (Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation) issues, while economic indicators are pointing in a certain directive, they say the opposite. This is downright disingenuous on the part of government. SONA induced neither hope nor confidence in the public.”

Japhet Moyo, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, was disappointed that the address was mum on runaway unemployment, which is threatening to top 90 percent.

“We are not even sure that jobs will still be there, come 2017. People are being forced to use bond notes and some are going without meals, yet (President) Mugabe says the economy is recovering. His government cannot simply pay workers. What kind of recovery is that,” Moyo asked.

Opposition political parties also grabbed the opportunity to lash out at government.

Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) spokesman, Obert Gutu, described SONA as a dump squib.

“Instead of addressing critical issues such as the grinding poverty that is afflicting at least 75 percent of the Zimbabwean population in both rural and urban areas, rampant unemployment particularly amongst the youth and the financial disaster that has been caused by the decision to introduce bond notes into the financial market, SONA was bereft of details on concrete and sustainable measures and policies to resuscitate the comatose economy,” he wrote.

People’s Democratic Party spokesperson, Jacob Mafume, touted: “You can no longer make sense of the policy positions that are announced by the government.”

In real terms, one needs not peruse the SONA speech to get the true state of the nation, which says government imported large quantities of maize to feed people, they need to visit villages where people are starving and little girls are dropping out of school to take up sex work to escape poverty.

The true state of Zimbabwe is realised when one travels to Beitbridge to see hundreds of people risking life and limb crossing the great crocodile-infested Limpopo River to beat the much lauded Statutory Instrument number 64 which banned imports.

To realise the true state of the nation, one may need to move around the filthy slums and crammed streets of any city or town that have been invaded by vendors, some with one-month-old babies strapped on their backs, selling all sorts of things.

News 24

7 December 2016

Harare – “This is a fact: Zimbabwe has the strongest currency in Africa”.

Sounds unbelievable – but that’s what the official Herald newspaper claimed on Wednesday, hours after President Robert Mugabe resolutely avoided the vexed topic of bond notes in his State of the Nation Address (SONA).

In its lead editorial, the pro-Mugabe paper said Zimbabweans “have full confidence in” their currency, ignoring the fact that photos of a broken bond coin are causing widespread alarm on social media. Ten million US worth of bond notes were introduced last Monday along with two million US worth of bond coins.

The central bank insists this surrogate currency is backed by a 200 million US dollar loan from Afrexim Bank. But many fear the notes will drag Zimbabwe back to the dark days of hyperinflation that reached a peak around 2006-2008.

Long bank queues have not improved since the notes were introduced. That is partly to do with the fact that teachers have just been paid and are having to queue repeatedly because of capped daily bank withdrawals.

The Herald claimed that Mugabe’s speech to parliament showed the economy was on the “recovery path”. Tweeted former education minister David Coltart: “Could someone please show me where that path is because all I can see is bond notes?”

Mail and Guardian Africa

By Brooks Marmon

23 November 2016

If Zimbabwe serves as an example of the way the US will go, Americans should be very afraid.

COMMENT

Much has been made of the warm reception that United States president-elect Donald Trump has received from many African leaders.

An enthusiastic pro-Trump editorial in Zimbabwe’s state newspaper, The Herald, was perhaps the most illuminating among the litany of diplomatic messages of goodwill from Africa to a candidate who received the endorsement of the most notorious white supremacist group in the US, the Ku Klux Klan.

The paper congratulated Trump, wishing “him all the best as he takes the reins at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”.

Since the launch of an accelerated land reform programme in 2000, which primarily targeted white farmers and was followed by a renewed emphasis on indigenisation legislation, Zimbabwe has aggressively sought to project an image of a bold, black state.

Like the US, Zimbabwe has a sordid history of racial discrimination. After an initial period of reconciliation following independence in 1980, Zimbabwe is now highly divided along racial, ethnic, political and economic lines. Despite a devastating economic collapse, it may also be one of the few African nations in which the Trump family has on-the-ground experience – his two older sons have hunted for big game there. His youngest daughter, Tiffany, has been to Malawi.

Although the racial tropes of Trump and Zimbabwe’s ruling party, Zanu-PF, are polar opposites, each draws from the same playbook. Several of the core tenets of Trump’s abrasive election campaign are reflected in the policies and actions of Zanu-PF. Trump won the Republican primary by viciously attacking his opponents and party stalwarts such as John McCain. As president, Mugabe has disposed of his acolytes at will, most notably firing vice-president Joice Mujuru after 34 years of service in his Cabinet.

Team Trump shot its way to the top of a crowded primary campaign with the help of a controversial slogan, “Make America great again”, and promises to build a wall on the Mexican border, rhetoric geared to appeal to white US citizens threatened by changing demographics.

Similarly, Mugabe frequently exclaims that Zimbabwe will never again be a colony. Zanu-PF’s political longevity is built on a strategy that promotes it as the sole custodian of revolutionary leadership following the turbulent struggle against white supremacy.

Mugabe plays to his base with announcements that white Zimbabweans should “go back to England” and that “we say no to whites owning our land and they should go”. Homosexuals have been viciously derided as “worse than dogs and pigs”. But, like Trump, he manipulates language for his own purpose.

Several of Mugabe’s backers have been white businesspeople, some of whom were subject to US and European Union-targeted sanctions for their support of Zanu-PF. Mugabe has used the presidency to establish a business conglomerate, Gushungo Holdings, a worrying sign for those hoping that Trump will put his businesses in a blind trust, thereby reducing conflicts of interest.

Amid reports that Trump’s son-in-law is angling for a position in the incoming administration, Zimbabweans will be reminded that Mugabe’s son-in-law was recently named chief operating officer of the national airline.

Zanu-PF rhetoric mirrors the fault lines that Republicans see – but which pre-Trump were only articulated in private. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign suffered a massive setback in 2012 when a leaked recording of him saying that 47% of the US population would not vote for him and that “[his] job was not to worry about those people” surfaced.

Zimbabwean ruling party elites also express disdain for those with different worldviews. In 2002, several months after Zimbabwe’s most closely contested presidential election since independence, Didymus Mutasa, then Zanu-PF secretary for administration, announced: “We would be better off with only six million people, with our own [ruling party] people who supported the liberation struggle. We don’t want all these extra people.” Zimbabwe’s population at the time was roughly twice that size.

Although Trump may ultimately be unable to get Mexico to pay for the wall, Zanu-PF has successfully translated similarly confrontational rhetoric into electoral (and policy) success. The government has nationalised large tracts of private land and, in a 2005 operation, Operation Murambatsvina (Clear the Filth), thousands of residential structures were destroyed, causing as many as 700 000 urban residents, the primary supporters of the opposition, to lose their homes and sources of livelihood.

Trump galvanised his supporters with threats of a rigged election, urging his followers to conduct partisan exit polling and poll monitoring, actions perceived as a way to intimidate supporters of Hillary Clinton. At a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump encouraged his followers to “watch your polling booths … [and] then go check out areas”.

Likewise, Zanu-PF has honed the art of rigging elections through a combination of violence and manipulation. The opposition and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have routinely accused the government of deploying war veterans and a youth militia, commonly known as the Green Bombers, to intimidate voters into supporting Zanu-PF. Trump’s recourse to violence has been less overt, although he has made comments that Democrats interpreted as an assassination threat against Clinton.

Zanu-PF mobilises its base with rhetoric decrying the imposition of sanctions by the West and the meddlesome role of NGOs as a way to achieve regime change, a tactic similar to Trump’s criticism of the media, which he accused of trying to “poison the minds of the voters”.

During presidential elections in 2008, political violence resulted in hundreds of deaths and the playing field was further stacked in Zanu-PF’s favour when the electoral roll was not released until the day before the election. An analysis by the nonpartisan Zimbabwe Election Support Network subsequently revealed the roll probably contained about one million invalid voters and excluded a million valid ones.

Republicans have followed a similar strategy to suppress votes, emboldened by a 2013 Supreme Court judgment that struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act. These efforts increasingly resemble Zanu-PF tactics, albeit under the guise of reducing voter fraud.

Both Trump and Mugabe appreciate a good insult. The former notoriously called Clinton a “nasty woman”, whereas Mugabe told the opposition to “go hang” following a violent election campaign.

Notably, Zanu-PF differs greatly from team Trump in its sophistication and intellectual composition. Mugabe, who holds seven tertiary degrees, once remarked that “cricket civilises people and creates good gentlemen”. He has few personality traits in common with Trump aside from a much younger trophy wife and a more pronounced propensity to campaign in political regalia.

But Jonathan Moyo, Zimbabwe’s higher education minister, is a downright Trumpian figure. Both enjoy recourse to litigation, actively court controversy and masterfully manipulate the media. Moyo has been accused of embezzling funds from the Ford Foundation in Kenya, the University of the Witwatersrand and, most recently, the Zimbabwe Manpower Development Fund, prompting his arrest.

Trump has found himself in a similar predicament with several of his business schemes. He recently settled a fraud case to the tune of $25-million against his now defunct Trump University venture.

Moyo has nearly 100 000 followers on Twitter, where, like Trump, he frequently engages in spats with his opponents. A primary recipient of his invective is David Coltart, a white former opposition minister whom Moyo revels in calling a racist idiot.

Both Trump and Zanu-PF regularly seek a legal mandate for their questionable actions, but they cry foul when they worry the law may not work in their favour.

Trump stated that the US-born judge presiding over a fraud case against him could not conduct an impartial hearing because he was of Mexican descent. Meanwhile, following a judgment by a regional tribunal in favour of white farmers, Mugabe responded that the court’s decision was “nonsense” and “of no consequence”.

Zanu-PF’s domestic interference in the judiciary has been significant. In 2001, Zimbabwe’s chief justice was forced to retire under the threat of violence.

But when it comes to reconciliation, Zanu-PF shows its most troubling colours. Originally acclaimed for its reconciliation efforts following the armed struggle for independence, the party has now drawn the same conclusion as Trump has with blacks, Latinos and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual community – minorities can be a useful punching bag.

In Zimbabwe, this rhetoric has been a matter of life or death. It’s estimated that massacres of the minority Ndebele in the 1980s, an ethnic group known for its opposition to Zanu-PF, may have resulted in as many as 30 000 fatalities.

Despite a unity accord with the opposition in 1987, no one has been held to account for it. Mugabe vaguely described the events as “a moment of madness”. Trump similarly struggles to be contrite. He has refused to apologise for his unsubstantiated claims that US President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and refuted allegations of sexual harassment after he was recorded boasting of that kind of behaviour.

It is no surprise that Zanu-PF is no fan of Clinton. As a senator, she co-sponsored the Act that led to sanctions against Mugabe and other prominent party officials. As a former secretary of state, her hawkish policies contributed to the death of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, a strong Zimbabwean ally. Mugabe’s spokesperson and secretary in the ministry of information George Charamba’s claim that a “Clinton presidency would have been terrible for Zimbabwe” is quite reasonable from the perspective of the ruling party. Attacks on Tendai Biti, a prominent opposition figure, for his support of Clinton, also fit with the Zanu-PF modus operandi.

But The Herald’s strongly worded op-ed represents a very generous olive branch to Trump, yet undermines the image Zanu-PF seeks to portray of itself as an uncompromising voice for those oppressed by the West.

Mugabe routinely savaged presidents George Bush and Obama but, according to US senator Chris Coons, the Zimbabwean leader was enthusiastic about a Trump presidency from as early as February 2015.

Zanu-PF’s zest for a Trump presidency is driven by a recognition that the new US leader exercises a version of realpolitik very similar to its own. In Zimbabwe, this has resulted in an unprecedented economic breakdown and high levels of political violence, with the ruling party demonstrating resilient political longevity.

It is a startling portent of what may be in store for the US, even if Trump begins, like Mugabe, by sounding the right notes.

Brooks Marmon is an American PhD student at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. His Twitter handle is @AfricaInDC