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LAST week South African President Jacob Zuma sent Mac Maharaj, a member of his negotiating team, to Harare to observe developments in the government of national unity (GNU) and try to bring the discordant members of government closer to consensus.
This month there will be a Southern African Development Community (Sadc) summit in Windhoek, Namibia. Whether Zimbabwe will be on the agenda, or not, is still open to conjecture.
Last month there was an African Union (AU) meeting in Kampala, Uganda; the Zimbabwean crisis was hardly mentioned.
The present chairman of the AU, Bingu wa Mutharika, couldn’t be bothered because his close ally Robert Mugabe is in full control, everything going his way.
Mugabe and Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni are birds of a feather.
Namibia, which will this month assume the chairmanship of Sadc is also led by another close Mugabe ally, Hifikepunye Pohamba who will try by any means to ensure Mugabe is not exposed to censure for all the breaches of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) he has committed.
So what does the AU and Sadc think of the situation in Zimbabwe? Have they taken a leaf from former mediator Thabo Mbeki who is infamously quoted saying: “What crisis? There is no crisis in Zimbabwe.”
Parties to the GPA which saw the formation of the GNU one and a half years ago have hardly gelled together with dozens of outstanding issues still threatening to tear the government apart.
It must be admitted though that all is not doom and gloom. The past year has seen some strides being made in the revival of the economy and the bad-boy image that the country had assumed over the past decade is beginning to be sanitised with a number of western journalists beginning to write positively about the country.
Most of the outstanding issues are nothing really but peripheral issues which do not deserve to be tabled at a serious regional or continental summit.
But what are the real issues?
The crux of the matter is that when the GNU was formed, to the majority of Zimbabweans it was tasked with three major deliverables: to write a new constitution, hold internationally observed elections and to put in place a government of the people’s choice.
The constitution-making process is stuttering; there is a clique in Zanu PF which does not want to see it succeed and is prepared to use violence to ensure its goal is achieved. The reason is difficult to work out but one can presume it is because this clique, which evidently, is very powerful, continues to benefit from the status quo.
Its readiness to use violence and intimidation will again ensure that the elections, supposedly coming next year, will not be free and fair and they will not be recognised by many countries across the globe; it will again be a case of the same old rubbish!
But the third deliverable is the most worrying. In case Zanu PF loses the elections, as they did in 2008, will they be willing to transfer power?
In 2008 Zanu PF was unwilling to transfer power to the MDC-T which had just won the elections. It took five weeks for the Zimbabwe Election Commission to announce the results and when they did they were doctored. The period between that election in March and the presidential runoff in June became the most singularly violent period in Zimbabwean history outside the gukurahundi era!
This unwillingness to transfer power should be the critical reason why Sadc and the AU should keep Zimbabwe on the agenda.
Commentators say it is now clear that the MDC made a suicidal mistake in entering the GNU without addressing this crucial issue.
It has become very clear that the people who call the shots in Zanu PF do not include President Robert Mugabe. Some say the nation is continually being reminded that he is the head of state and government and commander-in-chief of the defence forces precisely because he is neither. The role of the generals in the running of politics in Zimbabwe is becoming increasingly clear.
Zimbabwe is being run by a military junta; to deny this fact is to be foolish.
The military junta’s stranglehold on Zimbabwe has been tightened by the discovery of diamonds in Chiadzwa. Reports seem to indicate that the two companies contracted to mine the diamonds, Mbada and Canadile, are in fact only fronts of the junta. Their reporting structures eventually merge at the desk of the military strongmen who constitute the stratocracy. With the shadowy way in which the diamonds are mined and sold, the junta must be floating like a cork in money.
This money will be used to block a clean transfer of power should Zanu PF lose next year.
This is why the transfer of power is the most important outstanding issue in the GPA; not the other almost vexatious issues such as the playing of jingles on radio.
If Sadc and the AU are to fulfill their mandate as guarantors of the GPA, they must deliver the generals! When Sadc meets in Windhoek this month top of their agenda should be how they are going to do this.
Zuma may send some of his greatest negotiators to Zimbabwe to mediate the impasse in the GNU but all they will do is dwell on the trivial issues such as that of the provincial governors, Gideon Gono, Johannes Tomana and Roy Bennett. What they will never do is to tackle the real issue, namely the issue of disabling the generals to ensure a smooth transfer of power if it becomes necessary.
BY NEVANJI MADANHIRE
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Nevanji has possibly grasped the issues in contention on power shakers and movers than on change strategy. Change strategy would embody the people wishes which mean winning or losing of an election. The question is can one divorce power hunger from rigging? What else can the so-called joint command do which they have not done except making it m*re and m*re clear that Zanu-Pf has totally lost the people support period.
In my opinion, the GPA has worked well to expose the machinations of Zanu-pf that they are blindfolded in maintaining what they are losing year after year-people confidence. Their strategy is to prolong suffering not as choice but as hope to change world opinion to support Zanu-pf once m*re. Inevitably they are hunting for leadership to rescue their effort even though it’s running late. Current contenders of power appear far removed despite their fight for enrolment. Mugabe is a night mare itself and really it does not matter what he is for as long as he speaks the language for the force behind him.
The truth is no one in the world today, including African leaders, can prophesy ignorance and that they do not know what Zanu-pf is after by and large in Zimbabwe. Zanu-pf like any failing regimes on the continent are after making sure their surrogates are wealthy. Africa bleeds from this callous attitude hence their agendas are empty.
The strategy for change is to secure international electoral supervision and control the source of Zanu-pf mischief, which is the ill mannered army who pour energy on citizens to crush their inalienable right to chose a government of their making. If that were to be in place, then we would not hypothesize on what if the MDC wins elections again.
With beating or ma*sacre, the MDC will win the elections because the Zanu-pf has displayed the ugly height of their avarice and pa*sionate disregard for people lives, as before but acutely, in recent diamonds discoveries. There is no alternative therefore in majority of people in Zimbabwe that Zanu-pf has become m*re an emissary of death and pain and should go. The African Union (AU) unfortunately is a dysfunctional organ run by visionless people who lack leadership at most, and are therefore, empty of human empathy. The AU is in denial as to its ruinous acts on human resources of Africa through upholding to poor governance without consensus on what to tell a dictator who is emerging or one already among them.
The continent diplomacy is poor and extremely embellished and shrouded in hypocrisy. It ignores reality of people dying from abuse and fears of leadership change m*re so, constitutional change, since they have no hand in military coups.
Whether we like it or not, military role or militarism, has and should constitute and play a major part to resolving conflicts on the continent. The fact that we find African leadership investing much in military to the extent they train their children or relatives, should indicate to us the need for military professionalism. Yet one finds no discussion on military or its being an agenda item on the continental meetings. The outcome is unwanted death apart from those caused from causes of no medication and treatment as a result of poor governance.
Zimbabwe's case is one of dishonesty within and dishonesty without. Dishonesty is an agenda coined in a variety of ways, short of openly endorsing loss of live by careless means otherwise preventable. Zuma should also learn to say I have failed, which is an anathema for leadership to concede either to defeat or failure. Zimbabwe will remain an expensive political experiment. The answers are within insight, vision and persistence to conquer and win people supported victory by Zimbabweans. How is not the issue but when. History is consistent that suffering matures into peace gained and safeguarded.