Speech to the Zimbabwe Society, University of Cape Town

Speech to the Zimbabwe Society, University of Cape Town

By Senator David Coltart

16 May 2011

Thank you, Zimbabwe Society, for this invitation. I’m really grateful to have this opportunity, which in many respects brings my life at UCT full circle. Almost exactly thirty years ago, almost to the day, I was chairperson of the Zimbabwe Society and was involved in trying to organise a Focus on Zimbabwe Week. It’s amazing how some things don’t change.

We were very proud of our Society thirty years ago. We were proud that our society changed its name before the country even changed its name. I was first elected to the Zimbabwe Society at the end of 1978 and one of our decisions made in 1979 was to change the Society’s name to the Zimbabwe Society, which at the time was quite a radical thing to do. This university was very different in composition to what it is today, because it was, although a liberal university, nevertheless a reflection of apartheid and there were very few black students. It was dominated by white students so our decision to change the name before the country even changed its name was at that time viewed as progressive.

We, in 1980, felt very strongly that we had a future in Zimbabwe. As a committee we felt that we had a role to play, in 1980, in the rebuilding of our nation after several decades of war and many, many decades of oppression and injustice. And for two years running, in 1980 and then in 1981 we tried, and I emphasise the word ‘tried’, to run Focus on Zimbabwe weeks. The intention was to portray the new Zimbabwe in a positive light. The intention was to encourage then Zimbabwean students that they had a future in Zimbabwe, that they had a role to play in Zimbabwe. You can imagine that those intentions ran contrary to the intention of the then apartheid government. At that time, in 1980 and 1981, the apartheid government was intent on destabilising Zimbabwe, not on rebuilding it, and so they were confronted with this group of young students who were doing just the opposite of what they were doing at the time, portraying Zimbabwe in a different light to what came across on the SABC news every night. And we were encouraging specifically white Zimbabweans to return to Zimbabwe, which just didn’t match their vision.

In 1980 the apartheid government effectively banned our Focus on Zimbabwe Week. They made things incredibly difficult for us, and in the end we were not able to get any of the speakers down from Zimbabwe to speak, and we had to have our Focus with a UCT set of characters to run it. We were determined though to try it again, and in 1981 – and at that time I was then Chair of the Society – we decided we would do it again. I and friends and committee members had a series of meetings with senior government people, including the then Minister of Information, Nathan Shamuyarira, from ZANU PF, and my present colleague in Cabinet, Minister Murerwa, the current Minister of Lands, who was then Secretary for Labour. We had these meetings as students and tried to encourage them to come down for our Focus on Zimbabwe week, which they agreed to. Amanda, I know your committee’s been working hard, I know the amount of effort that you go into just to prepare one talk like this. Well, we had prepared for an entire week. On the night before cabinet ministers and other leading lights from Zimbabwe were due to fly down to Cape Town, the meeting was banned by the apartheid government and at the same time they sent a warning to me, as Chairperson, that if I wanted to continue this subversive activity I could do so from back in Zimbabwe. In other words, it was a veiled threat that if we continued this activity we would face the end of our studies and deportation.

There’s an interesting result of this because in August 1981, about a month after this Focus Week had been banned, I got a telegram through the post. I saw it was from the Zimbabwe government, went down to the Post Office – those were the days pre-email, just after the rinderpest, when there weren’t even faxes, so you got urgent communication by going down to the Post Office and getting a telegram. I got this envelope and opened it, and it was a telegram addressed to me from none other than Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. I still have that telegram today. If you go to my website and go to the archives in August 1981 you will see the telegram posted there, and see what it says. I’ll paraphrase it for you this evening; he spoke about what we had wanted to speak about in our Focus. That he had a vision for a multi-racial, prosperous Zimbabwe. He concluded by quoting from Roosevelt, the second Roosevelt American President, saying that in coming back to Zimbabwe, “you have nothing to fear but fear itself”. You can imagine as a young student getting a telegram like that how it amazed us all. I walked into my tax class which was being taken by now Judge Dennis Davis. Those of you doing Law, I’m sure, will know of Dennis Davis. If ever there was a character it was Dennis Davis – he was my favourite lecturer and he allowed me to read this telegram out in class, which I did. The whole Law class was amazed, the SRC took it up and had posters of this telegram put up on campus. It caused a stir right the way through UCT, because of course it ran contrary to everything the apartheid government was putting out about Zimbabwe.

Thirty years have gone past since then. A lot of water, much of it bad, has flowed under Zimbabwe’s bridge since then. Some of you may say, well, that story that you’ve just recounted to us has confirmed us in our view that we have no role to play in Zimbabwe, that there is no future in our country, because you David Coltart listened to that call, returned to Zimbabwe in 1983 and you’ve had 28 years of strife. And in one sense that is correct. But I believe that we have gone through a long, hard process of transition. We didn’t start in 1980, we started much further back than that. It started with the injustices that really kicked in the late 1950s and 1960s, perpetrated by a succession of white minority governments. And we’ve paid a heavy price for the injustice of those times. It’s taken a long time to get to this position. But as I will go on to speak about this evening I believe that we are now on the threshold of an amazing future in that country that those of us know is God’s own. And that’s what I want to speak about this evening.

We can’t ignore the last thirty years. We can’t ignore the last fifty years of our history. But now is the time to concentrate on the present and the future.

Let me, madam Chair, speak briefly about the current prospects of the so-called Global Political Agreement and challenges facing it at present. My colleague Deprose Muchena was going to speak about that. Sadly, as you’ve already been told, he’s not able to come and speak tonight. He is a good friend of mine. He is one of the great intellects of Zimbabwe, and I was hoping that he would be able to come and give us the completely objective, unbiased view of the situation. You have to take what I say with a pinch of salt, of course, because I am a partisan politician and inevitably, no matter how objective I try to be, will give you a partisan perspective. But allow me to do that now, and you can sift through what you think is correct and what isn’t.

Let me start off with looking at the Global Political Agreement itself, to go slightly back in history. Personally, going into this transitional government was one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. It was a case of going into a government with people who have been my personal antagonists for some thirty years. It was going into government with people who have policies that I fundamentally disagree with. There were many people as well, both inside the country and outside of Zimbabwe – friends of mine, colleagues of mine – who felt that it was the wrong decision to make. I would argue that it was much easier to apply that purist, absolutist position in judging the GPA, and in judging whether we should participate in it.

The reality within the country, which was the reality that I and people like Morgan Tsvangarai and Welshman Ncube had to face, was catastrophic. We need to remember 2008. In 2008 we faced hyperinflation. We faced the dramatic spread of cholera in our cities, and even in rural areas. We faced the near collapse of the country. There were only 26 teaching days that were conducted in 2008. We faced, educationally, the loss of an entire generation. We faced the degeneration of the country into a Somalia or Liberia. We also faced a military junta who were already receiving money from the diamonds, who were quite prepared to take our country down to Somalia or Liberia, knowing that diamond proceeds would keep the core of their support base running. They were prepared to pay that price.

There were some who argued that we should have just let it collapse, and some still argue that today, especially those in the diaspora. Had we allowed it to go a few more months, the argument went, the country would have imploded. Yes, it would have been difficult but we could have picked up the pieces and started afresh. Well, aside from the moral responsibility that all those committed to non-violence have not to allow any country to become a failed state, I believe that that thinking was misplaced on other grounds as well. It was misplaced because of what I just said now, and also because of what we have learnt in the last few years regarding the wealth that we have seen in Marange, which the Generals knew about then. There is no doubt in my mind that while the rest of the country would have collapsed they would have been allowed to continue running the country, because of the receipts that they would have had from those assets. Whilst hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Zimbabweans would have suffered, they would have remained in control. And so, I was convinced in 2008 that it was the right thing to do and I have to say today I believe more so than ever, that as flawed as this arrangement is, it remains the only viable, non-violent option open to Zimbabwe and the region.

So let me talk about the prospects of the GPA today, in 2011. Where are we at? I would compare it to where South Africa was at ten years after I was at university, in the early 1990s. Like South Africa in the early 1990s Zimbabwe is a country in transition. We have hard-liners at play, seeking to subvert that process of transition. We cannot get any guarantee that this process of transition will end happily. Like South Africa, we have people who are utterly determined to end it. Thankfully, we have not had, for example, the assassination of the equivalent of a Chris Hani, yet, but I have no doubt that there are elements within ZANU PF who are prepared to go to almost any means to derail this process. But in many ways it is so much like South Africa. No one in South Africa could guarantee that 1994 would happen, that you would get through this process. No one could guarantee that there would be an end to the violence that happened in KwaZulu Natal. But it was all that South Africa had then. It was the only option open to South Africa, and putting it negatively in Zimbabwe, it is, and remains, our only option.

But that’s putting things negatively. Let me assess the current situation positively, because there is a very powerful positive aspect to this story. As flawed as this agreement is, as flawed as the process is, as many problems as it has, the fact remains that it is still on track. That in itself is a miracle. I spoke about protagonists – we have people who are diametrically opposed on virtually all the policies that we have to tackle, and yet, despite that polarisation, we remain governing. I would never describe Cabinet as cordial, but it is functional. On the vast majority of issues that we face, we do ultimately reach a compromise. The compromise almost always is not to my liking, and I’m sure not to ZANU PF’s liking – but it is middle ground, it is designed to take us through. The economy has stabilised. We have effectively tackled hyperinflation. The economy is now growing, the mining sector, for example, having achieved amazing growth in the last year. Even the worst segment of our economy, namely agriculture, has seen growth. Even the area of tobacco, which had been devastated, has seen a massive increase in its tobacco crop.

I’m not standing here today saying that all is rosy, I’m simply saying that it is not all negative; that there are positive aspects. Cholera has been dealt with. Clinics have been re-opened, hospitals have been re-opened. We have stabilised the education sector. When I took over in February 2009, we had 80,000 teachers on strike and over 7000 schools were closed. The textbook-pupil ratio was one textbook to fifteen children on average, and that was optimistic. Today all our schools are open, a new rapport has been established with teachers, and just in the last few months we have delivered 13 million textbooks to primary schools which has got that textbook ratio for core subject areas down to 1:1. As I speak we are finalising the contract for secondary schools, and by the end of this year we will get textbook-pupil ratios down to 1:1 in six core secondary school subject areas. We have not resolved everything. We still have major structural problems – the physical infrastructure of our schools is still collapsing because we haven’t been able to address that – but we have given hope to a generation that could have been completely lost.

In the vexed area of the media, and I see some of my friends here tonight – hello Jan Raath! – we have not made progress in certain areas. Electronic broadcasting is still tightly controlled by ZANU PF. We have no independent radio or television stations, despite clear commitments in the GPA to achieve that. But, since the signing of the GPA, we have two new daily independent newspapers being distributed throughout the country, publishing independently and fearlessly. One of these now has the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country. That is a tangible reality of progress.

What about the constitutional reform process? I’ll speak in more detail separately about that in a minute. It has been delayed – it should have been completed already. The GPA sets out a ten stage process for constitutional review and reform, and we’ve only been through three of those ten processes. But it is still on track. It has been set back by in-fighting and a lack of funding, but the constitutional outreach went on, the thematic committees are sitting – often with great debates and turmoil and boycotts – but the process continues. And we will shortly be drafting. Will it result in a constitution that I’m happy with? No! That is not my expectation. But will it result in something better than we have today? Yes, I’m confident that it will. And to that extent, we come back to the word ‘transition’.

This is not a short transition. This is a stepping stone in our nation’s history. The constitutional reform process is part of that step, and we will have to continue walking in the future to ultimately achieve a constitution that reflects the will of all Zimbabwean people. We’ve seen electoral reform. We have a new Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. It’s not perfect, far from it, but at least now we have some principled people on it who are trying to do the right thing. We have agreed as coalition partners on substantial reforms to our electoral laws. For example, one of the main bugbears that we had in the past was that we were never able to get access to an electronic copy of the voters’ roll, which meant that we couldn’t do an audit of the voters’ roll, which meant in turn that those who wanted to corrupt the process by engaging in fraudulent electoral behaviour could do so. We now, in terms of this new law, will have access to electronic copies of the voters’ roll. Is it perfect? No. But will it introduce substantial changes to the electoral process? Yes. We have a Human Rights Commission, now chaired by an alumnus of this great university. Is it working properly? No. It is under funded, it has to face obstacles, but it is there, and we will in time give it teeth.

So what I’m saying is that as you view Zimbabwe, recognise that the press will almost always pick on the negative. And those negative stories are usually true. My intention today is not to pull the wool over your eyes. There are terrible things going on in Zimbabwe. The rule of law is still abused, disrespected. People are arrested on spurious charges. Law is used as a weapon. I’ve spoken about the media – we all know other facets of our society which are far from perfect. But it’s not the only story, and we are working hard to improve the picture as every month goes by.

So what are our current challenges? Well I would identify three immediate challenges to this process. Firstly, the greatest challenge is posed by a group of hardliners. They tend to be men twenty years younger than Robert Mugabe. I don’t include Robert Mugabe in their number. They are men who have committed crimes against humanity, generally. I stress ‘men’ deliberately because this group is dominated by males. They are males who are deeply embroiled in acts of corruption. They understand that if this process continues, as flawed as it is, as uncertain as it is, it will ultimately lead to fundamental change, and when that happens not only will their past behaviour be exposed but their current access to wealth will be terminated. And so they are doing all in their power, their immense power – their immense physical power, their immense financial power – do derail the process. It is this group that is behind the arrests of cabinet ministers, the vile statements uttered in our government-controlled press and many of the acts that have happened recently which undermine this process and put the entire GPA at risk. But let me stress that this group is a minority. It is a minority within the country; it is even a minority within ZANU PF. It certainly a minority within cabinet, and certainly a minority within the ZANU PF parliamentary caucus. But they pose a major threat. Their desire is to have an election as soon as possible. They can only have that election this year if they literally tear up the GPA and the constitutional reform process. But they know that if they don’t do that as every week and month goes past the prospect of this transition working grows, and that is not in their interest.

The second major challenge to the GPA comes from what I term ‘Western indifference’ and a lack of finesse by the West in dealing with the Zimbabwean crisis. If I could revert to the analogy of the example of South Africa, had the West in particular been sceptical about the transition process of South Africa in the early 1990s it may well have failed. Had the West not embraced that process as it did and funded the process as it did, the hardliners in South Africa may have got their way. Tragically, the West, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom, are so sceptical about this arrangement that they have not backed it fully. I understand – and I need to stress this point – why they are sceptical.

There are many reasons why this agreement may not work, but tragically that has resulted in the under funding of certain key areas, including education. I can speak with authority on education. I set up an education transition fund in September 2009 to support that transition and that rebuilding of education. The German government, for example, has put in 18 million US dollars to support that process. Other countries have put in, in government terms, paltry amounts – one million US dollars here, one million pounds there. And unfortunately this can result in a self-fulfilling prophesy. What we’ve seen in education is that by delivering textbooks, for example, not just pupils but parents have grown in confidence about the education sector, but also about a peaceful, non-violent process of transformation. We have always been on a very fine line in our country. There are opposition elements in our country who would readily embrace some form of violent struggle, and our battle has been to persuade people to go the non-violent route. We’ve done this very effectively through education. Unfortunately when the West doesn’t embrace what we’re trying to do it undermines those of us who are committed to a non-violent process.

Furthermore, the general reluctance to budge on the sanctions issues isn’t helping. Let me stress, the sanctions issue is highly controversial. I’m sure in your own groups here you’ve had vigorous debates about them. I’m very happy to tell you my view regarding them. I believe that they are past their sell by date. I believe that they don’t achieve anything at present for the democratic struggle in our country. I don’t believe that sanctions have stopped one single member of the ZANU PF elite from enriching themselves in the last decade. I don’t think that they have stopped a single spurious prosecution of political human rights activists in the last ten years. What they have done in the past ten years is to stigmatise those who are guilty of human rights abuses, but that job was done a long time ago.

The irony for me about sanctions today is that the party most benefiting from them is ZANU PF, because ZANU PF has made the sanctions issue a major campaign issue. Everything is blamed on sanctions. When I’m in Parliament during question time I’m often asked by ZANU PF MPs to comment on the effective sanctions on education. The objective reality is that the education sector has been in decline for two decades. The first decade of education saw wonderful progress and no one can take that away from ZANU PF and Robert Mugabe. There is no doubt that because of the farsighted policies of Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF the various bottlenecks that were created in education by white minority governments were broken and education was extended to all. No one can take that away from ZANU PF – that is an objective reality. But equally, if one looks at successive budgets since 1990, the education sector has been under funded consistently for two decades and that has resulted in the decline of education standards for two decades, which has nothing to do with sanctions. But sanctions are used as an excuse by ZANU PF on which to blame all the country’s woes and we need to take that particular wind out of their sails.

To that extent, the call for sanctions to remain is wrong and the sooner sanctions go the better. But as long as they remain it threatens the entire GPA. It is tragic that often the decision on sanctions is made not on the grounds of Zimbabwe’s best interest, not on foreign policy grounds but on domestic policy grounds in certain countries, and that is wrong. I saw, for example, in my capacity as Minister of Sport, this applied to the tour of Scottish cricket to Zimbabwe last year. Now one would think that a tour by Scotland cricket to Zimbabwe doesn’t come particularly high up on the list of major foreign policy issues. But a concerted effort was made to stop Scotland from touring Zimbabwe last year, completely undermining the efforts that I and others have made to integrate Zimbabwe cricket into the international community, much in the same way as South African cricket was integrated as early as 1991. If you remember your history, long before the process of transition ended in South Africa the South African Test team, all white, was invited to play a Test against the West Indies. What was the thinking about that? Sport can be a good weapon; it can assist in the process of reconciliation within countries and between nations. That is what we are trying to do, and we have been frustrated in certain respects.

The third and final challenge to the current transition is focused on SADC and SADC’s weakness. I need to say that President Zuma and the ANC have generally not put a foot wrong in this regard in the last few years. On occasions they’ve been distracted, but since President Zuma came to power they have tried to do the right thing. The danger is that what I term the ‘non-democracies’, the Angolas, the Swazilands, the Malawis, and some others may hold sway in SADC deliberations and not hold ZANU PF to account, and will allow ZANU PF to breech the GPA without any form of sanction. If that happens then yes, ZANU PF may be able to subvert the spirit and the letter of the GPA, and that may cause it to collapse.

So, we are at a fragile juncture in our history. We have hardliners who are desperate to have an election this year, but they can only do so if they disregard the constitutional reform process. As I said, that has been delayed, but it is on track. We still have to go through the drafting and a variety of other things, but suffice it to say that we cannot have an election this year and complete the constitutional reform process. We simply don’t have the time to do it effectively and if anyone seeks to rush it, it will be the equivalent of actually tearing up that process. But let me say this as well, that the broad consensus within the country – and I include moderates within ZANU PF – understand what I have just said, that if we are going to stabilise the country and create a foundation for the future, we simply have to go through all the processes in both letter and spirit in this constitutional reform exercise. Ultimately, ladies and gentlemen, the short term future is going to be determined not so much by what we do internally, not so much by what the West does, but ultimately by what SADC does. So in that context, what does the future of Zimbabwe look like post-transition?

Zimbabwe’s future is inextricably linked to the future of SADC and to the future of its immediate neighbours – South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia. Those countries have been very supportive of the GPA. Those countries are trying to do the right thing in ensuring that the GPA is respected, because they know that if this process fails and if Zimbabwe is thrown back into turmoil it is going to undermine not only Zimbabwe but the entire region. South Africa and Botswana, to a certain extent, have benefited greatly from our woes in the last ten years; our educated, mobile middle class have benefited South African universities, South African businesses and the like. But the next wave will be refugees, many of them illiterate, many of them poverty stricken. They will undermine economic progress in South Africa and our other neighbours, and that is why they are determined to make this work.

But we ourselves need to understand as we consider our future in Zimbabwe, that our futures, along with these different nations’ futures, are inextricably linked not to a Zimbabwe that exists in isolation but to the whole Southern African region. We need to think increasingly in regional terms. SADC, if it continues its current path, will increasingly become integrated. Visas will disappear. Borders as we know them will disappear. People throughout the entire region will become more mobile. The qualifications that you get in this university will increasingly be applicable to all countries in Southern Africa, and your vistas will go way beyond just South Africa. SADC is, for example, committed to a single currency. I believe that that will happen. I believe that tariffs ultimately will come down. That needs to be our vision; when we get a vision of a region rather than an individual country, it opens up all sorts of positive ideas and synergies for us.

Tragically, Zimbabwe in the last ten years has received very little dividend from integration. Countries in the region have benefited but nothing much has come back to Zimbabwe. But when Zimbabwe embraces what other countries in the region have already embraced, namely democracy, Zimbabwe is going to boom. Zimbabwe is on of the richest countries on the planet in terms of its natural resource wealth per capita. There are very few countries in the world that have our platinum reserves, gold reserves, iron ore reserves, lithium reserves, coal reserves and methane gas reserves of such magnitude in relation to our size of population. We’ve had missing ingredients that have stifled Zimbabwe’s growth. Those missing ingredients have been democracy and what I term a ‘befuddled adoption’ of tight central government controls of the economy. When Zimbabwe embraces what the rest of SADC has already embraced it will become the fastest growing economy in the region, probably in the whole of Africa. And I believe it will become the most secure country in SADC. All countries go through transitions. Zimbabwe has had a particularly long and troublesome one going back the last fifty years. We lost our way as far back as 1958. The country was then led on a war which we are still suffering the consequences of. But I believe that we have now committed ourselves as a nation to a new democratic and peaceful path.

I’ve spoken about all the things that will derail our process in the short term, but there’s one thing that will derail us in the medium to long term, and that is if our young talent does not return to Zimbabwe to help rebuild the country. No one, and certainly not I, can promise that this process in the short and medium term is going to be easy. If I look back on the last thirty years that I’ve had in Zimbabwe it has been anything but easy. But despite that I have no regrets about the last thirty years. I remain absolutely passionate about our country not because of its natural resources but because of its people. I’m always amazed that despite my personal history, black Zimbabweans have voted me into office on three occasions. I think that says a lot about black Zimbabweans and their capacity to forgive. When I look at race relations in Zimbabwe and compare them to race relations in other countries, despite the propaganda – I’m speaking personally – I believe that race relations are far better than in the vast majority of countries. It is not to say that they are perfect, far from it – that is not my argument this evening – but comparatively speaking I believe that race relations are exceptionally good in our country.

So what then, in conclusion, is your role? It is a difficult role that you have to play, but it is relatively straightforward and it involves two things. Firstly, you need to achieve your short term goals. You need to work hard and not be distracted by whatever is going on in Zimbabwe at present. Yes, be engaged, read up on what is going on in our country, but focus on your studies because the reality is that we will never rebuild our nation unless we have the engineers and the doctors and the architects to help us rebuild. So that is the first thing that you have to do: get your degrees, get your qualifications. If needs be get experience. But then the second and final thing is that you need to come home. You need to come home with determination, with patience, to rebuild our nation and to transform it into the jewel of Africa as it so deserves to be, and I believe will become.