April 15, 2005 - August 15, 2005
The 'war-for-own-land' in Africa is a reality
Posted: Monday, August 15, 2005
Africa: The Other Side of the Coin
Like EU, Africa Should Close Ranks
Neither academic analysts, nor well-resourced international lobbies and their think-tank programmes will be able to stave off Africa's "war-for-own-land"!
By Udo W. Froese
JOHANNESBURG
THE 'war-for-own-land' in Africa is a reality. No imported industry of "neo-liberal, US approved democracy", "free market economy" and no "willing seller, willing buyer concept" will be able to reverse it.
Africans are aware of their historical rights and are angry.
Obviously, Africa's land is an emotive and sensitive issue for both sides: the current landowner, whose history on this continent is known and the original, first African, who had to go to war to eventually receive democracy, but still sits with no real access to land and therefore, remains in abject poverty. This is also known.
Zimbabwe's fast-track land reform made Africans on the continent and the Diaspora more aware of their failure to get land back that once belonged to their ancestors and was taken by colonial conquerors from Europe. After Zimbabwe's fast-track land reform, African governments had to re-introduce land reform in their national agendas.
In their efforts to remain pro-active, white landowners and multinational companies introduced the concept of "willing buyer, willing seller", being aware that it would be contrary to development, as they decided what land to sell, the timing of the sale and the price - thereby making quite sure it was not working. This observation is on record particularly in Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
In addition, the usual open threats of "damage done to (white, international western) business confidence and (international western, neo-imperial) investor perceptions of South Africa and the SADC region, as well as damage done to the stability of South Africa and SADC's commercial farming sector" are repeated on as many public platforms.
On those public platforms it is regularly insisted that the price for land, according to the concept of "willing buyer, willing seller", should be "market-related".
Whose market and what market? And, who determines that market? Is it not those landowners and their multinational industries, which have all to lose?
A spokesman for the "Transvaal Agricultural Union, South Africa" asked whether "these guys (black Africans) are commercial farmers"? He further expressed a "concern", which most landowners and their agricultural industry have - that is food security.
"Almost every other country in Africa needs food aid," he explained. The spokesman of the "Transvaal Agricultural Union SA" referred to Africans, who had lost their land in the process of colonialism and its surreal outflow of apartheid, UDI and current neo-imperialism.
Is it not a direct threat of economic destabilization and even war, if things do not go the way the landowners strongly "recommend" the "willing buyer, willing seller" way?
It is a known fact that 'Africa needs what it does not produce and produces what it does not need'. This is a colonial hangover with perpetual dependencies for those on the receiving end of the neo-imperial stick.
Zimbabwe's Prof. Sam Moyo of the 'African Institute for Agrarian Studies' summarized the continent's land reform by sounding a clear warning to governments concerned, particularly on the failed "willing buyer, willing seller" programme: "If the state does not move when it is challenged, it will be challenged. The social process leads and the state must then try to contain, and conduct and reform in the correct way."
At the land summit with over a thousand participants in Johannesburg, it was observed that the South African government is facing serious criticism over the pace of land reform, with many groups warning of "Zimbabwe-style land grabs" if the reform is not speeded up.
Zimbabwe's Prof. Moyo suggested that South Africa's government should adopt a "radical approach to land reform, instead of a structured, conservative one".
Prof. Moyo further explained, "People often thought the Zimbabwean land invasions were government-orchestrated because it wanted to win the elections. In fact, the invasions had social origins." He compared the legal and policy framework and the market concept in Zimbabwe before the land grabs with those of Namibia and South Africa today.
In fact, Namibia's Permanent Secretary for Land and Resettlement, Frans Tsheehama, had to agree at the same summit that the concept of "willing buyer, willing seller" has failed in Namibia too. Tsheehama pointed out "the Namibian constitution, as in South Africa, allows land to be expropriated, if necessary". "Land of foreign and absentee landlords would be targeted first for expropriation," he announced.
All parties concerned agreed that the "willing buyer, willing seller" concept has failed. And foreign landownership was bluntly defined as "just another form of colonisation via the cheque book".
In Kenya, the assistant director for settlement at the Ministry of Lands highlighted that "the situation in Zimbabwe has made their work more difficult, as landless Kenyans who have learnt from the events in other countries are putting pressure on government to settle them. Landless Kenyans are now talking of getting back their ancestral land that is in the hands of multinationals (international, white owned companies)".
As recorded by the monthly magazine "New African" in London, in their June 2005 edition under the title "Kenya – The Growing Land Issue", The Kenya Bankers' Association voiced concern that titles held by banks as security for loans comprise 54% of their asset portfolio. And the banks' exposure amounts to US$3.4billion in loans tied up in title deeds.
No wonder then that Kenya's government recently abandoned their "controversial" policy of issuing "new generation title deeds", as it had caused panic in the financial sector.
This columnist suggests, as one of the ways forward, that a new tax law should be created, which would commit all landowners to be taxed according to the registered value of their land. In order to do so, all landowners would have to register their land in their regions. The value of the land would be established together with a government evaluator. The final value of the land would then be registered with the 'national revenue services' and taxed, similar to property owners in the urban areas. It could stop inflated land prices.
South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki paid a surprise visit to the Land Summit in Johannesburg and explained, "When the Lancaster House Agreement on land reform with Zimbabwe, which was market-based, expired in 1990, the then deputy secretary-general of the (British Colonial) Commonwealth, Emeka Onyeouku, asked Zimbabwe to delay taking another approach."
Onyeouku's reasoning was then that any other approach to land reform would "scare the colonial-apartheid regime and set back the liberation of South Africa".
Above explains Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe's predicament. In addition, his land reform is not supposed to work, according to the neo-imperialists of the international West. If it would succeed, other African countries, particularly South Africa would follow suit. South Africa's commercial agricultural sector employs over 7 million farm laborers.
Above further highlights the policy of 'national reconciliation' works only on terms of the owners of the economy and the land and their powerful international lobbies, as they are resourced with easy access to expensive law and judiciary. However, it is they who have all to lose on a continent they so persistently seem to disrespect and destabilize.
In the words of respected Pan-Africanist from Kenya and director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University, New York, Dr Ali A. Mazrui, "The imperative for African Renaissance demands the cooperation of countries (on the African continent and the Diaspora) at the same level of development.
Towards this end, the first logical stage for Africa is Pan-Africanism, a quest for solidarity with other African countries and with people of African descent around the world."
In other words, Africa should close ranks, consolidate, pool its resources and then re-negotiate all its deals with the international community.
After all, this is the way the European Union works.
Reprinted for Fair Use Only from:
http://www.newera.com.na/page.php?id=17
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Animal Whites
Posted: Sunday, August 14, 2005
By Tim Wise, www.timwise.org
Although I have long supported the vast majority of the goals set forth by the animal rights movement, I have to admit that, on a personal level, the animal rights activists I've encountered almost never fail to come off as insufferable jerks. The smug moral certitude with which so many carry their agenda forth, has, for me at least, often overshadowed the righteousness of that agenda on face value. I wish it weren't so, but it is.
First, there was the campus animal rights crusader at my college, who, in the midst of our struggle to gain divestment from companies that were bolstering apartheid in South Africa, made several remarks to the effect that "every day was apartheid day" for chickens, and that what the school should really do was stop selling meat.
Then there was the young woman who came to Tulane Law School, and upon learning that she would have to complete a pro bono legal assistance requirement in order to graduate, said that was fine, but--and this is a direct quote as told to me by a friend who was present at the time she said it--"I don't want to work for people. I want to work for animals."
The misanthropy that seems to inform and motivate such comments, and literally hundreds more I could mention, guarantees that the otherwise valid principles upon which animal rights positions are often grounded will remain unexamined, and unrecognized in policy.
It is for reasons such as this that I have long wondered what is more important to the animal rights movement: actually ending animal experimentation, and other blatant cruelties, or being able to preen about as moral superiors who gain self-esteem by looking down their noses at others: be they meat-eaters or wearers of leather shoes? After all, it's pretty hard to build a movement for animal liberation--which has to be led by people, seeing as how animals can't do it themselves--if you're castigating most of the potential foot-soldiers as willing participants in genocide.
I mean, what other than a deep-seated hatred for humanity (or a strategic incompetence so profound as to boggle the mind) would lead someone to say, as Ingrid Newkirk, Director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has, that she opposes having children, because "having a purebred human baby is like having a purebred dog; it's nothing but vanity, human vanity."
Nice going Ingrid: why don't you deliberately alienate pretty much every parent in the world, and for that matter, anyone who is someone's child (hint: that means everyone), since I've yet to meet too many people who appreciate being told they were bred for vanity like some Bichon Frise at the Westminster Kennel Club.
Oh, and while we're not caring about how many people we offend--since, after all, "human beings are cruel," in the words of Newkirk (a true but rather typically one-dimensional characterization)--let's really go off the deep end and launch a photo exhibit entitled "Are Animals the New Slaves?" which compares factory farming to the lynching of black people. This, quick on the heels of PETA's prior publicity effort: the notorious "Holocaust on your plate" campaign, which just a few months ago compared cruelty to farm animals with the extermination of millions of Jews, Romany and others at the hands of the Nazis.
This kind of absurdity would make for a really good segment on the Daily Show, if it weren't so tragically serious. The very legitimate goal of stopping the immense horror of factory farming--which horror should be able to stand on its own as an unacceptable cruelty, in need of immediate action--gets conflated with the extermination of millions of people in two separate Holocausts (that of the Middle Passage and that in Europe), thereby ensuring that damn near everyone who hears the analogy will conclude that PETA is either completely insensitive, at best, or bull-goose-loony, at worst: no offense meant to geese, by the way.
The "New Slaves" exhibition, currently making its way around 42 cities over a 10-week period has drawn outrage, understandably, from African Americans. And, typically, representatives of the blindingly white, middle class and affluent animal rights establishment, show no signs of understanding whence the anger emanates.
To wit, Dawn Carr, PETA's Director of Special Projects, who has admitted that lots of folks are upset about her group "comparing black people to animals," but who, in PETA's defense, doesn't deny that that is what PETA is doing, but rather insists it's OK, because the exhibit also compares factory farming to other injustices, "like denying women the vote or using child labor." In other words, don't worry black people: you're not the only ones we're comparing to animals!
Whereas Newkirk was reluctantly forced to apologize for the "Holocaust on your plate" campaign (but even then only did so "for the pain caused," not for the venality of the comparison made therein), PETA appears unwilling to apologize for the slavery and lynching exhibit. And even the apology for the pain caused by the Holocaust comparison seems disingenuous when you consider that elsewhere, Newkirk has essentially said that anyone who isn't a vegan is worse than Nazis, as with her quip that "Even the Nazis didn't eat the objects of their derision."
Now I'm sure there will be some animal liberationists who read this and who think that since animals are sentient beings too, and since they have the right not to be exploited for human benefit (positions with which I don't disagree), that comparisons with the Holocaust, or lynching are perfectly fair. To think otherwise, they might argue, is to engage in an anthropocentric favoring of Homo sapiens over other species.
But of course, whether they admit it or not, most all believers in animal rights do recognize a moral and practical difference between people and animals: after all, virtually none would suggest that if you run over a squirrel when driving drunk, that you should be prosecuted for vehicular homicide, the way you would be if you ran over a small child. The only basis for a distinction in these cases is, at root, recognition of a fundamental difference between a child and a squirrel.
And whereas most all sane persons see the problem with, say, French kissing one's three-year old, Ingrid Newkirk recently suggested that there would be nothing wrong with tonguing your dog, so long as the dog seemed to be liking it, so, draw your own conclusions.
Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but if the folks at PETA really think that factory farming and eating the products of factory farming are literally the equivalent to human genocide, then, to be consistent, they would have to argue for the criminal prosecution of all meat-eaters, and War Crimes Tribunals for anyone even remotely connected to the process. After all, if you consume a factory-farmed chicken, you are, by this logic, implicated in mass murder, the same way many whites were in the lynching of blacks, by purchasing the amputated body parts of the latest victims of white rage.
To draw any distinction at all--and to not support criminal incarceration of meat-eaters the way one would for a cannibal the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, indeed, draws that distinction--is to admit, whether openly or not, that there is a difference between a cow and a person. That difference may be quite a bit smaller than we realize, and that difference certainly doesn't justify cruelty to the cow--and it may indeed be so small that we really should opt for vegetarianism--but it is a difference nonetheless.
That PETA can't understand what it means for a black person to be compared to an animal, given a history of having been thought of in exactly those terms, isn't the least bit shocking. After all, the movement is perhaps the whitest of all progressive or radical movements on the planet, for reasons owing to the privilege one must possess in order to focus on animal rights as opposed to, say, surviving oneself from institutional oppression.
Perhaps if animal liberationists weren't so thoroughly white and middle-class, and so removed from the harsh realities of both the class system and white supremacy, they would be able to find more sympathy from the folks of color who rightly castigate them for their most recent outrage.
Perhaps if PETA activists had ever demonstrated a commitment to fighting racism and the ongoing cruelty that humans face every day, they would find more sympathy from those who, for reasons that are understandable given their own lives, view animal rights activism as the equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns, rather than as a struggle for greater compassion for all.
But then again, if the animal rights movement wasn't so white and so rich, it would never have thought to make such specious and obviously offensive analogies in the first place.
Tim Wise is the author of two new books: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son(Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com Hate mail, while neither appreciated nor desired, will be graded for form, content and grammar.
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We welcome self-regulation: Mahoso
Posted: Saturday, July 30, 2005
The Herald (Harare)
INTERVIEW
July 30, 2005, allafrica.com
Conversation with Caesar Zvayi
ONE of the biggest problems Zimbabwe faced over the past five years is the problem of media terrorism that manifested itself in sensational reports in the privately owned Press and Western media, pirate radio stations that broadcast hate speech and a proliferation of on line publications pursuing the illegal regime change agenda. Today, Media and Information Commission Chairman, Dr Tafataona Mahoso talks about media practice and regulation in Zimbabwe.
Q: Dr Mahoso, you have been branded number one enemy of the media by some of the titles whose licences were cancelled. How would you describe your relationship with the media?
A: My relationship with the media depends on which media it is. There are so many media in Zimbabwe, as you know the word includes even those Internet sites that are proliferating. I would not mind being called an enemy of the media by some of those channels because they have become part of the global conveyor belt of lies. We live in a very dangerous world where the media have become an integral part of invasion. The examples of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and even Haiti and Granada and the Falkland Islands - all these are graphic examples of the abuse of the media and if the media which corroborate with such forces of inhumanity call me the number one enemy, it does not surprise me or cause me any regrets. However, there are other media in Zimbabwe who are trying to do an honest job and who are working under difficult conditions. I know that for instance, the programme of the foreigners in Zimbabwe since the 1990s has been to try to make the white minority voice the mainstream voice in Zimbabwe, and at the helm of this we have the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) and Norwegian Development Agency (Norad). So we are aware of that programme and I know that the people who say I am an enemy of the media are people who are aware that I am aware of that strategy.
Q: The internet and on-line newspapers are presenting major challenges to the regulatory regimes of developing countries, how can Zimbabwe deal with the scourge of on-line newspapers some of which are peddling hate speech?
A: There are a number of fronts on which we should fight. The first one is that we must have some of our own sites which are reviewed regularly, the MIC is in the process of trying to do that, we have just interviewed the candidates for our Information Communication Technology section. We intend to have two things;
One is round-the-clock media monitoring, and each morning we review which stories were on radio, TV or even on the Internet in order to advise our stakeholders about what will be happening in the media.
The other front has to do with regulation, and at the moment I am not clear whether Government has actually decided which agency will be responsible for the electronic media beyond broadcasting. There has to be some legislation to regulate those channels that are not catered for under the Broadcasting Services Act (BSA) or the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA).
The third front is by training and by training we do not mean training of journalists, training journalists is also important but we have to find ways of training the audience.
The Media Ethics Committee Report was an attempt to do that. We found out that the consultations that we held when we went out were effective ways of empowering people because, first of all we invited them to say what their experience of media had been and then we shared with them some insights which they might not have had. In the process they also told us what they wanted to be done with the media. So media users need to be trained but as in every country, they are scattered they have no centre of their own. We want media critics who are not journalists but who are citizens who can also advise citizen groups about the role of the media in a national setting.
Q: MIC has monitored the papers published in Zimbabwe, but you have done nothing about a paper called The Zimbabwean, which is always on our streets just like all other weekly papers and pirate radio stations. Are these media exempt from laws affecting titles published in Zimbabwe?
A: That is a concern of ours but as you know the Commission is not a law maker but is bound by the Act that it uses, it is empowered to make proposals to Government, and there is a proposal with Government on how The Zimbabwean problem can be solved. But while we wait for a response from Government we have of course not been idle, I think you will remember the responses that the MIC gave when the paper was first introduced. We believe that the moral critique of the Zimbabwean succeeded in weakening the paper and subsequently we are told that its finances are very weak and we do know definitely that its impact in the country is negligible. So if the Government eventually responds to the proposals that we put before it, it will not be because the paper has a huge impact, but because in future there may be six or seven similar papers being dropped into Zimbabwe from outside. But the weaknesses of the paper are very clear both morally, ethically and even technically because you can not write effective stories from a desk in London, and our people know what London stands for in Zimbabwe. So the paper more or less has discredited itself before the Government has actually legislated to control similar developments in the future. We are glad in fact that the people in Zimbabwe, because of their understanding of ethics and morality, their understanding of communication they have been able to resist this paper, so that it is simply tolerated as a nuisance among many other nuisances that we have to put up with.
Q: You chaired a Media Ethics Committee between 2001 and 2002 that looked into professionalism or lack thereof in the media, what were your findings and what became of the report you submitted?
A: The report was of course done for the Department of Information at that time, it was really meant as a policy guideline but it was also intended as a resource for media studies programmes. We have seen quite a number of these recommendations being implemented, the creation and strengthening of the BSA and the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe; the creation of MIC was actually echoed in the recommendations. What we discovered was that all the people we consulted recommended that we could not rely on voluntary regulation, there should be statutory regulation. The experience of the previous 21 years - for this was in 2001, had shown that journalists in Zimbabwe would not self regulate and that the manoeuvres that were being made by donors were making it even more unlikely. But we also dealt with training. We have seen a lot of the report being implemented, even the idea of local content, we can see the idea there.
Q: In one of your articles, you accused journalists of reporting events instead of relationships between events, and a few months ago your office said it was going to look into the curriculum and qualifications of the staff offering journalism training, how far have you gone with this initiative?
A: It is a huge project and we have already designed questionnaires, there are three of them, one for editors, one for media trainers and one for the students themselves. Rather than mail them, we decided that we should actually present them in person. What we have noticed is that the students are very eager to tell us what they are experiencing and the quality of their experience. The administrators are reluctant but so far we have said that we do not want to resort to section 50 of AIPPA, where we can actually subpoena information, we want a corroborative system, where they voluntarily give us information but the information has to be correct.
The questionnaires are very thorough, what they require is thorough documentation. How many students do you have per computer? How many students are there for every full time lecturer? How many part time lecturers do you have? What is the minimum qualification of the lecturers and so forth? There are also questions like what is the aptitude of the student you produce at the end of the programme, are you achieving that, what kind of examinations are you giving at the end of the programme? Who is able to double-check your examinations, is it a self-contained system where if you cheat on your own exam, nobody finds out? We believe that when the results come out it will be a big report. We already know a number of things that are quite disturbing, that the numbers of students who are in so-called journalism courses are too many. There are just too many students for the market. It appears that in one year, the training institutions produce enough students to replace all the full time journalists, which is unsustainable. Apart from the problem of quality the overcrowding is not good. It is important to mention that we do not have a statutory mandate to discipline the media training institutions, that mandate belongs to the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education. However, we do have power to influence and redirect and what we have done in recognition of that power is that we know for instance that we can give prizes, and there are a number of subject areas where of students excel we can give prizes of up to a million dollars. We want to give prizes in areas that we think are not being adequately addressed at the moment. Gradually, we want to tighten the qualifications, we will reach a stage where we say these certificates are not acceptable, and in fact we are already beginning to do that. There is one certificate going round, which has a good transcript but that can not be justified, this is a certificate obtained by correspondence school, than one we have already said we won’t use. The holders are using five published articles in lieu of the certificate.
Q: Critics say the MIC is being vindictive by waiting to pounce on Journalists who violate ethics, instead of monitoring the training to ensure that all who lay claim to journalism have been thoroughly trained. What you have outlined are long term measures, what will you do in the short term?
A: Our view is that it is not really the journalists, much of what we see as unethical conduct is the responsibility of the employers and editors, therefore everyone who approaches MIC wanting to register, a publisher or a mass media service, has to produce a proposed code of ethics. We are busy collating all the submissions from publishers; we will publish a volume of all the codes of ethics, which have been proposed by mass media service providers in Zimbabwe. There will be a section for newspaper publishers, magazine publishers, advertisers and publication houses. With a volume like that, we can then go to the stakeholders to say this is what you have suggested. We think that all of them are weak in certain areas, and those are the ones we want to discuss before we actually synthesise a national code. We believe that is the way to go. A journalist may have good intentions, and may have in his possession a good code of ethics, we have among the ones that we collected during the media Ethics Committee, a code ethics proposed by Geoffrey Nyarota, yet his practice had nothing to do with that code of ethics. It was just a paper, so we do not want to fool ourselves. When we come up with the code, it will be based on submissions and it will be discussed, our strategy is that once the volume is produced we will give it to media users.
Q: Some critics say the MIC has been visible only where a newspaper is about to be closed, apart from the closure of unregistered titles, what other changes has the MIC brought to the media?
A: The first change is simply that in 2002, around June or thereafter, because we were actually appointed afterwards, there was nothing except a piece of paper called AIPPA. So the problem with some journalists is that they see the coming of the MIC as an event, it is a very detailed process. From the Act we had to envision an organogram, an office structure, committee structures, even personnel — how to define people who work in the organisation. What is in the Act is just the board, the Commissioners. The Secretariat is not there, so we had to spell out the kind of posts essential to fulfil the requirements of the Act, all that has been done. We now have a Media Trust Fund in terms of the Act; the fund will be used for media development. The only hurdle is that the amount of money is not enough for the problems that we have to deal with. I believe in two and a half years, we have done a lot.
There was a workshop that was held in Nyanga after AIPPA became law, it was co-ordinated by Media Institute for Southern Africa (MISA), but other so-called human rights organisations were there.
They gave themselves duties, the Law Society of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, (ZUJ) Independent Journalists’ Association of Zimbabwe (IJAZ), and ZIMRIGHTS - to scrap the legislation. Obviously the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ) is best known for that, but there were various efforts all over the place. The first responsibility of the MIC is to defend the Act, and we have done that successfully, and it is only after the legislation is secured that we could implement the development side of the Act.
Much of that can not be visible, in the sense that you have to start by creating a Commission where there was just an Act, the fact that they can actually see a Commission becoming visible means that we have achieved something.
Q: And your relationship with ZUJ?
A: I understand that they have approached the Minister of Information with a proposal for self-regulation, and a code of ethics. There was an attempt to say that we (the MIC) are afraid of their ethics and we want to stop it no. In fact the problem is that it was ZUJ, IJAZ and MISA who have misled people and misled even the rest of the world that AIPPA makes self-regulation illegal and impossible. AIPPA does not actually forbid self-regulation, in fact, the Commission would be very happy if the journalists were able to discipline themselves because it would mean that our resources would then be directed towards the development side of the Act which is quite enough to absorb our energies and resources.
So we would welcome self-regulation, though we are saying that in terms of weight the employers have more weight in determining the direction of a newspaper than the journalists.
The original challenge to stop MIC did not come from ANZ, it came from ZUJ, which filed an urgent application before Justice Makoni saying the whole thing should stop, and they gave reasons. The first reason was that the form the MIC was using was demanding information that was too sensitive and too private to be given to a government agency. The second reason they gave was that the MIC had not notified the journalists and had not published the forms. All we did was to take forms which the journalists routinely fill at workshops, when they apply for loans or when they join an NGO, and the information was almost identical. It had everything, e-mail, home address, business address, telephone, the same information that MIC was asking for except for the fact that these NGOs and other organisations do not give legal guarantees that this information will be used for the purposes for which it is collected. We have two Sections in the Act, Section 50 and Section 33, which actually say this information will be used only for the purpose for which it is collected. We then produced articles which the journalists had published in the Sunday Mail, in the Daily News and other newspapers, to show that in fact the journalists were aware of the regulations and the procedures, so Justice Makoni actually threw out the case.
Q: The media is a critical institution in society, which is why some have called it the fourth estate. Do you feel the Zimbabwe media can be described as the fourth estate?
A: No! Because of the origins of journalism in the first place. Media operators say that they are there to promote accountability, democracy, transparency, human rights and so forth, so we asked the question during the Media Ethics Committee: Where did journalism come from as an aspect of communication? Journalism started as part and parcel of the machinery of foreign intervention, and I always refer to the example of Henry Morton Stanley, who came to Africa assigned by the New York Herald Tribune in 1869, what was he looking for? He was looking for the North Atlantic agenda in Africa, he was not looking for Africans and he is not known for writing a story about what Africans were doing or saying, he is known for recognising a white man in Africa – "Dr David Livingstone, I presume?"
We are saying therefore, when did journalism drop this agenda and start becoming a fourth estate, and we say that the part of the media which represents the majority interests in Zimbabwe came from exile during the Rhodesian days, it came from Mozambique, from Zambia, to the extent that the Director General of the Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation in 1976 told an American Editor, "the reason why Africans are not allowed anywhere near a microphone is that they when an African gets a microphone he stirs up violence against the whiteman". So when we saw Sida and Norad, coming back in the 1990s wanting to reinvent that minority media to make it mainstream again, we found we did not have a fourth estate. We have a struggle between the external foreign voice embedded among us, and the African voice which has come from exile and is establishing itself and has not yet fully overcome the obstacles created by the minority media, and one reason is that Zimbabwe is a neighbour to a country where the minority voice is still mainstream - South Africa. That is why a hangman judge, Hillary Squires of the UDI and Apartheid era is being celebrated in the South African media as a man who is fighting corruption, when in actual fact the fact that Squires is a judge is in itself a manifestation of white racism as a form of corruption. If we were living in an uncorrupted world, Squires would be on trial at a war tribunal for the crimes against humanity in Rhodesia. So it is not yet a fourth estate, it is struggling to be.
Q: The MIC has again refused to register the ANZ, and some critics have reduced the issue to a Mahoso - ANZ affair, what exactly is the problem?
A: The first part to my answer is that the matter is still subjudice. But there are a few points that can be discussed, the first piece of information the public should know is that this was not a fresh application, it was an old application which the Supreme Court remitted to the MIC, and remittal means that the Supreme Court was saying to the ANZ go back to the MIC to have your case heard again, because you are alleging that when the decision to deny registration was made you were not given an opportunity to answer to each of the contraventions had submitted made in the determination. So the purpose off coming back was to have the ANZ answer the contraventions, and then the Commission decides whether those answers exonerated them or convicted them. That is the first part. The second part is that the determination is available, and there is no need to speculate what the reason for the basis of the decision were.
Lastly, the matter is in court, and we will submit to the courts.
Reprinted from:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200508010348.html
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Zimbabwe land reform 'waited for SA'
Posted: Thursday, July 28, 2005
news24.com
Johannesburg - The Zimbabwe government delayed its land-reform programme so that negotiations for South Africa's liberation succeeded, said President Thabo Mbeki on Thursday.
"They slowed down to get the negotiations in this country to succeed," said Mbeki as he arrived at the land summit without prior notification.
He said that when South Africa was negotiating its transition to democracy, around the time which Zimbabwe had started its land reform programme, the Organisation of African Unity had asked Zimbabwe to stop the programme as it would "frighten the apartheid government in South Africa".
To suggest that Zimbabwe's land-reform programme was marred by corruption was actually wrong, Mbeki said to loud applause from delegates.
Mbeki surprised delegates when he arrived at the land summit at Johannesburg's Nasrec Expo Centre without a hint that he would attend.
"Welcome comrade president," said Blade Nzimande, the general secretary of the South African Communist Party, who was chairing a session when Mbeki arrived.
"You are really welcome to join the summit. It's a very pleasant surprise," Nzimande said as photographers jostled to take Mbeki's picture.
As Mbeki entered the conference hall just after 17:00 delegates burst into song.
Reprinted from:
www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/Politics/0,,2-7-12_1745450,00.html
Flashback: Good African Leaders
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Zimbabwe and Eurocentric Nostalgia
Posted: Saturday, July 9, 2005
Zimbabwe Currency Stabilizes as Informal Market Dwindles
The Zimbabwe dollar has regained some ground against the U.S. dollar since the start of Harare's offensive against the black market in foreign exchange. At one point the U.S. dollar fetched 30,000 Zimbabwe dollars, but has slipped to Z$20,000 per U.S. dollar.
The Zimbabwe dollar's recovery won't last, though, according to Lucy Sibanda, who has worked in the parallel currency market for six years. Before Operation Restore Order she operated from a stall in the Bulawayo forex mart known as the World Bank. But she has adapted to the new circumstances for informal traders.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Reply by franksta
About two or so years ago a US senator or congress man said that it was the intention of his government(Bush II) to make the economy of Zimbabwe " scream" as a result of Mugabe's land policy. So it comes as no surprise to me when my good friend Masimba states that Mugabes has run the economy into the ground , he is oblivious to the shenanigans of europeans who make it their bussiness to meddle in Africa's and black nations affairs . Due to the fact that I am unable to find or remember the individuals name or the occassion where the speech was delivered , i have not used it in my reasoning with our lost and confused brother .
As head of the government of Zimbabwe , the responsibility lies with Mugabe , that is undeniable . It is my opinion , in this regard naive and simplistic , to not take into consideration the manipulation be done be european powers against the elected government and the people of Zimbabwe .
Thanks for that encouraging bit of news
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Reply by Ayinde
"The Zimbabwe dollar's recovery won't last"
I share that view for the very reasons you gave. What is happening with Zimbabwe is quite deliberate and any move Mugabe makes will, in many ways, anger some people in Zimbabwe. The opposition, in cahoots with the U.S. and other European powers, intend to exaggerate and exploit that anger to force regime change. That is part of their entire plan.
Imagine they want us to believe that white people in Zimbabwe liked having poor blacks with their shacks and slums hustling around their businesses. The white business interest is the main player in the opposition party. These whites are pretending to be on the side of the vendors. We know whites are exploiting the situation and really want the black vendors removed.
The government's motive may be to try to stamp out the black market that is driving the Zimbabwe dollar down. The claim that President Mugabe is clearing the slums to persecute the opposition is just foolishness. The government's reason for their actions makes the most sense.
Most countries in the world would not be able to maintain the illusion of successful economies without trading with European nations, and them having access to European financial institutions. European financial institutions remote control other countries and success is largely measured and reported from their point of view. If they deem the success too much to the benefit of the country/indigenous people, they manipulate using sanctions and threats of military intervention. If the governments do not agree to their unfair policies, they are targeted for removal.
That is the nature of modern so-called democracies that developed out of slavery and colonialism. Elite whites in these African countries and foreign white business interests, are the ones who profit the most from the land and Black labour. White power intends to keep it that way.
Along the way, African leaders and a few other Black businessmen, just funnel the 'riches' to elite whites, and for that they got more material wealth than the average person. Of course, they never got enough to set up viable challenges to elite European hegemony. They got just enough to want to protect the status quo, and they were armed by European powers to do so.
So when we speak about Zimbabwe's prosperous times, we are talking about a time when more of the basics were available to Blacks, just enough to get by. We are talking about when whites felt secure to continue reaping most of the profits from stolen resources. A country is branded a success when whites are prospering and the local government can at least take care of the basics. Elite Whites do not see Blacks as anything other that subsistence labourers and consumers.
The nostalgia that some are displaying on this board for what existed before in Zimbabwe is very Eurocentric. They are fighting for white control... never seeing Blacks as being able to claim their own space and economic direction.
Most post colonial societies moved along similar lines and that is how we have neocolonialism today. I feel none of these leaders really thought out the entire system enough to realize a better way forward. Some experimented with change, but as history showed, they were either killed or removed from power by European orchestrated coups.
Real change is not possible, unless the majority of people in Zimbabwe are educated about themselves throughout history and the evil in the European systems they inherited. Only an educated majority can withstand the aggression of European powers.
The White leaders loudly proclaim that they want to protect their way of life. Their way of life is exactly the problem. They will pay poor people to fight and kill as many people as possible who oppose them to protect their greed.
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Africa's new best friends. Yeah Right!
Posted: Tuesday, July 5, 2005
The US and Britain are putting the multinational corporations that created poverty in charge of its relief
by George Monbiot, The Guardian UK
Reproduced for Fair Use Only
I began to realise how much trouble we were in when Hilary Benn, the secretary of state for international development, announced that he would be joining the Make Poverty History march on Saturday. What would he be chanting, I wondered? "Down with me and all I stand for"?
Benn is the man in charge of using British aid to persuade African countries to privatise public services; wasn't the march supposed to be a protest against policies like his? But its aims were either expressed or interpreted so loosely that anyone could join. This was its strength and its weakness. The Daily Mail ran pictures of Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof on its front page, with the headline "Let's Roll", showing that nothing either Live 8 or Make Poverty History has done so far represents a threat to power.
The G8 leaders and the business interests their summit promotes can absorb our demands for aid, debt, even slightly fairer terms of trade, and lose nothing. They can wear our colours, speak our language, claim to support our aims, and discover in our agitation not new constraints but new opportunities for manufacturing consent. Justice, this consensus says, can be achieved without confronting power.
They invite our representatives to share their stage, we invite theirs to share ours. The economist Noreena Hertz offers, according to the commercial speakers' agency that hires her, "real solutions for businesses and individuals. Hertz teaches companies how to be smart and avoid the frictions that surface when corporate interests conflict with private life ... the political right is not necessarily wrong." Then she stands on the Make Poverty History stage and calls for poverty to be put at the top of the agenda. There is, as far as some of the MPH organisers are concerned, no contradiction: the new consensus denies that there's a conflict between ending poverty and business as usual.
The G8 leaders have seized this opportunity with both hands. Multinational corporations, they argue, are not the cause of Africa's problems but the solution. From now on they will be responsible for the relief of poverty.
They have already been given control of the primary instrument of US policy towards Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act. The act is a fascinating compound of professed philanthropy and raw self-interest. To become eligible for help, African countries must bring about "a market-based economy that protects private property rights", "the elimination of barriers to United States trade and investment" and a conducive environment for US "foreign policy interests". In return they will be allowed "preferential treatment" for some of their products in US markets.
The important word is "some". Clothing factories in Africa will be allowed to sell their products to the US as long as they use "fabrics wholly formed and cut in the United States" or if they avoid direct competition with US products. The act, treading carefully around the toes of US manufacturing interests, is comically specific. Garments containing elastic strips, for example, are eligible only if the elastic is "less than 1 inch in width and used in the production of brassieres". Even so, African countries' preferential treatment will be terminated if it results in "a surge in imports".
It goes without saying that all this is classified as foreign aid. The act instructs the US Agency for International Development to develop "a receptive environment for trade and investment". What is more interesting is that its implementation has been outsourced to the Corporate Council on Africa.
The CCA is the lobby group representing the big US corporations with interests in Africa: Halliburton, Exxon Mobil, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Starbucks, Raytheon, Microsoft, Boeing, Cargill, Citigroup and others. For the CCA, what is good for General Motors is good for Africa. "Until African countries are able to earn greater income," it says, "their ability to buy US products will be limited." The US state department has put it in charge of training African governments and businesses. The CCA runs the US government's annual forum for African business, and hosts the Growth and Opportunity Act's steering committee.
Now something very similar is being set up in the UK. Tomorrow the Business Action for Africa summit will open in London with a message from Tony Blair. Chaired by Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the head of Anglo American, its speakers include executives from Shell, British American Tobacco, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and the Corporate Council on Africa. One of its purposes is to inaugurate the Investment Climate Facility, a $550m fund financed by the UK's foreign-aid budget, the World Bank and the other G8 nations, but "driven and controlled by the private sector". The fund will be launched by Niall FitzGerald, now head of Reuters, but formerly chief executive of Unilever, and before that Unilever's representative in apartheid South Africa. He wants the facility, he says, to help create a "healthy investment climate" that will offer companies "attractive financial returns compared to competing destinations". Anglo American and Barclays have already volunteered to help.
Few would deny that one of the things Africa needs is investment. But investment by many of our multinationals has not enriched its people but impoverished them. The history of corporate involvement in Africa is one of forced labour, evictions, murder, wars, the under-costing of resources, tax evasion and collusion with dictators. Nothing in either the Investment Climate Facility or the Growth and Opportunity Act imposes mandatory constraints on corporations. While their power and profits in Africa will be enhanced with the help of our foreign-aid budgets, they will be bound only by voluntary commitments: of the kind that have been in place since 1973 and have proved useless.
Just as Gordon Brown's "moral crusade" encourages us to forget the armed crusade he financed, the state-sponsored rebranding of the companies working in Africa prompts us to forget what Shell has been doing in Nigeria, what Barclays and Anglo American and De Beers have done in South Africa, and what British American Tobacco has done just about everywhere. From now on, the G8 would like us to believe, these companies will be Africa's best friends. In the name of making poverty history, the G8 has given a new, multi-headed East India Company a mandate to govern the continent.
Without a critique of power, our campaign, so marvellously and so disastrously inclusive, will merely enhance this effort. Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Africa's problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people's lives. Where, on the Live 8 stages and in Edinburgh, was the campaign against the G8's control of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the UN? Where was the demand for binding global laws for multinational companies?
At the Make Poverty History march, the speakers insisted that we are dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming towards our demands. It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us dancing and cheering towards theirs.
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Zimbabwe is being hypocritically vilified
Posted: Friday, July 1, 2005
Monster of the moment
Zimbabwe is being hypocritically vilified by the west for forced slum clearances that are routine throughout the developing world
By John Vidal, guardian.co.uk
For a month now, the BBC, CNN, ITV and others have been reporting what has been portrayed as one of the greatest humanitarian and human rights disasters in years. At least 200,000 people - sometimes this figure grows to 250,000 or even 300,000 - are said to have been forcibly evicted from slum areas of Harare in Zimbabwe. The figure peaked last week at 1.5 million, but yesterday the BBC reckoned that bulldozers were now "crashing through the homes of 500,000 people".
In fact, only about 1.2 million people live in Harare and no one is suggesting that half the population has fled in terror or that most of the city has been wrecked. So where are all these allegedly terrorised people? A few thousand have been filmed in makeshift camps but not many more. Who is trying to count the numbers? They are almost always attributed to an unnamed person in an unnamed UN agency. But read the only UN statement on the evictions and it says nothing of 200,000 people.
The evictions - which are clearly happening on a wide scale - have been seized on by the west, and the former colonial power Britain in particular, as another reason to demonise President Mugabe and further humiliate long-suffering Zimbabwe. It's open season on the Harare regime and it appears that anyone can say anything they like without recourse to accuracy or reality. Whipped into a frenzy of hypocritical outrage, the EU, Britain and the US, as well as the World Bank - all of which have been responsible for millions of evictions in Africa and elsewhere as conditions of infrastructure projects - have rushed to condemn the "atrocities".
The vilification of Mugabe is now out of control. The UN security council and the G8 have been asked to debate the evictions, and Mugabe is being compared to Pol Pot in Cambodia. Meanwhile, the evictions are mentioned in the same breath as the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans - although perhaps only three people have so far accidentally died. Only at the very end of some reports is it said that the Harare city authority's stated reason for the evictions is to build better, legal houses for 150,000 people.
Perspective is needed. The summary removal of people at gunpoint from their homes is indefensible, almost certainly unnecessary, and probably economically counter-productive, but it is not unusual in the developing world. Every year millions of poor people are evicted to make way for tourism, dams, roads and airports, for events like the Olympics, and for the gentrification and beautification of cities, national parks and urban redevelopments.
Nor is it new. Forced evictions, brutal land grabs and slum clearances were all used by Britain's own rulers in the past to enlarge their estates, build bigger, more modern cities, construct reservoirs, make way for railways and lay out fine parks and fashionable areas for the newly rich to live. Rapidly developing countries are now doing the same as the rich world did during its own industrial and urban development.
The difference is mostly in numbers. According to UN-Habitat, the Nairobi-based agency that concerns itself with the urban environment, hundreds of millions of the world's poor are technically illegal squatters living in slum communities like those in Harare, liable to be moved on by private landowners or by governments. In the past five years, slum clearance programmes have forced more than 150,000 people out of their homes in Delhi; 300,000 people were evicted to make way for Olympic sites in Beijing; 100,000 were moved on in Jakarta; 250,000 were forced out of dam sites in India; and as many as a million in Lagos and Port Harcourt in Nigeria. There are many more.
Yet those who like to call themselves "the international community" say nothing about these mass evictions and the world's press has been mostly silent. For the World Bank to condemn the Zimbabwean evictions was particularly rich. According to its own calculations, the bank has funded projects that have required the eviction of at least 10 million people.
So why are the Harare slum clearances so different? As international monster of the moment, Mugabe is unacceptable to Britain and the west mainly because he has chosen to evict whites and redistribute land grabbed in colonial times. The fact that the African Union and other African leaders are not prepared to condemn him for the Harare evictions reflects the fact that they, too, recognise the injustice of the colonial land ownership inheritance and do not want to see Africa bullied again by the west.
But there may be another reason why African leaders have not condemned the evictions. Urbanisation is overwhelming most African cities, which have been flooded by impoverished people forced off the land. According to the UN's 2003 study of urbanisation and slums, the driving force behind the slums of Africa and Asia is not bad governance or tyrants, but laissez-faire globalisation, the tearing down of trade barriers, the privatisation of national economies, structural adjustment programmes imposed on indebted countries by the IMF, and the lowering of tariffs promoted by the World Trade Organisation.
Like every city in the world that has tried to clear its slums, Harare will find that history repeats itself. This year, Zimbabwe faces massive food shortages that will force more of the urban poor into destitution and drive yet more people off the land into the cities to look for work. The poor, punished for their poverty rather than for voting one way or another, will become poorer and the shacks and shelters so brutally pulled down in the past month will just go up somewhere else.
However, an alternative to forced evictions is emerging right under Mugabe's nose. Last year, 250 homeless Zimbabweans, members of the Federation of Slum and Shackdwellers, negotiated the provision of land from the city authority. They have now planned the layout of their community, worked out the costs of the homes and are ready to build. Where are they? Harare.
·John Vidal is the Guardian's environment editor
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Aid in exchange for alienating Mugabe
Posted: Saturday, June 18, 2005
Malawi accused over tear gas for Mugabe
AN African government whose people are receiving financial aid from Scotland has been accused of flouting sanctions in supplying the Zimbabwean police force with tear gas.
~~~~~
Comment by Ayinde
This is how European 'Aid' works. European leaders intend to create more divisions among African leaders and nations. Today, European/ American 'Aid' is tied to getting African leaders to alienate President Mugabe and Zimbabwe. Among other methods, such as sanctions, this is often accomplished by adding restrictive control measures before aid is released.
Of course, European and American leaders want to determine what good governance in Africa is. The African countries that they would claim are practicing good governance will be those that cheaply sell their assets to European/American investors and countries that maintain colonial inequities. They also want African countries to continue allowing a minority of whites to occupy and profit from the best agriculture lands in Africa.
Bob Geldof and Bono may not be aware of Blair's motives, but Blair's entire 'Aid for Africa' drive is intended to get African nations distracted from examining and attempting to correct colonial injustices as part of resolving poverty and wars. They fear the infectious Land Reclamation exercise in Zimbabwe can spread to other parts of Africa. So 'Aid' today is to work just as AIDS; it is to ensure that Africans do not develop immunity from European/ American trinkets and control.
Also Read:
'A truckload of nonsense' by George Monbiot
World Bank "Conditionalities" by Greg Palast
Re: A truckload of nonsense by Linda Edwards
International Aid by Evans Munyemesha
New Millennium, Same Old Foreign Aid by Rep. Ron Paul
Africa - debt, aid and race by Gwynne Dyer
How Western Aid Helped Destroy Somalia by George Ayittey
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The real cause of Zimbabwe's food crisis
Posted: Saturday, June 4, 2005
By Stephen Gowans, gowans.blogspot.com
June 02, 2005
It's dangerous to comment on events that are distant in space or close in time. And Zimbabwe's food crisis is both these things – distant and recent and therefore ambiguous.
But there are some things that are less ambiguous than others.
Take the claim that agricultural production in this southern African country has shrunk. That's beyond dispute.
So too is the claim that, without outside assistance, many Zimbabweans will go hungry.
What is, however, a matter of disagreement – or should be -- is why.
To the Western press, Zimbabwe's food crisis is the inevitable outcome of Harare's challenge to decades of imperialist exploitation.
Of course, it's not put that way. Harare hasn't challenged imperialism. It has seized white-owned farms. Robert Mugabe, the country's president and leader of its national liberation struggle, is a power-hungry, anti-democratic, thug. He wants to reward his lackeys with stolen farmland, using a progressive land reform program as cover. Only a fool would fall for this.
Anti-imperialist struggles, seen through the lens of the Western press, are always dark, sordid and corrupt affairs, Zimbabwe's no less than any other. And those who challenge these campaigns of vilification, are no less vilified, than the main targets.
A recent Washington Post (June 2, 2005) account is emblematic of the Western media's dark, tendentious take on Zimbabwe's troubles.
"Once known as the breadbasket of southern Africa for it bounteous exports of corn and other staples, Zimbabwe has failed to produce enough food for its own population since the often violent land seizures began in 2000."
Lay aside the reality that the arable land of the former colonies of Western imperialist countries have, as a legacy of their previous colonial status, been largely given over to the production of a few cash crops for export, on land often owned by absentee landlords, not production of food by indigenous owners for internal consumption.
This, the Washington Post notes (Zimbabwe, "once known ... for it bounteous exports...") but assumes that an export-based cash crop economy can, in a pinch, be converted to "production of food for internal consumption."
Ignoring that point, and reading the analysis in the strictest literal way, there's nothing to dispute.
Harare did abandon the unworkable willing seller, willing buyer policy favored by its former colonial master, to pursue a land redistribution program to reverse the effects of imperialist exploitation. A food crisis did follow.
The cock crows; the sun rises. But does the cock cause the sun to rise?
Read the analysis again, but not in a strict, literalist, way, and the insinuation is that the roots of Zimbabwe's depressed agricultural production can be found in Harare's land redistribution campaign, and not surrounding – and vastly more significant -- events.
"Drought," the Post article acknowledges -- though at a point sufficiently removed from the critical pairing of the food shortage with farm seizures to make the calamity appear to be an interesting side note, but nothing more -- "has cut food production in several (neighboring) nations."
Indeed, drought, sufficient to lower food production in neighboring countries, should go a long way toward explaining why Zimbabwe can't produce enough.
But if drought isn't enough, add punitive sanctions imposed by Western countries in reaction to Zimbabwe's anti-imperialist challenge (a point the Washington Post either misses or ignores.)
Surely, both these things are significant.
The sanctions, as intended, have been crippling. Fuel – vital to the operation of farm machinery – is in short supply. The economy is in a shambles.
And it's not only Zimbabwe whose agricultural production is drought-ravaged and depressed. That of surrounding countries, whose governments haven't launched meaningful land reform programs, is too.
Only a miracle worker could produce a bounteous crop under drought conditions, in the midst of an economic war, whose objective is to force the government to cry uncle, and leave the legacy of past imperialist exploitation in place.
Accordingly, an honest account of the direct causes of Zimbabwe's agricultural troubles would dwell less on land redistribution, and more on drought and Western punishment for Harare's land reform programs.
The Washington Post, were it other than a mouthpiece for advancing the interests of US investors, financiers and shareholders, may have put it this way:
Once known as the breadbasket of southern Africa for it bounteous exports of corn and other staples, Zimbabwe has failed to produce enough since drought began to ravage southern Africa and Western countries undertook a campaign of economic warfare to cripple the impoverished country's economy, including its agriculture sector.
Don't expect letters to the editor, complaints to the newspaper's ombudsman, or the pressure of liberal media watchdogs to change this. (Indeed, expect no pressure at all; Zimbabwe has few friends in the West, including among nominally anti-imperialist groups.) The Washington Post, its sister publications, and the West's mass media, are not neutral. They never can be, anymore than a lion can live on grass.
The hunger of the poor of Zimbabwe is, as it has been for over a century, not the consequence of the backwardness of Zimbabweans, or the corruption of its national liberation leaders, but the consequence of Western exploitation.
And the iron heel brought down on any who challenge it.
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Tsvangirai's Big Head Has No Sanity - Mugabe
Posted: Friday, April 29, 2005
BINDURA, Mar. 31 - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has charged opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) president Morgan Tvsangirai's "big head carries no sanity".
And President Mugabe said his government could have killed the colonial master Ian Smith because he deserved to die after the country got independence.
Addressing thousands of people in Bindura district, about 120 kilometres away from Harare on Tuesday, Mugabe said Tsvangirai had won 57 seats in the last elections simply because he told lies about Zimbabwe to Europeans who were the greater liars.
"Europeans are never honest. They think that lies play a great part in politics. Tsvangirai has a big head and you would think that big head carries sanity...none at all!" President Mugabe said. "He runs to the British like a dog with a wagging tail to say 'my country is not free, there is dictatorship, there are irregularities and people are dying of hunger'. Lies, lies and more lies... goodness me. We do not pursue that kind of politics, it is foreign to us. Tsvangirai lies to greater liars than himself and the British are happy because they have someone to use.
"What country, really, would allow a man like Tsvangirai to sit at the helm? This Tsvangirai, what is he? A man with little education, little sense and no background? Ok, we created the trade unions and he had a chance of serving as secretary general but he messed up. He has no mind of his own, he just interprets other people's thoughts both in words and actions. Anyway, fools can also run as politicians. It's only in politics where fools can also run."
And President Mugabe said Smith was still alive and criticising his government because they had spared him.
President Mugabe said Smith had done a lot of harm to Zimbabweans and for that reason he did not deserve to live.
"Ian Smith is still alive and farming because we spared him. He did a lot of bad things to us but we still spared him. He had two farms, we only got one and they say we are tyrannical. If we had wanted, just one bullet could have taken care of things that side but he is still alive and criticising us," President Mugabe said. "He is still writing things against us, he is free to do so. He would have been dead but he is still hanging his head. Tell me, in which part of the world could a man like Ian Smith be alive today? He had kidnapped and assassinated a lot of people in the bush. Others were thrown in mine pits and we do not know where many others were buried. Over 50,000 people died during the struggle and Ian Smith destroyed a lot of lives. But we are survivors and Tony Blair must know that. Our sovereignty will not be interfered with by anyone, be it Blair or Bush."
And President Mugabe charged that Europeans were the worst liars despite their strong Christian foundation.
He cited America's attack on Iraqi as an incursion based on lies. However, President Mugabe said that African leaders believed in telling their people the truth.
President Mugabe said Zimbabweans had a right to determine their own political destiny adding that self-rule was their birthright. He wondered why British Prime Minister Tony Blair could not leave Zimbabwe alone in that it was not the only country in Africa.
President Mugabe said Zimbabwe single-handedly introduced multiparty elections and had managed to stand on its own without help from the Europeans. He said his cabinet was among the few in the world with very learned brains.
"We have had democracy since 1980. We introduced one man, one vote and when we went to Lancaster, if Smith had never accepted the democratic principle we could never have sat with him. We went to the polls in 1980, we won. In 1985 we won, in 1990 we won and in 2000 we won. In 2002 when we introduced the presidential system, I won that election," President Mugabe said. "Blair, leave us alone. We don't have to be directed by you. What do we have to learn from you? Nothing at all. Why do you want to extend your rule to poor Zimbabwe and even to wage a stupid war against people of Iraqi? Blair's sanctions are unjustified. And who is he to us? Have the British people asked him why he is so concerned only with Zimbabwe in Africa?"
President Mugabe said he was confident that the ruling Zimbanwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) would carry the day in today's parliamentary elections.
"There is no bar in running for elections, even fools can contest. In 2002 the MDC managed to get 57 seats and we accepted because they won after lying to the people. We have a free run again and of course they are losing because people have seen through them. They are now wearing see-throughs," he said.
President Mugabe also said there would be no rigging as people who rigged were MDC supporters.
And referring to his former information minister Jonathan Moyo, President Mugabe said some people were over-ambitious, wanting to get to the top earlier than their time.
"Others are ambitious like Jonathan Moyo and they want to jump forward. A frog will never give birth to a cow. A frog is a frog and it can never be a cow," he said.
President Mugabe urged the people of Bindura, the home of the first female war veteran Mbuya Nehanda and the country's Vice-President Joyce Mujuru, to maintain their patriotism saying the liberation struggle started from their province.
He said thousands of people died during the struggle and that people should not forget how people sacrificed lives for Zimbabwe.
President Mugabe said Zimbabwe had reached a third revolution - the land reforms.
"Today is the final day I am talking to you. I have been around the country with only one word. Where are we and where did we come from? We travelled long distances in 1980 and tried to pursue ways of uplifting our people. We built schools even in outlying areas where there were mosquitoes and tsetse flies. Women empowerment is very important and it has to start with agriculture and mining. In mining, people in surrounding areas should benefit by getting royalties. In agriculture there is need for women to be given small loans to enable them to run viable businesses. We need to help our women in the province. Right now we have the support of the chiefs and only two chiefs are on the opposition's side. Liberation is precisely a reflection of our performance as we try to uplift our country," he said.
President Mugabe commended Vice-President Mujuru's commitment to Zimbabwe's liberation, which she started as a very young girl.
He said even when her husband (Mujuru) fell in love with her whilst in the bush, he first approached him but he (Mugabe) asked him to hold on until they got into town.
"Joyce Mujuru was just a little girl in the camps, she looked after herself and she was never ambitious. When the husband fell in love with her, he came to me and by then we were in the bush. So I said man, we are in the bush. Can you write on a piece of paper which will be a reminder when we get to town? So that is that about Joyce and since she is from this province you need to keep that spirit," said President Mugabe.
Amos Malupenga, Chansa Kabwela Brighton Phiri
Source: www.post.co.zm/zim3087th.html
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Blair is More of a Devil Than Mugabe
Posted: Friday, April 29, 2005
The Post (Lusaka)
Posted to the web April 22, 2005
by Brighton Phiri
BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair is more of a devil over Zimbabwe's land crisis than President Mugabe, Dr Kenneth Kaunda has said.
Commenting on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's revelation that Prince Charles was being despised for shaking his hand during the pope's funeral, Dr Kaunda said it was wrong for President Mugabe to be demonised for the British government's betrayal over its promises to facilitate Zimbabwe's land reforms.
"Before we can call comrade Mugabe all sorts of names, we must look at the history of this country (Zimbabwe). In this country's history, you will find colonialism, which meant land grabbing...then came federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland with the same land grabbing," Dr Kaunda said.
He wondered why Blair had been silent over the atrocities that Ian Smith's regime had committed against black Zimbabweans during the era of land grabbing, and the British government's failures to meet its promise to facilitate the land reforms in Zimbabwe, 10 years after independence.
Dr Kaunda said he was a living witness of the land reform agreement between President Mugabe, then Zimbabwe African National Union leader, Zimbabwe African People's Union leader, the late Joshua Nkomo, and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
"When Zambia was getting close to its independence, Rhodesia rebel leader Ian Smith declared that no black government would exist in his lifetime and none in a thousand years," Dr Kaunda recollected. "Soon after we got independence, Smith locked up all black political leaders, including Mugabe and Nkomo."
Dr Kaunda recalled that in 1974 he had organised a meeting with then South African president John Vorster to discuss the release of President Mugabe, the late Nkomo and others who had served 10 years in jail.
"I targeted Vorster because I knew that the British were not influential to Smith at the time. So I met Vorster in his train at Victoria Falls Bridge and I demanded among other things, the release of all the political detainees and withdrawing of South African military choppers which were killing the black combatants," he said.
Dr Kaunda said it was from his meeting with Vorster that President Mugabe and the late Nkomo had been released from jail and the deadly military choppers had been withdrawn.
Dr Kaunda said he had taken advantage of Thatcher's presence during the Commonwealth meeting held in Lusaka in 1979 to solicit for a meeting between the British government and Zimbabwean liberation leaders.
"I demanded for a meeting from my dancing partner Thatcher and fortunately she accepted that the meeting be held in London the same year," Dr Kaunda said. "But when I informed comrades Mugabe and Nkomo while we were attending a non-align countries' meeting in Cuba, both comrades refused, saying that they were not going to attend the meeting because they could not trust the British government. I sought the support of my late friend Julius Nyerere and late comrade Samora Machel to convince our colleagues to attend the meeting."
Dr Kaunda said while in London, the British government through Thatcher had pleaded with the Zimbabwean delegation to avoid discussing the land issue until after 10 years to enable her government to source for funds to facilitate the land reforms in Zimbabwe.
"So Mugabe and his colleagues did not talk about land in respect to the British government's promise. But 10 years down the line, the British did nothing. Come 1990, people were tired of lies and false promises," Dr Kaunda said. "This led to the problem of land in Zimbabwe. So how can you blame Mugabe? Demonise those who cheated and not Mugabe, who respected their promise."
Reprinted for fair use only from:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200504220587.html
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Call for an end to the imperialist economic sanctions
Posted: Wednesday, April 20, 2005
By John Trimble
All-African People's Revolutionary Party
I would like to start by thanking the Embassy of Zimbabwe and Ambassador Mubako for this opportunity to share my experiences from visiting and living in Zimbabwe over the past 3 years. I hope this will help provide clarity on what actually is happening in Zimbabwe.
Since July 2002, I have made five visits to Zimbabwe, the longest being from August 2003 to August 2004 when I lived in Bulawayo and served as a Fulbright professor to the National University of Science and Technology. The most recent visits have been 3 weeks in December 2004 and a week in March 2005, just 2 weeks prior to the elections.
While living in Bulawayo, I was able to observe and follow the municipal elections and several by-elections (elections to fill the seats of deceased MPs and in one case the seat of an MDC MP who had abandoned his seat and moved to Britain). In all cases the process appeared fair and peaceful.
Full Article : mathaba.net
CALL FOR AN END TO SANCTIONS ON ZIMBABWE
American citizens and the rest of the world have been urged to call for an end to the racist immoral sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by western imperialist powers. The call was made by a representative of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, Professor John Trimble, at a press conference in Washington DC, United States, on Wednesday.
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Independence marked new era
Posted: Tuesday, April 19, 2005
www.zimbabweherald.com
THE following is the full text of the speech delivered by President Mugabe on the occasion of the Independence Silver Jubilee celebrations yesterday.
Twenty-five years have gone by since that eventful midnight of 18th April, when our country was born, proudly taking up her place among members of the community of nations as a full, independent and sovereign State. This birth followed bitter struggles and wars of resistance waged by our people for nearly a century, struggles meant to dislodge British settler colonialism which, in 1890, had planted itself on our soil through force of arms.
When this day finally arrived, we had paid the price of British bondage for ninety long and arduous years of systematic assault and injury to our body and soul as a Nation under occupation. To this day, we bear the lasting scars of that dark encounter with colonialism, often described as civilising.
Important as it is, this magic day of 18th April did not mark our destination or herald the end of our struggles. April 18 announced the beginning of new and even more demanding struggles ahead. We had to secure peace; we had to integrate three previously warring armies; we had to resettle thousands of displaced persons and refugees from the war; and we had to rehabilitate a war-ravaged countryside. The challenge was daunting, a real matter of faith.
Twenty-five years later, we have an opportunity to look at how we have lived as a Nation since then. But we do so having achieved the landmark of 25 years which this day, the 18th of April represents, for it was the day on which, in 1980, we proclaimed our birth and presence to the world with a collective voice. The emotion-laden visual of that proclamation was the lowering of the Union Jack - the British flag - and its subsequent replacement by our own.
The lowering of the Union Jack was a ceremony performed by a British royal person - His Royal Highness, Prince Charles, now being maligned for recently shaking my hand in Rome, at the funeral of our Pontiff, Pope John Paul II. But I had met him several times before. Was it not one revered Briton who said a century or so ago that "small minds and great empires go ill together?" Comrades and Friends, when we ascended to full sovereignty and freedom, we clearly communicated our resolve never again to be in bondage.
The new flag represented the wealth we carry as a Nation, although, sadly, it was wealth we were not able to control or take over quickly. That, of course, included our land, all that which grows on it, and all that which is embedded deep within its bowels.
The new flag also expressed our deep compassion, our wish and offer of peace to the world. As a war-weary people, we badly needed it, both at home and abroad. And the circumstances were most delicate, for the embittered Rhodesians were plotting the reversal of the people’s revolution.
The same flag, yes, carried our dreams, our hopes, our lofty and boundless ambitions. It represented our colour and our past, both combining to give identity to a young and achieving African Nation steeped in proud history. We hoisted all these things on 18th April, the day we joyously mark today. We thus struck a covenant with ourselves and those to come after us. We are the living, the independent and an African people firmly rooted.
In celebrating our coming into being, we acknowledge the founding struggles waged by our forbears. Their brave resistance started from the last decade of the 19th Century and went into the first decade of the 20th Century. From that historical experience, we have gleaned life-long lessons for building this Nation which has turned twenty-five today.
Our Chimurenga or liberation struggle was "a people’s war" and thus demonstrates the imperative need for national unity not only in winning and defending our sovereignty but also in pursuing the post-war struggles against poverty, hunger, disease and ignorance. A united people can never be really defeated. This reckoning thus impels us to be on a tireless search for unity even as we uphold the Unity Accord of 1987. Our people are, indeed, united and we therefore dare not undermine the Accord.
Above all, our struggles have taught us that sacrifices are an integral part and signify the element of bravery and courage. For Africa, freedom has never come cheap and easy. Colonisers do not freely let go of nations they occupy. Their hold has to be broken through bitter and bloody struggles by the oppressed. Such struggles have always demanded sacrifices.
Today, we tell our children that the joys of 18th April emanate from the hapless villager slaughtered in cold blood only yesterday, for supporting the struggle. We tell them that today’s joy is the product of the strangled shriek of a guerrilla bravely facing execution, it comes from his corpse as his body dangled from the noose of an inhuman white settler hangman. We tell them real stories of battle-hardened cadres who fell in battle singing "Ropa rangu muchazoriona pamureza weZimbabwe." (My blood shall colour the flag of a free Zimbabwe") all such sacrifices colour our joy today.
We shall never forget that we shared the sacrifices with our brothers and sisters in all the neighbouring countries we used as rear bases for our struggle: Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola and Botswana. Their blood too, emblazons our flag, making them deserving shareholders in our freedom and pride. The honour we extended to their leaders last night, most of them posthumously, recognises and celebrates this hushamwari hweropa - friendship born of blood. Their sacrifices towards our cause are infinite and priceless, bonding our peoples forever. Again, let the children know this sacred story of their freedom, namely, that it was secured through collaborative African efforts and sacrifices, which have provided a firm foundation for our pan-African spirit and character.
But we also recall and take pride in the fact that we opened our Independence with a demonstration of compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation, unexampled in European history. Confounding all expectations and fears of retributive justice against Rhodesian war criminals, we, in March 1980, proclaimed a Policy of National Reconciliation by which we forgave their heinous sins and atrocities against our people. By this policy, their war crimes stood forgiven, expiated not by restitution or even a show of contrition on their part, but simply by our own forgiving consciences. Against that bitter history, we still gave our hand, gave our hearts and our love to the erstwhile oppressor, in clear demonstration of African humanity. Today, Ian Smith, himself racist Rhodesian incarnate, still lives a free man. Out of this policy, we built peace, healed weeping wounds, pacified restless souls of all those disconsolately bitter and deeply injured. Yes, we freed the oppressor. Who, in the Anglo-Saxon West would have done what we did?
Democracy has come during the same 25 years, not as a hand-down from Europe, but as a natural offshoot of our struggle. We made our democracy and owe it to no one, least of all Europeans. Until we beat them on the battlefield, Britain and her kith and kin here would not concede voting rights to Africans. The one-person-one-vote we have enjoyed since 1980 is a gain from our liberation struggle. Let it be forever remembered it was the bullet that brought the ballot.
The twenty-five years we celebrate today have been years of regular elections in 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2002, and, just slightly over two weeks ago, in March 2005. Our polls have not needed Anglo-American validation. They are validated by fellow Africans and friendly countries from the Third World. That is our humane universe, not Europe, not America. We never agitate to observe their elections, and, therefore, let them keep away from our affairs.
We thank Africa for her support as we prepared for our polls. We thank all the political players and their supporters for heeding the call for peace. We thank our people for ensuring peace throughout the entire election period. Indeed, this is as it should always be.
The twenty-five years that have gone by have taught us that democracy cannot grow well on the soil of racial poverty and inequality. Genuine democracy cannot co-exist with structural deprivation and racial inequality. It cannot be an escape from addressing the national question. Such a model of democracy we reject for it is meant to give the oppressed an illusion of power and control.
The historical fact of land, at the heart of our liberation struggle, necessarily forges this vital connection in our political circumstances. In Zimbabwe, land governs the ballot. It is a symbol of sovereignty; it is the economy, indeed, the source of our welfare as Africans. It remains the core social question of our time, as, indeed, it was the main grievance on which our liberation struggle was based.
Today, 25 years later, we rejoice that this fundamental goal of our struggle has been achieved. We have resolved the long outstanding national land question, and the land has now come to its rightful owners, and with it, our sovereignty. Our people are happy and fulfiled, and this is all that matters to us. Let the grief and bitterness that has visited Europe following the repossession of our land heal on its own, in its time. Zimbabwe is in Africa, not Europe!
We have done much more in the 25 years which have gone by. We have built schools, colleges, polytechnics and universities. We have trained teachers and expanded education at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. We have educated our children and with a literacy rate of well over 86 percent, Zimbabwe far surpasses most nations of the world in education, which is why our skilled people are much sought after in most parts of the world. The coming years will see resolute steps taken to review and overhaul certain aspects of the current education system, placing emphasis on development-related education, Information Technology, vocationalisation and entrepreneurship for self-job creation.
We have also built health institutions throughout the country and have stepped up the training of health personnel, albeit against the challenges of induced skills flight. Today, every community has a clinic or health centre on the basis of which our national primary health care programme has been an example to, and the envy of the developing world. However, the biggest challenge we face as a nation is the HIV/Aids pandemic, which has really strained our health delivery system. Definitive steps are being undertaken to address the challenge, including greater local manufacturing of anti-retrovirals, as well as significant subsidies for HIV-related drugs and treatments. But the achievements in the health sector have been enormous and we can only improve in the years ahead.
Dramatic gains have been registered in opening up rural areas through greater infrastructural development. From a road and rail network designed to serve white interests, we have expanded the road network to bring hitherto neglected rural areas within the national developmental grid. We have built an effective system of feeder roads, overcoming natural barriers through a network of bridges. However, a lot more still needs to be done.
We have expanded rural electrification, covering the far reaches of our country. We have lit up rural service centres, rural schools, offices and homesteads of traditional and community leaders. With electric power in place, it is now possible to attract meaningful small to medium scale investments into rural areas, in the process, tackling rural unemployment.
Complementary to the rural electrification programme has been the provision of rural telecommunication services.
Our water sector has also enjoyed huge investments during the same period. We have built many dams of all sizes in all provinces, especially the drought prone provinces of Matabeleland, Midlands and Masvingo.
But not all has been rosy in these 25 years that we are taking stock of today. The spectre of drought has repeatedly visited us, seemingly increasing in frequency in the new millennium. And although we have invested heavily in harvesting water, not much has been done to harness that water for irrigation purposes. We, thus, suffer repeated "wet" droughts. Increasing irrigable land is the surest insurance and no effort will be spared from this very year.
While our detractors claim that our economy has not done that well, we are happy that it has delivered spectacularly on our social goals, thereby laying a firm foundation for our future growth policies. It has delivered on education, health, infrastructure, water, energy and communication. These happen to be prerequisites for an economic take-off. And we now have them in place. True, business has not expanded as fast as we would have wished, and much remains to be done for that to happen.
Until recently, the economy had suffered a general rise in inflation and price instability. Businesses either closed or contracted. Wages were eroded, while unemployment rose quite markedly. Punishing interest rates have also dissuaded investments or business expansions. Our experiments with the ruinous economic structural adjustment programme appear to have unleashed mayhem in the economy. We are a lot wiser now.
We are clear and definite on the way forward in the years ahead. We need to protect our people from the ravages of drought that have afflicted us for years. We shall continue to organise ourselves in order to resist droughts and when they occur to be in a position to prevent hunger. The responsibility of sustaining our people during challenging periods is primarily that of our Government. We shall always live up to this responsibility.
All these efforts naturally must unfold within the framework of our Economic Turnaround Programme which has already registered dramatic gains in restoring macroeconomic balance. While these gains have been generated by reforms championed by our Reserve Bank, they need an emphatic supply response to remain sustainable. Agriculture must grow and expand. Industry and mining must respond positively to the turnaround, as indeed should commerce and the service sector.
The hostility we have faced from western countries in response to our Land Reform has taught us to diversify our source and export markets. We have turned East; we have turned to our region and other sub-regions on our continent. With this support, we have started building mutually beneficial partnerships that will help us build a strong national economy, our ultimate goal.
Let me conclude by thanking leaders from our neighbouring countries who have agreed to grace our Silver Jubilee Celebrations. Some of them lead countries that produced heroes we honoured just yesterday. We hold them in great affection and cherish this deep relationship forged through shared struggles and sacrifices.
I also thank friends and supporters of Zimbabwe, friends and supporters who have stood by us through thick and thin. They are friends indeed and we shall not fail them. Gone are the days when Africa produced tragic revolutions. We have to defend our own space by any means necessary. We have to defend our policies and pursue them unhindered. Africa for Africans! Long live the African Union!
Long Live Zimbabwe!
Long Live the People of Zimbabwe!
Long Live our Independence!
Long Live Africa!
www.zimbabweherald.com
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Zimbabwe election officials reject poll fraud
Posted: Friday, April 15, 2005
By Staff Reporters, newzimbabwe.com
Last updated: 04/07/2005 13:36:11
EXTRACT:
"In the first announcement made after polling had ended, Justice Chiweshe read out voting figures from the 120 constituencies. However, when the results started coming in, it emerged that more people appeared to have voted per constituency more than had earlier been announced.
But facing the world media for the first time after the controversy, Justice Chiweshe poured scorn on the rigging claims. In fact, according to Chiweshe, the initial announcement of voters per constituency was for the voting patterns up to 2pm on the voting day.
He said: "(I indicated at the time that) figures quoted in any update that the commission may give are not necessarily a reflection of facts on the ground. The figures were given without prejudice and only for the purposes of giving indications as to the turnout trends in various provinces and constituencies.
"I further indicated that correct and official statistics would be known after the constituency results. Notwithstanding that explanation, certain quarters have taken it upon themselves to misinform and mislead the public that there is a discrepancy between figures given in the update and the final figures as reflected in constituency results, and that because of such discrepancies irregularities had occured.
"The correct position is that there is only one set of figures to be considered, and only one process to be examined -- these are the figures counted at each polling station and authenticated by presiding officers and party agents under the watchful eyes of monitors and observers.
"These figures (which are the official figures) were transmitted to constituency centres where they were collated by constituency election officers, again in the presence of party agents, monitors and observers.
"Once that process was completed and authenticated, the figures would then be transmitted to the national results centre for announcement by the chief election officer, constituency by constituency.
"These are the official figures by which the results of the election were determined. There are no other figures that come to play. Therefore, the question of inconsistencies does not arise. That, in a nutshell, is the position of the commission. This position is vindicated by the constituency results that we made public at the time," said Justice Chiweshe.
Meanwhile, a week after the election ended, Chiweshe said his commission had not yet received a single complaint from any contesting candidate. In a jibe aimed at the MDC, Chiweshe said his commission would not act on "complaints raised through the media".
Chiweshe's announcement came hours after an MDC official told New Zimbabwe.com: "We are clutching at straws."
The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)'s spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi had released widely-publicised details of discrepancies between the number of people said to have voted in each constituency by election officials, and the final voting figures for each candidate.
In over 30 constituencies, the MDC said deficits between the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission’s official pronouncement on the number of votes cast and the final total directly accounted for the Zanu PF 'victories'.
But a senior MDC official told this website that the party's polling agents had checked their figures, against the results announced by the ZEC, and the numbers TALLIED."
Full Article....
www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/electoral108.12491.html
Also Read:
http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com
"It is not true that the Mugabe government "essentially runs all media outlets in Zimbabwe." True, the sole television station is state-owned, although private stations from neighboring South Africa can be seen. There are privately-owned radio stations, and privately-owned newspapers outnumber state-owned. With the exception of the Daily Mirror, all of these newspapers are rabidly anti-government and the level of vituperation heaped upon the government in these papers rivals that of privately-owned media in Venezuela.
Election officers were not appointed by the Mugabe government. The five members of the commission were appointed by Parliament, with input from both ZANU-PF and the MDC. President Mugabe was responsible for choosing only the president of the commission.
Zimbabwe fully implemented the SADC electoral standards, and was among the first nations of the region to put these into effect. The new electoral laws were worked out in Parliament, including the adoption of several amendments submitted by the opposition MDC, such as the use of indelible ink.
Ten percent of voters were turned away because they either had failed to bring proper identification or they had reported to the wrong district (presumably many of them later in the day ended up at the proper voting place). Observer teams noted that this problem was due to insufficient efforts at voter education and that it affected both parties equally.
It is not true that Mugabe’s supporters killed hundreds of opponents in the 2002 election. In all, a total of 58 people were killed, and this included both ZANU-PF supporters killing MDC and MDC-supporters killing ZANU-PF. Too many, to be sure, but considerable progress was made at subduing the hotheads on both sides, and by all accounts the election went off peacefully."
Full article...
and,
One Zimbabwe or Another: An Interview with Greg Elich
www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/2005/1504.html
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One Zimbabwe or Another
Posted: Friday, April 15, 2005
An Interview with Greg Elich
By Mickey Z
Is it me or is there a suspicious number of democratic (sic) revolutions (sic) going on these days? And they come in more colors than the Department of Homeland Security terror code. With Zimbabwe being one the nations suddenly on America's democratic (sic) hit list, my go-to guy is Greg Elich, author of the forthcoming book, "Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit." I asked him (and Jack Straw) for a little context on the recent elections.
Q. Indulge, if you will, in a little roleplay. You're British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and you've condemned the Zimbabwe elections as "seriously flawed." How were they flawed?
A. As Jack Straw, I'd feel that the clearest indication that the recent elections in Zimbabwe were flawed is the fact that the party I backed, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) fared quite badly. The MDC won a mere 41 seats in parliament, as compared to the ruling ZANU-PF's 78. Worse yet, this outcome was a marked drop off from the 57 seats the MDC won in the previous parliamentary election in 2000. The signs of decline were there all along, with the MDC losing a majority of by elections in recent years, and polls taken just before the recent election all showed a significant drop in support for the party. Over the past few years, the British and American governments have pumped millions of dollars into the coffers of the MDC and various NGOs operating on behalf of the MDC and Western governments to bring about "regime change." As Jack Straw, I expect a return on my investment, and the MDC failed to deliver. It couldn't even pull off a post-election coup against the government.
Q. What does Jack Straw do now that his team has lost?
A. Now, as Foreign Minister, I can't be too obvious about what it is that I find so disturbing about the election. So I announce that the election did not reflect the will of the people of Zimbabwe when in fact what I really worry about is that the election did not reflect my will. Any election that the party I back loses is by definition flawed. Yet, as Jack Straw, I still harbor hopes that British, U.S. and European Union sanctions and destabilization campaigns will ultimately bring down the government and I warn that the government of Zimbabwe is "fragile" and "will collapse sooner rather than later." That's the British government's stance, and indeed, that of the Bush Administration's as well. Western media have spared no efforts in imparting that viewpoint to their populations, and it is rather remarkable how completely their assertions have gone unexamined. They have their interests. The real question for the rest of us should be how believable and accurate is the information we're being fed? There's plenty of room for skepticism.
Q. Speaking as Greg, what's *your* take on the recent elections?
A. The March 31 Parliamentary election was the first in Zimbabwe since implementation of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) election guidelines, which were designed to ensure a fair and transparent election process. Zimbabwe, in fact, is the first nation in the region to modify its legal structure to accommodate the guidelines. Among the provisions adopted was creation of an electoral commission responsible for management of the process, with five members appointed by both parties in Parliament, and its head appointed by the President. All votes were to be counted at polling stations in the presence of agents from both parties and translucent ballot boxes would be utilized. Air time on state television and radio would be given to the opposition party during the election campaign, and the government of Zimbabwe allocated funds to both parties based on the percentage of seats won in the previous parliamentary election. In line with that policy, the government provided $559,000 to the ruling ZANU-PF and $516,00 to the opposition MDC to fund election publicity campaigns. During parliamentary debate on the new electoral laws, several amendments proposed by the MDC were adopted, including the use of indelible ink and extension of voting hours. The government of Zimbabwe had in fact successfully implemented regional election standards well before the election.
Q. Did the Western powers follow a familiar formula in their response to the election results?
A. It is not by chance that the U.S. and British governments started crying "fraud" weeks before the election even took place. All polls showed the MDC would lose the popular vote. The strongly implied message from Anglo-American leaders was that the only fair outcome would be a win by the opposition, planting the seed of doubt in the minds of the public and in effect, preparing the ground for rejection of the election results. The election went as expected, with the ruling party winning 59 percent of the vote, matching very closely what the polls had indicated. Predictably, after the election, accusations of fraud by the MDC and the Bush and Blair Administrations' grew louder and more persistent. International observers on the ground came to a different conclusion. The SADC mission said that in its view "the elections were conducted in an open, transparent and professional manner," and voters "were able to express their franchise peacefully, freely and unhindered." The mission noted that the MDC had approached them with a series of complaints. "In a number of situations, they did not bring evidence to back their complaints. In general we have come to the conclusion that that the election does reflect the will of the people of Zimbabwe. We operate on facts." In regard to claims of fraud, the mission noted, "Up to now it has not been backed up."
Q. What about non-Western nations? What about the rest of Africa?
A. Both the South African and the African Union missions concluded that the election reflected the will of the people. The MDC had complained to the South Africans that food distribution was being used as a political tool. The South African mission investigated specific complaints by the MDC but in the end said it "was unable to verify the truthfulness of the same, where follow-ups were made." The Zimbabwe Council of Churches, which deployed 856 observers, felt that "the elections are an expression of the people's wishes and our conclusion is that they were free and fair." This wasn't the story we were being told by Western media, which instead focused on the MDC's persistent allegations. Changing vote totals proved fraud, the party asserted. In almost all polling stations, the MDC claimed, final totals had gone up, surely the result of tampering with the vote. The main problem, however, appeared to be the fact that the number of voters given as the election was in process reflected the situation at the moment, and therefore, the final totals would be inevitably be higher. In two constituencies the MDC maintained that totals went down, but offered no evidence to back the claim.
In the U.S. and Great Britain, the claims were accepted without examination, and it was widely assumed that the mere assertion of fraud had proven the case. However, the MDC had four monitors assigned to each polling station who were fully involved in the vote-counting process. Due to the implementation of SADC guidelines, each step of the process was audited and a paper trail recorded, and all votes were counted in the presence of observers from both parties. At the end of the process at each polling station, party agents endorsed the final count. Only then could the final result be sent to the registrar. According to the anti-government New Zimbabwe, "a senior MDC official told this website that the party's polling agents had checked their figures against the results announced by the ZEC, and the numbers tallied." The MDC official persisted in believing there must have been some sort of fraud, despite a lack of evidence. "We are clutching at straws, to be honest," he admitted. Under the circumstances, though, fraud seemed impossible. According to SADC observer mission head Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, "The vote-counting process was conducted meticulously and lawfully. It is worth noting that all stakeholders from party agents, monitors, presiding officers and local observers performed their duty as expected and no one could leave the room before the counting was finished."
Q. Let me ask for a clarification: Are you saying the election was problem-free?
A. No. It was evident that insufficient attention was paid to voter education, leading to a high number of voters being turned away either due to lack of proper identification or for reporting to the wrong voting station. Presumably, some voters were able to rectify their mistakes in time to vote. But even here, the scale of the problem was greatly exaggerated in the Western press where figures like 10 percent or even 25 percent were being bandied about. In fact, the number of voters involved was 4.9 percent. International observers pointed out that the problem affected supporters of both parties equally, and did not influence the outcome. Overall, the election was a success in terms of implementation of SADC election guidelines, ensuring a smooth and transparent process. U.S. and British leaders could only regard the election as a complete failure, however, except in terms of a successful propaganda campaign to discredit the results.
Reprinted from counterpunch.org with permission from Mickey Z.
Also Read:
Zimbabwe election officials reject poll fraud
www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/electoral108.12491.html
Greg Elich responds to an article in the Saturday,
April 09, 2005, Press Action, 'Zimbabwe's Very American Election',
by Gene C. Gerard cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/
Zimbabwe criticism unfair
www.africaspeaks.com/articles/2005/1304.html
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