Zuma came, saw, showed Zim he cares

President Robert Mugabe is going to continue obstructing where he can, and play to the gallery through the public media he still controls. And Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai will remain “optimistic” and endure Mugabe’s obstacle course with grace and poise.

There will be no sudden turnaround nor miracle, at least while Mugabe remains in control of the levers of state power. It’s the only power he has, as his constituency has pretty much disintegrated and almost everyone wants him to go.

Did Zuma’s visit last week achieve more than lighten the load, shorten the pain? This is the question on many lips in Harare.

Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) seems to believe that he did achieve more than that, calling his visit “refreshing”. But will the outstanding issues from the political agreement be resolved now, after Zuma’s visit?

Will MDC provincial governors be appointed? Yes, probably in a month or two. Will MDC deputy agriculture minister Roy Bennett be sworn into office by Mugabe? Yes, eventually, maybe just before the year’s end.

Will central bank governor Gideon Gono go? Probably, in his own time, and probably later rather than sooner. Of all people he must have got the message loudest and clearest when Zuma, in his speech to open the Harare Agriculture Show, praised finance minister Tendai Biti for dropping the Zimbabwe dollar. Gono has been running a campaign in the state press for its return.

Will the attorney-general Johannes Tomana go? Mugabe’s unilateral appointment of him and Gono after the political agreement to establish the unity government was signed, was subject of the MDC’s complaint to SADC recently and was raised with Zuma. Tomana’s departure will be more complicated constitutionally, but his determination to prosecute MDC legislators and human rights activists is weakening, because the hard core of partisan Zanu(PF) policemen are also inefficient. They can’t provide evidence for the cases.

Zimbabweans have to hope Zuma was right when he said on arrival that the worst may be over for Zimbabweans. Presumably, if the country does degenerate, if the youth militia re-mobilise to terrify the rural population, SADC will find some teeth to stop Mugabe’s last desperate bid to retain state power.

But at present Zimbabwe is, in the main, politically stable.The crowds at the agricultural show were proof of that. Nearly all of them would have been MDC supporters. Tsvangirai was greeted with applause everywhere he went as he toured the show on Thursday. They were polite, but quiet, when Mugabe took Zuma around the show the next day.

The showgrounds were cleaner and brighter than for some years. There were even some hanging baskets of bright petunias around the Harare Show Society buildings which had been repainted. The entertainment in the Glamis Stadium, though shabby and amateurish, still thrilled the crowds. There were hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken and chips and children with painted faces. The crowds were mostly well-dressed families, looking as far removed from a repressed, hungry society as could be imagined. In the exhibition halls, entries were sparse, and each seemed to have won “first prize”. There were some amusingly iced cakes, embroidered Manchester United wall hangings and a hand-made apron or two.

Despite the last 10 years of economic collapse and misery, a few communal farmers, mostly women, using their own cash, had travelled hundreds of kilometres and put on displays of vegetables, grains, pulses and fruit which would compare with the best of the best anywhere.

Zuma did not visit these women in his guided tour of the show, but the day before, Tsvangirai did. The women lamented to him that they had no fertiliser or money to buy any for this year’s crops. He promised to find fertiliser for them. Maybe he will. They believed him, they said, as he went from cobs of rather poor quality maize to the Zimbabwe Airforce stand where he was told how their weapons worked.

Beyond these barely visible green shoots, Zimbabwe faces its most precarious summer season ever. Not even Mugabe’s cronies on stolen farms can raise cash for inputs this year.

“It is cheaper to import mealie meal from South Africa than it is for us to grow maize. None of us can get loans beyond 90 days,” said a reasonably affluent white commercial tobacco farmer who also grows maize and has some beef cattle and farms on a tiny section of his original land holding.

“It cuts across all farmers, us commercial guys, the communal and small-scale and the A2s (mostly Zanu(PF) beneficiaries of white-owned land) are looking to us to go into partnerships. I am not sure anyone understands how bad this season is going to be”.

Zuma saw the cattle at the show, a very different breed to those which once earned Zimbabwe’s reputation as a world-class beef producer. The Herefords and Aberdeen Anguses were not on show. There are hardly any left in the country. This year’s cattle were the tough, short-haired “communal” variety. Their value would baffle traditional judges, but there are about 4.5 million of them in Zimbabwe.

Zuma, a regular visitor to Zimbabwe when he was in exile in Lusaka, could not have avoided seeing evidence of the collapse of agriculture, the shabbiness of the streets. But he must have also noticed the people were having a good time. His main point in his show-opening speech was about the need for economic recovery so Zimbabwe could become what it had been, when he knew the country quite well, the “regional breadbasket”.

Few, including Mugabe, could have avoided concluding that Zuma was saying, in other words, leave productive farmers alone. Let them water the little green shoots.

But Zanu(PF) predictably only picked up, through the state media, Zuma’s call for Western “sanctions” to be lifted. The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, which has the only radio stations, did not record the second part of Zuma’s sentence when he said that without full compliance with last September’s political agreement, there would be no Western aid as the West had certain benchmarks about human rights and governance.

At the end of his speech, Zuma noted, from the podium in the members enclosure, that Africa needs to respect human rights. One of the victims of Mugabe’s disregard for human rights, Tsvangirai, was sitting a few feet away. Zuma noted there was more stability in Zimbabwe: that it had started a “healing” process, and referred obliquely, without naming it, to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He stroked the common bonds of “history and heritage”.

Some were disappointed that he didn’t have tougher words for Mugabe. Maybe he did in private because it is impossible not to know that Mugabe continues to obstruct the power-sharing agreement as he tries to hold on to his only remaining power, the state. Maybe Zuma’s greatest contribution on his visit to Zimbabwe, was to show, albeit briefly, that he cares.

Weekend Argus (SA)