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Transcript of "Hot Seat" interview with Brian Kagoro, Tapera Kapuya and Ralph Black Part 2
Violet Gonda, SW Radio Africa
June 06, 2007

http://swradioafrica.com/pages/hotseat060607.htm

On the Programme Hot Seat, journalist Violet Gonda concludes her discussion on sanctions with Brian Kagoro (right), a lawyer and political commentator, NCA Co-ordinator Tapera Kapuya (centre), and Ralph Black (left) the MDC Deputy Representative in North America.

Violet Gonda: On Today's Hot Seat programme we bring you the last discussion about whether the sanctions are having an economic impact, as claimed by the government. My guests are Brian Kagoro, a lawyer and political commentator, NCA Co-ordinator Tapera Kapuya, and Ralph Black the MDC Deputy Representative in North America. US legislation prevents their representative to the Breton Woods Institutions from lending to Zimbabwe or re-scheduling debts that are due. I started by asking Brian Kagoro if these measures can be described as economic sanctions on the country.

Brian Kagoro : Hardly, hardly because the power to grant or with-hold a loan to cancel a debt is discretionarily, it's not obligatory. So for that reason they're not strictly speaking economic sanctions. But, do they have an effect economically? Well, I mean there are factors that you have to consider. The with-holding of debt cancellation is on conditions of governance and because the cancelling country is not responsible for inducing a situation of risk, you cannot, strictly speaking, uh, sorry, let me just put it simply. We've not seem them fully applied so whilst there does exist a potential to fully apply, there's been continued engagement between Harare and the IMF and the World Bank. So, if you wanted a strict and simple answer that would be it. If they were to be applied in the spirit of that particular piece of legislation, then they would have an effect that might qualify them to be called 'economic sanctions'. But, in their current form, no. The problems that Harare is facing are anything else other than economic sanctions.

Violet: Ralph, let me also ask you the same question, that do you think these sanctions; whether they are targeted or not; still have an economic impact?

Ralph Black: Well I agree with Brian's application that in their present form they have as much economic impact as ZANU PF's inability to plan strategically for their economy. I think the question ought to be, what has had the greatest effect economically; our policy or the IMF's response in terms of not cancelling debt and not re-lending money for developmental projects. And, I think the issue is simple, that the economic effect that is being experienced is not a result of Harare being cut off from finance, but rather, it is self inflicted because Harare has been unable to plan strategically, has itself been responsible for passing a series of repressive legislation. And, I think we as Zimbabweans must be responsible for what we have been able to control, or what we have not been able to control but has taken place anyway.

Violet: But, is it not the case that Zimbabwe can't trade and that the country cannot have liquidity and that you have industries like the Zimbabwe Defence Industries and the Reserve Bank that are being affected by the restrictions?

Ralph: The country can trade. Zimbabwe Defence Industries cannot trade because it is a company that is associated with ZANU PF very closely and that is on the asset freeze. And anyway, the Zimbabwe Defence Industries raises a substantial amount of foreign currency, but not enough foreign currency to heal the ailments of the nation. And, in general, there is still trade between America and Zimbabwe, between Europe and Zimbabwe. I wrote an article a couple of years ago that I asked Condoleezza Rice whether Zimbabwe was a trading post or an outpost of foreign tyranny because a great amount of foreign currency, up until 2006 was being generated from coffee exports from Zimbabwe to America, timber exports to America via China, tobacco exports when we had tobacco crop; flower export. So the country and industry has been trading and continues to trade. What is lacking is an economic framework within the country to harness the foreign currency earned and channel its economic development and obviously for the betterment of the people's standard of living. I think it's a fallacy, Violet, for any Zimbabwean to believe that there is no trade. There is trade. What we are seeing is that those companies that are associated with ZANU PF and who have at their helm, on their board or as substantial shareholders, being unable to trade on the international market because they are associated with human rights abuse

Violet: Now, Tapera, some critics still say thatthe US sanctions, although they are financial, they still have an adverse economic impact. Now, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act has exacerbated the crisis in Zimbabwe?

Tapera Kapuya: My point, Violet, is just a follow up to my previous contribution last week, is that much of the responses which we have had have actually come from embedded analysts and so forth. People who want to give a justification and falsify and de-historify the Zimbabwean crisis. The problems of Zimbabwe emanate from critical issues of governance, they don't emanate from sanctions which were imposed on Zimbabwe in 2000 and so forth, which ever classification people might want to give them. I think we are suffering as a result much more of our own economic failures than as a result of economic sanctions. We are suffering because individual critical enterprises which should be locally located. We have had a number of bankers who have been excluded out of the country; thrown out of the country. We have a number of industrialists that have been thrown out of the country and so forth. And, unless we create conditions which would allow and facilitate industrialisation of Zimbabwe, industrial investment, investment by Zimbabwe nationals in the Zimbabwean economy; investment by Zimbabwean intellectuals in the Zimbabwean cultural and industrial fabric; can we begin to talk about investment. I think its quite misplaced to then even locate the Zimbabwean crisis within sanctions. I think we are a rich nation, rich enough for Zimbabweans to contribute. What the conversation should rather be around is why are Zimbabweans not being part and parcel of Zimbabwe's economic development? It's strictly because we are living in a country where our own contribution as individuals is ignored; is not allowed unless we are part of the ruling regime's political fabric.

I think this is where the major crisis comes from, and, I think one thing which I want to put right and quite clearly on the table is that people must not confuse or mis-direct the Zimbabwean struggle in itself. The Zimbabwean struggle is also a resistance against neo-liberal policies which have bought the country on to its knees as much as it is about the despotism of the ruling regime. It's a dual struggle. We are fighting against neo-liberalism, we are fighting for Zimbabweans to take ownership and control of their economy, to engage productively in globalisation; we are fighting for the country to belong to Zimbabweans.

Ralph: Ya, and just to add to Tapera, for any Zimbabwean to think that our fortune or prosperity lie with hand-outs from Western institutions, or the lack thereof, is, in and of itself, simplistic . And, I say this, in agreement with Tapera, that some of the responses have been meant to mis-direct the debate so that we can underscore and underpin Robert Mugabe's great white lie that the West is responsible for his actions. ZESA collapsed long before the IMF decided not to loan money to Zimbabwe. NOCZIM, the national oil company of Zimbabwe, failed to import fuel not because the IMF withheld funds, but because Enos Chikowore chased women and not fuel! So, it's important that Zimbabweans place the responsibility for our present situation squarely at the feet of the ruling party. It's almost embarrassing to think that because the IMF has withheld funding, the country cannot function. And, I think Mugabe takes us for granted if he continues to spread this lie that because white men withheld money that we are unable to feed ourselves. It makes us look foolish.

Violet: But Ralph, some critics say the mandate of the IMF or the World Bank is to give money or to ensure global financial stability but with the IMF asking Zimbabwe to pay up its debts right now . . .

Tapera: Violet, Violet . . .

Violet: . . . now, when it knows that Zimbabwe cannot pay up at the moment, can we say that the IMF is actually causing instability?

Ralph: No, there's no instability

Tapera: Violet, Violet . . . .

Violet: We'll come to you in a moment Tapera, let me just hear from

Ralph: There's no instability. There's no instability that the IMF is causing. Hear me out in simple tones. How can we expect the IMF to advance money to a government that lacks the ability to plan to repay a loan? Are we are saying that we only can function on white mans' hand-outs or Western institutions hand outs? Is that we are saying, as Zimbabweans? Have we accepted this argument that we can't do things for ourselves? And also, the IMF has a responsibility to its member states not to continue funding corruption; not to send good money after bad. Zimbabwe got to this point because of ZANU PF's policies that the IMF could not be guaranteed that ZANU PF would repay its loan.

Now Violet, as a matter of fact, the Reserve Bank has paid the World Bank and IMF loan arrears off. They got the money from sources. Some of the sources was taking Zimbabwean men's property and selling it to Americans and using it to pay the IMF and the arrears and there's an incident, the Matumwa Mawere case that is still being fought in the Courts. So I think, at this point, the argument is not about whether the IMF withholding of funding or support for Zimbabwe is creating the crisis. The debate ought to be, we must change the source; we must go to the source of the crisis. And, that is the ineptitude and incompetence of the ZANU PF regime. And when we have found solutions in dealing with this regime then we can approach the world and say we have a system of our own now come and support us or help us in rebuilding our country. I think we should be careful not to mis-direct the crisis and I like the term 'de-historify' what is happening in Zimbabwe

Violet: Let me go back to Brian, some say the IMF is shackled by the US as they have the largest vote and power. Now, outside IMF funding or outside the political realm, where else can Zimbabwe get money from?

Brian: We got money from the Libyans, the largest funder to Africa China, we're getting money from the Chinese. The issue with money, external money, Violet, is that it is not a panacea to bad policy and bad planning and poor inclusion of people in the development process. And, secondly, that it doesn't matter whether you get money from the IMF, from the European Union or from the World Bank, or from the Chinese, if you get aid that is tied it's essential that you use either Chinese firms, construction firms, infrastructure, you are literally destroying the potentials of your domestic industry.

So what we have consistently done over the years when we entered the Structural Adjustment period in the '80s is we accepted conditions imposed by the IMF and the World Bank to downsize the state, to cutback on the State. So we created many redundancies. So unemployment figures shot up, we created a very big informal sector without a clear strategy for absorption and for ensuring that children leaving school would be absorbed in some form of employment or entrepreneurship. So the crisis, as others have said, started a long time back. So the problem is not where we get money, the problem is what is our development plan, what is our industrialisation policy. In the service sector, where we have earned a lot of money, what is our clear policy within the service sector? In the agricultural sector, post fast-track land reform, is the reason why there is no grain growing in the fields the IMF? Is it purely drought? Are there other factors? And, Gideon Gono himself; as the Reserve Bank Governor; pointed to corruption and incompetence. He actually said in one of his monetary policy statements that people took farms, accepted farms but have not put them to productive use. Now those matters you can't blame on the IMF. Those matters are not contingent upon receipt of international development assistance.

But, let me underscore this point. We do get money for social service delivery, or, we should get money from the Global Fund for HIV and Aids and from other sectors, because investment in social service is actually a huge burden; not just for Zimbabwe; for all African countries. It seems to me objectionable that the Global Fund should use governance conditionality for not giving money to Zimbabwe for HIV and Aids. Now that has nothing to do with your so called 'western sanctions' that is an institutional provision that manymust contest. So around the questions of investment in social service provision, it seems that it is totally mis-directed on the part of any donor to say 'we will not invest in social service delivery; be it health, education, access to clean drinking water and stuff, on the basis that you object to the Harare regime. Because the people who suffer in that instance are not, and this is not foreign direct investment, this is not even in the usual rubric clause, its loans, grants that are given to alleviate social suffering.

So in my view I think that we often mix up a lot of issues. I have read responses that say 'what are you asking to be cancelled?'. I actually think that for any citizen to suggest that the - targeted sanctions have, as I think a colleague said last week caused a great measure of inconvenience to individual interests of the ZANU PF elite. So in my view, they are not even a big point of debate. What I wish to maintain is that for all right- minded Zimbabweans, there are two political objectives. The one is to ensure that you don't sustain economically and even cause to prosper, those who are pilfering and plundering the economy and doing so by repressing and oppressing other people. That's one objective. Two, it's the whole point of ensuring that you don't auction your own integrity and sovereignty to the dictates of Western states, who themselves, if they were put under the international radar and scrutiny, their human rights records in Iraq, Afghanistan, even in Somalia are worse than the human rights record of the Harare regime. So, in my view I don't want to be dragged into 'is Bush better at human rights through his Guantanamo Bay detentions and what we have seen in Iraq than Mugabe'. No, that's neither here nor there. I'm simply saying the standard of what is just, what is democratic, what is civilised is a standard that should be set by us as Zimbabweans; by us as Africans. So I think . . .

Violet: So Brian, which sanctions do you support and which sanctions do you not support in a nutshell?

Brian: Clearly if South African activists like the Labour Unions were to wake up and say we will not purchase shoes made by this company because the money used is the money that was pilfered by the State and also individuals who benefit from oppressing Zimbabwe; the people to people type sanctions. Those ones, I think that is an expression of solidarity by the sovereign people in Africa. State imposed sanctions and sanctions of an economic nature that results in misery to the general population, I don't support.

Violet: And Tapera?

Tapera: No, I just wanted to comment on Brian's remark which is probably a point of convergence between myself and him although we come from the same school, is, what needs to be maintained on the ruling regime is pressure. The ruling regime at the moment is allowing for talks strictly because it is being pressured; it is feeling a sense of pressure from the protests that we are holding on the streets, the embarrassment which it is facing within the region and so forth. And it's multi-factorial and all the forms of pressure must be maintained. And, individuals and governments and people that are wishing to provide support to Zimbabwe should provide it whatever we might debate here and there about the consequences and so forth. What I want to strictly put on record is that the sanctions that the majority of the Zimbabwean population is facing has been a result of the current regime. This corruption; resource-stripping of the country on a country-wide scale; diamonds are being looted out of the country by the ruling regime, gold is being looted, there are no gold accounts, there is no form of any kind of accountability towards the Zimbabwean people by elements within the ruling regime and so forth.

Violet: So Tapera do you think they should be sharpened further to include children of members of the Mugabe regime?

Tapera : What I want to put on record as well is that they are flocking around. I mean, there is no son or daughter of any senior member of the ruling regime who studied at the same university with Brian Kagoro or Tapera Kapuya - at the University of Zimbabwe. Their children had never been there. I mean they are located widely - in the previous years they were located at the Universities in the United States. Nathan Shamyurira's children are in the United States, Ignatius Chombo, Gideon Gono's children are in Australia, and the vast majority of them are studying in South Africa. We ask the question 'why is that so?' It's strictly because they have ruined the educational infrastructure in the country. Many of them are operating business enterprises in South Africa, in Washington, in the United Kingdom and so forth. What's the reason? It's because all those various other countries have put in place systems that allow for enterprise, enterprise to happen.

And as well, just jumping onto the other question which you had asked Violet, around where are the finances for this regime coming from. I want to put this on record also. I mean we have carried out ample research around the financing of this Zimbabwe regime from various other sources. French banks have been loaning money to Zimbabwe, Libyan banks have been loaning money to Zimbabwe, South African firms have been loaning money to Zimbabwe: they are South African individuals; within the ANC for instance; who have come out and said we are making vast amounts of profits in Zimbabwe. Mzi Khumalo is on record, he is a senior African National Congress in South Africa, he has come on record around how much billions he has made out of Zimbabwe despite its economic collapse. And, I think these are things which we should as well put within our own narrative analysis. And how is this money being paid out? The Libyans, for instance, the money which they gave to Zimbabwe in loans for fuel was translated into equity in national firms. Libya now controls over 17.8 % of the Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe. ABSA, a South African bank, controls almost 27% of the CBZ in Zimbabwe. How else are they financing this? Translation of Resource equity for instance, IMPALA Platinum now controls in excess of 68% of ZIMPLATS. This is how they are financing, this is how debt is being financed; by translation of Zimbabwe's future equities, Zimbabwe's mineral equity into corporate equity. They are making money out of Zimbabwe's lying minerals.

This is how the Zimbabwean system is surviving and what we are saying is that Zimbabweans must wake up to this, wake up to we might liberate our country when it is already liquidated. So what we have to be very attentive to is the dealings of this regime; the monies which it is paying to the IMF, where is it getting the money from? They are mortgaging the future of Zimbabwe through whatever and to whoever is giving them the monetary support. We mustn't compromise the future of our country for temporary gains.

Violet: And let me just get Ralph Black's views on the issue of sharpening the sanctions to include family members. Now Ralph is it proper to target family members when they individually might not be responsible for the actions of their parents?

Ralph: Well, they may not be responsible for their actions of their parents, however . . .

Tapera: They are beneficiaries!

Ralph: They are beneficiaries of the system that their parents are part of that is stripping the wealth of the nation. Secondly, they are part and parcel, they are accomplices in this great fraud. Tapera raised the issue of children in the United States. Our research and intelligence gathering has revealed that credit cards with huge credit balances are being used to finance government functions and the names of those cards are held in the name of ZANU PF officials' children, right here in the United States. They have access to college scholarships and loans that should be available to all other Zimbabwean children.

Ya so, basically the sanctions for the family members must be included. Those family members who are responsible for funding their father and mother's activity, who are beneficiaries of that activity, who are running that activity on behalf of their parents. Violet, the regime has children here in the United States running Bureau de change, they are sending money home on behalf of Zimbabweans and are holding US dollars here for their parents because their mother and father have access to a lot of money there that they can give other peoples' parents. And, these people are involved in money laundering.

So I believe that the targeted sanctions must be made tighter or broadened to include their children, to include third parties. And, even third parties who are foreign nationals; the Bredencamps and the Rautenbachs and Van Hoogstratens. These men are trading for and on behalf of the regime internationally. It must also include some of the professionals within the country. There are certain lawyers who are travelling with diplomatic pouches for and on behalf of the Zimbabwean Government with huge amounts of foreign currency to deposit in United Kingdom banks or to deposit in the Channel Islands, for example. So all this, the Zimbabwean people and your listeners, must appreciate that the Government is not only getting funding, from the French, as Tapera has said, from the Libyans, as Brian as said, from the Iranians, from the Chinese. There is money that is coming to the country that is not being used to put food onto your tables. It is being used to put food on the elites' tables and to send their children to school. Meanwhile, the Zimbabwean person, the pedestrian, suffers.

Violet: Brian, briefly, your thoughts on this particular issue?

Brian: I am a lawyer and so let me surprise many of your listeners. As a lawyer it is not acceptable, legally, to engage in collective punishment. There must be a causal linkage between an offensive act and the penalty. So unless if you show that there is collusion where a child is being used as a conduit for laundering money, it seems to me that an indiscriminate use of sanctions, flies in the face; as desirable, as politically inspirational as some may find it, flies in the face of the very principles of justice that must constitute the new democracy that we are trying to build. And so, the only qualification for me would be this: if you can demonstrate that the child is being used to launder. If, at the very most, the child is on a scholarship, I think it would be unduly punitive and not all children of the ruling elite appreciate what their parents do. Even when they do, very few of them have a choice; they can't divorce their parents. So, in my view, we need to counterbalance, we can't apply the slogan 'mwana we nyoka inyoka', that's a very ZANUist way of doing things. However, when we can prove 'hunyoka we mwana wacho' - that they are not only a child - so they are not only an accidental beneficiary by genetic accident or a biological accident that they were born in the family, but they are actually an active participant in defrauding a nation and then also perpetrating the repression, it's a different matter.

So, I just wanted to say, as a lawyer, I think that my first loyalty is to my training and the principles of justice. I don't believe in collective punishment where you have not proven - which was my other objection to the way the sanctions work. Applying anything indiscriminately reduces its strategic value. I think you need to selectively - you need to apply to some and not to others because, to make everyone equally culpable when we know that some of the actors, perhaps their only fear is their failure to speak out; which is cowardice. But others are more active, they are actual active perpetrators. I think it seems to me a disingenuity of wanting to use them.

But, my principled position and I have read people who have accused me of selling out and accused me of all sorts of things. But it's a principled position and I adopted it when I was in the NCA, I maintained it as the Chairperson and then Director of the Crisis Coalition. I am opposed to any external, and by external I mean out of Africa by the global North. And, more so, to any form of economic conditionality imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, whether on Zimbabwe or any other African country. I think economic sovereignty requires that the function of monitoring and holding accountable, be that either of peers within the region or of the citizens themselves. An act of solidarity by people outside the region should not become the mainstay of any strategy to dislodge the dictatorship. I have heard arguments about how in South Africa it was economic sanctions. Unfortunately, we live in a different historical era and ZANU PF's actions are inexcusable. But what would be more inexcusable is to auction our future and to . . .

Violet: But, Brian, talking of the region, how can the sanctions issue be used in aid of the SADC region's initiative to solve the political crisis?

Brian: Listen, it is within. MDC doesn't control it. Civil society doesn't control it. However, I do not see, and I would discourage the Opposition from staking its life on targeted sanctions. As I've said earlier, that if what was intended was to call Mugabe's bluff - a temporary suspension of those sanctions in the spirit of negotiation is something to me, and I say me, as Brian Kagoro. Partly because, I don't think there's a real utility value. But, in any event, a temporary suspension allows those who have imposed it to reinstate should the conditions they were anticipating not result. But, I don't want us to ever divert a discussion on Zimbabwe's negotiations to sanctions because the negotiation is about the internal situation. Sanctions were externally imposed. The internal situation should be negotiations about demands pertaining to the internal situation that the government has an obligation to alter, that players internally can do . . .

Tapera: Sorry, I just wanted to add . . . in a sense I do generally agree with Brian. I mean, on a number of lengths. One of them being, which is a point which we said last week, that no one called for sanctions. I mean none of the Zimbabwean communities called for sanctions. Sanctions were imposed by the United States Government, they were imposed by the European Union. If Mugabe has got a problem with sanctions he must talk to the European Union, he must talk to the United States Government, influence their politics so that they can remove those sanctions for him. There is a tendency here of then reducing the Zimbabwean crisis itself into a non- Zimbabwean issue, into a diplomatic stand off between the West and the dictatorship in Zimbabwe, which we think in the broader pro-democracy movement becomes extremely wrong because the Zimbabwean crisis in itself is not a crisis of sanctions. The Zimbabwean crisis is a crisis of governance; it's a crisis of bad economic management, wrong policies which have been put in one after the other.

Brian suggested around the legalities of collective punishment and so forth. I think much of the children of this ruling regime are beneficiaries, an extension of the offspring of the ruling regime. You can never separate a child's' wealth from parental world, especially in the case of many of these young offsprings, extensional offsprings of the ruling regime. They are going to school using money, the majority of which is being tapped out of the taxes of the majority of our people. Money which is being tapped out of the diamonds of our nation, which should be rather used building hospitals, building clinics, building educational infrastructure for our people. And, for us to say they must be excluded from our quest for our resources which is being externalised, they become problems of that.

Brian: It's useful to clarify. When you arrest a thief who is married, who has children, you don't immediately send the children and the wife to jail. So, if somebody commits a fraud against Zimbank and they are caught and they are convicted, you don't immediately arrest the family that may have . . . .

Tapera: There is no justice system which . . .

Brian: Allow me to finish, allow me to finish . . . allow me to finish

Tapera: the profits of a criminal endeavour

Brian: Allow me to finish. My point was simple, you have to demonstrate that the person who took part in a collusion, that they were not accidental beneficiaries. In a sense for me it's a legal issue I'm raising. The moral point iswhat my colleagues have raised. The moral point is that don't allow those who are beneficiaries from the plunder of a nation to benefit and then claim that they are technically or legally innocent. It's arguable, I may be persuaded, that the moral point, in this instance, is stronger than the legal point. But, I did not want us to lose the fact that the pro-democracy movement is about rights, it is about human rights, and as much as we would want to associate ourselves with . . . .

Tapera, Ya, and it's about struggle; we are in a moral struggle. If it were a legal struggle we would still be respecting the Public Order and Security Act!

Brian: Ya . . . allow me to finish Tapera

Tapera: The Protection of Privacy Act . . .

Violet: Tapera, let him finish

Brian: Let me give you an example. ZANU PF will arrest everybody. ZANU PF will seek to punish everybody associated with the Opposition and call you a proxy of the West. So it applies this collective punishment most, which we find objectionable. It will seek to ban every rally and every meeting simply because it is organised by people who are not in government. Its claim is that they are people who are likely to be involved in violence. It is this principle of collective punishment, I think the morality and struggle is in various ends. The oppressor's morality the people's moral apprehension.

All I am cautioning is a very simple one, and, it's not even about fence sitting - we must never, in fighting an enemy end up losing the very essence of who we are. We are about establishing a new order, a new democratic order in which there is a rule of just law. If my colleagues can persuade me that it is a just law that says every child and grandchild of anybody who is in Government, is, by virtue of their being a child or grandchild and that they will receive a gift of money and therefore guilty and should be punished, I am willing to be persuaded. I am simply saying, on the face of it, as strong and compelling as the moral case might sound, it's legal basis is shaky.

Violet: And I'm afraid I'm running out of time and I want to get Ralph Black's final thoughts on the sanctions issue. Must they be removed

Ralph: No, No.

Violet: or before dialogue, or in response to dialogue or after dialogue succeeds, and why?

Ralph: The position of the party is this. Number one Robert Mugabe's relationship with America and with Britain are bi-lateral issues, they have nothing to do with his relationship with the people. We have a problem with the way he has mis-ruled, we have a problem with his mismanagement, and, while he seeks to befriend the West, he must deal with us first. Secondly, the actions that have been imposed by the West; by Britain and America and the European Union; the targeted sanctions, the asset freeze and the travel ban are measures that were implemented in solidarity with the pro-democracy movement in Zimbabwe. As the party, the MDC, those measures must remain in place until such time as Robert Mugabe has satisfied not only the demands of the Zimbabwean people, but has met the standard for good governance worldwide. We are not too concerned with what is happening in Nigeria and in Ghana and in Uganda, these are issues that must be tackled separately.

However for Zimbabwe those sanctions must remain in place. These restrictive measures must remain in place until such time that ZANU PF and Robert Mugabe has satisfied the Zimbabwean people on taking turns of reform. Now, at what stage or what time they must be lifted is not for us to debate or even to talk about. We believe that they must be held in place for as long as they are effective. And we believe that they are effective, the fact that they have been brought as a pre-condition to talks is a clear indication that somebody is being pinched and they are feeling that pinch. And, all we can advise our neighbours in the world is keep the pressure up because it will benefit us in the long run, the Zimbabwean people.

We are beginning to see systematic violence, kidnappings and beatings and the closure of offices and arbitrary arrests. This is clearly Mugabe's election campaign, starting his election campaign, his election campaign in progress. The methods he is using are unacceptable not only to ourselves as Zimbabweans first and foremost as Zimbabweans but to Africans in general and to the world at large. And, unacceptable behaviour must not be rewarded with a pat on his back and money in his pocket. No. It's unacceptable and those measures must be kept in place and made more stringent.

Violet Gonda: Ok. We have to stop here, thank you very much Ralph Black, Tapera Kapuya and Brian Kagoro.

Audio interview can be heard on SW Radio Africa 's Hot Seat programme (6 June 07). Comments and feedback can be emailed to violet@swradioafrica.com

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