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Zim a steadfast country
Baffour Ankomah, Editor of New African
Extracted from The Herald (Zimbabwe)
October 04, 2005

http://www.herald.co.zw/index.php?id=47509&pubdate=2005-10-04

FROM the international media, you may be forgiven for thinking that Zimbabwe, demonised as a failed State, is about to collapse. Baffour Ankomah, Editor of New African magazine, was here again in August, and reports that the rebuilding programme launched after the recent controversial clean-up operation is going pretty well, and though the economy is still struggling, the obituary writers had better suspend rushing to their computers. They may well have to praise rather than bury President Mugabe’s country.

ZIMBABWE is an enigma. When everybody expects it to go down, it goes up. Unlike Isaac Newton’s falling apple, pulled down by the force of gravity, Zimbabwe appears to defy the gravitational pull, much to the chagrin of its detractors.

Weighed down by what President Mugabe calls "these odious economic sanctions" imposed by Britain, America and their European partners, and not helped by some spectacular own goals scored by Zimbabwe itself, the country still marches on, chest high, where many others in similar situations would have long fallen.

Yes, fuel, foreign exchange and other essential shortages persist, and agriculture the mainstay of the economy — has still not recovered from four straight years of drought (though irrigation has been stepped up this year), but Zimbabwe refuses to go down, largely through the determination of the nationalists there who want to prove a point to the world that some Africans do possess stiffer and capitulation is not an option.

Take the recent controversial Operation Restore Order which saw the demolition of slums and shacks across the country, an operation which was widely condemned by Western countries and later by a damning UN report which came up with an estimate of 700 000 people having been affected by the operation.

In late August, the Government officially responded to the UN report with a 45-page rebuttal in which it accused the compilers of the report, led by the Tanzanian head of UN-Habitat, Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, of bias against the Government.

"From the content of the report," the rebuttal said, "it is clear that submissions from Government are dismissed as claims, allegations or rhetoric whilst submissions from NGOs hostile to the Government, donors and those opposition leaders who are critical of the Government, are explicitly or impliedly treated as statements of fact.

"The report grossly exaggerates the number of people who were rendered homeless by the operation. A fact-finding mission must report on what it actually found on the ground and not infer homelessness from some fictitious formula or mathematical extrapolation."

The rebuttal continued: "Zimbabwe is currently under illegal sanctions that were imposed by the USA, UK, EU and the white Commonwealth countries opposed to the land reform programme. It is not true that the sanctions are not directed at the economy.

"The Zimbabwe democracy and Economic Recovery Act (co-drafted by one of the opposition MDC’s white parliamentarians, and passed by the US Congress in 2001), blocks Zimbabwe’s access to balance of payment support from the IMF and any financial assistance from the World Bank, and excludes Zimbabwe from benefiting from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) facility.

"EU sanctions have seen Zimbabwe being denied access to the ACP-EU 9th European development fund. Even access to humanitarian assistance through the Global Fund for HIV/Aids, TB and malaria has been blocked mainly as a result of EU and USA pressure, and the UN report says nothing about it."

However, what both the Government rebuttal of the UN report have refused to say is the exact reason why Operation Restore Order was launched in the first place.

New African can now reveal that the operation was the brainchild of Zimbabwe’s intelligence community which felt it had to move quickly to nip in the bud a Ukrainian-style revolution (or street protests) then being planned in Zimbabwe and funded by the same Western countries who paid for Ukraine’s so-called "orange revolution" earlier this year.

After the success in Ukraine, the same metropolitan powers that paid the Ukrainian students to start the street protests in Kiev were paying for a similar thing in Harare. They had in fact hoped that Zimbabweans would do it by themselves in the aftermath of the March 31 parliamentary elections that saw the MDC beaten out of sight.

When the protests did not materialise, because the majority of Zimbabweans saw no need for them (having voted for the party of their choice and accepted the elections to be free and fair), the metropolitan powers upped the ante by secretly channelling funds for an insurrection via opposition elements who were going to use vulnerable slum dwellers to confront the Government in what they had hoped would be bloody street clashes.

Somehow, Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), one of the best spy agencies on the continent (if not the world), got wind of the impending operation — and they must have panicked; because they chose to deal with it in a most usual way — nip the danger in the bud by dispersing the slum dwellers via the demolition of their habitats.

The security agency quickly got hold of the President, showed him the evidence of the anger and sold him the hasty solution.

With the experience of Ukraine fresh in everybody’s mind, Operation Restore Order was given wings, without going through the normal route of Cabinet discussion and approval. As a result, many Cabinet ministers and key Government officials who would have normally been privy to such an operation were kept in the dark. Some, in fact, heard about it a day after it had begun.

In so doing, a lot of mistakes were made in the implementation of the operation.

First, the normal civil service scrutiny was dispensed with. In normal times, as happened with the land reform programme, the civil services would have been tasked to write papers looking at the pros and cons of the operation, the relevant local and international laws governing the area, the provision of alternative accommodation and stalls, the financial cost, the international repercussions, and so on, before the operation could get Cabinet approval.

In this case, as the security services drove the operation, all the elaborate laid-down procedures were short-circuited, and in the process serious errors were made, leading to international outcry and condemnation.

Therefore, some of the criticisms contained in Tibaijuka’s UN report were justified.

In private, some Government ministers and key officials admit that they could have done it better. They say the security services were allowed too much latitude to run the operation, and as security people, they focused too much on diffusing the danger and less on the consequences.

Interestingly, you will have to read up to the end of page 30 of the Government’s response to the UN report to find an "official hint" of the main reason why the operation was launched with such haste.

"The risk to public health and morality, national security and the economy necessitated that the operation had to be undertaken without further delay," the Government response says.

However, where the UN report got it totally wrong was underestimating the will of the Zimbabwean nationalists to provide for the people in the face of adversity.

In the 100-page UN report, only four pages were devoted to the rebuilding programme (code-named Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle) launched while Tibaijuka and her mission were still in Zimbabwe compiling the report. And even out of the four pages, two were used to dismiss Operation Garikai.

In a rather unenthusiastic manner, the report said of Garikai: "Whilst the reconstruction intervention is much welcome, and a sign that the Government of Zimbabwe acknowledges the existence of the crisis it has created, and is willing to accept its responsibility to take corrective measures, it is the view of the UN special envoy (Tibaijuka) that Operation Restore Order has precipitated a humanitarian crisis which the Government itself, even with the best of intentions and efforts, has limited capacity to fully address without the assistance of the international community.

"Firstly, the scale of announced expenditure (US$300 million) was not foreseen in the 2005 budget, and if it were to somehow materialise, it could exacerbate the inflation rate which is running at over 140 percent.

"Secondly, as conceived, Operation Garikai is predominantly a developmental intervention. It does not address immediate needs, such as shelter, food, water, sanitation, health and education… Operation Garikai continues to be premised on the false assumption that evictees would return to their rural homes while the majority in fact have not, or are not in a position to do so."

Perhaps Tibaijuka and her mission would want to go back and see what Operation Garikai has achieved since their report was released on 22 July. The "illusive" US$300m has materialised, not from this year’s budget but from the Government borrowing from the Reserve Bank’s strategic reserves that had been lying idle until now.

In its response to the UN report, the Government said it " has released a further $3 trillion (US$300m) under the National Housing Facility which is being disbursed through building societies at low interest rates to those who opt to construct their own homes".

Rather than " exacerbating" the inflation rate as prophesied by Tibaijuka’s report, the "illusive US$300m" has created jobs linked directly and indirectly to OPeration Garikai. For example, thousands of construction workers, including women, have been employed, building houses and market stalls (or Small and Medium Scale Enterprises) for those who lost their homes and stalls in the clean-up operation.

Local suppliers to the building industry are, thus, laughing all the way to the bank as Operation Garikai has brought an unexpected boom. And contrary to what the UN report said, Operation Garikai is addressing the need for shelter, water, sanitation and health.

All these amenities are being provided as part of the rebuilding programme. And a "majority" of the evictees have returned to "their rural homes" to await the day, in the next few months, when they would be recalled to take possession of their new homes.

In mid-August, this writer had the opportunity to tour some of the rebuilding sites in Harare, Kwekwe, Gweru, Bulawayo, Masvingo and Mutare — right across the country. It was an impressive sight that awaited me, especially since the Government had had only a few weeks to do it.

What was quite heart-warming was to see women bricklayers and masons rubbing shoulders with their male counterparts at these sites.

In short, because of the exigency of the situation, the Government is building half of each house (which, in Zimbabwe, is called a "core house", made up of one bedroom, a kitchen, a separate bath and a separate toilet).

The new owners will be given loans by the Government (payable over 30 years) to buy the "core houses" outright. They will then build the other half (or extend it) at their own pace.

The "core houses" will have amenities such as electricity, water, sanitation, roads, sewage, postal services, etc, which their former shacks did not have. (In Zimbabwe, unlike many African countries, the post office delivers letters to home addresses provided it has a street number — a service which the former slums did not have because they had no street numbers). It will be a big improvement on their demolished habitats.

By mid-September, work was going pretty well all over the country. Apart from one location, Hatcliffe Extension in Harare, where the Ministry of Local Government unwisely allowed evictees to return to their former plots without shelter, there was good news almost everywhere else.

Sadly, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, who had accepted an invitation from President Mugabe to go and see things for himself at the end of August, cancelled his trip after pressure from the big powers.

Meanwhile, another surprise in this nation of many surprises is the famous US$1billion loan that Zimbabwe is said to have asked for from its southern neighbour, South Africa. The truth is that Zimbabwe did not ask for any such loan. Or, better put, the initiative for the loan did not come from Harare; it was the World Bank that initiated it.

New African can reveal that when the World Bank’s boss, James Wolfowitz, visited South Africa early this year, a member of his entourage — a woman called Krueger — sold the idea to President Thabo Mbeki. According to inside sources, Krueger told Mbeki: "Why don’t you help Zimbabwe as it is your biggest trading partner.

"If Zimbabwe is expelled by the IMF, all credit lines will dry up and it will affect your trade with your northern neighbour. All that the IMF will need is a word from you to underwrite Zimbabwe’s debt to the IMF. You may not even need to move any money. Just your word".

According to the sources, Mbeki was taken aback as he did not know the Bretton Woods institutions to be charitable to Zimbabwe. He, however, carried the message to President Mugabe when they met at the AU Summit in Sirte, Libya, in early July.

President Mugabe, according to the sources, was equally surprised to learn of the unexpected generosity from the World Bank, but decided to go along if the offer was truly genuine and not a Trojan horse.

However, as officials of the two countries began to discuss the offer further, elements in the South African central bank opposed to the deal leaked the story to the anti-Mugabe media in South Africa. The opposition Democratic Alliance gave it even more wings.

Soon all sorts of conditions, from within and outside South Africa, were being attached to the loan. Twice in the past few months, when President Mbeki was out of the country, some of his officials conspired behind his back to send letters to Harare attaching even more conditions to the loan. On each occasion, Mbeki had to dispatch an envoy to tell Harare to disregard the letters.

At the time of going to Press, the two countries were still discussing the loan. In the meantime, Zimbabwe, from its own resources, had paid US$131m of the IMF debt of nearly US$300m — even before the South African loan became available — wrong-footing the IMF, which threatened to throw Zimbabwe out for non-payment. — New African magazine October 2005.

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