UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 252 - iHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREINTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the International Development Committee
on
Members present
Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair
John Battle
Hugh Bayley
Richard Burden
Mr Virendra Sharma
Andrew Stunell
________________
Memoranda submitted by Mr Donald Steinberg,
Professor Teddy Brett and Dr Steve Kibble
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Donald Steinberg, Deputy President (Policy), International Crisis Group; Professor Teddy Brett, Associate Programme Director, London School of Economics; and Dr Steve Kibble, Zimbabwe Europe Network, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman:
Thank
you very much for coming in. As I think
you will know, the Committee is actually visiting
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
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 be 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. Their 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
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 ten 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-included 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 round 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
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
Q4 Hugh Bayley: A few months ago I had quite a long conversation with Lovemore Moyo 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 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
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
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
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 and
AU 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 would 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
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 Central Bank the Reserve Bank?
Mr Steinberg: Right; I am using the terms interchangeably. That 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 run by ZANU-PF to pay 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 v. 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
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
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
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
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 Group - 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 Smith 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
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
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
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, both SADC and the UN, 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, which was probably 750,000 people 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 Makavhoterapapi, which was about displacing MDC support - burning their houses, torture, rape and mayhem in general. So there is a certain sense in which 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. It is a kind of unrecognised problem. The reason for these kinds of displacements are the subject of debate, but one effect is possibly the idea of driving MDC supporters from urban areas into rural areas where they are more under the control of the likely 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 people of 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 to 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 the ZANU are very happy for these people either to disappear or to be forced into the rural area 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
Dr Kibble: There was a judgment by the
Immigration Tribunal here called RF
that anybody who could not demonstrably show support for ZANU-PF was at least
theoretically at risk of being returned to
Q17 Hugh
Bayley: What do you estimate in the number of
Zimbabweans living currently in other countries in
Dr Kibble:
Q18 Hugh
Bayley: These people are disproportionately professionals
and skilled or semi-skilled workers.
What impact does that absence have on the economy of
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
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
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
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.
Memorandum submitted by World Vision
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Rob Rees, Africa Advocacy Co-ordinator, CAFOD; Mr William Anderson, Country Manager Zimbabwe, Christian Aid; and Mr Justin Byworth, Chief Executive, World Vision, gave evidence.
Q21 Chairman: Can I say welcome to you and thank you very much for coming in. You will probably appreciate that we are slightly pressed for time and one or two colleagues may have to leave. We want to hear from you and if you can be crisp in your answers that would be helpful but please tell us what you think we need to hear. You have been in before and heard what has been going on in the previous session. I will start with what DFID has been doing with its Protracted Relief Programme but, firstly, could you introduce yourself for the record.
Mr Anderson: I am William Anderson.
Mr Byworth: I am Justin Byworth from World Vision.
Mr Rees: I am Rob Rees from CAFOD.
Q22 Chairman: DFID ran this Protracted Relief Programme I and II which attracted some degree of support. How effective has it been? What have its problems been? What do you think they could or should have learned which might help inform the next stage?
Mr Anderson: Let me just make a quick point. Overall, I think DFID has a very good
programme in
Mr Byworth: I agree with everything that William has said. I think PRP is a flagship programme that DFID should be proud of. World Vision and others as partners of that have seen real impact in the lives of communities that we are working with. One particular aspect of it that we welcome is its focus on the vulnerable, including vulnerable children, combined with a focus on livelihoods to lift up the communities, through such things as conservation agriculture, together with safety net and social protection programming to support those who are most vulnerable.
Q23 Chairman: Could you explain that a bit more, though, because this is in a country where the Government has been crashing around destroying things all over the place. To what extent can they be sure that this sticks? What has been the reaction of the Government to this if then they decide they want to work in an area or displace people? Has that happened or how have they managed to protect it?
Mr Byworth: Certainly where World Vision is working is at that interface between community and the lowest tier of government, particularly government service deliveries in health and education. In those places obviously in the last 12 months we have seen real progress on that in terms of staff being there and able to deliver those basic services, so certainly we are more hopeful about that now than we were 12 to 18 months ago. Of course the future is uncertain.
Q24 Chairman: Are there no-go areas, parts of the country you just would not go?
Mr Byworth: Not for World Vision. We have been working in several parts all around the periphery of the country and we do not have that issue, certainly not recently since the NGO ban, but that was a different matter.
Mr Rees: I would endorse what they have said about the programme overall. Just a slight comment though on the way that the programme is managed through a contracting agency, GRM. We recognise that DFID needs to minimise transaction costs and save its own costs, but there is a feeling that it increases the distance between civil society organisations that are actually implementing the programme on the ground and the donor. Through the partners that we work with they would like to feel that they have some opportunity for more direct contact with DFID in order to be able to get a better understanding and to ensure that DFID has a good understanding of the situation that they are working in. This applies to a certain extent in the health sector as well. At the time of the cholera crisis DFID gave the funds for the response to cholera all to UNICEF and there were a lot of delays subsequently in the provision of the relief assistance. Generally, we think that there should be some improvements in the means of communication and dialogue between civil society and DFID.
Chairman: Thank you for that.
Q25 Richard Burden: On the same area of DFID programmes around agriculture, it is good to hear what you say about the conservation agriculture programme. DFID's work in terms of improving agricultural productivity has also been praised. Are there any ways that you think that that work can be improved upon and built upon for the future? I take your point about GRM as well, about mechanisms for distributing support to small farmers.
Mr Anderson: The key part
of conservation agriculture is teaching people how to better manage their land
and how to get a profitable harvest. The
national average in
Mr Byworth: One point to
add in terms of building on that, I think it is important also in supporting
agricultural development and greater food production to link from that into the
area of nutrition. Obviously even where
you have higher yields and higher consumption, it does not automatically
translate into better nutrition for children and women. There have been examples of other projects,
Healthy Harvests for example with UNICEF, where that work has been combined
with greater education on good nutritional practice in the home, and certainly
World Vision would advocate that a link is made between the agricultural-based
programmes with also the child-focused vulnerable programmes to improve child
nutrition. The levels of chronic
malnutrition and stunting in young adults in
Mr Rees: Conservation farming is aimed at making better use of resources and particularly rainfall, but at the end of the day the overall productivity will depend on a successful rainy season. Just at the moment there is a very big fear that the rains have stopped. There has been a three-week break in the rains in many places and yields are going to be greatly reduced and possibly be in total failure unless they resume. This then adds additional complications because farmers have taken resources, fertilisers and seeds on credit and the question is whether they are going to be expected to repay those loans even though they have no harvest and how they will do that. It raises the issue of land and land ownership, which is quite a critical factor in the matrix.
Mr Byworth: I think next week some of you will be there. I was there ten days ago and I saw literally the contrast where the conservation farming had been applied or not in terms of surviving the period without rain. I have not heard good news that there has been rain, but I heard from some farmers and they said last year they had good rains and a better harvest but because of the economic and political situation they did not have access to the inputs; this year they have access to the inputs and now they have no rain.
Q26 Chairman: The Committee has a reputation for finding the rain.
Mr Byworth: That is fantastic. The rainmakers!
Mr Anderson: I have a
couple of points, harking back to what was said before. One is about internally displaced
persons. That is a term that cannot be
used in
Q27 Hugh Bayley: As the health system has contracted health needs have increased. What can be done to recruit and retain and, dare I say, repatriate health staff?
Mr Byworth: That is a
very good question. Obviously there is
an international dimension to on which I do not think myself and World Vision
are best-placed to comment in terms of the diaspora, for example, in the
Q28 Andrew Stunell: If I could just pick up the specifics of the HIV programme where DFID has allocated £40 million over the next five years. Do you think DFID's focus on that is correct? Is it working? What would you say about the programme itself and the outcomes we might expect to see?
Mr Rees:
I would say it is a major priority and DFID
does have its level of commitment right.
Q29 Andrew Stunell: What about the vulnerable and margionalised groups?
Mr Byworth: As you mentioned, particularly the orphans and households made vulnerable by HIV, the scale of it is just immense. DFID has responded well to it. I think the programme of support that they have given through UNICEF has been very well received and well used. I think it is completing later this year in 2010, so we would certainly encourage DFID to look at continuing that. Rob mentioned earlier that UNICEF in terms of an intermediary and a grant-making body to NGOs and civil society has not been set up to do that as efficiently, say, as GRM have done for the PRP, so I think they either need some support to get better - we have had all kinds of problems with procurement through them - or look at an alternative intermediary. We certainly support what UNICEF is doing there and the DFID work with UNICEF. Although HIV prevalence rates have reduced, the numbers of orphans and those affected has increased, so it is going to be many years that this needs to be continued for.
Mr Rees: Within the work that we do under PRP with DFID support we try to prioritise families and communities that are affected by HIV, so single-parent families particularly and those mothers who are HIV positive will be given preferential treatment and access to support through that programme. It is a matter of targeting assistance to try to encourage and maintain self-reliance within the family and within the community because the problem is so big that institutions are not the response.
Q30 Andrew Stunell: Compared to other African countries, the amount of aid going in for HIV projects appears to be lower. Is that a function of the instability or is there government resistance or have we just not got round to it?
Mr Anderson: Lower than
what? I think one of the reasons why
there is not a huge amount of money is because of some of the large
foundations, for example the Bill Gates Foundation and PEPFAR, which are
supporting
Mr Byworth: We certainly
have not come across the social stigma that was there some years ago or a "head
in the sand" political mentality about this.
That has not been an issue that we have encountered locally. Programmes are able to be effective there but
the need is huge. There is a great link
with cross-border migration as well, with
Q31 Mr Sharma: In the last few years the child mortality rate has increased. What are the main causes of that and illness in the country and how do you then go about addressing these issues?
Mr Rees: I think it is a combination of factors reflecting the chaos that has prevailed within the country and within the primary health care sector: the reduction of the number of medical staff, the trained nurses and doctors who have left the country, so there are not the personnel on the ground to provide the services ;lack of basic supplies; the inability of the poorer sectors of the community to be able to pay for the services. Especially pre-dollarization where prices were going up by the minute, then it was a very difficult situation for anybody to plan ahead for and to be able to make the necessary allowances in terms of their own personal expenditure.
Mr Byworth: Certainly
under five child mortality is an absolute top priority. World Vision has a global campaign on that at
the moment to try and reduce the 8.8 million child deaths each year, to try and
reduce the six million or so of those which are largely preventable. Certainly in
Mr Anderson: It is due to the breakdown of Zimbabwean society and the social services structures. It is as basic as that.
Q32 Mr Sharma: You did mention that poor child health is due to malnutrition. How effective has the food aid programme been in tackling it?
Mr Anderson: Food aid now through the World Food Programme has been going on for eight years and there are very good things in that it has stopped people from dying. It has operated during the hunger gap period from around November/December to around March/April when the harvests come in. I would say it has saved lives. In terms of how we can improve that, I would suggest that there are areas that WFP should be looking at and nudged by DFID, particularly Food for Work, because simple food aid for eight years on the trot does induce dependency on food aid and people perhaps might decide just to take the bag of food at the end of the month rather than try to grow their own food. There are also things like issuing worm tablets. It is a very simple operational activity to issue worm tablets with the food aid. There are lots of other things that could be done like that to support the food aid. In general, I think the World Food Programme could be held a little bit more to account by DFID. NGOs are under strict accountable measures through the GRM and the TLC. The TLC is very good and they have certainly improved the capacity of international and national NGOs in particular. It would be nice to see a bit more accountability for UN structures as well.
Mr Byworth: World Vision has partnered with the World Food Programme and also the USAID food programme as significant suppliers of food aid for the whole of that period, so certainly we can attest first-hand to lives being saved through that, but we would also agree that with conditions economically improving, there needs to be a move (which has happened) to greater targeting of the most vulnerable because even if you move away from general food distributions, which has not yet happened and probably cannot yet happen fully but needs to happen over the coming years, you are going to still need some targeted food assistance for particularly vulnerable groups. Yes, there will need to be a move towards more livelihood-based use of food such as Food for Work and to combine that with agricultural development programmes to reduce dependency. I would not say it is time to stop yet but it is time to start the transition to a more targeted and more livelihoods-based approach. Definitely that transition needs to happen. DFID's view on that has been largely correct. Even in the PRP they are pushing for a more economically viable approach to recovery now, which again the conditions allow for more now than they did 12 or 18 months ago.
Q33 John Battle: Just as infant mortality is rising maternal mortality is rising as well and DFID has taken some actions to try and decrease the rising rate of maternal mortality. Is it successful? Is it helping?
Mr Byworth: Not sure is the answer.
Mr Anderson: I do not know but just as an anecdote, private hospitals were extremely good in Zimbabwe but even in private hospitals now, due to the collapse of the system, there are not enough medicines to go around, certainly not enough staff, so even if you wanted private expensive medical care in Zimbabwe you might be thinking about going down to Johannesburg. At the community level/communal level outside of these private hospitals you have very little to support you.
Mr Byworth: Certainly World Vision is not as involved with maternal health except in as much as the link with that and child and neonatal health particularly. I know the number of women having deliveries at home is very high. Up until the last couple of years it is 40% or something like that. The number of skilled birth attendants is not enough and access because of distances to travel are difficult. Again anecdotally, I saw women come for ante-natal check-ups just ten days ago at a clinic in Matabeleland, and there was a women who had had a baby two years before, and she contrasted that experience with the child that she had with her of four months on her knee and she talked about the difference of both access for delivery where she it at the health centre more recently and also access to immunisation and child monitoring. She talked of a real difference and a real improvement between her second child who was a baby and her first child who was two/two and half. That is anecdotal. In terms of DFID's impact I do not have any evidence.
Q34 John Battle: DFID themselves highlight the high rate of contraceptive use in
Mr Byworth: It links to PSIs perhaps.
Mr Anderson: I do not know the PSI programme.
Mr Byworth: They talk
about the high rate of female condom usage in
Q35 Hugh Bayley: What were the causes of the cholera outbreak last year? Are you expecting another outbreak this year? What should DFID be supporting in terms of promoting better public health and hygiene?
Mr Anderson: Cholera has
always been in
Mr Rees:
In the longer term there has to be major
rehabilitation of the infrastructure.
Community-based responses really are just short-term measures,
particularly in densely populated areas like
Q36 Hugh Bayley: I can see the need for the immediate response and I can see that that is possible now but what political conditions would you need for major infrastructure projects to be viable?
Mr Rees: It will be dependent upon economic recovery within the country and, as William alluded to, the financial resources being committed by the national government, whether it is from its own internally generated income or whether it is through aid packages after the resumption of normal aid and financial support from the international financial institutions. As I say, that is an issue to be dealt with in the future when those basic economic and political questions have been addressed.
Q37 Hugh Bayley: Can I ask a slightly wider question. It is a chicken and egg situation, is it not? If you wait until conditions are right, conditions will never be right. Politics is about a process of moving from the dire position you are in to a better position. How does the nexus of aid and politics help you? In other words, should you be planning this now and how would you plan it now? Should you be telling a big infrastructure player like the EU to put together a programme? How do you get to a position where you can improve infrastructure in a relatively near timescale?
Mr Anderson: There is a
recovery plan and DFID was part of producing that. It was based on The Hague Principles in
October 2007 and then a major donor meeting in
Q38 Andrew Stunell: Can we just take a look at education and children. The DFID allocation is 2% of aid going to education. There has been talk about schools getting back to work and so on and yet there are clearly some priority areas. Could you just comment on the amount of money that DFID is allocating and the effectiveness of what it is doing. Are we short of teachers? Are we short of buildings? Are we short of security? What do you see as being the problems or perhaps there are not any problems?
Mr Rees:
All of the above, I would say. There is a shortage of teachers. Along with health professionals many teachers
have migrated out of the country. I
heard an interesting report that some of the best educations in the countries
around
Q39 Andrew Stunell: So do you think this is something which can come through the state or DFID can only contribute through the state? In terms of the amount being given, 2% of DFID's money is going to education; is that about right, is it too much or too little?
Mr Anderson: I do not
know. In terms of the Ministry of
Education, it is run by David Coltart at the moment. He was the only MDC MP not to accept a brand
new Mercedes Benz when he took office.
He is trying to drive out corruption but again his hands are in effect
tied to a large extent because of the political deadlock between ZANU-PF and
the MDC. He is also completely tied by
the fact that teachers are not paid so they want to go to
Mr Rees:
I do not think there is any country in
Mr Anderson: I think in 1980 ZANU-PF said that they were going to provide free primary education. We have not seen that to date.
Q40 John Battle: I think it was Justin that mentioned that there are over a million orphans and vulnerable children. In your submission you ask DFID to carry out a Child Rights Situational Analysis. I want to ask a little bit about how effective you think that would be. I understand that many of the orphans go to stay with extended family. What is the support given to extended families with over one million children pushed out to further relatives to cope with? What is your view on the orphan situation?
Mr Byworth: We talked
about it a little earlier. It is an
enormous situation. Obviously family
coping mechanisms are stretched beyond breaking point in many cases. World Vision's point on child rights is that
in some respects DFID often uses a human rights framework to look at things and
obviously that was relevant when they put together their strategy for
Q41 Chairman: You have all been complimentary about DFID's basic programme in
Mr Byworth: Firstly, let me say from World Vision's perspective there is a wider issue about DFID instruments of aid and using intermediaries like GRM to move transaction costs out of DFID, the head count and all of those things, into a third party where the transaction costs are lower.
Q42 Chairman: You are suggesting it is more to do with that bureaucratic pressure
within DFID than it is to do specifically with the situation in
Mr Byworth: I am just saying
there is a wider issue about DFID's aid
instruments. I think GRM work well. We have been happy with them and they work
effectively. The people and the way that
they work has been good. The one major
concern we have raised is we are very happy to have the highest level of
compliance and monitoring in terms of standards to demonstrate impact and to
demonstrate outcomes. That is not an
issue for us but where you have multiple advisers on different thematic areas
and you have compliance monitoring and all the frameworks that come with that,
you can get three meetings in the same week from different people and they are
not always very joined-up. In our case
we are working out of
Q43 Chairman: Would it be better delivered if DFID appointed one person to deal with each NGO or each programme rather than dealing with it by sectors?
Mr Byworth: We have good contact points within GRM on the programme. For good reason, they have set up an elaborate mechanism to get good technical advice and support. You mentioned, William, about the support they have given to NGOs, both international NGOs and local ones. That is welcome but they could do with being a bit more co-ordinated. Their internal systems tend toward silos. It is more about streamlining what is happening. Plus I think the point Rob made, a bit more access to DFID perhaps in terms of policy dimensions of things. If you subcontract a programme, the relationship should be subcontracted in terms of partners. If DFID had a bit more of a partnership arrangement with civil society in terms of dialoguing about bigger picture issues rather than project management issues, I think a combination of fewer silos in GRM and better co-ordination and streamlining with a bit more access and co-ordination more in the sense of policy would be helpful.
Mr Rees: I have nothing really to add to what I said before about the specific example that my colleagues informed me about. They sometimes feel that it is difficult for them to get access directly to DFID to talk about the policy issues, to talk about the broader aspects of the programme because their relationship is constrained to dealing with the managing agent.
Q44 Chairman: Is that because there are not enough people and they are too busy or do you think it is because they have created a mechanism where it just does not happen?
Mr Rees: They seem to have created this mechanism but what the real thinking is behind that, whether it is because of pressure of work and people are too busy or whether it is just a policy to simplify the management from their point of view, I am not sure.
Q45 Chairman: We can explore that obviously but do you have anything to add, William?
Mr Anderson: Just to stress my earlier point that it would be nice to see greater accountability of the UN in the same way that NGOs are held to account.
Chairman: We can all shout "hallelujah" to that. Okay, thank you for that. John Battle?
Q46 John Battle: I think you mentioned, William, that the World Food Programme perhaps needs more accountability but perhaps its operations as well. DFID gives them £9 million and will probably give more. Should we be pursuing other approaches to the World Food Programme? How could we change it to make it more effective as well as just tracking the money?
Mr Anderson: That is a very big question. In a drive for efficiency and effectiveness, the UN perhaps is not the best mechanism at the moment but it is the only mechanism we have, so DFID has to put in place some more accountability measures that hold the UN to account for that.
Mr Byworth: One of the
things that World Vision does where we partner with the World Food Programme in
terms of delivering food to vulnerable populations, we have established in many
of our agencies work on areas of humanitarian accountability to give the people
who receive the food a voice. In every
place where we are doing food distribution we have a complaints mechanism and a
helpdesk. I have sat there and looked at
the logs of people who were meant to be receiving food complaining if someone
in their family was not registered properly or if they were not happy with the
rations or type of food. Building in
mechanisms where the beneficiaries themselves have a voice and that is heard
needs to happen more across the board, both in
Mr Anderson: Just thinking
back to 2008, the UN set up the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA) against the Government's wishes in 2005 after
Murambatsvina. In 2008 the head of OCHA
was rather a block to NGOs trying to ensure that the operational ban did not
happen or to respond effectively to what the needs were on the ground. We complained as NGOs to the donors,
particularly DFID, quite a lot about this and eventually we wrote a letter to
the UN in
Q47 Chairman: Obviously there is a whole substructure there about the relationship
with international organisations. Just
one particular point about the WFP. We
did a report on them 18 months ago at the height of the crisis, as it turned
out, but they were keen of course not just to respond to emergencies but
actually to anticipate them, not just with emergency back-up but with actual
planting programmes. Are they doing any
of that kind of work in
Mr Anderson: I think it is pretty much business as usual, it is pretty much food relief. I know they were talking about possibly distributing some seeds and fertiliser almost with the FAO or in co-ordination with them, but, to be honest, I do not know.
Q48 Chairman: That is fair enough. We can obviously ask about that because I think we are looking at some of the basic agricultural support programmes that DFID is supporting and I just wondered whether WFP and DFID are in competition or at odds with each other on that.
Mr Byworth: I believe they have done some maize seed distributions but it has not been a massive change of strategy. Certainly World Vision, together with WFP inputs and other support, have done quite a lot of agricultural inputs. I am not sure to what extent they have shifted. As you said, it is business as usual.
Q49 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. We appreciate the informal evidence you have given us but it is nice to have a bit of information on record which is helpful to our inquiry and the production of our report at the end of the day, so can I thank you all three of you very much indeed for coming in.
Mr Byworth: Have a very good trip for those of you who are going.