Fragile Signs of Hope Emerging in the Gloom of Mugabe’s Rule

New York Times
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: March 19, 2009

HARARE, Zimbabwe — On his first day as education minister in a government so broke that most schools were closed and millions of children idle, David Coltart said he got a startling invitation.

“Come and get your brand-new white Mercedes,” an official told Mr. Coltart, a veteran opposition politician, as President Robert Mugabe peered down from a portrait on the minister’s office wall.
The offer of an E-Class Mercedes to every minister in the month-old power-sharing government was vintage Mugabe, an effort to seduce his political enemies with the lavish perks he has long bestowed on loyalists.

Mr. Coltart said no thanks.

Opposition members like Mr. Coltart who joined Mr. Mugabe in office last month have already achieved some successes, like getting teachers back to work and winning the release of some political prisoners.

But many of them warned in interviews that the progress would be short-lived if Western nations, meeting Friday in Washington to discuss expanding assistance, did not extend billions of dollars to rebuild Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe’s main donors of emergency medical and food aid — the United States, Britain and other European nations — face a painful question posed by those pleas for more help. How do the wealthiest nations pump money into Zimbabwe’s crippled economy without propping up Mr. Mugabe, feeding his patronage machine and extending his disastrous three decades in power?

Before fully re-engaging with Zimbabwe’s government, the donors have said they want to see the release of all political prisoners, the adoption of sensible economic policies, a halt to seizures of white-owned farms, and the restoration of a free press. But some diplomats here say hard-liners in Mr. Mugabe’s old guard seem determined to sabotage the power-sharing deal and the infusion of Western aid that the public would credit to the newcomers, led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change.

The most critical test for Mr. Tsvangirai is whether he can deliver on his inaugural promise to pay the civil service in foreign currency — particularly the police officers and soldiers who have enforced the repressive rule of Mr. Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, but whose pay in local currency is now worthless.

Even some diplomats who were most skeptical about Mr. Tsvangirai’s deal to govern with Mr. Mugabe, 85, now sense an opportunity to weaken “the old man,” as he is called here.

“There’s a creeping sense that we are in an endgame, that there is a new dynamic here,” said one Western diplomat who spoke anonymously according to diplomatic protocol. “Never before has the government been this prostrate. Never before has ZANU-PF been so weak or the opposition in office.”
The opposition politicians say that they, too, sense an opportunity to loosen Mr. Mugabe’s grip on power.

Mr. Coltart’s experience is a good example. He faces huge hurdles, not least the fact that his ministry’s foul-smelling headquarters had no running water to flush toilets when he arrived. But he has coaxed most of the nation’s teachers back to work with little more than a paltry $100 monthly allowance and the promise to try to give them more.

The sight of children in tattered uniforms walking to school has become another sign of encroaching normalcy — along with affordable loaves of bread and well-stocked grocery shelves — in a country ravaged by hunger, hyperinflation and cholera.

But the teachers’ unions have warned Mr. Coltart that their members will soon stop working unless he can get them better salaries, akin to what the British, the United Nations and other donors are already paying to more than 20,000 doctors, nurses and other workers in Zimbabwe’s collapsed public health system.

“If we don’t get support for education in, literally, the next few weeks, there’s a very real danger the teachers will leave in their thousands as they did last year,” Mr. Coltart said.

Teachers at the Fungisai Primary School in Chitungwiza, a city south of Harare, the capital, say $100 a month does not come close to paying for the essentials: rent, clothing, food, school fees. Still, they seem hopeful.

“The government is broke, but it’s better to have someone promising something better,” said Mercy Manza, 38, a third-grade teacher and mother of two. “Before, it was as if we didn’t exist. They just ignored us.”

The hyperinflation became so bad last year that the teachers’ pay in Zimbabwean dollars was worth almost nothing. Many teachers emigrated to South Africa to work as maids or grape pickers. Mrs. Manza and Kudzayi Chivasa, 44, a widowed teacher, said they sold their clothes, plates and silverware to raise cash to feed their families.

“I went for a week in January without food,” Mrs. Chivasa said.

The teachers said their lives had gotten materially better this year. The Zimbabwean dollar has effectively died, and all goods are now priced in United States dollars and South African rand. With the lifting of price controls and some import restrictions, goods have flowed into the country and food staples cost less.

The Fungisai school, a complex of single-story red brick buildings, was empty for months last year. All its 52 teachers are back, along with 2,200 neatly dressed children in royal blue uniforms.

But the headmistress, Angela Katsuwa, doubts she can hold on to her staff unless they get a raise. “I’m afraid they may go away,” she said. “They’re grumbling because that $100 is not enough to take them to the end of the month.”

The teachers are not the only ones challenged by poor pay. Every minister in the new government makes the same as a teacher — or a janitor, for that matter.

Sitting in his 14th-floor office, with a sweeping view of Harare’s skyline, Mr. Coltart took his crumpled pay stub out of his wallet. His earnings were 4,224 worthless Zimbabwean dollars and the voucher for $100. Mr. Coltart is a prominent human rights lawyer from Bulawayo who describes himself as “completely self-funding at present.”

Some new ministers, however, have devoted years to political activism in a country whose economy is crumbling. Diplomats here worry that Mr. Mugabe will exploit this vulnerability with his usual strategy of “bait the hook.” Many new ministers have accepted the Mercedes-Benzes that Mr. Coltart refused.

“There’s a very real danger our members and ministers could be sucked into the patronage system,” said Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, who is now driving an E280 Mercedes. “Our members have to be vigilant and principled.”

Eric Matinenga, one of Zimbabwe’s most respected trial lawyers and the new minister of constitutional and parliamentary affairs, said he talked to others in the Movement for Democratic Change about taking a unified stand on the cars. “I said, ‘Look, how would we justify getting these luxury vehicles when there is a humanitarian crisis out there?’ ” he said. “To my disappointment, we were not able to come up with a single position.”

Mr. Matinenga, who braved arrest and weeks in jail last year after representing victims of political violence, took a metallic green E-Class Mercedes. “I know it’s not a good excuse,” he said, “but will I make a difference if I turn this down?”

Diplomats and local analysts say that despite some missteps the Movement for Democratic Change ministers, led by Mr. Tsvangirai and Mr. Mutambara, are standing up to Mr. Mugabe and demanding a say in how the country is governed.

Finance Minister Tendai Biti is credited with taking control of economic policy from Gideon Gono, the Reserve Bank governor widely blamed for the profligate printing of money that drove inflation to astronomical levels.

“If Zimbabwe was a company, it would long ago have been liquidated,” said Mr. Biti, a combative lawyer who was beaten and jailed on flimsy treason charges during his years in the political wilderness. “If it was a human being, it would be brain dead.”

Looming over them all is the old man. Mr. Coltart has not quite figured out what to do with the portrait of Mr. Mugabe hanging behind his desk. “I’m thinking I’ll find a more appropriate place,” he said, “where he’s not looking over my shoulder.”