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Zimbabwe needs an answer
Cameron Doudu,Guardian Unlimited (UK)
April 08, 2008

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/cameron_duodu/2008/04/zimbabwe_needs_an_answer.html

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) - which won a majority of seats in Zimbabwe's parliament in the elections - has gone to court to try and get the electoral commission to release the result. The commission argued in the high court that the court did not have jurisdiction to hear the matter. The court disagreed and decided to hear it. But rather strangely, it said it would wait till Tuesday before announcing whether it wants to hear the case as an "urgent" one or not.

I find the court's decision extraordinary. Zimbabwe has a held a presidential election whose result has been withheld, probably illegally, for over a week, and the country's judiciary needs time to decide whether the matter is an "urgent" one or not? Where was the judiciary when violence broke out in Kenya in January and over 1,000 innocent people lost their lives, while nearly half a million were rendered homeless? Does the court want the same thing to happen in Zimbabwe before it decides the matter is urgent?

Maybe the former secretary-general of the UN, Kofi Annan, should pack his suitcase, ready to go to Zimbabwe.

And maybe he should stop over in Kenya on his way back home, since the agreement he secured there has broken down and most probably will still not have been fully implemented by the time he finishes with Zimbabwe.

Some of these African "leaders" show so very little concern for the safety of the ordinary person whose welfare they have sworn to promote. When violence breaks out, they stay safe within strongly guarded palaces. And ordinary folk see their neighbors coming at them with machetes and guns and torches - ready to butcher them for merely belonging to the ethnic group of one or other of the contestants for power, who has no intention of sharing the spoils of office with other ordinary mortals.

The withholding of the election result confirms what many have suspected throughout the hiatus in which the result has been placed, namely, that Mugabe's Zanu-PF is dictating the decisions of the electoral commission - a body that the Zanu-PF leadership would have us believe is "independent" of any political party.

This seeming manipulation is dishonorable. No self-respecting organization - least of all a movement such as Zanu-PF, which gained worldwide support in its struggle against Ian Smith and his murderous "cowboy cabinet" - should do that.

Unfortunately, Zanu-PF has now irrevocably surrendered the moral high ground to the MDC, which is a pity because the MDC definitely contains racist remnants of the Smith regime, and should not have gained any ground at all in Zimbabwe, if Zanu-PF had not governed in such an incompetent manner.

Zanu-PF should know that you cannot allow inflation to reach over 100,000% and expect people to tolerate it. It has failed to guarantee fundamental rights to Zimbabweans, such as food and wages. One apolitical nurse I spoke to in a London hospital recently told me: "I fear civil war, you know. People who don't have anyone outside to send them money are starving. It will lead to war."

She is right. Millions of Zimbabweans have crossed into South Africa, where some of they have to make do with sleeping in churches, prey to xenophobic elements within the South African police, who make occasional raids to arrest them and send them back. No sooner are they on Zimbabwean soil than they plot to go back again, risking life and limb to do so.

The bottom has also fallen out of the value of the Zimbabwe dollar in an unimaginable manner. In 1991, I spoke to the then finance minister, Bernard Chidzero, during which I told him about how low the Ghanaian currency, the cedi, had been allowed to sink by the PNDC regime. "What!" Chidzero exclaimed. "The people of Zimbabwe would never tolerate that."

Unfortunately for Zimbabwe, Chidzero stepped down as finance minister in 1995, due to ill-health, and died in 2002. His successors have not all possessed the steadfastness with which he would have defended the integrity of his nation's currency, and today, the Zimbabwe dollar is so valueless that Zimbabweans need millions of it just to buy a loaf of bread. When they can find a loaf of bread to buy.

Nevertheless, until the current election, they had - contrary to Chidzero's prophecy - more or less "tolerated" the incredible devaluation of their currency. Now, they have said "enough is enough" and officially divested Zanu-PF of its majority in parliament.

It is inconceivable that having booted out so many Zanu-PF grandees out of parliament (about nine ministers have lost their seats) the electorate would spare the leader of the pack himself, Mugabe, from a similar fate. He has only himself to blame. His current maneuvers to reverse the people's decision indicates that perhaps he didn't quite understand the term "liberation" when he was throwing it about in relation to "freeing" the people of Zimbabwe from oppression.

"Liberation" means setting people free - free to take their own decisions regarding who to vote for and who to vote against; free to declare people heroes and free to rescind their decision when they think fit.

Of course, the people are difficult to serve. They threw Winston Churchill out in Britain, after he'd led the country to victory in the second world war. Russians grew to hate Josef Stalin, although he too fought valiantly against Hitler. War leader though he was, he incarcerated them, in their millions, in gulags.

It is individuals who offer themselves as capable of serving the people. When these individuals fail and the people reject them, they should accept it and step down. Kenneth Kaunda did it in Zambia. Mugabe should now follow suit. For what can he do in the next six years that he couldn't have done in the past 28 years?

Manipulating election results in particular, and thereby exposing the people to the risk of an ethnic conflict on the scale that we saw in Kenya, is a criminal act unworthy of any person in whom the people once reposed trust. And, for the "leader" concerned, it is indisputably dishonorable.

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