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NGOs,
donors and Zimbabwe's transition - SAPES Seminar with
Jonathan Moyo and Brian Raftopoulos
Upenyu
Makoni-Muchemwa, Kubatana.net
May 27, 2010
View audio file details
As part of their
ongoing policy dialogue series SAPES
Trust hosted a discussion about formulating a strategy for Zimbabwe's
Economic Recovery. Presenting at the Seminar themed NGOs, Donors
and Zimbabwe's Transition was former Minister of Information,
and current Member of Parliament for Tsholotsho, Jonathan Moyo.
The discussant was Zimbabwean scholar and activist Professor Brian
Raftopoulos. The seminar was chaired by Professor Rudo Gaidzanwa.
The following
are excerpts from their presentations.
Jonathan
Moyo
The nationalist
view of Zimbabwe's transitions is about achieving and maintaining
the country's permanent as opposed to temporary indigenous
interest which brings together the past, the present and the future
aspirations of the people of Zimbabwe. This stands in contrast on
the other hand to a view of transition which I present here as the
regime change view and this regime change view of the NGO donor
alliance, locates the Zimbabwean crisis in 2000 and defines it as
being about undemocratic or autocratic rule, bad governance, chronic
human rights violations the break down of the rule of law and poor
economic management. According to this NGO / Donor view, and in
very plain terms, the Zimbabwean transition is supposed to be from
ZANU-PF rule to MDC.
Listen
What about the
goals of development is emphasized by these two perspectives? Obviously
it stands to reason that countries seek economic growth and this
is has been an objective of this state since 1980. It also stands
to reason that they seek equity or redistributive justice as a second
goal. They seek democracy, good governance, rule of law and human
rights as a third goal. They also seek political stability and order
as a fourth goal and finally sovereignty or autonomy in international
affairs. The nationalists have remained seized with all these five
in a total package or as pillars of the transition from Rhodesia
to Zimbabwe, as objective of the state. The state has sought in
various ways to address these five things. The regime change alliance
of NGOs and donors has exclusively remained focussed on the goal
of democracy, with the preposterous claim that the struggle for
democracy in Zimbabwe, starts or started in 2000.
Listen
There have been
some attacks or setbacks to the nationalist view of the Transition
that started in 1980 from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. It has had the following
setbacks over the years. Number one: the Gukurahundi atrocities
between 1980 and 1987; Apartheid destabilisation between 1980 and
1994; the ill-advised adoption of ESAP between 1990 and 1997; the
Anglo-American onslaught against our country led by Tony Blair's
so called new labour between 1997 and two weeks ago. Then, the failure
of the 1998 donor conference on Land in Zimbabwe; the failure of
the Draft Constitution in 2000; and ZANU-PF's poor electoral
performances in the 2000 and 2008 general elections.
Listen
This alliance
has suffered major if not fatal setback out of which the following
stand out: One: right from the beginning it has been an alliance
without common values and without a shared strategy or ethos. Its
been all about regime change, but it has not been about alternative
values to the nationalist legacy, nationalist ethos. In fact its
very instructive to know that most of the NGOs with the support
of their donors who have been part of this process when ever given
the opportunity, they have behaved more ZANU-PF than ZANU-PF itself,
especially on those issues that they have criticised. They have
not shown any behaviour or holding of values and principles that
constitute a paradigm, which can be said to be an alternative. This
has been quite fatal. Then there has been the failure of the MDC
to win the 2000 elections, which was quite a major blow. If you
have such an alliance and you contest an election for the first
time around, for the transition that you have in mind to succeed
you must win. If you lose or fail to win, your opponents, especially
if they are nationalists, will wake up the next day with a bigger
and better plan. And yours will be an uphill struggle. We saw this
when the MDC had quite a difficult time in the 2005 elections. ZANU-PF
actually won a two-thirds majority as a result of the failure of
the MDC. Then of course there was the split of the MDC in 2005,
and the failure of Tsvangirai to win outright the March 2008 presidential
election. The signing of the GPA by MDC-T in September 2008, MDC-Ts
joining the inclusive government in February 2009. We remember some
of us that the mantra of the donors at the time was "no deal
is better than a bad deal" and it appears that they went into
a bad deal from their own point of view.
Listen
Above all there
is donor fatigue. After ten thousand hours of failed regime politics,
people have gotten tired. In western countries and therefore among
donors, anything that does not succeed after ten years must be reviewed,
and often the review results in dramatic changes in strategy, discarding
of partners, looking for new partners. If you want to understand
how that goes look at the case of Libya and you will understand
how in fact It is possible that yesterdays friends will part ways
and the donor community will start trying to find and forge new
relationships with the nationalist movement.
Listen
If you follow
carefully the debates that are going on in our country today they
are being shaped by ZANU-PF around fundamental questions of indigenisation,
economic empowerment, consolidation of our natural resources. We
have in Washington, the United States Government amending ZIDERA,
promising us debt relief and so forth, but at the same time, threatening
to block us from utilising our resources. If there is going to be
a change in our country in terms of the upliftment it will require
that we use our resources and the message about that is coming form
the nationalist movement. The NGO and Donor talk about outstanding
GPA issues, political and media reforms which was quite prominent
a few months ago is now having fewer popular takers. The nationalist
message is winning the day.
Listen
Brian
Raftopoulos
I think one
of the important things that emerged in 2000 was that we did get
a more plural notion of what the nation should be. A more diversified
discussion around democratisation, around constitutionalism, and
about ideas of a state which imposes certain narrow definitions
of what citizenship and belonging is. I think that's been
one of the great achievements of the civic movement to open up the
debate on what national belonging is. And to not allow being owned
by a party state, which says that it alone has the right to define
what the national question is and what national belonging is. I
think that still remains one of the great challenges that we face
and I feel that we have a long way to go.
Listen
But more than
that I would say its not just a question of indigenisation. It's
a question of state party ownership of processes. That what we've
been seeing in many of these fields, certainly on the land, certainly
in the judiciary, its not just a level of indigenisation, but a
level of state party control where the state itself is assumed to
be the possession of a particular party. And we see therefore that
process taking place in all these areas. That's a very different
process from the broader process of indigenisation. The two are
not the same and should not be conflated. That ZANU-PF constructs
it like that, that doesn't make it so.
Listen
What has been
the issue is the right of Zimbabweans to expect their vote to be
respected. And that has not happened yet in this country sufficiently.
The key role that the civics have played is to document the abuses
around that particular right, to have their right to vote. Which
after all was a major feature of the nationalist struggle which
was one man, one vote, to have that recognised fully in the context
of a post colonial dispensation. And therefore the role of the civics
had been around documenting abuses around that question.
Listen
When it comes
to the question of messaging, of course ZANU-PF sets the trend,
for a simple reason, they control the media. They control the means
of communication. You'd be absolutely hopeless if you weren't
controlling the messaging around certain issues. . one would want
to see how that would be if there was a greater openness of the
discussion around that messaging especially in the electronic media,
especially in the radio, so that you really did get a national messaging
which came out of a conflicting sense of opinions. That's
a key issue now in this transition.
Listen
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