OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

Power is the key word and the ongoing impasse between the two sides in the current negotiations in Zimbabwe is characterised in the media as a struggle for power’ as if power in itself was a dirty word and the two sides are no better than dogs fighting over a bone. I would argue, however, that the desire for power is not necessarily harmful in itself. The desire for political power for its own sake, for personal gain and self-aggrandizement is very different from wanting power in order to bring about change in people’s lives; to make life better for the majority of the population.

Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF have been in power for twenty eight years. They have become used to the trappings of power; they are richer than their wildest dreams. All of this has been made possible through their unquestioning support for Mugabe and the ruling party. Personal integrity has gone by the board; judges have delivered their judgements not in accord with justice but according to the political dictates of Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF; policemen have long forgotten their true mandate to serve and protect the people and have instead become no more than party functionaries willing to beat and kill the people they deem to be the enemies of the state. In Zanu PF’s eyes they are the state, all power is theirs and the people are merely appendages to be used and abused as the state sees fit. Absolute power has corrupted Zanu PF absolutely. After twenty eight years of unchallenged power they simply cannot accept that any other party is entitled or competent to share power. A statement in the government mouthpiece, The Herald, this week claimed that: The MDC is too inexperienced to run finance…Government they added is formed by the President …the MDC is not fit to oversee security agencies. We urge them to get into government to learn the ropes and build trust. Unintended irony perhaps, I wondered as I read the Herald comments alongside the list of ministries that Robert Mugabe abrogated to himself in an Extraordinary Government Gazette, issued late one evening just  before Thabo Mbeki arrived on yet another attempt to rescue the floundering negotiations. Could anyone, even within the ruling party, with a modicum of intelligence claim that the Ministries of Finance, Foreign Affairs, Defence, Home Affairs, Justice and Information had been competently run by the present holders of power? The evidence of financial mismanagement is clear for all to see. You don’t need to be an economist to know that inflation makes your salary worthless before you have even withdrawn it from the bank or bought a loaf of bread or paid the bus fare home again, let alone put food on the table or paid the school fees. Are we seriously supposed to believe that the MDC is too inexperienced (ie.incompetent) to run finance’ as the Herald would have us believe? And what of Home Affairs, the Ministry that runs the elections? The electoral roll is stuffed with names of long dead voters and under the hopelessly incompetent Mugabe puppet, Tobiwa Mudede, has reduced the country’s electoral system to a laughing stock. The police, the army and the justice system have similarly been reduced to nothing but caricatures under Zanu PF mismanagement but still Mugabe claims he wants all of them and his puppets at the Herald and ZBC continue to spew out their poisonous lies to the effect that no one could have done it better’

But, you can’t fool all the people all the time and this week there are signs that Hungry people are indeed Angry people. Civic society appears to be on the move, sporadic as yet and certainly not free of police violence. It was the students on Tuesday in Harare trying to present a petition as the House re-assembled and getting beaten and gaoled for their trouble; on Tuesday and Wednesday it was journalists thrown out of the Talks venue for supposedly not being accredited; on Thursday it was the Woza women in Bulawayo, inexplicably beaten and arrested this time despite last week’s peaceful demo and today, Friday, the residents of Chitungwiza take to the streets in an action organised by NANGO and titled Do the Right Thing, designed to send a message to the government  about the desperate lack of water and sanitation in their home town. The government has always been doing the right thing, claimed one Clever Mutukwa a senior civil servant and war veteran, The crisis is directly linked to the imposition of sanctions. Instead of calling on the government to do the right thing it is the NGOs and their allies in the opposition who should do the right thing and call for the lifting of sanctions.

You have to hand it to Robert Mugabe; the one ministry he has really run well is his (mis)Information Ministry. Those pesky sanctions must really be hurting him and the other listed Zanu PF top people. For the rest of Zimbabwe, it is not sanctions that are making people’s lives unbearable, it is one old man and his power hungry Zanu PF followers who are unable to see beyond their own greed. A heart-breaking story from the eastern district of Nyanga tellingly illustrates that very point. A group of MDC officials had managed to gather donations of food for starving AIDS orphans and were busy distributing the food when a lorry load of police and war vets in Zanu PF shirts arrived and drove the Good Samaritans out claiming they were not licensed to distribute food. The biblical parallel is painfully clear: Suffer the little children. Such gross inhumanity, such blatant abuse of power defies belief; yet still Mugabe and Zanu PF claim they are the only ones fit to govern Zimbabwe.

Yours in the (continuing) struggle PH aka Pauline Henson the author of Countdown a political detective story set in Zimbabwe and available from lulu.com.