Harare’s iron man

SATimes
14 February 2009

THE OLD GOVERNMENT BROKE IT, THE NEW GOVERNMENT MUST FIX IT: Tendai Biti has his work cut out for him

BITTERSWEET DEAL: As Zimbabwe’s minister of finance, Tendai Biti faces the unenviable task of turning around the most devastated economy in world history.

He became very radical very quickly. He authored a petition against government corruption in his first year at university and spearheaded the first real anti-government student demonstrations’

It was a deep-seated hatred of greed, whether in the form of corruption or capitalist excess, which propelled Biti into politics at university Biti is ‘no diplomat’, said a friend, who added: ‘He’s a radical who always speaks his mind, and who speaks of transforming the state, not reforming it’

Surrounded by enemies in the worst job in the world

A stubborn and principled lawyer made the compromise of his life on Friday when he took the position of minister of finance in the unity government headed by Zimbabwe’s dictatorial president, Robert Mugabe, write Rowan Philp and Njabulo Ncube

They called him “Bismarck” at university. Tendai Biti earned the nickname because, to fellow students, he seemed to be as fearless and stubborn as his idol, Germany’s 19th century “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck.

They got the idea when the young Marxist law student led student demonstrations against corruption in Robert Mugabe’s government in 1987.

And it stuck when Biti, who had no talent as a soccer player, found a way to be part of a team anyway — by founding a club.

At the height of the mediation chaos for a transitional government in Zimbabwe last year, a frustrated Biti — then secretary-general of the MDC — blurted out: “Where is Africa’s Bismarck?”

The remark reflected his disgust at the pettiness of Thabo Mbeki and Mugabe in stalling the negotiations and the clear need to rescue and unite a devastated country, as the German leader had done.

But now, as the new minister of finance charged with turning around the most devastated economy in history, Biti is faced with a task that would surely have horrified the German icon.
The 42-year-old labour lawyer will take charge of an economy with more than 90% unemployment, a farcical currency and an inflation rate of 10 sextillion percent (10 plus 36 zeros), estimated as of Thursday.

Desperately needed foreign aid and investment will likely flow like molasses for the same reason that Biti was the most reluctant new minister to sign up: the unity government is not a reflection of the March 29 elections last year, and still has a tyrant as president.

And if all that is not difficult enough, Biti will have to work with Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono, who he recently described as “the number one economic saboteur, terrorist… the number one enemy of this country.”

This week, Biti told the Sunday Times: “The job is the worst in the world. But I will have to look the job in the eye and have no doubt that I will be equal to the task and prevail.”

Regarding Gono, he would only say: “We will wait and we shall see.” But he added: “We will make sure that the role of the (Reserve Bank) becomes minimal.”

In some ways, Biti is an unlikely choice for minister of finance. The only obvious finance-themed book on his shelves in his office in Harare is a thin volume on quotable quotes by former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Otherwise, it is laden with books such as Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and a biography on US president Barack Obama.

The office is piled high with newspaper cuttings. His most relevant resource for his new job is perhaps a copy of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Biti is a lawyer, not an economist. He is more an academic than an administrator. Most worryingly for critics, he remains a fan of old-fashioned Marxist economic theory.

In an essay on the global economic crisis last year, Biti wrote: “History has had its revenge and the unbridled hegemony of the market has been exposed. Bonapartism, Keynesianism, market regulations and welfarism will from now onwards be critical and essential instruments in the management of any economy.”

But a number of key unity government officials polled this week, including David Coltart of the rival Arthur Mutambara faction, said he was “just the man for the job”. One reason for this, they said, was that Biti is a workaholic. Returning from a diplomatic mission to the US two months ago, he went directly from the airport to the supreme court, where he argued an unremarkable case for a paying client.

This week, he was finally forced to take a “leave of absence” from his law firm, Honey and Blanckenberg, where he has somehow been working full time as a partner and trial attorney throughout the past decade.

And he can take his work home. Biti’s new wife, Charity, lives in Johannesburg, while his teenage son, school rugby star Tawanda, lives in Australia.

Friends suggested his extraordinary workload may have contributed to his divorce from his first wife, urban planning expert Bathsheba Biti. But apart from his untiring work ethic, Biti is considered perfect for one of Zimbabwe’s most demanding jobs because, says Coltart, “he’s seriously smart, and seriously driven”.

Biti grew up in Harare’s working-class suburb of Dzivarasekwa, the eldest son of a taxi owner.
It was a deep-seated hatred of greed, whether in the form of corruption or capitalist excess, which propelled Biti into politics at university.

“He became very radical very quickly. He authored a petition against government corruption in his first year at university and spearheaded the first real anti-government student demonstrations,” said Innocent Chagonda, a fellow university student and one of Biti’s closest friends.

“Arrogance also made him angry. I still remember how he immediately demonstrated outside the US embassy after the bombing of, I think, Libya by the Americans.”

But it was not only his indignation which made him stand out — his intelligence did, too. “He was always in the top five of the class, in any course — a combination of a hard worker and a highly intelligent person,” said Chagonda.

So impressive was Biti that a senior law lecturer wangled him a job at the Blanckenberg firm before he had even completed his degree at the University of Zimbabwe.

Here, he founded the Red Stars football club, even recruiting his constitutional law lecturer to the team, and produced squad shirts emblazoned with anti-colonial rhetoric and the words Aluta continua (the struggle continues).

While other student activist leaders continued in politics, Biti spent most of the ’90s making a name in human rights and labour law. He became his firm’s youngest-ever partner at the age of 26.

In one prominent case, he forced a change in the law by proving that the expulsion of a pregnant student from a teacher’s college was unconstitutional.

He became a focus of Mugabe’s wrath in 1995, when he proved in court that Zanu-PF had rigged a parliamentary election against an MP who had dared to leave the party. The results were nullified and his client, Margaret Dongo, won the rerun.

Convinced that the law could bring change, Biti co-founded the National Constitutional Assembly and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights.

Beatrice Mtetwa, Zimbabwe’s leading human rights lawyer, said: “He has always been very committed to human rights. I believe his strength of character alone is sufficient to qualify him for his new job.”

Although eloquent in court, Biti is “no diplomat”, according to friend and MDC official Nqobizitha Mlilo, who added: “He’s a radical who always speaks his mind, and who speaks of transforming the state, not reforming it.”

Biti became Morgan Tsvangirai’s number two — and Mugabe’s number one target — when his former lecturer, the widely revered Professor Welshman Ncube, led a split from the MDC in 2005.

During his detention in March 2007, Biti was stripped naked, humiliated and beaten. One interrogation session lasted 23 hours.

And, in June last year, yet another detention was accompanied by a charge of treason, leaving Biti with a possible death sentence hanging over his head until a magistrate withdrew the charge last week.

He had earned the old nickname again: pursued and harassed for years, like the giant World War II battleship Bismarck.

One supporter this week expressed concern about the cumulative effect of a decade of harassment on Biti’s physical and mental health. Both this supporter and a critic — neither of whom wished to be named — agreed that Biti’s behaviour had “changed” after the 2007 detention, becoming less tolerant of compromise and quicker to anger in the long negotiations with Zanu-PF.

The critic, a prominent politician who has known Biti since his university years, said: “One minute you think he is such a sweet person, the next minute he is very crude. He is a very temperamental man. So I can’t see how he will have the patience to run the Ministry of Finance, which, unlike law work, needs level heads.

“He wants to have his way, he can’t compromise. You can ask the negotiators and the facilitation team in the Southern African Development Community talks — Tendai was the most difficult person.”

But he made the compromise of his life on Friday when he joined a government headed by Mugabe.

Coltart described Biti as “the brains trust of the MDC”. And he looks the part.

Although he’s often seen in Che Guevara-style berets and Arsenal football club headgear, Biti is famed for his bowler hats — a source of both mockery and affection.

Chagonda recalled how Biti had once refused to remove his bowler hat in a restaurant when asked to do so by a waiter.

But Biti will now be forced to hold that hat out to the West, begging for contributions to an emergency recovery package and promising discipline and democratic practices in return.
With little faith in the free market, he will use intense government intervention as his tool for change, including the regulation, infrastructure investment and stimulus packages he devised for the MDC’s Restart economic recovery policy.

For Biti, it is a case of the government broke it, now the government must fix it.
His success in achieving this will depend on which of Bismarck’s two most famous maxims he can live by in his partnership with the enemy: either “politics is the art of the possible”, or “the great questions of the time will be solved not by majority decisions, but by iron and blood”.
‘We must save the Zimbabwe dollar’

Zimbabwe’s new finance minister, Tendai Biti, has vowed to “save the Zimbabwe dollar” — and avoid resorting to the rand — as part of his plan to rescue the country’s economy.

And he is to embark on a radical scheme to get Zimbabweans saving money and working on public projects, while luring aid money from Western governments.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Biti said: “We have to make sure that we start by saving the Zimbabwe dollar. ‘Randising’ the economy is not the solution. Our money can only be saved by floating the Zimbabwe dollar so that it finds its natural value.

“ We want to establish the real interest rates and encourage savings for the country and make sure that these contribute between 1% and 2% of the country’s GDP.”

Biti said he would attempt to sideline Zimbabwe’s disastrous Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono and take direct control of inflation management and fiscal policy.

He also outlined dramatic stimulus plans for industry: “Industry has to graduate in the first six months from the near 0% capacity to at least 60% capacity. We also have to work towards restoring viability to the agricultural sector by making adequate preparations for the 2009-2010 season: 90% of the country’s GDP is influenced by agriculture.”

Biti is expected to throw out the budget produced by Zanu-PF last month and unveil his own within weeks. — Njabulo Ncube and Rowan Philp