Are we ready for elections or it’s much ado about nothing?

Business
Some of you will remember the memorial service of Nelson Mandela. Thirty-four-year old Thamsanqa Jantjie, the owner of South African Interpreters, was hired by the African National Congress (ANC) as a qualified interpreter for the hearing impaired. While the world watched, world leaders gave eulogies, Jantjie, the prime interpreter, confidently continued interpreting all speeches using sign language. No one noticed what was going on for a while.

Some of you will remember the memorial service of Nelson Mandela. Thirty-four-year old Thamsanqa Jantjie, the owner of South African Interpreters, was hired by the African National Congress (ANC) as a qualified interpreter for the hearing impaired. While the world watched, world leaders gave eulogies, Jantjie, the prime interpreter, confidently continued interpreting all speeches using sign language. No one noticed what was going on for a while.

By GLORia NDORO-MKOMBACHOTO

Those competent in sign language gradually became aware that Jantjie was making up the sign language as the dignitaries spoke. Self-assured and composed, Jantjie was fake as they come, conducting sign language that made no sense at all.

According to the Guardian of December 16 2013, “a day later, the official inquiry disclosed Jantjie put his behaviour down to a sudden attack of schizophrenia, for which he takes medication: he had been hearing voices and hallucinating.” In an interview with the Star newspaper, Jantjie defended himself saying, “There was nothing I could do. I was alone in a very dangerous situation,” he said. “I tried to control myself and not show the world what was going on. I am very sorry. It’s the situation I found myself in.” Jantjie nonetheless defiantly insisted that he was happy with his performance and had done a sterling job.

Further investigations revealed that Jantjie had a criminal record having been arrested several times since the mid-1990s and due to being mentally unfit during the time the crimes were committed, had escaped serving jail time. The Guardian further reported that Jantjie had over the years been “accused of rape, theft, housebreaking and malicious damage to property; his most recent brush with the law occurred in 2003 when he faced murder, attempted murder and kidnapping charges”.

It is a no-brainer that because there were heads of state of several other countries attending the memorial service a comprehensive foolproof security clearance of those who were going to be on the podium with these dignitaries would have been done. How was it conceivable or even possible, with all the security and control measures for such an international event, for a person the calibre of Jantjie to be shoulder to shoulder with world leaders? Here was a criminal, hiding in plain sight, with the guts, courage, confidence and chutzpah to fake sign language and almost got away with it.

Thamsanqa Jantjie is not alone in the world of make-believe

In a few months Zimbabweans are casting their votes. In the schizophrenic madness like that displayed by Jantjie, there are over 100 presidential candidates including the incumbent. Who are these people and what are they seeking in presidential political spaces? Many of their political parties are unknown and if they have developed manifestos, only them know about the contents. Who is their constituency and where they are holding rallies.

The Guardian suggests that, “Jantjie’s performance was not meaningless —precisely because it delivered no particular meaning (the gestures were meaningless), it directly rendered meaning as such — the pretence of meaning.” If the idea of the upcoming elections is essentially to give credibility, validation and legitimacy to the governing party, surely this could have been temporarily achieved by other means such as engaging the opposition groupings and mapping out a reasonable timeline for electoral reforms followed by free and fair elections.

Like Jantjie’s meaningless gestures to the hearing impaired, the upcoming elections are certainly not intended to benefit the electorate. They are meant to present a veneer of having created a democratic state, when the truth on the ground is, we are in a military state. I do not believe the citizenry is bothered much as long as there is no tyranny of the past and people are able to go about their daily business without extortion from the police.

Then there is weirdness, coupled with amusement, descending into outrage at the thought of the toppled former incumbents under the National Patriotic Front banner who are considering a comeback. Only they are privy to what they believe they will achieve now for the citizenry that they failed to achieve in 37 years. If their most recent utterances are anything to go by, they could end up being a source of destabilisation for the country.

It goes without saying that every Zimbabwean has a constitutional right to put themselves forward as a presidential candidate, but to have over 100 candidates smacks of insanity and dementedness of Jantjie proportions.

The terrain for free and fair elections is uneven

Why do we need these elections in the first place? Are we ready or is it because the governing party is seeking legitimacy, given the way they ascended to power?

If so, legitimacy to whom, and for whose benefit? Many level-headed people have already accepted the fact that Operation Restore Legacy did not happen in November 2017 so that the governing party loses elections and power a few months later. That is unlikely and unthinkable. As much as the country needs an infusion of new blood and innovative ideas from various constituencies, the governing party is not going to let power slip. They missed an opportunity to be inclusive of other parties when President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced his Cabinet.

The governing party is doing road shows at home and abroad making all kinds of promises around investment, transformation, etcetera. They inherited the rot that they helped create and must certainly be given a chance to clean up their mess.

Besides that, electoral reforms are far from fruition. Among legal issues that are outstanding include but are not restricted to the following: l Repressive legislations such as Aippa and Posa are yet to abolished.

l Vote-buying as evidenced by chiefs, some of whom do not have driver’s licences, being prioritised for extravagant and unnecessary car purchases over the bedrock of our health system, the doctors and nurses who are paid paltry wages and salaries.

l Delimitation of constituencies has not been done.

l Biometric voter registration incomplete

l Unequal access to government media and so on.

The Jantjie syndrome must not be used to mislead the citizenry into believing that free and fair elections will prevail. There are insufficient conditions on the ground right now to achieve that.

Cash and foreign payment challenges linger

Political rhetoric is not going to get us out of this quagmire. The new order needs to show political will and commitment to improving the business landscape for both local and foreign investors. Those potentially local investors who externalised money are not going to repatriate money back to an economy where cash availability and foreign payment problems persist. Foreign direct investment will gravitate where it’s able to remit dividends and profits and where property rights are guaranteed and there is rule of law.

No need to fuss over nothing — the solutions are within reach

Zimbabwe is not the first country that has found itself at the crossroads. Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia and Senegal, to mention a few countries, were able to turn around their economies after, like Zimbabwe, they had gone off and got stuck into political detours that led to economic decline. As succinctly suggested by a recent ZFN Realtime Financial Intelligence report, “the most effective way to conduct ‘re-engagement’ with the international community in pursuit of an economic turnaround is to engage, literally, global banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase with a mandate to raise money on global capital markets to retire debt arrears and fund government’s development priorities with real money instead of printing and debasing existing bank balances.” We are playing catch-up and half-hearted approaches will only prolong Zimbabwe’s long-awaited metamorphosis. And as for Jantjie, he was subsequently barred from working as a sign language interpreter by Deaf South Africa and has been struggling to eke out a living as an actor.

l Gloria Ndoro-Mkombachoto is an entrepreneur and a regional enterprise development consultant. Her experience spans a period of over 25 years. She can be contacted at [email protected]