President of the Chiefs Council, Senator Fortune Charumbira (FC) recently torched a storm after declaring traditional leaders’ support for Zanu PF ahead of the coming 2018 elections.
BY OBEY MANAYITI
Constitutionally, the institution of traditional chiefs is required to be apolitical. Following outrage over Charumbira’s comments, our reporter Obey Manayiti (OM) spoke to the chief about his controversial statements. below are excerpts from the interview.
OM: Your statements at the recent chiefs’ conference in Bulawayo pledging traditional leaders’ support to Zanu PF ahead of the 2018 elections was met with outrage. Why are you turning an institution that is supposed to be apolitical into a ruling party affiliate?
FC: The traditional leadership is not an affiliate. As you are aware, they represent everybody but I think the misconception that you as journalists and all Zimbabweans have is when you talk of being non-partisan [you think] politically chiefs must be passive bystanders.
If we see that democracy is being dysfunctional and instead of democracy promoting the will of the people, it is actually undermining the interests of Zimbabweans then chiefs will stand up and pronounce themselves on matters that are critical to national interest. Being apolitical doesn’t mean that we take no interest in the way the country is being governed. Being apolitical doesn’t mean we don’t have interests to protect as an institution.
We owe our existence to protecting national interest and by so doing, we realise the aspiration of every Zimbabwean. If you reflect upon the 1896 Shona-Ndebele uprising in this country, it was led by chiefs and one thing that the colonialists said after that war was that they needed to put up a new administrative system to ensure that chiefs had no authority over their people through the laws that they passed called Native Regulations (1898).
In those regulations, they said let us set up a cadre of officers who will be deployed across the country and these are the people they called the native district administrators and their sole purpose was to ensure that they turned people away from traditional authority and people looked up to those native commissioners. They feared the chiefs would lead a repeat of the 1896 war so the whole scheme was to create a political administrative system that ensured traditional leadership was done away with. But what were the chiefs fighting for? They were leading resistance and we will always lead resistance when things are not going on well.
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And now how do you separate struggles of 1896 from the struggle of today? Chiefs remain chiefs and their core business is to protect the national interest and the aspirations of the people of Zimbabwe, their wealth, values, culture, ubuntu and so on.
In the current situation of political chemistry, there are two groups of people and the first say chiefs and politics are inseparable while the other one says get the chiefs out. Can you send chiefs home to go and sleep and forget about how the country is governed? We are basically the iota of governance.
If you form a government that says if I get to power I will allow homosexuality, do you think the chiefs will keep quiet? The only problem that you make is that you are over-emphasising the stick without showing us the carrot.
You need a stick and carrot strategy in this issue of politics and chiefs. One will say chiefs have no role but it’s not correct, that is intellectually shallow. If you need to succeed in politics, the issue is what is the role of chiefs in politics and if you say there is no role then you are being unrealistic. If there is another aspiring leader who wants to reverse the land reform, then, chiefs will come out to say this person must not rule. This is the preamble that I thought everyone should know first before judging chiefs.
OM: So when you say national interest, you mean supporting Zanu PF?
FC: No, but the problem is that if you look at various political parties, their agenda, especially MDC-T, doesn’t support chiefs and therein lies the problem. Some people don’t even believe in the institution of traditional leaders and we have to fight that. There are people who don’t believe in the existence of our institution and if they don’t, why must we support them? Can we sit and listen to someone wishing our institution death? That is where we come in and say, no. In the Constitution preamble we are recognised.
OM: Do you mean all other parties don’t support chiefs except Zanu PF?
FC: I don’t know, but I have never heard them supporting us. The MDC-T spokesperson Obert Gutu wrote an article criticising that we were given cars.
OM: Lawyers argue that you are interfering with the basic freedoms of all community members to exercise their rights to support candidates of their choice without fear of reprisals. What is your reaction to that?
FC: We have never interfered with anyone’s freedom to choose a candidate and we don’t even do that.
OM: So why the blanket announcement on supporting Zanu PF? Maybe there are some who might want to support the opposition.
FC: (Laughing) What I said at that forum comes from the chiefs themselves and this is why you see no one opposing that. There is a process that took place before we even made that pronouncement. [Ordinarily] provinces meet first and come to the council of chiefs with issues from the provinces and what they want us to present to the president. I only repeated what they said.
OM: Can chiefs and other traditional leaders be in a position to treat their subjects fairly when they dabble in partisan politics?
FC: We separate our role with the community in terms of allowing everyone to have equal access to the chief regardless of political persuasion. All those things that people allege, like that chiefs distribute food on partisan lines, it’s because of ignorance of the facts on the ground.
A chief leads thousands of people and sometimes there are two constituencies served by one chief — there is no way a chief can compile a list of beneficiaries. It’s like claiming President Robert Mugabe is selectively distributing items to people, say in Tsholotsho. All those things happen at the level of the village head. In some cases, a chief may have more than 500 village heads, but it is people in the village who carry their own debate and gather to draw a list of who qualifies to get whatever is there.
At no point does a chief draw a list of beneficiaries and for instance, on support from NGOs. It is those organisations that draw their own lists. In fact, it is very misdirected for people to attack chiefs saying they are the ones who deny people assistance.
OM: Your statements were made after Local Government minister Saviour Kasukuwere announced that government had bought 226 vehicles for chiefs. Is there a link between the vehicles and your pledge?
FC: It’s not the first time the government has done that. In the last 20 years, chiefs have made similar pronouncements. 2005, 2008, 2013 if you remember there were no vehicles that were pledged. using that historical narrative, there is no link to what you are saying. However, this scheme is a lawful scheme, it is not like it was created in Bulawayo. There is a statutory instrument which binds the government to give chiefs motor vehicles after every five years.
OM: But what can you say if someone says your stance on chiefs supporting Zanu PF is not different from the behaviour of traditional leaders that were used by the [Ian] Smith regime against their own?
FC: It is totally different. Smith had no programmes similar to those we have today. When you say under the Smith regime, you are talking about an individual chief who supported Smith. He (Smith) had no council like what we have now where we can pronounce that we are supporting so and so.
There was no such platform, but mind you, there were chiefs who helped in the formation of parties to oppose Smith, for example, [Rekayi] Tangwena. However, there are individual chiefs, who out of lack intellectual capacity, saw Smith as their ruler. It’s different now because I am driving an agenda of an institution and not individuals.
OM: Are chiefs comfortable living in the lap of luxury with top-of-the-range cars and electrified homesteads while their subjects wallow in poverty?
FC: (Laughing) The question should be the other way round. Are you people happy to see your chiefs languish in poverty being your leaders to whom you go for guidance at one point or another? Do you want a father who is basically destitute while his children are living luxuriously? Is that the society that you want?
After all, it’s there in the Constitution that chiefs must be respected and given the dignity they deserve. Why are you running away from the Constitution? How many cars are there in Zimbabwe? millions, right? Some of them acquired fraudulently. Why are you concerned with only 226? We have more than 300 vehicles given to MPs who also earn more than $2 000 and what do chiefs get? Why don’t people complain? Let’s be honest with each other.
OM: Chiefs and other traditional leaders are accused of forcing villagers to surrender their voter registration slips on behalf of Zanu PF. What are you doing to curb that kind of criminality?
FC: We condemn that. If anyone is doing that, it is bad. However, there is quite a significant proportion of village heads who are not able to write and the secretaries, elected by the people, sometimes do the writing and they then do those things you are making reference to.
We need to absolve the chiefs. There is no chief who is writing letters. Let’s go to the village heads, let’s give an example of the police force. Sometimes there are rogue elements and in a court of law the magistrate says identify those officers accused of bribery so that they are fired. Let’s have a similar approach; as chiefs council, we want evidence. We want those who were asked to do that to come forward and give us evidence so that we take measures against those people.
OM: Some say you are being over-enthusiastic to deliver chiefs to Zanu PF because you are seeking protection against those questioning your legitimacy as a chief. What is your reaction to that? Do you consider yourself a legitimate chief in light of the challenge by your own clansmen?
FC: There is no chieftainship in the country which is not contested. I want you to know that. Come to my office and you will see that almost 90% of chieftainships are being contested. Everyone wants to be a chief in Zimbabwe and there is nothing new about chieftainship being contested. What you should know is that in the Charumbira chieftainship, I am a chief in terms of the traditions and customs of succession. It’s like in national politics, MDC always cries that elections were rigged but can Zanu PF stop ruling because of that?
