Zimbabwe's finance minister Tendai Biti adressed a meeting at the National Endowment for Democracy today
Corrupt hardliners within Zimbabwe’s former ruling party are sabotaging efforts to realize the democratizing commitments of the September 2008 global political agreement, the country’s finance minister said today. Speaking at the National Endowment for Democracy, finance minister blamed the “catfish” – creatures that prefer to lie in the mud of corrupt patronage – for “sponsoring all of the toxic activities” designed to prevent genuine power-sharing, including ongoing land seizures and the continued detention of Roy Bennett and other political prisoners.
In joining the government for national unity, the democratic opposition had inherited a “totally and thoroughly failed state,” said Biti, in Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Bank and to plead for financial assistance. There is currently a window of opportunity to foster reform, he said, but observers have pointed to a lack of tangible progress reform and the United States and the European Union are reluctant to release funds without evidence of a genuine shift towards rule of law and transparency.
He defended the “very unsatisfactory” agreement as a flawed but necessary compromise to prevent the country deteriorating into a “Somalia scenario”, he told the meeting, co-organized with Freedom House (watch a recording of the event here). It had been a “most excruciating experience” to negotiate the pact with individuals personally responsible for egregious human rights abuses, but the democratic opposition had no other viable options.
The power-sharing pact provides for several specific benchmarks for gauging political reform, but Biti was unable to point to visible progress other than to stress that violence had diminished. Unfortunately, he said, “peace and stability do not attract headlines in The New York Times or The Washington Post.”
As long as political prisoners remain incarcerated and security service chiefs openly disdain the Prime Minister, the government of national unity remain one in name only, Tyanai Masiya, chairman of the Harare-based Centre for Research and Development, told the meeting.
Given the limitations of the pact, civil society has a three-fold role, said Vukasin Petrovic, Freedom House’s senior program manager for Africa. It should monitor and hold government accountable, be a driver for change, and help the “progressive parts” of the government through its expertise, resources and by acting as a communications channel between government and people.
Zimbabwe’s labor movement has been perhaps the largest and most consistently mobilized element of civil society, said Marc Bayard, director of the Solidarity Center’s Africa program. The prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, had been an architect of the Zimbabwean Confederation of Trade Unions, while the ZCTU had been a force behind the formation of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and, despite violent assaults, a key mobilizing force in civil society.
The March 2008 election was the first Zimbabwean poll in which domestic observers could statistically confirm the true result, said Susan Page, the National Democratic Institute’s regional director for Southern and East Africa, describing NDI’s collaboration with the Zimbabwe Election Support Network.
The new government may have made an electrifying difference in some areas, but the media is not one of them. Some 74 days after the global agreement committed the parties to freeing the media “as a matter of urgency”, independent newspapers remain banned and the state still controls the airwaves, said Ray Choto, a senior editor with Voice of America’s Zimbabwe Service.
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