Current goverment led by Robert Mugabwe. Ministries

The opposistion MDC (Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tasvangirari http://www.mdc.co.zw/downloads/MANIFESTO%202008.pdf

And

Simba Makoni http://www.mdc.co.zw/downloads/MANIFESTO%202008.pdf

Zimbabwe after the elections
Zimbabwe Watch (2008-03-27)

In collaboration with both its European andZimbabwean partners, Zimbabwe Watch organised a roundtable titled“Elections and Post-Elections period in Zimbabwe: What to do after 29 March2008 - Views from Civil Society and Dialogue with the European Union” on 13 March 2008 in Brussels. The roundtable brought together civil society activists from Zimbabwe, officials of the European Union (EU) institutions and variousEuropean and international interest groups. These are the recommendations from the round-table.

1. The conditions for the elections are such that they will not be free nor fair and therefore cannot be called a legitimate expression of the will of the people. The African Union (AU) and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) should be encouraged to make objective assessments of the conditions and the process based on the SADC Guidelines on Free and Fair Elections. The European Union (EU) should welcome such assessments that recognise the unfree and unfair environment. If the AU and SADC fail to recognise this, the EU needs to voice a very clear position on the the unfree and unfair nature of the elections and condemn these partial assessment. The international community must exert pressure on the Zimbabwean government to restore the rule of law.

2. The delegation of the European Commission in Harare will produce a report on the election process and outcomes. The EU Commission needs to consult relevant Zimbabwean and European civil society organisations and include their inputs in this report as well as in the EU’s common position on the elections. This report and the EU conclusions will should refer explicitly to the SADC Guidelines for free and fair elections and look at the longer term election environment which can already be considered as not conducive for free and fair elections.

3. After the elections, a new fully inclusive AU led mediation process that leads to a transitional process need to take place. This mediation must include not only the political parties but also Zimbabwean Civil Society and take place in an open, transparent and accountable process. Such a process should be actively supported by the EU.

4. SADC proposed and started discussing an economic recovery plan for Zimbabwe in 2007 but they will need the support of the international community to implement this plan. The EU should work together with SADC (and with the broader international community) through its regional assistance programme on a broad economic, political and social recovery plan. This process must be strongly inclusive of Zimbabwean Civil Society (including Trade Union). Any recovery plan must reflect the demands and needs of Zimbabwean Civil Society while having good governance and human rights as key concepts.

5. For such a recovery plan to be devised initial audits of all the relevant sectors (such as education, health, land, etc – not only the economy) needs to be undertaken. For example proper accounting of the education sector is required and support to local research institutions and universities is needed. In addition a comprehensive census, including of Zimbabweans outside the country, is needed for planning the recovery. Such a recovery plan needs sustainable planning and clear commitments from the EU for at least the next ten years.

6. The new Africa strategy emphasises common principles on human rights and governance, the role of civil society and regional approaches – the EU should together with SADC develop regional programs on governance, human rights and crisis prevention in which Zimbabwe can be addressed. Europe must develop and maintain a consistent position on Zimbabwe which also responds to the needs and demands of the Zimbabwean Civil Society. The EU must look at all the policy and financial instruments it has at its disposal (such as the Cotonou agreement, the EU-Africa strategy, human rights, peace and security and crisis prevention instruments) to engage SADC and AU partners on Zimbabwe in a principled manner. It must consider Zimbabwe as a military crisis and bring SADC and the AU to look at it in this way e.g. by having SADC excluding Zimbabwe from joint military operations. The EU must investigate if they support regional military training which includes Zimbabwe and pressure for their exclusion from such programs.

7. The European Commission has produced a draft Country Strategy Paper (CSP) in negotiation with the current Zimbabwean government for the spending of the 10th EDF. It plans to adopt it as soon as the political situation allows it. This is not the way to go. The EU has stopped bilateral aid because the current government is not following good governance rules and is not accountable. The EU therefore needs to re-open the negotiation of the CSP with an eventual new (transitional) government and negotiate the key sectors with them and Non-State actors in a very inclusive, transparent and accountable manner. This must apply for any assistance to any new (transitional) government.

8. The influence of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) should be fostered in Zimbabwe, so that labour standards are observed and upheld and serious abuses stopped. Zimbabwe should be answerable to the ILO.

9. The International community should now start to plan for and deploy assistance programmes for the coming transition phase including recovery policy development plans by Zimbabwean Civil Society. Planning the transition is campaigning for it! In the event of significant power shifts leading to a transitional government and policy changes, swift support for the reconstruction of institutions, especially the justice, police, banking and education sector must be available.

10. Continued support to civil society organisations as providers of checks and balances for the human rights situation is needed. Protection of human rights defenders (HRDs), especially in the case of escalating post-election violence and security/military clampdowns needs to be prioritised and the EU and member states must find urgent ways to provide necessary support. Adequate actions need to be devised in accordance with the demands from HRD’s themselves, the EU Guidelines on Human Rights Defenders and the Handbook linked to them provide examples of such actions including observation of demonstrations and trials, visits in prison or hospital, staying in touch with the HRD’s and providing safe houses.

11. The EU must support the strengthening of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council and making the AU Peace and Security instruments more effective and operational, using Zimbabwe as a test case. The full implementation of the African Charter of Peoples and Human Rights, which Zimbabwe signed, must be demanded. In view of the military nature of Mugabe’s regime, no Zimbabwean participation in international peace and military interventions, in the context of the UN or the African Union, must be allowed.

12. Silence of the United Nations Human Rights Council to post-election violence would not be acceptable; it must then come up with a clear resolution. The Mugabe government must be pressurised particularly by African countries to extend an open invitation to all UN human rights special rapporteurs (such as the one on torture) to the country. The EU must work with African partners to ensure such steps. The EU must also continue the monitoring of the human rights violations on the ground and engage the AU and African countries to implement the resolutions coming out of the Afican Commission on Human and People’s Rights condemning the human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. Finally, in the event of escalating post-election violence, Zimbabwe needs to be referred to the UN Security Council.

Pambazuka News

Sentamu’s latest “performance” – whipping off his clerical collar (the adoring British media described it as a “dog chain”) and cutting it into pieces live on BBC TV, and vowing never to wear another one until President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was out of power, would go down as one of the saddest days in African history. A day an African of Sentamu’s standing allowed himself to be used as a diversion from a crucial EU-Africa Summit in Portugal where the continent, for once, stood as one and refused to bend the knee to European chicanery.

And Liz Hunt of The Daily Telegraph wants us to believe that Sentamu “started to cut the collar into pieces with a pair of scissors that just happened to be handy”. Come on, since when did pairs of scissors “just happen to be handy” in BBC TV studios? I have been to a few BBC studios over the last 20 years, and pairs of scissors don’t just happen to be handy there. You plan to make it handy. Either Sentamu asked for it before the programme started or he brought it from home. In which case a security issue arises – how did he get the pair of scissors through the stiff security at the BBC without being detected? – unless, as Liz Hunt reports, “some have dismissed it as an organised stunt”. Which, sadly, paints Sentamu in his true colours!

The other day when Sentamu made similar remarks about Zimbabwe in front of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he was said to have just “dropped by” No.10 Downing Street - on a Sunday. But only the downright gullible will believe that the whole event was not choreographed to appear (as one Son of the African Soil put it), “as a chance drop-by of a holy man on the home of one of his flock. Come on, let us be serious! You don’t just drop by No.10 as if you are alighting from a train at Victoria Station. I know the rigmarole of minding schedules of leaders.” Sentamu even went on TV thereafter to reinforce his message. And in the UK, you don’t just pick up a phone and tell a TV station that “my name is Sentamu, I want to come on your programme today. Expect me at 11 o’clock”. It doesn’t just happen like that. But … well … let’s leave Sentamu aside for a while and tackle other matters. We will come back to him in a jiffy.

Our friend at the Commonwealth Secretariat, Brother Don McKinnon, has finally called it a day and decamped to his farm down under in New Zealand. Last year, when New African reported that his tenure as Commonwealth secretary general had engendered – in the words of seven Commonwealth staff members who came before an official Investigation Panel set up by McKinnon himself – “a climate of fear” at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, his PR Office, again headed by an African (another Ugandan!) tried to rubbish our story and the magazine itself.

And so it happened, thank God, that just before McKinnon’s second term as secretary general ended in November,
Prof Victor Ayeni, the Nigerian senior staff member at the centre of last year’s Commonwealth story, who contended that he had been subjected to discriminatory treatment on the grounds of his race and nationality, won his appeal before the Arbitral Tribunal of the Commonwealth Secretariat against McKinnon’s “unlawful” refusal to renew his contract. The
Tribunal’s judgement, given in October, could not have been a stronger rebuke of the abuse of power at the Commonwealth HQ.

“The discretion of an administrative authority is not absolute,” the Tribunal said in its 26-page judgement. “… While it cannot be disputed that the secretary general, as head of the Commonwealth Secretariat, is entrusted with the overall responsibility for the employment of staff and in the discharge of other responsibilities, he has to discharge those responsibilities within the fundamental parameters which the Agreed Memorandum together with the Staff Regulations and Staff Rules as laid down in the HR Handbook have prescribed… We are satisfied on the evidence before us that the discretion was not properly exercised… Consequently, we must find that the refusal to renew [Ayeni’s] contract was unlawful and that decision is set aside.”

I don’t normally have a drink (my favourite drink is water, because of its medicinal purposes, and water has been kind to me, and will be kind to you if you drink more of it), but on the day I received a copy of the Tribunal’s judgement, I allowed myself a celebratory drink. For it was not only Ayeni’s victory, it was New African’s as well. Truth and propriety had triumphed.

Which gave the hitherto intimidated Commonwealth Senior Staff Association (CSSA) to editorialise in its newsletter thus: “The judgement sends a strong message to [the Commonwealth] management – present and future – that they are accountable for their actions which are subject to challenge and an independent review…”

In the “Have Your Say” column of the CSSA Newsletter, one senior staff member calling himself “Verum-i-et Aequitas” added for good measure: “The [Tribunal’s] decision has brought us closer to the end of this rather unsavoury episode in the life of the Commonwealth Secretariat. Staff looked on in silent horror as the Ayeni saga unfolded. In the minds of many of us, while Prof Ayeni’s electronic missives to all staff might have been ill-conceived, we never had any doubt that he was the victim of some injustice, and possibly, even discrimination… Now that [the Tribunal] has given its judgement in the matter, we hope that senior management will at least learn one important lesson: This is the 21st century and it is no longer tenable for managers to operate arbitrarily as has clearly been done in this case – and in many other cases that I can readily call to mind. Indeed, the proclivity for arbitrariness has been a characteristic of management decision-making at the Secretariat in recent years.”

And the Commonwealth goes around the world teaching governments, African governments, the ethics of good governance, rule of law, and arbitrariness. Healer, heal thyself! We pray that the new man at the helm at the Commonwealth, Kamalesh Sharma, will take due advice from the Tribunal’s judgement and improve conditions at the Commonwealth HQ.

Now, let’s return to the other Ugandan at Yorkminster and his “dog chain”. Now tell me, who wears a “dog chain” with his eyes open? Yet this “world-class showman” from the rolling hills of Uganda, says “as an Anglican, this is what I wear to identify myself, that I am a clergyman”. Well, from the way things are progressing in Zimbabwe, between the opposition MDC and Zanu PF, this Anglican may end up standing in the pulpit wearing absolutely nothing. And what a great sight that would be! Yes, Bishop Sentamu has the right to cut his “dog chain” (and even his cassock) into pieces live on TV, but his take on Zimbabwe, and recent utterances on black and African issues, have been wrong – dead wrong, precisely because he has refused to acquaint himself with the full information available on the ground. For example, he blames President Mugabe alone for the economic difficulties in Zimbabwe. Imagine this, Bishop Sentamu: Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary (now deceased), tells a Zimbabwean cabinet minister in early 2001: “You must get rid of Robert [Mugabe]. If you don’t, the economic hardships that will descend on you will make your people stone you in the streets.” Cook had accosted the Zimbabwean in the corridors of one of those international conferences where Zimbabwe is always a feature. The Zimbabwean was shocked! “What did you just say, Robin,” he inquired after composing himself. Cook repeated his demand. “You must get rid of Robert or the economic hardships that will descend on your country will make your people stone you in the streets.”

Zimbabweans are a tenacious people. “You want us to get rid of Robert,” the minister asked, still incredulous. “For the same reasons that you want him out, we want him in,” he told Cook matter-of-factly. “Well,” Cook said, shrugging his shoulders, “it’s your choice; but don’t say I didn’t warn you – your people are going to stone you in the streets.”
A few months later, Robin Cook left the Foreign Office, and another British foreign secretary told the same Zimbabwean cabinet minister: “I never knew that there is such hostility against Zimbabwe at the Foreign Office. But I am not going to jeopardise my political career fighting your cause.”

So, Bishop Sentamu, even British foreign secretaries know that Zimbabwe has a “cause” to fight for. And since Robin Cook was not a prophet, you may want to know how he knew about the “economic hardships” then in the offing that would make Zimbabweans stone their leaders in the streets? I say he knew because he was privy to what the British and their allies were planning to make Zimbabwe suffer.


IC Publications | Opinions

So who's gonna win?

Western Media Hijack Zimbabwe Vote
By Omowale Clay
March 31st, 2008
[Zimbabwe: Election Update]

The eight year Western-led campaign to overthrow the leadership of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF Party is quickly escalating.

Western media, in particular CNN and the BBC, are banned from reporting in Zimbabwe, but have nevertheless acted as conduits for disinformation reports circulated by Western intelligence sources--CIA, MI5-- on the inability to hold a free and fair election in Zimbabwe. Before the voting for President took place on March 29th, the Western press had reported that the only way President Mugabe and ZANU-PF would win was by “electoral violence” or “rigging the voting.”

This “vote rigging” accusation was a pre-emptive strike against the anticipated victory of President Mugabe and ZANU-PF. It was intended to create the false perception in the minds of the western public that ZANU-PF lacks popular support from the masses of the Zimbabwean people and that any victory could only come from cheating.
The December 12th Movement delegation is in Zimbabwe as one of a large contingent of international observers to the voting. We went to several sites and spoke with polling officials as well as agents from all of the parties running for office. All found the election peaceful with no problems in people being able to cast their votes freely.

By the close of voting yesterday, the West, realizing that it could not play the “electoral violence” card, immediately moved to its next tactic, “vote rigging.” Prior to the March 29th voting, all parties agreed that there should be no premature claims of victory until all the votes were counted. Nevertheless, the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC declared victory only a few minutes after the polls closed when it was both physically and factually impossible to have actually known the results. By doing so the MDC laid another brick in the false “pre-emptive strike accusations.”

The logic being that when all the votes did finally come in, if MDC lost, it could only happen because the votes had been rigged. Be clear, the United States and Britain’s real contradiction with President Mugabe and ZANU-PF has everything to do with African people reclaiming their stolen land and nothing to do with a concern for democracy.

They have unsuccessfully tried to overthrow President Mugabe and ZANU-PF, through vicious economic sanctions, like the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2002, media demonization and the establishment and funding of opposition parties like the MDC.

The West believes that by “making the economy scream” they can create enough popular discontent in Zimbabwe to remove President Mugabe and ZANU-PF. This election was their last best shot.
We urge those in the West to critically analyze Western media reports and to not believe the “vote rigging” hype.

Clay is a member of December 12th Movement International Secretariat, which has sent an Official International Observer Team currently in Zimbabwe

West sworn to deposing Zim Govt

By Netfa Freeman

AFRICAN people let’s wake up! Just as they did three years ago detractors of Zimbabwe’s governing party Zanu-PF and President Robert Mugabe are already forecasting that the election in Zimbabwe is rigged.........

One Mary Ndlovu, a Zimbabwean "human rights" activist has been feverishly providing anti-Mugabe articles and analyses to set the stage for whatever happens. In one published by Pambazuka News she supports her prediction with a diatribe of misinformation and over simplifications asserting, "there is no minutest possibility of a "free and fair" election. Those observers from Sadc who boast that it can still be so are only destroying their own credibility."

Logic dictates that such thinking by an African places their faith in and aligns them more with the neo-colonisers, the United States and European Union, led by Britain than with Africa embodied in this case by entities like Southern Africa Development Community, and the African Union mission.........

Never mind their rabid contempt for Mugabe mirrors in words and deeds that of officials from the US State Department or the British government. One will never hear them address the point of former Assistant Secretary of State on African Affairs, Chester Crocker when he said in a testimony to the US Senate. "To separate the Zimbabwean people from Zanu-PF we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you senators have the stomach for what you have to do." (Democracy Now!, April 1st, 2005).

This not only proved that the sinister intent of US imperialism has been to destabilise Zimbabwe, it also indicates that they believe the government of Zanu-PF is a popular one. Elections in spring 2005 had also reflected the will of the Zimbabwean people and those results were confirmed so by observers from the Sadc, the AU, and others like the US-based December 12th Movement who were not afraid to speak truth to power.

It should be pointed out that although the MDC had lodged unsubstantiated claims of fraud back then, their ballot counters signed off on the results from each polling station. They later admitted publicly that elections were not rigged.

"In first signs of yet another possible split within the opposition party, (Isaac) Matongo (3rd highest ranking MDC leader) publicly acknowledged that the MDC had no grassroots support and that was the major reason the opposition party was losing elections." (Daily Mirror, February 5th, 2006)

So why are Zanu-PF and President Mugabe detractors so insistent in repeating over and again the lie that Zimbabwe elections are fraudulent? .........the arrogant and shameless measures of imperialism to affect the outcome in Zimbabwe this Saturday should not be underestimated. They’ve wanted Mugabe out at least for the last ten years. Those who think that the British and US governments confine their contempt for an independent country and its leaders to public denunciations and lip service are wallowing in the height of folly.

If this were the case they would have simply needed only to talk negatively about Saddam Hussein and not invade Iraq, or orchestrate a coup against Kwame Nkrumah, or assassinate Patrice Lumumba, or bomb Libya. Some Western media pundits have been dangerously forecasting for the last month or so that Zimbabwe elections hold in store the same intense and fatal violence we saw in Kenya.

Even though Pan-African Parliament’s observer mission, now on the ground in Zimbabwe, has said that the current environment in the country is conducive to free and fair elections.

"After what Africa witnessed in Kenya, we are encouraged by the pre-poll situation in Zimbabwe. . . The mood is good and it brings hope to the continent that we are moving in the right direction" (BuaNews, March 25, 2008) Those making such comparisons between Zimbabwe and Kenya are playing on the already tarnished image of democracy in Africa and want to prevent the public from asking the hard questions and doing thorough investigations when all is said and done.

Some were surprised when, on April 5th 2007 the US State Department admitted to sponsoring opposition in Zimbabwe but allowances for this policy had already been written into the text of the US’ hypocritical Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2000, aka ZIDERA.

This is why when the imperialist beholden "civil society activists" speak or write about the leading figures opposing President Mugabe these figures seem almost surreal. They speak of Morgan Tsvangirai and his faction of the MDC as if he is not the same person who plotted an assassination of Zimbabwe’s president as a prelude to a coup; as if it is not unusual for Tsvangirai to be flanked by young thugs from urban areas who just over a year ago went on a terrorising spree around the country fire bombing buses, kombis, police dormitories, and attacking citizens and police in the streets.

All of that was part of imperialism’s modus operandi to make Zimbabwe ungovernable. One won’t hear the "civil society activist" mention these things.

Likewise when this imperialist beholden "civil society" speak or write about Robert Mugabe, one might never understand from them that he was against the Lancaster House Agreement that tied the hands of the Zanu-PF Government from reclaiming land from white settlers; that the 1989 conditions and constraints that led to Zimbabwe’s acceptance of loans and the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund were largely due to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and felt by all countries trying to pursue an independent path. You will never hear from them that Mugabe spearheaded the abolishment of said Economic Structural Adjustment Programme, something done nowhere else in Africa.

One would think a land reform programme like none seen since the days of Sekou Ture in Guinea or Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, was not under the leadership of President Mugabe; or that there is nothing positive in the new law he signed that mandates majority ownership of all businesses to "indigenous" Zimbabweans.

Such a listing of facts by an African (person of African descent) is often belittled as a one-sided and romantic worship of an old liberation fighter, turned tyrant. However, when these things are completely omitted, then a bias befitting of a racist Western perspective is the result.

No one thinks criticism should not be placed where criticism is due. However, the usual suspect detractors more often list the symptoms of economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the US, EU and Britain making no attribution to the sanctions.

They keep peddling the lie that the sanctions are "smart" sanctions, targeting only certain Zimbabwe officials. Could they be totally ignorant to what Brandon Stone has been able to assess in his well-documented paper, An Investigation of Zimbabwe’s Different Path? Stone reveals "the results of the sanctions were severe, as foreign trade plummeted towards near zero, and foreign direct investment in Zimbabwe plunged by over 99 percent."

Inflation soared, and the lack of foreign exchange devastated Zimbabwe’s manufacturing sector, causing unemployment to rise to over 70 percent. These factors — the external campaign by great powers to cripple Zimbabwe’s economy — are rarely discussed by Western academics or journalists, who instead portray the crisis in Zimbabwe solely as the result of the land reform, or President Mugabe’s mismanagement."

The intensely biased propaganda campaign has been no less damaging. One example can be seen when comparing Guinea and Zimbabwe which both have a head of state who has been in power since early-mid 80’s; Lansana Conte in Guinea and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Conte, however, became leader through a military coup following the death of the democratically elected Pan-Africanist President Sekou Ture.

President Mugabe on the other hand was democratically elected after earning his place as a freedom fighter in the struggle against British settler colonialism. But only President Mugabe receives a heavy degree of patented denunciations for being "in power too long". .........

The intended affect of "making the economy scream" as Crocker put it has transpired. Whether or not sisters and brothers in Zimbabwe react the way imperialism wants remains to be seen.

As African people we should hope not. At this juncture the question should not be whether or not President Mugabe stays in office but whether or not an imperialist beholden opposition could ever bring resolution to Zimbabwe’s problems.

The answer should be obvious. And if the people do hold strong and see through the designs and machination of imperialism by once again voting in President Mugabe, we must still be wary of how imperialism and its agents will react.

And we must understand that as goes Zimbabwe, so goes Africa and her Diaspora. Only fools sleep in a burning house and only bigger fools watch while arsonist burn.
Netfa Freeman is currently the director of the Social Action & Leadership School for Activists at the Institute for Policy Studies.

l Freeman is a longtime activist in the Pan-African and international human rights movements and is also a co-producer/co-host for Voices With Vision, WPFW 89.3 FM, Washington DC. He can be reached at netfa@hotsalsa.org. This article was first published by Trinicenter.com

I wish the Western Media would just quiet themselves, they're an insult with their false pretences, like they really have Zimbaweans interests at the forefront of their concerns. Its so obvious they're still pissed that Magubee outed all their white farmers and humiliated their race the same way they have dealt with us for generations.

The question id like to know is does Mugabee truely have our interests deep in his heart or is he just a crazed dictataor with a blinding ego? Surely if its the former hed see that his supposed vision for Zimbabwe would best be served as a two tier-system, involving another leader using his foundation that he obviously cannont build upon.

I like Mugabes stance shame he couldn't get the whole country behind him like say Castro unfortunately his intent is to support those that are part of his political party leaving the rest to whallow in misery...