“We all know someone killed by ZANUPF”

The Sunday Independent, South Africa

By Peta Thornycroft

25 September 2011

When Tendai Biti quipped that he was finance minister without any “finance”, his audience in a church hall in Harare smiled knowingly.

They knew that when Biti went into the treasury for the first time as finance minister in 2009, he found his Zanu-PF predecessor had left him little more than petty cash to run the country and about R50 billion in foreign debt.

In the audience, labourers, clerks, domestic workers, vendors, activists, artisans, a handful of mostly middle-aged shabby whites and many unemployed people understood Biti’s joke because they too were demolished by hyper-inflation, the trademark of Zanu-PF’s mismanagement prior to the unity government with the MDC.

Like Biti, ordinary Zimbabweans have no “finance”.

Biti was reporting back to his constituency last week. For months beforehand he had been unable to get police permission to hold the meeting. So he went ahead anyway but without advance publicity. The audience was quite small, more intimate town hall conversation than grandstand report-back.

He described for the first time some of the hazards of being in a government with Zanu-PF, why he and cabinet colleagues found it so difficult to get the country moving again.

Biti told the meeting his party, the main MDC faction, “saved” Zimbabwe by going into the inclusive government with Zanu-PF which it had defeated in elections a year earlier.

He told his constituents that during negotiations, he had opposed MDC joining an inclusive government. But he added that now, 31 months later, he believed it had been the right decision because it gave Zimbabweans “time out, time out (to recover from Zanu-PF violence) as we were being scorched.”

Biti said the MDC now understood “the levers of power in government. And now we know the myths too.”

The levers of power Biti says are not held by policymakers such as he but by the bureaucrats.

It is public knowledge these days that Zanu-PF ministers nod off during Tuesday morning’s cabinet meetings and spend only a few hours per week attending to ministry business.

The rest of the time they are either working for Zanu-PF or attending to the formerly white-owned farms they have been given since 2000.

The permanent secretaries (equivalent to South Africa’s director-general) are in jobs-for-life and are as important to Zanu-PF’s political survival as the security forces.

He said these bureaucrats “keep you busy without being busy”, Biti said. Many insiders in government say that Biti’s own permanent secretary is particularly obstructive.

Mugabe has mostly ignored his commitments to joint decision-making with the MDC under the three-year-old multi party political agreement he signed in 2008, and has unilaterally appointed most top civil servants.

Biti surprised some when he said that it no longer mattered to him that Zanu-PF controlled the security ministries.

“I learnt that the secret of good governance is not constitutions, it’s not about the army or the police, it is about love and caring. It is better to run the social ministries.

“It is better to be in charge of health and education than the police.

“We had a vision to democratise our country when the MDC was formed in 1999. We wanted to put an end to 20 years of cruelty, 20 years of theft, of fear, and this has been a long and tortuous road.”

And it is not over yet and the struggle goes on each day, often within the ministries.

David Coltart, education minister in the other, much smaller, MDC, is regularly obstructed by his permanent secretary.

It’s hard to imagine, though, that either Biti or Coltart have it as bad as one key MDC minister – who did not want to be identified for safety reasons – who has more or less given up trying to reform public service employees within the ministry and who is openly defied by the ministry’s permanent secretary.

“He seems my number on his mobile and hits the off button. If I go to his office he comes forward and pushes me back and closes the door in my face.

“So when I am desperate to communicate with him, I try to go to a social event where I know he will be and try to talk to him there, where in front of others he cannot be so rude to me. I don’t think I can make any progress while he remains.”

Biti said: “I turned 45 three or so weeks ago but I feel I am 87 years of age.” That prompted quiet titters from the crowd because, of course, everyone in the hall knows that President Robert Mugabe is 87.

“My life and yours have been compressed with pain and suffering. So even though you may be young in age you are old because of the experiences, the exposures that all of us have gone through at the hands of Robert Gabriel Mugabe and his acolytes in Zanu-PF

“We have been beaten up, we have been tortured, we have been raped, we have been killed.

“They have called us names, dogs, puppets of the West, you name it. I think the only thing we have not yet been accused of is incest.

“Each one of us knows someone killed by Zanu-PF.

“We are not normal. You, we, are candidates for psychiatric treatment. Because we have been traumatised by Zanu-PF and Robert Mugabe. We pretend to be normal but this is a society that functions on the culture of impunity.

“If you look in the eyes of Zanu-PF, and I sit with Mugabe often, they have the glassy eyes of a dead person. We grew up in a nice Christian background, we are very spiritual, we don’t need the Bible to tell us it is wrong to kill or rape.

“We are an unbelievable society for the kinds of things we tolerate.

“All my life I have known only one leader, Mugabe. It’s been a long road and people are tired now.”

An evicted white farmer in the audience asked Biti what he would do about compensating the farmers for the loss of their farms.

“We did a rough estimate and your properties should be worth about $3bn (R21bn) but we can’t pay that. But there must be compensation.

He said the debt to white farmers for their homes, businesses, equipment etc would best be solved by becoming part of sovereign debt to be settled one day and jeered at continuing land invasions 11 years after they began and references made by Zanu-PF to “new” farmers years after they took the land.

“So,” Biti said with his landmark giggle, or perhaps it was a snigger, “we have ‘new’ farmers who are 87 years old” alluding to a clutch of at least four prime farms 60km north west of Harare which Mugabe helped himself to and which were, for years, secretly funded by taxpayers’ money.

He said that the journey to democracy in Zimbabwe was not over.

“We are down to the last two stages of the struggle: to ensure power transfer (after the next elections) and to protect the vote,” he said.

Biti, Industry Minister Welshman Ncube from the smaller MDC – who has just persuaded the Indian iron and steel giant Esser to buy the derelict Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company (Zisco) – energy minister Elton Mangoma, the MDC’s health and education ministers and perhaps one or two Zanu-PF ministers who now want to rebuild the country they wrecked, have indeed saved Zimbabwe. The country is just hanging together. Without them it would have completely fallen apart.