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(NEWZIMBABWE BLOG) Making a constitution no one wants

Making a constitution no one wants
Posted By Joram Nyathi on 19 Aug, 2010 at 11:51 am

THE United States ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, appears to me to be a decent man despite his recent theatrics on behalf of The System at the burial of Sabina Mugabe at the Heroes’ Acre. If, on the other hand, it is all acting, then he deserves a chance on the theatre stage. I will explain why later.

Since the constitution outreach programme started nearly two months ago, the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (JOMIC) has attended a number of the meetings. We witnessed the chaos of the first week in Manicaland and Mashonaland Central and people’s frustration with the Constitution Parliamentary Select Committee (COPAC)’s delays.

We didn’t witness any of the violence or intimidation we read about in the media. We have received reports of violence and intimidation, but these are sporadic rather than systematic and JOMIC has been dealing with such reports since early 2009 before COPAC constituted.

People were free to air “their views”. The reservation was whether these would be reflected in the new constitution. In Manicaland, we visited five centres in the first week. We had pretty much the same experience in Matabeleland South. We had similar reports from other provinces, especially Masvingo where women often far outnumbered men. It wasn’t too hard to tell which “party” was talking.

We have our limitations. We are able to send only two two-member teams per district at a time to observe COPAC’S scheduled meetings. I travel with one political liaison officer. Where I am unable to go out, the three liaison officers from Zanu PF, MDC-T and MDC travel together, and none of them would want to prejudice his party. On average, they stay out for three nights to attend a random sample of meetings per province. We are still attending some more meetings.

Still, there are problems. In the constitutional debacle, unlike the Marange diamonds where we had foreigners pleading our cause and innocence while some among us fought gallantly to paint the gemstones redder than the Red Sea in defence of sanctions, we only have ourselves to blame. Despite its numerous demoralising logistical problems, it is not COPAC’S problem.

For all his wilful waywardness, Lovemore Madhuku has no clout to be the “evil men” in the constitution-making process. He is correct that Zimbabweans are not making a national constitution. It is mainly Zanu PF and MDC-T who are engaged in a contest of wits. Given a chance, they would emerge with two constitutions from the same meeting.

In a bid to please a mischievous but vociferous crowd driven by illusion that the biggest problem and hence the solution to all our problems is the constitution, Zimbabweans were stampeded into putting the proverbial cart before the horse. Meeting the Global Political Agreement (GPA) timeframe on the new constitution soon became a national pandemic.

During JOMIC’s historic interparty workshops, I indicated that Zimbabwe was still too polarised to craft an enduring constitution. We needed national healing first. Traditional leaders know this reality. I understand Party activists too are aware of this but are unemployed, and many crave some bit of action. Civic society wants the dollars.

Politicians are playing along and ordinary Zimbabweans are caught between the hammer and the anvil: mention of an election evokes images of 2008, yet political stability has not yielded the much talked-about Mighty Dollar. And they don’t know what a constitution is beyond the propaganda from their parties. Thus the Presidency is not an office but Robert Mugabe, and Prime Minister means Morgan Tsvangirai.

The parties to the GPA went out divided. When you ask people what they want in a preamble to a constitution in a remote bush in Bosha/Marange, and an elderly woman stands up to denounce gay marriages and a school drop-out demands dual citizenship, you don’t ask which political parties have been prowling this wood.

Worse still, some COPAC team leaders could not explain what a “preamble” was. Translation into vernacular drew blank faces. At one meeting in Umzingwane District, Matabeleland South, from a crowd of about 120, only two men seemed to have a clue of what was going on. At the close of the meeting, an elderly man stood up and wagged his index finger at the COPAC team sitting up front: “When this thing turns sour, don’t tell us we gave it to you,” he warned grimly.

At a meeting in Insiza District, also Matabeleland South, the COPAC leaders couldn’t explain what a devolved state was. Proportional representation, said a COPAC team leader, meant that people voted only for a party and the president selected MPs for them. A federal system of government was equated to the defunct Federation of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland! It is a scandal that a nation can allow itself to be led on wild goose chase for a “people-driven” constitution.

Which can lead to only one outcome: a constitution no-one wants, whether it passes or fails the referendum. Not Zimbabweans; not Tsvangirai, not Mugabe. It’s Morton’s fork. We adopt it or revert to the devil we know from Lancaster. Which is back to 2000 when the “no” victory left everybody else a loser except President Mugabe.

We visited a business centre near Esigodini in Matabeleland South where we were warmly welcomed by Eddie Cross as one of the team leaders. They had a clever set up upfront where the “talking points” were raised in a rotation. A blind man on a wheelchair reading Braille asked the question on the disabled. There was an outpouring of compassion.

When it came to war veterans, a number of positive proposals were made. Then a grey-haired man in his seventies stood up to make a point. “Let’s do away with war veterans,” he said. And sat down. Many Zimbabweans talk disparagingly of “so-called” war veterans. The man was old enough to be my father.

One of my sons is about my age when the liberation war “ended” in 1980. I am trying to explain to him where Zimbabwe came from, what the land reform and indigenisation mean. His mother is trying to teach him to fasten his trousers around the waist, not across the buttocks. The man on the wheelchair at the top table should have been old enough to be a war veteran. I don’t know how he came by his disability. I said to myself: “Has it come to this? What am I supposed to tell my son?”

On the occasion of our Heroes’ commemorations last week, it took Charles Ray in an article in The Standard newspaper to explain what war means, and that we should respect war veterans, regardless of the cause. It was politicians who started war, he said, and it is invariably the youth who give their blood, sweat and tears.

That includes disastrous ventures like the US is facing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could be the liberation war like Zimbabwe’s in which an estimated 50,000 lives were lost. As a show of gratitude, all we can say is: “Let’s do away with war veterans”! To please who? For what?

Unfortunately, given the extent of self-hatred and sponsored anger in Zimbabwe, Ambassador Ray runs the risk of being labelled “too African”. Twice in July, he had to defend Zimbabwe against itself even as her own sons wanted her slaughtered over her diamonds.

First, Ray said coalition governments could be made to work if people focused more on their commonalities and less on the things that divide them. And I always wonder why we should be so divided over control of our land and minerals!

Second, Ambassador Ray was angry at false reports in a local daily that President Barrack Obama, in his “broken heart”, had classified President Mugabe as a financier of terrorism. As the US embassy pointed out, “the ambassador is not amused at all. It seems that in their haste to discredit the President (Mugabe), they failed to interpret something that has been in existence for seven years.”

Ambassador Ray might want to know that some media here worry more about the freedom to earn money by smearing people than they care about truth and the sacredness of facts. How else does one explain the insanity of denying the existence of sanctions which the whole world knows about? How does one justify the fight against Zimbabwe lawfully exporting its diamonds but instead that it should wait for foreign aid contingent upon nebulous benchmarks?

Indeed, without in any way condoning corruption, how does one explain that when Finance Minister Tendai Biti talks of US$30 million missing from the export of diamonds, the media wants to give him a Nobel Prize but there is universal silence when he states that the country’s diamonds, gold and platinum are “benefiting outsiders”, and reveals that: “Last year we only got US$44 million from the mining industry yet they exported over a US$1 billion. This year they have exported about US$650 million worth of minerals but we have only gotten US$15 million?”

And when the same daylight robbers of our finite minerals return with a token US$5 million donation to their own NGO, some lunatics tell us they are the philanthropists who feed Zimbabwe!

What happened to the US$956 million from last year’s exports, plus US$635 million so far this year? Is there any moral or economic justification for this imbalance? Does one have to be Zanu PF to appreciate the need for indigenisation?

Joram Nyathi is JOMIC communications manager and former deputy editor of the Zimbabwe Independent newspaper. He writes in his personal capacity

Labels: CHARLES RAY, CONSTITUTION, COPAC, JOMIC, JORAM NYATHI

posted by MrK @ 5:20 AM