This report online: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=93302

To what extent are politicians entrenching a common sense racism as they purport to deal with popular fears?

It is election time again and politicians are returning to their core ‘narratives’ and vote winning strategies. The politics of race and prejudice coded as ‘immigration’ dominated media coverage of the 2010 general election. It is certainly unclear whether it was actually a determining issue in the outcome of the election – but politicians and their ’spads’ (special advisers) never let a few facts stand in their way. For instance one interesting recent poll, the MORI Economist April 2011 ‘Issues Index’ (http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/2765/EconomistIpsos-MORI-Issues-Index-April-2011.aspx), stated that ‘This month fewer (17%) mention race relations/immigration – the lowest percentage to do so since April 2002′ whereas 52% mention the economy, 24% unemployment and 22% foreign affairs.’ One might expect ‘poll driven’ politicians to welcome this drift away from fear and anxiety on immigration. But this is not the way racism now plays out in British politics. It is assumed that there is an embedded rightwing and prejudiced ‘common sense’ discourse around race relations and immigration. John Humphrys on the Radio 4 Today programme on 15 April, interviewing politicians on David Cameron’s Romney speech on immigration put it clearly, ‘A lot of people would say he was just speaking a lot of plain good common sense.’ The Daily Express echoed the theme with a leader the same day on ‘Prime Minister’s Common Sense about Immigration’.[1]

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Source: Institute of Race Relations

Catholic bishops in Southern Africa have warned that conditions are not yet fit for elections in Zimbabwe after the bloody presidential run-off election which left scores of people dead.

“Conditions in the country are emphatically not conducive to elections in 2011. We strongly believe that holding elections at this stage would be dangerously premature,” said the group. The bishops are from Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Sao Tome and Principe, Swaziland, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The statement was prepared at an Inter-regional Meeting of Bishops of Southern Africa held in Pretoria, South Africa, last December and released on 22 February.

The bishops said Zimbabwe’s voters’ roll had not been updated for years while cases of violence had increased following the announcement of possible elections later this year. They also said freedom of association and of the media was severely restricted and that the nation was in the grip of extreme fear. There are increasing signs of intimidation and violence as the election campaign has built up, they said.

Their statement came after Zimbabwe’s long-ruling president, Robert Mugabe, said he will call for elections later this year with or without reforms agreed to in a pact with his strongest rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, who is now Prime Minister. Tsvangirai and Mugabe are in a shaky power-sharing government that was formed in February 2009.

Zimbabwe’s last elections in June 2008 were marred by violence which saw the deaths of more than 300 supporters of Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party.

Following the disputed elections, a regional bloc, the Southern African Development Community, persuaded Mugabe and Tsvangirai to form a powersharing government to avoid a descent into full-fledged conflict and mend an economic crisis that featured hyper-inflation.

Under the pact, the two political rivals agreed to reforms including drafting a new constitution and changing electoral and media laws to ensure free and fair elections in future.

The work of the compromise government has been characterised by fighting over the allocation of key government posts while the drive to collect people’s views for the new constitution was disrupted several time by violent clashes between supporters of the two main political parties.

Last month, scores of supporters of Tsvangirai’s party sought refuge in churches after they were attacked and forced out of their homes by militant supporters of Mugabe’s party.

[With acknowledgements to ENInews. ENInews, formerly Ecumenical News International, is jointly sponsored by the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the Conference of European Churches.]

South African mediators travel to Zimbabwe in the next few days amidst reports of increasing political violence and selective arrests in the country. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai says security forces are violating their national mandate, and President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF blocks reconstruction of Zimbabwe.

The Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, says that since the start of the year its supporters and civil society activists are being arrested on spurious charges as part of an increased harassment campaign against the party. Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights says that it is currently dealing with more than 30 cases.

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President Robert Mugabe is expected to announce a date for national elections in 2011, according to local media, but NGOs and human rights activists fear they could lead to a surge of political violence.

The Herald, the official daily newspaper, reporting on ZANU-PF’s recent annual conference, quoted Mugabe as saying the party was “a fired-up, fuelled and fast-moving train that would crush anything that dares stand in its way.”

The donor group, which calls itself the Friends of Zimbabwe, said programmes they supported in 2010 helped “Zimbabweans regardless of political persuasion”: Every child in primary school in Zimbabwe now had new text books; some of the water and power networks had been rehabilitated and agricultural inputs had been given to 600,000 households, the statement said.

Zimbabwe Unity Government has failed to keep its promise to reform state institutions to prevent violence and human rights abuse and perpetrators are given the all clear.

The situation on the ground echoes fears expressed by Amnesty International Africa Director Erwin Van Borght in June this year. Then, he warned Zimbabwe could face a new wave of political violence in light of attacks on independent monitors activists by alleged supporters of President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party during the constitutional revision public outreach process.

Almost two years into the rule of President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai,  torture, harassment and politically motivated persecutions of human rights defenders and perceived opponents have persisted. Human rights defenders in Zimbabwe are systematically targeted and subject to arbitrary detention, arrest, disappearance and torture by Mugabe’s Zanu PF militias .

Signs are slowly showing that Zanu PF is starting to prepare for elections. Torture camps are cropping up. Mugabe recently revealed he was tired of the coalition deal and wanted an early poll so there could again be one man in charge of the government. He told his party conference on Friday that the country’s uneasy power-sharing government ” can’t be allowed to continue.”

“We agreed to work together … as a compromise to enable us to sort things out, establish peace, political stability, now some are dragging their feet,” Mugabe told members of his Zanu-PF party.

Across the country there remains fear that violence will mar the run-up to the election, as happened two years ago.

Zanu PF is pushing the issue to remove the sanctions . Once the sanctions are lifted members of Zanu will go overseas and grab their wealth ,stolen in Zimbabwe but hidden abroad and take back their assets to local banks . Once they do that come elections they will revive torture camps and people from oppositions will be killed and then if they bring back sanctions it will be of no use.

SADC must act now to ensure people of Zimbabwe are safe for the period leading to the elections. I strongly believe the SADC must play a leading role to make sure the referendum and the constitution making process and elections are conducted freely and fairly.

*Kevin Ngwenya is an MDC activist and human rights campaigner based in Leicester

HAT News is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

The deranged mandarins in ZANU PF led by the increasingly senile geriatric, Robert Mugabe are, in their wisdom or none of it, clamouring for early elections without the necessary roadmap as required under the Global Political Agreement (GPA), which was signed by ZANU PF and the two MDC formations, one led by Morgan Tsvangirai and the other by Arthur Mutambara.

It is this GPA that led to the formation of the government of national unity (GNU) which has put some brakes on the looting spree that had characterised past ZANU PF governments’ conduct in public offices.

When the GNU was formed, the country was at a crossroads, the economy had collapsed, and everything was in meltdown, the government printers Fidelity, was working non-stop printing worthless paper money called bearer cheques.  All that could go wrong went wrong in Zimbabwe.  The entire economic system had ground to a halt.

Mugabe had been soundly beaten by Tsvangirai in free and fair elections held in March 2008 only to declare himself winner in a stage managed brutal election run-off in June 2008.  The sham election cost the country hundreds of lives through state-sponsored violence and was duly condemned by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the African Union (AU) and the international community at large.

For almost a year, Mugabe failed to put together a government because his regime would not have had any legitimacy.  With his tail between his legs, Mugabe accepted what was thought unthinkable – to share power with his sworn enemy – Morgan Tsvangirai.

This marriage of convenience has however managed to stabilise the economy despite the poisoned and acrimonious atmosphere that characterise Zimbabwe’s current political landscape.  Now that the MDC has helped to arrest the economic decline that Mugabe presided over for decades without any grain of remorse, Mugabe seemingly buoyed by the recovery and the recent discovery of the largest diamond field in Southern Africa in the last hundred years, now wants to go it alone.

These two factors have suddenly energised ZANU PF to the extent that they now see no reason to continue working in partnership with the MDC formations.  The call for early elections with or without a credible roadmap for the holding of free and fair elections should be viewed within this broad context.  In any case, ZANU PF has a well-documented disdain for free and fair polls.  No wonder why they are not even interested in the roadmap.

In fact, the roadmap is their worst enemy, because they cannot win a free and fair election contest and the worst part is that they have known it for a long time now.  This is why they have perfected violence as a reliable weapon, which is deployed with reckless abandon every time there is a general election.

This time, President Zuma of South Africa should tell the blundering geriatric North of the Limpopo to go and hang.  Mugabe cannot be allowed to continue to drag the once prosperous country downhill in order to pursue his selfish interests of clinging on to power till Kingdom come.

No right minded people would want early elections that would lead to more violence and a disputed plebiscite.  Investors demand security for their investment and markets require stability.  Reckless calls for self-serving elections should be dismissed with the contempt they deserve.

Witless Didymus Mutasa unashamedly told whoever cared to listen that whatever Mugabe says stands without question.  Anyway, we all know Didymus as one of those ministers who was fooled by Rotina Mavhunga into believing that pure diesel can be extracted from a rock, ready for the tank.  What gibberish!

What pains ZANU PF is that the unity government is now making it difficult to loot at will , especially the precious diamonds as they have done other national resources.  Elections can and should wait.  A genuine and credible roadmap first, after which all other things can follow.

HAT News is precluded from expressing a corporate view: the opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

*Kevin Ngwenya is an MDC activist and human rights campaigner based in Leicester

“We want to get to elections and get into a situation where ZANU-PF can rule the country. We do not want to pass June [2011] without elections. We want acceleration of the pace [to ensure that the polls are held],” Mugabe, who has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980, told a ZANU-PF women’s league meeting recently.

Zimbabwe’s unity government was formed after the violent parliamentary and presidential elections in 2008, when ZANU-PF lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since independence and Mugabe became president after his main opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and now prime minister, withdrew from the poll in protest against political violence.

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The post 2008 general election trauma is still haunting the entire majority of Zimbabweans. It was an election marred and characterised by unforeseen violence caused by Zanu PF with their intention to cling on to power until Kingdom come. Many people were beaten, tortured, maimed, and killed while others were left homeless with no hope for the future.

What is particularly worrying is Zanu PF’s belief that they can still win the forthcoming elections. It is still not clear whether these elections will be held any time soon. The truth is that Zanu PF will never relinquish power even if they are defeated. Their (Zanu PF) cronies who have ravaged the country’s economy and massacred innocent civilians will never allow a free and fair election. The truth is that Mugabe’s pensioners are aware that people are fed up with their tactics.

Vote rigging

The entire world is now aware that Zanu PF has been winning elections through rigging and violence. Mugabe and his allies would rather cling on the dysfunctional unity government rather than face humiliation. Despite the malfunctioning of the unity government, Mugabe is still adamant that he can still win back the hearts of electorate although he is reluctant to share power accordingly. He is still dictating the the pace and worse through the indiscriminate persecuting of his opponents.

If MDC really joined this Unity Government to save the country and its suffering people, then now is the right time to press hard for fresh, free and fair internationally supervised elections. People are geared up to defeat Zanu PF. There is no doubt Zanu PF is now very unpopular.

Ideally, MDC should be in the driving seat since they have the majority of seats in parliament but Mugabe and his thugs are still using their unscrupulous dictatorial tactics to maintain a stranglehold on the reigns of power. The way Mugabe is handling this unity government leaves a lot to be desired. There is no need for Tsvangirai to keep on compromising. It is now high time he should press for new elections. Zimbabweans have suffered enough and people’s rights continue to be abused with impunity, living in perpetual fear of their brutal leaders.

Economy

The economic recovery of the country is being jeopardised by the tensions within this so called unity government. The three parties involved are pulling in different directions threatening the already fragile coalition government with collapse. To worsen matters, Mugabe’s policy to grab 51 percent shareholding from any foreign investment makes Zimbabwe not only an unattractive destination for foreign investment, but also a no go area for those who respect the rule of law and property rights.

The longer Tsvangirai stays in this unity goverment, the harder it will be for him turn things around for the better. Notwithstanding the MDC’s involvement, Mugabe’s blood thirst rag tag army of party thugs and war veterans continue harass and brutalise defenceless civilians. It is high time that the MDC make a bold stand and force Mugabe to account by ensuring that a new constitution that guarantees free and fair elections is in place sooner rather than later.

International Observers

Previous elections have not been free and fair at all. They were mared by violence and the election observers were very incompetent. The Electoral Commision whose mandate is to supervise the conduct of the elections is largely pro-Zanu PF. So if ever a free and fair election is going to take place then, International monitors and observers are supposed to be involved at the earliest possible time. The current electoral system favours Zanu PF and it gives its supporters a free reign to cause mayhem with impunity.

As it stands, Mugabe will never support free and fair elections to take place because that will have disastrous consequences for his Party. He knows that once that is allowed to happen, this will mark the beginning of the end of his reign paving the way for a refreshingly better political
dispensation with safeguards for human rights and the much needed rule of law. The big question is; Can there be free and fair elections in Zimbabwe with the geriatric leader at the helm? Only time will tell.

Mbiriyashe Chiratidzo Mungaraza is a Zimbabwean based in Leicester

HAT News is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the author.