Examination of Witnesses (Question
Numbers 1-20)
MR DONALD
STEINBERG, PROFESSOR
TEDDY BRETT
AND DR
STEVE KIBBLE
26 JANUARY 2010
Q1 Chairman: Thank you very much
for coming in. As I think you will know, the Committee is actually
visiting Zimbabwe next week and we are obviously anxious to get
your expertise and your views to help us focus our questions.
Can I say that we have a particularly busy week as we are going
away next week, so we are a little bit tight for time. We do want
to hear from you, but perhaps if you could be reasonably crisp
with your answers; not all of you have to comment on every question,
but do tell us what you think we need to know. If we can start
with the general political situation, which is clearly complicated.
The Government of National Unity has been in existence for coming
on for a year. Obviously there has been dollarization of the economy
which seems to have led to some recovery, and there is some indication
that there are things in the shops; that schools are functioning,
and so on. However, from your perspective what do you believe
is the current political and economic situation; and how firmly
is the Global Political Agreement embedded? It has had a pretty
rocky road; so if you could give us a take on that? I should have
asked you, for the record, to introduce yourselves, so if you
could do that first?
Mr Steinberg: I
am Donald Steinberg and I am Deputy President for Policy of the
International Crisis Group.
Dr Kibble: Steve Kibble, representing
the Zimbabwe Europe Network.
Professor Brett: Teddy Brett from
the London School of Economics.
Mr Steinberg: Mr Chairman, when
Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC decided to join the Unity Government
last January I think a lot of people said that he was setting
himself up for a fall; that he was simply the latest victim of
Robert Mugabe's attempt to divide and conquer and that the Government
of National Unity was doomed from the word go. In the year since
that Government was formed we have seen enough evidence to justify
the views of sceptics but enough evidence as well to justify the
faith that Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara and others had
in that process. We have indeed seen a solidification of the economic
situation—very little new growth but stability, a currency
that is stable, goods returning to market places. We are seeing
a Government of National Unity that performs after a fashion;
we have seen the creation of a plan for national reconstruction
that has worked to at least convince international donors that
something serious is going on here. At the same time we have seen
a continuation of farm seizures—about 150 during the course
of the last year; we have seen a continuation of intimidation;
we have seen hard line elements within ZANU-PF in particular stifle
the working of this Government. So the question is: are you seeing
a process that is moving towards a successful conclusion or are
we about to see the process fall apart? I think that there are
three formal challenges that we have to see met and three informal
challenges. Just very quickly, on the formal side we have to see
completion of the Global Political Agreement. There are a number
of key steps that have to proceed. We have seen some good movement,
both in terms of formation of the Government and formation of
committees on human rights, on the media, on electoral processes,
but the record is still very mixed. We have not seen the National
Security Council, for example, take over the security dimension
from the heinous Joint Operations Command; we have not seen the
appointment of MDC governors; we have not seen a resolution of
the issues regarding the Chairman of the Reserve Bank, Gideon
Gono, or the Attorney General. So that is a real question. The
second formal challenge is to complete the constitution. There
is a process underway right now; it is stalling for the time being
but I think there are some relatively good signs out there that
people understand that this is not a process that can be run exclusively
by the Executive and by the legislature. It is a people-orientated
process—or at least it should be. There are other signs
that the Kariba Draft, which is the anti-democratic executive
power structure draft that was agreed to before, is being put
aside and that would be a positive element. On the elections,
I think there is an emerging view that 2011 would be too soon
to hold elections and we as the International Crisis Group would
support that view. We believe that holding premature elections,
allowing politics to reassert themselves at this point would be
a somewhat dangerous process. I think the MDC is coming to that
view as well, both as they try to show the people of Zimbabwe
that they are reasonable stewards of the public domain, and also
they are very concerned about how the military would react to
the election of the MDC at that point, which I think is a forgone
conclusion. On the ZANU-PF side, they are not anxious to hold
elections right now. A recent poll showed that they have about
10% of the vote; they have geriatric leadership; they are not
viewed as a change agent; and they are not particularly excited
about going to the polls at this point. Chairman, those are the
three formal challenges. The three informal challenges are: on
the first hand there is a need for political maturity in this
process; both parties have to recognise that even as they are
competitors in the political arena they are partners both in the
Unity Government and in building the future of Zimbabwe, and on
that front we are going to have to see some radical changes within
ZANU-PF. It is very difficult as long as Robert Mugabe is at the
helm, but there are movements beneath him—especially Vice
President Joice Mujuru's movement. And at the same time the MDC
recognises that they have to prove themselves to the people of
Zimbabwe as reasonable stewards, not corrupt, able to run a government.
The second challenge is the security side. There are a dozen or
so generals who have veto power over this transition process.
It is a very dangerous phenomenon; it is the reason why MDC is
not anxious to see a transform and transfer of power right now.
I think that Zimbabweans are coming to the conclusion that some
sort of soft landing is necessary to move these generals on during
this transition process. The final challenge that we are looking
at is the challenge of rebuilding the economy. Even as we look
at the very significant changes that have occurred over the last
year we still see 90% unemployment; we still see an agricultural
sector that this year is probably likely to produce 40% to 50%
of average crops. We still see a manufacturing sector that cannot
get electricity and basic raw materials, and we still see an international
community that is sceptical about the process; that is not going
to come in with major amounts of investment or aid unless some
positive developments occur. So, again, a very mixed picture at
this point.
Q2 Chairman: Perhaps you could pick
up different points.
Dr Kibble: Yes. I think one of
the interesting things is that the dollarization of the economy
means that ZANU-PF networks are unable to be served by inflationary
money printing like they were in the past, which is a step forward
if you like. My major concern is the fact that the militarisation
of the state that occurred over the last 10 years has really not
significantly been challenged—something at which Donald
hinted there. To be honest, I do not think that the nature of
the state has changed at all; it is still a kleptocratic state
with a certain amount of what you might call social democratic
interventions in the economy. To that extent I am probably slightly
more pessimistic than Donald, but do see that the continued existence
of the Government of National Unity-inclusive Government is actually
a plus. But the major decisions have still to be confronted, in
my opinion.
Professor Brett: I think that
was a very useful summary of the situation. I am just as pessimistic
as Steve. It seems to me that the nature of the situation at the
moment is that it is an intrinsically unstable situation—it
is an interim situation because basically ZANU's objective is
to recapture power, and in the memo I sent to you if you look
at the fifth party conference that has just taken place they are
absolutely intransigent; they are totally opposed to the GPA;
they are going to resist every possible concession they have to
make because basically they simply do not accept the legitimacy
of the MDC or the democratic process. Any call for political maturity
in a context of a situation governed by gangsters and crooks who
have stolen half the assets of the country—each of these
army officers has his political power and has used his political
power to amass huge estates and so on—the notion that somehow
they are going to be willing to give this up voluntarily as a
result of the democratic process is simply unjustifiable. So I
think this is an argument for the postponement possibly of that
electoral process because the whole process of the political conflict
right now is on the fact that at the next election the MDC will,
if it is a free and fair election, come to power; and that will
threaten the whole structure of economic power that has been built
up through this process and through the fact that the state has
been allocating resources to ZANU cronies and these ZANU cronies
are threatened with losing their assets, for example if there
is a land reform process that the MDC introduces, because all
this land that has been used by these military officers is lying
unused and it is one of the reasons why Zimbabwe is dependent
on food aid now. So I think the critical problem is that one has
to see this as an interim situation and one has to recognise that
within the next two or three years there is going to be a really
major crisis that has to be confronted. My own expertise started
in Uganda. In Uganda in 1987 the new Government that took over
could take over and not confront this problem because it won a
civil war; because it destroyed the power of the existing military
apparatus. This is not the case in Zimbabwe and that is the central
political problem—that you have a military-economic complex
of business people who have their resources out of the power of
the state that actually will confront losing those resources if
they lose genuine political power, and that seems to me to be
the medium-term crisis that we have to confront when we think
about dealing with that situation.
Q3 Hugh Bayley: A question for Donald
Steinberg. You have said that there is a risk that donors will
doom the Government of National Unity. The problem is this: we
are damned if we do and we are damned if we do not. If we provide
aid we may strengthen ZANU-PF's hand and delay the process of
reform; if we stand back we may expose the reformists' weakness
or inability to deliver. So what should donors do in the situation
we are in now, after a year of Unity Government?
Mr Steinberg: The second threat
that you identified I think is a more real threat than the first.
People in Zimbabwe know that the only thing that has changed over
the last year is the entry of the MDC into Government and therefore
to the extent that there are positive things that are emerging
the MDC gets most of the credit for that. We are now facing a
situation where that first round of euphoria is about to disappear.
We are, for example, seeing the possibility in February of massive
civil service strikes, from teachers, from nurses, from doctors.
The biggest sign that Zimbabwe was back on the road was the opening
of schools, the opening of hospitals. The reason that these civil
servants are about to go on strike is that they are being paid
$160 a month. They are saying that that is not even enough to
go to work every day. They are demanding $620 a month; the Government
is saying, "We can pay $263." The bottom line is that
schools are going to close, hospitals are going to close and MDC
is going to be painted with the same brush that ZANU-PF is—"What
have you done for me?" This is the biggest threat to the
MDC right now because they are being perceived with either, "Have
you gone over to the other side? Are you now Government as opposed
to civil society with the people?" And the concerns that
we are starting to hear about corruption are tainting them as
well. So for me the clear answer here is to provide resources
through clean mechanisms, including the Multi-Donor Trust Fund,
which the IMF has in effect certified as being worthy of receiving
$500 million of their funds; to do it in line with the Finance
Ministry, to clearly put aside the Reserve Bank, which has been
tainted, which is discredited, which, even in the past year when
everybody has been watching, has taken millions of dollars and
transferred them from reserve accounts into funding presidential
scholarships and foreign diplomatic missions, et cetera—so
continuing the policies of the past. The one footnote I would
put is that in order to encourage movement by ZANU-PF, sanctions
have to stay in place on a personal basis. So what we are arguing
for is targeted assistance but targeted sanctions as well.
Q4 Hugh Bayley: A few months ago
I had quite a long conversation with Lovemore Moyo[1]
and he was encouraging a greater British engagement but was cautious
of using aid to fund government services. Of course you can provide
food aid through NGOs and you can provide HIV clinics and so on
without engaging the Government; but to do what you are proposing,
to fund schools, to put in train economic reform, to provide a
network of state health services, you have to fund the Government.
So how doable is that? Do you have to pick and choose government
departments? And how then do you avoid the risk of favouring one
candidate who got 50% of the vote as opposed to another who got
50% of the vote, which is I guess how it would be portrayed over
there?
Mr Steinberg: The Government of
Zimbabwe has helped in this regard by indeed setting up the Multi-Donor
Trust Fund, by putting together a policy through the Finance Ministry
that is clean, that has been shown to be effective so far, and
so it is not a question of you as the foreign government picking
and choosing and you will support a ministry led by an MDC minister
but not one by a hard line ZANU-PF minister, but to simply support
the process. I would say that the line does already get a little
blurred here because if you go, for example, into sanitation projects
by definition you have to provide resources that in some sense
are fungible, that are going to be able to pay the salaries or
the stipends of those people doing those projects. The same is
true of agricultural development. We had focused in the past on
this phrase "humanitarian plus" assistance, until I
think most of us realised that humanitarian plus really just meant
reconstruction if you define it broadly enough and it became a
phrase that had no meaning. So I understand the concern but I
would also say that at some point we are going to have to realise
that if you want to sideline the hardliners and you want to give
that country a peace dividend that will inure to the benefit of
the democratic process then we are going to have to bite the bullet
as an international community and support these projects.
Q5 Hugh Bayley: Can I ask Professor
Brett whether you share that analysis and, in particular, should
aid have been targeted on the MDC and other progressive civil
organisations?
Professor Brett: I think that
phrase "targeted support" and "targeted sanctions"
is an extremely good way of describing the issue and of course
that means that basically you need to give the aid and you need
to, in a sense, give it to somebody who has the capacity to know
how it can be used effectively, by whom, who to give it to and
who not to give it to. I would want to reinforce the proposition
that at this stage, given that we have a very small window of
opportunity that depends upon the MDC being able to come into
partial power and deliver something, that it is absolutely critical
that that process be given maximum support. I also take the point
that it has to take the form of tangible service delivery. I would
also go on to say that while the current mode of delivering most
of our aid via NGOs has been a necessity because it has not been
possible to give money to either the Ministry of Health or Education
under ZANU without expecting it to be simply stolen, we do need
to start creating the opportunity to reconstruct state capacity
with the delivery of free services, health services, education
services and so on. I am not in touch with what is going on in
this government collective. If it is in fact in a position to
do this and to identify those sorts of things most critically,
what one wants is to be able to say, "We are going to give"—whatever
it is—"£5 million to rebuild hospitals."
And to be able to give that in a cast-iron way so that we can
actually track that money and show that that £5 million ended
up in new hospitals rather than in somebody's bank account. So
what seems to me to be the issue is that you have to start building
real relationships with particular ministries, which hopefully
will be run by MDC but even if they are not run by MDC, even if
they are run by ZANU officials, to give them the money in a way
which makes it possible to be sure that it is going to be spent
on what it is supposed to be spent on. There is always a fungibility
problem which is that that money will free something else. That
problem is not so strong in Zimbabwe because the Zimbabwe state
actually has no other resources to spend anything on; so the money
that you are giving it would not have been spent on hospitals
and it is not going to free up anything that is going to go into
the pocket of some ZANU politician or general, and that seems
to me to be the critical issue. We have to say that we need to
support obvious candidates. Health and sanitation systems—two
years ago thousands or people were threatened by or died of cholera
because sanitation systems had collapsed. Of course that means
that you also have to strengthen state capacity; you have to be
able to offer civil servants a living wage because if you do not
offer them a living wage they are not going to come to work.
Q6 Hugh Bayley: Can I ask one final
question? If one tends to favour or concentrate aid resources
on MDC-led ministries how should Britain then avoid the neo-colonial
accusation; that we are picking which leader and which team should
run our former colony? There are plenty of people in Africa outside
of Zimbabwe as well as in Zimbabwe who would say that. And to
what extent should we be putting our aid in bilaterally or through
multilateral agencies, and if it goes through multilateral agencies
do we avoid that charge to some extent?
Professor Brett: There is a problem—and
I tried to lay it out in my paper—that basically what we
want to do is to make it possible for the MDC to take over Zimbabwe.
Basically Zimbabwe is going nowhere without regime change and
whether we say that out loud or whether we say it quietly that
actually seems to me to be the fundamental prerequisite for the
reconstruction of Zimbabwe—that ZANU loses its capacity
to control policy. Obviously that creates a serious problem around
issues of sovereignty and our role, which is particularly sensitive
in Zimbabwe because of the whole neo-colonial story that has been
used by Mugabe and others to keep himself in power. Despite the
fact that that is what we are doing I think in relation to this
issue it is possible to simply present this very clearly not as
an issue of supporting MDC ministries, but of supporting particular
kinds of basic essential services. We know that Zimbabweans are
now living half as long as they were 40 years ago because of the
collapse of health services and all these other kinds of things.
So what we need to do is to develop a coherent strategy for the
reconstruction of basic merit good services—a pro-poor service
delivery strategy. We need to present that and we need to design
mechanisms for delivering it on the basis of consultation with
particular ministries; based on sanctions that we can use if we
see that those things are not being delivered properly. Whether
the minister in charge of the ministry is ZANU-PF or MDC is not
going to be the criterion that you are going to use to do that.
I guess—and, again, I have to admit that I do not know who
controls which ministry—my sense is that ZANU-PF's people
have gone into the security side and into agriculture because
that is what they want to control to stay in power. I suspect
they have handed over some of the health and so on, the social
security ministries to MDC, in which case we do not have a problem—we
will end up and say we want to spend this much on health, this
much on education, this much on sanitation and so on and we will
go to the ministries concerned and build a process for doing that
with them, and possibly try to talk about creating some systems
of administrative reform that create incentives that give officials
money if they deliver services rather than if they put it in their
pocket. There are all sorts of ways in which one can address that
issue. Whether you do it multilaterally or bilaterally is another
issue. Frankly, I am not all that concerned about being tarred
with the neo-colonial brush. What comes to my mind is a conversation
which I had with a young man who was trying to sell me a nine-foot
highcrested crane made out of metal—very beautiful and nobody
was buying it—and I said to him, "I am English,"
and he said, "What is wrong with your Mr Blair? Your Mr Blair
has gone into Iraq and got rid of the dictator there; why has
he not come here and done it for us?" I suspect that is a
view that would be very widely held in the townships of Zimbabwe.
That is a story that is being told by Mugabe and I do not think
it carries much weight now, particularly since handing over the
land to the people means handing it over to generals who are now
starving the people to death. So I think we should not be too
sensitive about that issue. But I do think that by developing
a well targeted and well organised and well thought through programme
of supporting services through the state and building state capacity
by doing this we can actually to some extent deal with that problem.
As I say, the bilateral/multilateral for me would be a practical
issue; I would want to know just how effective that bi/multilateral
programme was. They can often be relatively inefficient and I
have to say I have a prejudice against the United Nations as a
service delivery organisation. Whenever I have done research—and
I have done a lot of research on practical issues—the quality
of DFID projects has always been significantly higher by a factor
of several percentage points than any UN project that I have seen.
So that is a prejudice of my own. Again, I think that that is
something you would have to look at and ask yourselves, "Can
we see whether that process is an effective one or not?"
Chairman: I am conscious of time and
I know that Dr Kibble wants to come in, but if he does not mind
can I bring in John Battle because it is a related thing, and
if Dr Kibble could come back to us.
Q7 John Battle: In the background
of this in my mind is the whole question of corruption because
Transparency International suggests that corruption is now a major
challenge, not just organisational, but economic and political.
Obviously corruption would keep donors away. What is the scale
of the corruption? What are the worst areas affected and its impacts?
And what should Zimbabwe be doing to reassure the international
donors it is a place to which they could send their money?
Dr Kibble: Transparency International
reckons that Zimbabwe is the eleventh most corrupt nation in the
world at the current time, despite the fact that there has been
an anti-corruption unit since 2005 and despite the fact that Zimbabwe
signed up to the various SADC[2]
and AU[3]
protocols on anti-corruption. In a sense the question you are
asking is not just the kind of epiphenomenal stuff, it is the
fact that it is embedded into the culture now and has become so
widespread that it is actually part of the normal transaction
system. So you have a severe problem in trying to combat this
and it is not going to be an easy one. The two things go together
in terms of the kleptocracy of the regime and the human rights
abuses that are associated with it. So in that sense you are seeking
a kind of transition and we are not even in post-conflict yet—we
are still looking at transition. There are certain mechanisms
that Teddy has hinted at in terms of immediate delivery of services
and tracking revenues. My only proviso with that is that of course
for many people Tsvangirai missed a trick when he accepted that
the permanent civil servants, the secretaries, all the people
staffing the ministries remain as ZANU-PF appointments, which
means that you have a major problem not just of delivery but of
even any kind of acceptance that this is a legitimate thing for
outside donors to be doing. But there are groups inside Zimbabwe
like ZIG Watch of the Sokwanele NGO tracking Government performance,
they are looking at the whole issues of transparency; and to some
extent there is awareness as the process goes that corruption
is always there. For instance, the constitutional outreach teams
are supposed to be about 560 strong but ZANU-PF Women's League
suddenly jumped in there and all of a sudden there are 1,000 people
involved. So the Constitutional Commission then has to do its
own audit, which if it actually produces something will be a first
for Zimbabwe for several years. A number of audits have taken
place but no action has ever been taken against perpetrators of
either human rights' abuses or, indeed, of massive plundering
of state assets. So there are things that outside donors can do.
There are certainly questions of supporting civil society organisations
that are looking at transparency issues and Transparency International
still has an office inside Zimbabwe, I believe.
Mr Steinberg: If I could address
that as well because there is also a context here of a decade
or more of absolute lack of accountability and transparency and
I would again like to focus on the Central Bank where essentially
the answer was that if you wanted to fund anything or anybody
you just printed money. They invented things called the Productive
Sector Facility, the Basic Commodity Supply Side Intervention,
the Local Authorities' Reorientation Programme, which were just
ways to print money and give it to your cronies. As long as the
Central Bank Governor remains in place there is a clear sense
that it is business as usual. They have passed legislation that
has put a fence around the Central Bank and it is now literally
broke. It is being sued by suppliers because they simply do not
have resources.
Q8 Chairman: Is the Central Bank
the Reserve Bank?
Mr Steinberg: Right; I am using
the terms interchangeably. The fence around the Reserve Bank is
a good thing because this is an organisation that, even in this
last year, the IMF has reported has used $16 million of statutory
reserves to pay for embassies, to pay for presidential scholarships
for friends of Robert Mugabe, to pay for trips for 55 people to
attend a World Food Programme Summit in Rome. So you need to attack
that. The other point I would make is that the MDC has been very
aware of its need to avoid the taint of corruption. There are
cases right now that are floating around but they have been very
quick to jump in to establish codes of conduct, to establish committees,
to investigate that situation because, again, they need to prove
that they are different and that they are not going to be simply
falling for any Animal Farm type exercise and adopting the practices
of ZANU-PF.
Q9 Andrew Stunell: You have painted
a very bleak picture—I am sure quite rightly. There has
been huge migration out of Zimbabwe to neighbouring countries
and clearly that affects the relationship of those countries with
Zimbabwe. Can you say something about those developing relations
there, particularly with South Africa, and the links between those
countries and Zimbabwe in terms of unravelling things for the
future?
Dr Kibble: Funnily enough, the
last time I gave evidence to a parliamentary committee was to
the Foreign Affairs Committee, specifically on the issue of why
South Africa behaves towards Zimbabwe as it does; so I will put
that on the record and I can always send you the relevant documentation.
Q10 Andrew Stunell: We can take a
second look at what you said there.
Dr Kibble: The migration issue
is a complex one. A number of people have tried to document the
number of people who have actually left Zimbabwe, and you can
either do this by trying to count them or you can do it by extrapolating
from what you think the population would have been, bearing in
mind the HIV and AIDS epidemic, et cetera. Largely speaking there
seems to be some kind of calculation that up to three million
Zimbabweans have left the country and they are currently in South
Africa, Botswana and what is also known as Harare North, ie London
and Luton. The general problem has been not just xenophobia from
South Africa, although that has been a major problem—although
that is not just targeting Zimbabweans—but I think the major
problem has been the refusal to see this as anything other than
economic migrants. So the treatment of Zimbabweans inside the
region has been that of, "These people are only coming to
seek jobs and it is nothing to do with the current crisis inside
Zimbabwe." So there has been a disjuncture, I think, between
SADC attempts to try to solve the problem politically and to some
extent judicially around Zimbabwe and the kind of reaction that
is often quite a populist reaction to the numbers of Zimbabweans
actually inside Southern African regional countries. This goes
against the kind of support that those nations gave to the anti-apartheid
struggle inside South Africa and the liberation movement inside
Zimbabwe. It is very costly to deport lots and lots of Zimbabweans
every day when 35% turn round immediately and go back in again.
So you have a whole problem of cross-border traders, economic
migrants, political refugees all being lumped together, and if
you do not have refugee status then your treatment cannot be under
the specific international conventions that deal with refugees.
So the problem continues and it may be that with the World Cup
coming up in South Africa that there will be a greater appreciation
of how to actually deal with this economic situation that has
caused Zimbabweans to leave when they would much prefer to stay
in their own country.
Professor Brett: If I could take
up the second half of your question, which was the political implications
of relationships with the SADC community and South Africa in particular.
Of course that has been one of the central questions that has
been asked right through the last decade, which is to say given
that the ZANU regime has clearly, from the beginning of this century,
been breaking every rule in the book—it has been rigging
elections and all of those kinds of things—why is it that
ZANU has had almost 100% support from the region? The only pressure
that was applied to them by Mbeki when he was President of South
Africa was this notion that he had to have soft diplomacy because
if you did not have that he was not going to be listened to at
all and therefore he argued, probably legitimately, that if he
tried to put any real pressure on ZANU to change its behaviour
he would simply have been marginalised. That might have been true
but of course the question is the extent to which either South
Africa, or South Africa in collaboration with the other countries
in the region that take leadership from South Africa, would be
willing to recognise the two kinds of damages that Zimbabwe is
doing to them. The one damage is very clearly economic and social,
which is to say that they are confronted with three million people
who are semi-indigent wandering around towns doing unpleasant
things. When I lived in Johannesburg a couple of years ago one
of my friends said that these two old ladies were locked up in
a bathroom for half a day because a bunch of Zimbabweans had broken
into their house in Johannesburg and stolen things from them,
so that whole bunch of people without real incomes are a massive
problem in the region. Of course the whole loss of the Zimbabwe
economy—Zimbabwe used to be the major player after South
Africa in the regional economy and all of that has gone—has
imposed huge losses on everybody in that region. And we can see
that those are clearly associated with political immoralities
of various sorts and kinds. The damage that ZANU has done to the
Zimbabwean people is infinitely greater than the damage that Smith
did to the Zimbabwean people; during the Smith UDI[4]
regime the Zimbabwe economy grew 7% a year. This lot have basically
killed half the population or forced them to leave. So you have
that political question and of course that political question
is deeply difficult because this whole thing happened during the
period when Mbeki was talking about the new African renaissance
and African states were going to police each other's actions.
He then has Zimbabwe that broke every rule in the book for their
programme that was set up and yet he went in and connived with
this; so there is a huge loss of credibility of African governments.
Chairman: Can I bring in Richard Burden
because there is a specific question arising out of that and it
might be helpful to get that in.
Q11 Richard Burden: It is really
about where there looks like or there could be some hope of pressures,
particularly through the SADC—and I am thinking of the SADC
Tribunal last year, which found in favour of the cases being brought
and we are aware of the specific case of Mike Campbell and so
on; but the implications are of 79 white farmers and potentially
a lot more than that in terms of land seizure generally. What
is happening about this? It was November 2008 that all of this
happened; so where does it go from here?
Mr Steinberg: Step back for a
second and focus on the transition in South Africa because we
really have seen a much different approach under Jacob Zuma than
we did under Thabo Mbeki. Jacob Zuma has taken his three top advisers
and put them directly on the account and these people include
Mac Maharaj, who has the greatest revolutionary credentials in
the world; he cannot be out-revolutionised by Robert Mugabe. No
one is going to accuse Jacob Zuma of being a tool of the West.
He went into Maputo following the decision of Morgan Tsvangirai
to withdraw from the Government and read the riot act to Robert
Mugabe in private, such that we have heard that Mugabe was shocked.
He went back and within several weeks you had an electoral commission
established; you had a human rights commission established; you
had a media commission established. South Africa is paying attention
to this issue at this point and is applying the kind of pressure
that we are talking about. They need to continue to do that, and
I would argue—and this addresses the previous comment—that
they need to do it with the co-operation of the international
community. The easiest way to avoid charges of neo-imperialism
is to say that SADC negotiated this Global Political Agreement;
they are the guarantors of the agreement—"Mr Zuma,
working in cooperation with you, how can we help this process
move ahead?" That is the single answer to charges of British
national interests overweighing these processes. The answer to
your specific question about the Tribunal's decision is that the
current Government of Zimbabwe, the Attorney General remains a
ZANU-PF hardliner, who has basically thwarted the rule of law,
who got his Government to essentially say, "This has no meaning
for us," and it is now up to SADC to put its foot down and
to say, "Yes, it does and we are starting to talk about issues
of suspension from SADC if you do not obey the judgment of a ruling
to which you were a party."
Q12 Richard Burden: But it is some
time ago now—it was November 2008, the Tribunal decision,
and it was probably clear before then about what the response
was going to be and that the Zimbabwean legal team walked out
even before the decision was there. So what are the vibes coming
from South Africa?
Mr Steinberg: I will let Dr Kibble
address it, but the one thing I will say is that we are not yet
in a situation in Zimbabwe where the rule of law applies; it is
still a situation where the rule of power applies and that is
part of the reason we are so committed to this transition and,
frankly, in my mind, one of the reasons why we need to see the
movement of Gideon Gono and Johannes Tomana out of the positions
that they currently occupy.
Dr Kibble: In terms of the SADC
Tribunal, that decision in the Campbell case was November 2008.
The Zimbabwe High Court has shown no great willingness to follow
up the judgment. It has said it will do it in due course. It is
interesting that if you look on the positive side you might say
that the SADC judicial process it is actually going much further
than the SADC political process. Most of the cases that have come
before the SADC Tribunal so far have been to do with Zimbabwe.
There is currently a case outstanding from the Human Rights NGO
Forum about torture victims. So in that sense at least the SADC
Tribunal under the registrar Charles Mkandawire, who is trying
to push things along, has been quite a positive move. The problem
is that of course SADC is the ultimate court—the SADC Council
of Ministers is the ultimate court to actually bring those decisions
to fruition. You can get a decision through the SADC Tribunal—fine,
you get a legal judgment—but there is no mechanism for the
SADC Tribunal to actually put that into practice without the SADC
political organisations taking part, and that bit is obviously
much trickier. The fact that the judgment exists is an interesting
one and the counter factual, that if that Tribunal had found in
favour of the Zimbabwe Government, you cannot imagine that that
would not have been celebrated by ZANU-PF as a success. So the
picture is fairly mixed on that one. The North Gauteng Court currently
has a case from Afri-Forum, which is a South African NGO that
works on land issues in terms of making sure that that decision
by the Tribunal becomes part of South African law, which will
mean that if Zimbabwe is found to be in default of the SADC Tribunal
its assets inside South Africa could theoretically at least be
seized.
Mr Steinberg: If I could just
say that the critical point about the ZANU Government is that
it will never do anything that it does not want to do unless it
is absolutely forced to do so. So the critical question is what
sanctions could SADC use to push these things through? And is
it politically willing to actually do that?
Q13 Chairman: Can I take that forward,
on both SADC and the UN, on the issue of internally displaced
people? We get very mixed reports—the Government say there
are none and others say that there are hundreds and thousands
of people migrating backwards and forwards across the border.
I think actually in the discussion after we watched the film the
point that was being made was that nobody knows because these
are under the control of ZANU-PF and you cannot actually get at
them, but they are also the means by which they can secure victory
in future elections—by forcing people to vote the right
way or not vote at all—by stopping them voting for anything
other than ZANU-PF. The local NGOs are saying that the UN should
be doing something about this; there should be some direct action;
that we should be able to reach these people and we should be
able to support these people. What in reality could be done?
Dr Kibble: 2005 saw Operation
Murambatsvina "drive out the filth" in some versions,
or "restore order" in others, in which 750,000 people
were directly affected and one and a half million at least indirectly
affected, and there was the report by the UN Special Rapporteur,
Anna Tibaijuka, pointing out that this was a major human rights
abuse. Since then we have also had the displacement from March
to June 2008 associated with Operation Mavhoterapapi, which was
about displacing MDC supporters—burning their houses, torture,
rape and mayhem in general. So the internal displacement issue
has never gone away and the impacts of it are still not being
dealt with to any great extent, certainly not by the Government.
The reason for these kinds of displacements are the subject of
debate, but one reason is possibly the idea of driving MDC supporters
from urban areas into rural areas where they are more under the
control of the local ZANU-PF command structures and local Joint
Operations Command.
Professor Brett: There is an earlier
displacement, of course, because something like a quarter of a
million agricultural workers were displaced off commercial farms
when they were expropriated. I was told when I was doing research
in 2004 by a woman at the IFO that within five years of that displacement
something like 50,000 of those people had died from neglect, disease
and all of those things. The problem is that when people are displaced
like that they do not go off as a group and appear somewhere as
a million displaced people; they disappear off the farms and they
just become part of the great army of the unemployed who are,
in any case, 90% of the population. It is an interesting issue
of whether somebody who has been displaced forcibly by the Government
or somebody who simply lost his job because the whole economy
has collapsed has the greater problems and greater needs. I think
that that is an issue which could be addressed specifically as
something we might want to target as a donor agency. I think it
would be precisely the sort of thing that might be given to an
international NGO to manage if one wanted to do that. But I think
more broadly the problems of somebody who has lost his job as
a result of economic crisis is not all that different from the
problems of somebody who has lost his job because of some specific
political event. So it is that bigger issue that we have to address:
how do we put resources in that get the economy back to work so
that we can create real employment for millions of people?
Q14 Chairman: But in this insane
situation is it not the case in reality that ZANU are very happy
for these people either to disappear or to be forced into the
rural areas which they control? In a normal situation these people
would be voting for some change so they are either not voting
at all or they are voting for things to stay the same because
they are beaten into submission to do so. So how on earth does
the international community break that log-jam?
Mr Steinberg: One of the keys
here is to reduce the power of these forces that you are talking
about and we are absolutely convinced that so long as you have
a dozen senior leaders who, as we have talked about before, see
their personal stake and the continuation of this regime as paramount
then they will do what is necessary to keep themselves there.
These are generals, senior security officials who have a series
of personal motivations. Some truly believe that Tsvangirai will
sell out the revolution and they have revolutionary fervour and
do not want to see it returned to the good old days of Ian Smith.
Others are very concerned about their personal wealth because,
indeed, they have accumulated great wealth. Others are very concerned
about justice being applied to them because some were in fact
involved not only in the electoral abuses that we have seen over
the past couple of years but going all the way back to the 1980s
and their actions in Matabeleland, which most people would acknowledge
is either genocide or crimes against humanity. So they are very
concerned and will continue to use their power to thwart a transition
process. They recognise that time is against them; they recognise
that ZANU-PF in a recent poll got 10% support from the Zimbabwean
people—a very credible poll in fact. So our view is that
something has to be done to get those Generals to move on. It
is a very disagreeable option to look at a possible amnesty, a
domestic amnesty, a question of arranging a soft landing for the
individuals—it is not one that we like to talk about. But
it is one that the Zimbabweans themselves are talking about; they
are talking about, "Are we really going to allow a dozen
people to have the veto power on our future?" So I would
urge the Committee to think about talking with people about those
questions. Again, it is for the Zimbabweans to decide, not the
international community, but they need to be able to legitimise
that conversation.
Professor Brett: Can I say that
this leads directly into the issue of managing the next election
because all of these problems manifest themselves in attempts
to control politics, control voting and all of those kinds of
things; so I think all of the issues around how the next election
is going to be managed, who is going to manage it, the forms that
it is going to take, how you are going to avoid abuses and how
you are going to monitor it, those issues need to be addressed
and they need to be addressed in co-operation with people in the
region because it is much more credible to bring in monitors from
South Africa than from here.
Q15 Richard Burden: A credible register
would be a difficulty, would it not?
Professor Brett: That whole issue
is a major issue and, as I say, I think it is something on which
you need to take a general position and think about what sorts
of things can be put into that. The second point I would make
just in terms of what you do when you get to Zimbabwe, it is very
important for you to try to get close to and have serious conversations
with ZANU people as well as MDC people because I think the other
possible thing that might turn the situation around is the fact
that ZANU as a political organisation is deeply divided. There
are probably people in ZANU who do realise the enormity of the
problem that confronts them and the critical point coming up is
if ZANU can be split—and ZANU is clearly under huge stress,
the last congress was one of the most divisive that has ever existed
and even Mugabe publicly came out and said, "We are being
destroyed from within"—and it is important to get a
sense of what is going on inside ZANU to see whether there are
possibilities from inside that you could build a much more reasonably
broad-based Government that included some of ZANU without ZANU
being in control.
Q16 Hugh Bayley: One of the other
things that affects the electoral process is the number of Zimbabweans
living abroad. I have had MDC people say to me, "You are
just absorbing all our voters." To what extent are migrants
deterred from returning to Zimbabwe by the economic situation
and to what extent are they deterred through fear of political
reprisals?
Dr Kibble: There was a judgment
by the Immigration Tribunal here called RN that anybody
who could not demonstrably show support for ZANU-PF was at least
theoretically at risk if returned to Zimbabwe. So the British
Government—given that is a Tribunal decision—has had
to reconcile that with its desire to get rid of migrants as much
as possible. So people are scared of what is going to happen to
them if they return to either their area or an area under the
control of a ZANU-PF chief who does not know who these people
are and they (these chiefs) will be suspicious and will report
to security structures. There is that element of fear of the political
consequences of returning. One of the reasons that Tsvangirai
was barracked at Southwark Cathedral when he said that it was
time for Zimbabweans to go home was precisely because people were
extremely vulnerable and extremely aware of what was to face them
if they were returned to Zimbabwe. Undoubtedly people are here
because they cannot make a living inside Zimbabwe, but I think
the political imperative of them remaining here still remains
much the same as it has been for the last two years.
Q17 Hugh Bayley: What do you estimate
in the number of Zimbabweans living currently in other countries
in Southern Africa and the numbers in "Harare North"?
Dr Kibble: Harare North, if you
include Luton! I do not think that anybody really has a complete
handle on it, but certainly between three and four million Zimbabweans
inside Southern Africa—overwhelmingly in South Africa but
some in Botswana, a few in Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. The
population here has been estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000,
of whom some are undoubtedly illegal over-stayers, some have residency
rights and some have refugee status. Those are the figures I have
heard. I have no independent backup on those figures whatsoever,
and it would be an interesting piece of research to find out.
The whole issue—because of necessity certain people are
overstaying on student visas and visitors' visas—is clouded
with a certain mystification.
Q18 Hugh Bayley: These people are
disproportionately professionals and skilled or semi-skilled workers.
What impact does that absence have on the economy of Zimbabwe?
And if one has to provide economic progress to create the conditions
for political progress, what can be done to help those who can
return to return?
Dr Kibble: I think Donald wants
to come in, but just to say that if all the Zimbabwean nurses
could return home and all the teachers currently teaching in South
Africa that would make a major boost to the reconstruction of
Zimbabwe.
Mr Steinberg: I was going to start
by making that same point, that you have indeed seen, even over
the last year, a brain drain that is leaving not only the social
sectors that we are talking about, but the manufacturing sector,
the agricultural sector, the mining sector as well, which brings
up the larger question of how do you restore this economy? Indeed,
I do believe that the key to getting three to four million people
back from the region and the key to getting people elsewhere in
the world back is to give them economic opportunities. What that
insists upon is not only completing the Global Political Agreement
so that people know that this process is in fact going to take
place, but you have to remember what happened in October when
Morgan Tsvangirai temporarily suspended his participation in Government
and people thought that maybe this was going to fall apart, and
you saw a move of people leaving Harare for rural areas; you saw
hoarding of gasoline and other products; you saw the stock market
crash. So the economic implications of even a temporary blip in
this process are tremendous. If the process were to fall apart
the 3 or 4% growth that we have seen this last year would be a
20% decline over the next year. Zimbabweans also have to take
steps themselves, though. They have right now anti-business laws
and regulations. The indigenisation law is a disaster; it is scaring
off foreign investment and trade. They have to provide security
for ownership in their country. Zimbabwe is one of the 25 worst
places to invest in the world right now according to the World
Bank's estimate, and people understand that. Again, you have to
put in place mechanisms for clean foreign assistance to come in,
and again I would point to the Multi-Donor Trust Fund. God grant
that the Zimbabwe dollar is dead forever and they have to formally
accept another currency as their own currency—the South
African rand would be a good choice, the American dollar would
be just fine; there are other governments around the world who
do the exact same thing. Zimbabwe needs to finally put a dagger
into the 20 trillion dollar Zimbabwe notes that I have plastered
on my wall in my office. Finally, I need to stress again that
the Central Bank Governor has to go because he is the single symbol
of the old regime.
Chairman: We have slightly run out of
time but if I could just bring in Richard Burden.
Q19 Richard Burden: Just very briefly
about the DFID aid expenditure. For all the reasons we have been
talking about because of the severity of the crisis in Zimbabwe
a huge amount proportionally of DFID's aid is devoted now to humanitarian
assistance and a number of organisations have said that whilst
it is understandable, that the balance is wrong and that there
needs to be a way of getting that contribution more towards long-term
development rather than simply humanitarian assistance. Do you
agree that it is just a function of the crazy situation of the
whole thing, or is there something that can be done at the moment
to shift that balance?
Professor Brett: I agree absolutely
with that proposition. Clearly one does not want to stop spending
on the social sectors at all, but critically creating employment
is the way that you make it possible for people to generate the
resources they need to support their own services. I think that
there are two issues: there is the formal economic sector and
the informal sector. The formal sector can actually be got going
virtually costlessly, simply by eliminating a whole set of controls
over it that have stopped people from investing and the first
control, which was the whole monetary system and doing away with
that, has already produced massive results at virtually zero costs.
I think that given the fact that there is 80% or 90% of apparent
unemployment—it is not unemployment because if people are
unemployed they do not eat and they starve to death, so they must
be doing something—there is a small informal sector operating,
and I think the crucial thing that DFID could do would be to build
some small micro-enterprise projects that would in effect encourage
people to get into small business activities of various sorts
and kinds, and that could be done either using the state or, in
parallel with the state, by setting up micro-finance enterprises
and a whole array of other sorts of things. But that seems to
me to be where DFID has not actually been investing and that is
where the most important investment should go, particularly given
that Zimbabwe, of all African countries, actually went in and
systematically destroyed that informal business sector that was
responsible for the livelihoods of probably half of its populations,
in Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, when they virtually destroyed
half of the businesses in Harare and Bulawayo in the most devastating
kind of way. That would be my major recommendation in terms of
thinking about an allocation of DFID resources that would change
the way they operate.
Dr Kibble: At the moment we are
in a humanitarian-plus transitional phase. We are not yet in a
post-conflict phase. We obviously need the humanitarian aid to
continue with 2.2 million people being food insecure right now
and a major shortfall in cereals, etcetera, but we do need to
look at how that translates into developmental aid in a sequencing
way. It is not quite as crude as a stick and carrot approach.
You cannot institute development-orientated aid right now, but
what you can do is to say these are mechanisms that could work,
this is the money that is available, the clean kind of mechanisms
that Donald is talking about. Money going through international
NGOs and various other multi-lateral agencies into more and more
specifically developmental long-term assistance, once certain
preconditions are met, once you have indicators on the ability
of the state to handle that money, the ability of all the different
ministries to be able to come up with plans that are met, that
have no corruption attached to them. More and more you can move
into straightforward developmental assistance and possibly, lastly,
you can move into direct budgetary support but that is, in my
mind, quite a long way off yet.
Q20 Chairman: I think we recognise
that.
Mr Steinberg: Dr Kibble's point
about using aid as an opportunity to move the process ahead is
very important. I would also argue that sanctions and the lifting
of them should be much more deliberately tied to the steps that
we really want to see here. I will give just one example on using
aid as an opportunity. Right now under the Global Political Agreement
there is a commitment to do a land audit and this is very significant
because it gets to the heart of what land reform is all about
in Zimbabwe. It is not just a technical exercise. It is an effort
to say okay, we have transferred all of these large white tracts
of land to someone. Who have we transferred it to? What are they
doing with that land? Is it just lying fallow? Does a single general
own tracts and tracts of land? Is this what we really meant when
we were talking about breaking up the white farms and giving it
to the people of Zimbabwe? It is going to take another step. It
is going to say what do those smallholders need? Do they need
fertilisers? Do they need water? Do they need credit? This is
not just a technical exercise. This is the heart and soul of this
whole question about land reform and right now the Minister of
Agriculture says that it is too soon to do this. Even though we
committed in the Global Political Agreement, even though we have
already allocated the $31 million we need for it, even though
the EU have already said they will pay for 40% of that cost, apparently
it is "too soon" to do that exercise. Under this situation,
I do not understand how you could put money into a land reform
programme in Zimbabwe, which is absolutely necessary. No-one is
defending the past situation, and, with all due respect, I think
to say that people were better off under Ian Smith than they are
today or that the Government was more committed to growth then,
is particularly un-useful in this exercise, but, having said that,
we need to get to the root of what this is all about. Is it really
land reform or is it just empowering the cronies of Robert Mugabe?
That is what this is going to show us and any assistance we provide
to the agricultural sector ought to be tied to the completion
of an honest land audit.
Chairman: That saved me asking the last
question because that was an answer. Thank you to all three of
you. It has been very useful for us to have your insight. It is
obviously a confused and complicated situation that could go in
a lot of different directions but I think you have given us a
good feel for how aid and the development of aid can interact.
I want to thank you very much indeed.
1 Speaker of the Zimbabwe House of Assembly Back
2
Southern African Development Community Back
3
African Union Back
4
Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia in 1965 under
Ian Smith, Prime Minister Back
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