ABC Radio Australia
PM, 18 June 2010
With reporter Mark Colvin
MARK COLVIN: Should Australian cricket thaw out its relations with Zimbabwe, two years on from the election that brought in a power-sharing agreement there?
Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF Party lost the election of 2008, and after much negotiation were forced to share power with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai.
Mr Mugabe, however, remained as President and Zanu-PF still controls a great deal of the government, including the police.
Corruption and political skulduggery got Zimbabwe stripped of its right to field an international team for Test matches, but the Zimbabwe Cricket Union retains voting power on the International Cricket Council.
It’s understood they’ve been wielding that power to try to stop the former prime minister John Howard becoming the new vice-president of the ICC.
David Coltart of the MDC is Zimbabwe’s Minister for Education, Sport and Culture. He’s been having meetings with Cricket Australia and with the Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.
I asked him if it was fair to call the Zimbabwe Cricket Union a Zanu-PF fiefdom.
DAVID COLTART: It certainly had, it’s been led by people who are perceived as being aligned to Zanu-PF but there are many people on the board who I have known for many years who are not Zanu-PF aligned, so that’s not entirely correct.
MARK COLVIN: But I suppose a lot of cricket supporters and probably cricket administrators here, but certainly a lot of cricket supporters would be keen to make sure that if Australians went to Zimbabwe they were not in some way supporting the Mugabe machine.
DAVID COLTART: No of course, and I think that’s a natural concern, there’s strong domestic opinion on that in Australia and all I can say to counter that is that I’ve been one of the principal protagonists against Robert Mugabe for 27 years and I believe, along with Morgan Tsvangirai, that sport has a positive role to play in uniting our country, in helping this transition to democracy and we believe that it would promote that transition if Australia were to play cricket against Zimbabwe.
It’s not to say that the situation is perfect, far from it, but Australians need to know that there has been a change in the administration of cricket in Zimbabwe. We’ve taken a lot of the politics out of it and I think that that’s demonstrated by the team’s performance on the ground in recent weeks.
MARK COLVIN: And people also don’t want to see a situation where Australia would be playing against a team of well fed people in a country where everybody else is starving. That’s not the case anymore?
DAVID COLTART: Well, we still have many, many people starving in Zimbabwe. The question is more what can we do to end that starvation and one of the ways that we can end it is by ensuring that this fragile process of change towards a more democratic order is assisted and by ensuring that we encourage investment into Zimbabwe, business investment and further tourists to boost our economy and in that way help those starving people you refer to.
MARK COLVIN: How much is the campaign to have John Howard as the head of the International Cricket Council playing into all this; because I understand that the Zimbabwe Cricket Union has blocked that?
DAVID COLTART: Well this was a curve ball that I received a few weeks ago. This present trip has been planned for several months and it only came to my attention a few weeks ago that there was this point of contention, or apparent point of contention.
Prior to coming, about 10 days ago, I had a meeting with the president of Zimbabwe Cricket and the CEO and I pointed out to them that it would be utterly pointless in me coming to New Zealand and Australia to seek the normalisation of relations if there were elements within Zimbabwe Cricket seeking to scupper, clearly, what is the clear intent of Cricket Australia.
We then reached a consensus, that is between Zimbabwe Cricket and myself, that I would come in with a mandate to try and normalise those relations, including this issue of John Howard. Suffice it to say that I am going back to Cricket Zimbabwe and I hope that after my meeting with them we can come up with an arrangement which is mutually acceptable to both cricket organisations.
MARK COLVIN: Now on a broader level how is the coalition if you like, I don’t know how you describe it, the extraordinary arrangement as you described it before as a transition to democracy, but essentially power sharing between you and the Zanu-PF, how’s it working?
DAVID COLTART: Well we call it the transitional inclusive government, a bit of a mouthful but that’s what we call it. It is a very fragile process. The agreement which led to this is imperfect, it’s seriously flawed. We knew that from day one.
It’s a very difficult environment to have to govern with people that we’ve been so vigorously opposed to for so many years. We approach policy issues from fundamentally different positions. There are hardliners within the Zanu-PF camp who are doing everything in their power to scupper this deal. So I cannot pretend that it’s easy.
Having said that though I think that we’ve made remarkable progress in the last 15 months – we’ve stabilised the economy, we’ve stopped hyperinflation, we’ve stopped the cholera crisis, we’ve stabilised the health sector.
Regarding the sector I’m responsible for, education, when I took office in February last year I had 80,000 teachers on strike and 7,000 schools closed and an absolutely catastrophic situation. We’ve got the schools open, I have a new rapport with the trade unions and children are back at school.
MARK COLVIN: But can you foresee a moment when Robert Mugabe would actually step away from the presidency?
DAVID COLTART: Well you know we got very close to that in 2008. We have consistent intelligence that after the March 2008 election when he clearly had lost he wanted to stand down. It was only the intervention of the military, so we are told, who persuaded him to stay on. He is, after all, 86 – turns 87 in February – and I see in cabinet clear signs that he’s tired of this game and actually would like a way out.
MARK COLVIN: Zimbabwe’s Minister for Education, Sport and Culture, David Coltart. And you can hear more of that interview on our website from this evening.