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Empowering the nation: Towards rights based advocacy
Kamurai Mudzingwa
August 06, 2009

The majority of Zimbabweans have borne the burden of excruciating poverty, acute deprivation of freedom and wanton violations of human rights among other issues. For years Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOS) in Zimbabwe have assisted the majority through relief and needs based programmes such as food relief supplies, the provision of health services, medication, education and shelter among other things. Concomitant advocacy approaches by many civil society organisations (CSOs) have also revolved around needs, relief and reform rather than on human rights.

The failure by many civil society organisations to mainstream rights based advocacy approaches in their quest to alleviate the suffering majority has not only militated against the intended impact of promoting better and permanent standards of living, freedom and dignity among the beneficiaries but it has also had the unintended effect of disempowering and under-developing them. The crux of development is the alleviation of poverty yet many projects in the name of development leave the poor people poorer than before and more and more dependent on external assistance.

The same is largely true about efforts made by civil society where programmes, including those that are advocacy in nature, may offer relief for a short time but ironically leave long term poverty and general strife intact and deepening.

In Zimbabwe, despite efforts by civil society to improve the lot of the majority, people continue to suffer from torture, detention, abductions, political executions, political disenfranchisement, poverty, hunger, disempowerment and homelessness inter-alia.

One of the major reasons is that advocacy efforts have been largely targeting the symptoms rather than the root causes of the problems and this is characteristic of relief based, reform based and needs based advocacy dominating many advocacy approaches.

The rights based approach, which can also be viewed as the precursor to social inclusion, starts by focusing on violations of human rights (the fundamental cause of suffering) rather than on human needs.

In Zimbabwe, political, social and economic strife that lead to marginalization and suffering of the many is engendered by socio-political structures in the organisation of the distribution of resources that discriminate against the majority and that impede efforts to make permanent improvements in their lives and by implication, violating their fundamental human rights.

Politics in Zimbabwe has ensured that power is extremely hierarchical to the extent that it has been socially entrenched and institutionalized to the point of being legitimized in order to overwhelm any trace of democracy as politics plays a part in all programmes. For instance decisions about where a borehole is to be drilled, how much and how civil servants are paid, where a hospital is to be built or where a college is to be located etc are made by ministers and local government authorities whose political orientation rather than the desire to uphold human rights shape their thinking and for them, the consultative process is anathema or superficial.

Poverty and disenfranchisement are so structural and deeply embedded in the political system that they interact with violent oppression and repression and examples have been seen in operations such as Murambatsvina, abductions, torture, cholera outbreak etc.

Rights are now inappropriately connected to political membership and to the concept of citizenship based on, among other things, race, region, tribalism, descent etc

Civil society organisations in Zimbabwe have the obligation to influence policies that address the fundamentals of human rights not through articulation only but through tangible gains realized thereof.

The starting point should be to develop advocacy interventions that recognize people-s inherent rights. There should be institutionalization of rights talk in civil society organizational thinking and actions.

The rights based approach to advocacy, by its nature of social inclusion, empowers beneficiaries (the marginalized and downtrodden) and this will make them know and gain courage to demand their rights. Once they begin to do this, the system that denies them their rights will sag and in the long run, shatter. This implies that rights-based advocacy should go further - not substituting people-s self activity, but deeply anchored on active and conscious social mobilisation as a means to empower people towards their self articulation of issues.

* Kamurai Mudzingwa is the Communications Officer for the National Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (NANGO) in Zimbabwe and he writes in his personal capacity.

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