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Note: This document is from the archive of the Africa Policy E-Journal, published
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Zimbabwe: Recent Documents
Zimbabwe: Recent Documents
Date distributed (ymd): 000314
Document reposted by APIC
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Southern Africa
Issue Areas: +political/rights+
Summary Contents:
This posting contains several recent documents relating to
political developments in Zimbabwe, including a statement from
the Centre for Democracy and Development's monitoring team for
the February constitutional referendum, in which the draft
constitution was rejected by voters; several excerpts
concerning Zimbabwe from the debate in the APIC/ECA Electronic
Roundtable session on democracy and human rights; and a brief
excerpt from the Media Monitoring Project about coverage on
recent farm invasions.
A nationwide opinion poll reported in the Zimbabwe Standard on
March 12 found that 36% said they wanted the ruling Zanu PF to
continue ruling the country, while 63% said it was "time for
a change."
For additional news and links, including background on the
referendum and news on the parliamentary elections now
scheduled for late April, see
http://www.africanews.org/south/zimbabwe and
http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN/archive/zimbabwe.htm
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Centre for Democracy and Development
12, The Leathermarket {First Floor}, Weston Street
London SE1 3ER UK
Tel: +44 (20) 7407 0772 Fax: +44 (20) 7407 0773
Email: cdd@cdd.org.uk
Web: http://www.cdd.org.uk
Harare Contacts: +263 91 222 873; Fax: +263 4 300 340.
Email: mbayas@internet.co.zw; cddorg@aol.com.
Interim Statement by Professor Amos Sawyer, Chairperson.
The CDD Observer Group congratulates Zimbabweans on the
completion of the national referendum on the draft
constitution. The CDD has been involved in evaluating the
constitutional reform process in Zimbabwe since September,
1999.
We observed the national referendum over the two-day period,
February 12 & 13, 2000. Our Mission, consisting of 9 observers
from Liberia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Eritrea, and
Nigeria was deployed to six of the ten provinces. Prior to
this, the groups had held consultative meetings with various
stakeholders on arrival in the country on February 8, 2000.
The groups visited a total of 75 polling stations across the
country.
We commend the efforts of the electoral officials, security
teams and local monitors who worked tirelessly to ensure that
the referendum was conducted in an atmosphere that was
generally free, fair and peaceful. The CDD Observer Group
noted in all the provinces visited, a number of technical and
logistical problems. In the first category of shortcomings
were the following: the delay in releasing the designation of
the polling stations across the country; the confusion
surrounding the alien voters' list which caused severe delay
and, in some cases, inability of eligible permanent residents
to vote; and the confusion surrounding the use of the drivers'
licence.
We are of the view that whilst the counting procedure at the
various counting centres was open and transparent, there is
room for improvement in the transmission of results between
the centres and the Registrar General's office.
With the Referendum now over, we are of the view that now is
the time to revisit the constitution-making process to which
all sides in the debate have made substantial contributions
thus far. Through their vote, the People of Zimbabwe have
challenged their leaders to build a national consensus and to
establish an appropriate mechanism for constructive dialogue
as the way forward. We urge all stakeholders, regardless of
the outcome of the Referendum, not to adopt the attitude of
"winner takes all". This should be an opportunity for a very
positive re-engagement which is critical not only for
Zimbabwe, but also for Africa and the wider international
community as a whole.
Finally, we wish to record our thanks to all those Zimbabweans
who made our delegation welcome and assisted us in fulfilling
our mission. In particular, we thank the Registrar-General
and his officials, the Government of Zimbabwe, the
Constitutional Commission of Zimbabwe, National Constitution
Assembly, the Ford Foundation (Southern Africa) and the
Southern African Regional Institute for Policy Studies of the
SAPES Trust for their support.
The CDD Observer Group will release its full report as part of
the overall evaluation of the constitution-making process in
Zimbabwe in due course. That Report will be submitted to the
Government of Zimbabwe, the Registrar General's office,
political parties, civil society institutions, local and
international media and subsequently to all that may have an
interest in the document.
Professor Amos Sawyer Chairperson, CDD Observer Mission
15th February, 2000
Members of the CDD Observer Mission
Professor Amos Sawyer, (Chairperson of the Observer Mission)
is a distinguished political scientist and former President of
Liberia's national unity government between 1990 and 1994. He
is currently Chairperson, Board of Directors, Centre for
Democratic Empowerment, Liberia.
Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the General Secretary of the
Global Pan African Movement Secretariat in Kampala, Uganda and
Chair of the CDD International Governing Council.
Dr Margaret K.Y. Agama is a Research Associate at the Centre
for Conflict Resolution in Accra, Ghana and Medical Doctor
with the Ghana's Ministry of Defence.
Mrs Abeba T. Baatai is the Coordinator of the Citizens
Referendum Monitoring Group in Eritrea and a former member of
the Eritrean Constitutional Commission.
Mr Hassen Ebrahim is the Deputy Director-General at the South
Africa's Department of Justice. Mr Ebrahim formerly served as
Executive Director of the South Africa's Constitutional
Assembly, which produced the country's current constitution.
He is the author of Soul of the Nation: The Making of South
Africa's Constitution (Oxford University Press, 1998) which
received a distinguished mention in the Noma 1999 awards.
Mr Femi Falana is the President of the Committee for the
Defence of Human Rights in Nigeria. A distinguished lawyer and
human rights activist, Mr Falana was formerly president of the
National Association of Democratic Lawyers and has been at the
forefront of the campaign against military rule in Nigeria.
Dr Willy Mutunga is the Executive Director of the Kenyan Human
Rights Commission. Dr Mutunga was formerly Co-Chair of the
Citizens Coalition for Constitutional Change in Kenya. He is
also the author of Constitutional Making from the Middle
(Mwengo, 1998), an account of the struggle for constitutional
reform in Kenya.
Mrs Florence Nkurukenda is a Deputy Chairperson of Uganda's
Electoral Commission.
Mr Eze Anaba is a Senior Editor with Nigeria's leading daily,
The Vanguard Newspaper.
Secretariat
Dr J. 'Kayode Fayemi, Director, Centre for Democracy &
Development
Ms Susan Mbaya, Local Coordinator of the Observer Mission
Excerpts from APIC/ECA Electronic Roundtable
(1) from Panelist Presentation: Dede Amanor-Wilks, Harare,
Zimbabwe (Feb. 12, 2000)
(for full text of presentation, including references, see
http://www.africapolicy.org/rtable/ded0002.htm)
Zimbabwe's Farm Workers and the New Constitution
...while the international media, together with some local
media, have been preoccupied by issues such as last year's
arrests of journalists and Mugabe's "gay-bashing", when viewed
from the perspective of Zimbabwe's human rights record as a
whole, these amount to isolated incidents, which, though
serious infringements of civil liberties ... pale into
insignificance when compared to the disregard for human rights
for an entire segment of Zimbabwe's population, namely
agricultural workers, who make up 25% of the formal sector
labour force and between 11% and 18% of the total population,
working for commercial farmers who contribute about 40% of
foreign exchange earnings and 15% of the country's GDP.
Yet, despite the obvious wealth of the commercial agriculture
sector, many farm workers live in conditions of squalor and
have been relegated to a system of "domestic government"
(Rutherford 1996, see also Amanor-Wilks 1995) in which they
continue to depend on farmer paternalism for sub-subsistence
wages and perhaps food handouts, generally poor and often
appalling housing and sanitation, inadequate health care and
schooling for their children, and perhaps small patches of
land on which to cultivate nutrition gardens. It is therefore
not surprising that farm worker communities show among the
highest rates of morbidity, malnutrition, mortality, and
illiteracy in the country (Mugwetsi and Balleis 1994,
Loewenson 1992). Lack of political representation, moreover,
places farm workers among the most marginalised of Zimbabwe's
populations. Until late 1997, farm workers were barred from
voting in local government elections because they are not
property-owning ratepayers or rentpayers.
Farm workers have remained outside the normal governance
structures available to other Zimbabwean communities largely
because they have traditionally been viewed as "aliens", even
though many of them are in fact Zimbabweans, and a good number
second, third or fourth generation Malawians, Mozambicans and
Zambians who have no other home but Zimbabwe, but because of
high levels of illiteracy and lack of political representation
may not have regularised their status in the country.
The example also suggests a critical role for civil society in
bringing to the fore human rights abuses so commonplace within
a particular sector as to have assumed the appearance of
normalcy. Indeed, in addition to the social welfare issues
outlined above, the agricultural sector is guilty also of the
more obvious forms of rights abuse, such as physical beatings
and otherwise degrading treatment of workers, although the
full extent of this is not generally known. Within farm worker
communities themselves, women are particulary vulnerable to
physical and sexual abuse. ...
In many ways the right of farm workers to be protected under
the new constitution is complicated by their unclear
citizenship status. The new draft constitution provides for
citizenship by birth, descent or registration. But citizenship
by birth can only be bestowed if either parent was a citizen
at the time of a person's birth. In terms of citizenship by
registration, the draft constitution deals only with legal
adoption, minor children born of Zimbawean citizens by
registration and the acquisition of citizenship through
marriage. ... While the new constitution upholds the right of
children to "have a nationality from birth", in the case of
farm workers, children continue to be born each day to workers
who themselves have no legal status and therefore no
nationality to bequeath to their children. Many farm workers,
even second or third generation workers, carry national
idenfication cards bearing the designation "alien". An
alarming number of them have no national ID, much less birth
certificates for their children. Without a birth certificate,
children born on commercial farms cannot obtain a national ID.
Nor can they sit Grade 7 examinations qualifying them to enter
secondary school, assuming that such facilities exist within
walking distance of the farms on which they reside. ...
Though given the franchise at the end of 1997, it has in
practical terms been difficult for farm workers to participate
meaningfully in the Rural District Councils, not least because
the councils are dominated by commercial farmers, unused to
sharing power or ideas with their employees. Indeed, until the
unprecedented and violent 1997 nationwide stike by farm
workers, the agricultural sector had been seen as composed of
largely docile workers lacking the means or vision to press
for democratic change. Going now beyond the voluntarist
welfare approach, based, in the absence of minimum standards
governing the sector, on the individual sense of
responsibility of each farm employer, and shaped still by a
master-servant relationship, farm workers need to be given the
means to articulate their own demands and to themselves set
the pace for democratic change in their sector.
(2) Selected comments from Roundtable message archive
(for full archive see
http://www.africapolicy.org/rtable).
Steven Friedman, Center for Policy Studies, South Africa,
March 2, 2000
Do constitutional processes, even if they are driven by the
existing elites, present opportunities? As long as they entail
granting some degree of opportunity for public participation,
however grudging, absolutely - and recent events in Zimbabwe
are surely an eloquent testimony. It is also worth recalling
a previous period in that country's history in which, even
under white minority rule, the Pearce Commission process
initiated by Britain created opportunities for opposition to
the system to crystallise - historians may well conclude that
this rather colonial exercise in consultation began the
process which ultimately ended white rule. (Outside Africa, to
name but one example, the Pinochet junta's role in Chile ended
after a referendum which the military government called).
The point, of course, is that any opportunity for open,
peaceful, popular mobilisation is important, even if it is
limited and initiated by elites to shore up their rule. Most
attempts to use the opportunity will not produce the immediate
results achieved in Zimbabwe but, at the very least, they will
create beachheads of democratic organisation which will not
disappear when the constitutional process is over.
Patricia McFadden, SARIPS, Harare, Zimbabwe
I want to use the recent experience of Zimbabwe with `popular'
constitutionalism to show how African scholars here and I
suspect elsewhere, assumed that the ruling party would win
because they had the 'rural vote' in the bag. Most of us
seemed resigned to the strong possibility that, although large
numbers of urban based Zimbabweans would use the referendum to
express their dissatisfaction as citizens, the rural folk
(even the terms we use are archaic) would enable the ruling
elite to retain the political advantage. We were of course
proved wrong - but for me, this strengthens my argument that
Africa can only move on if our people have access to those
amenities which nurture the development of a modern
consciousness. If Africans develop a consciousness of
entitlement - the right to vote as they choose, not to 'vote'
as prisoners of a state which controls the most critical
resource in their lives (land) even as it proclaims that the
land belongs to the people, then we will have taken a critical
step forward to changing this continent.
The MEDIA UPDATE is published and distributed by Media
Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ), 221 Fife Avenue, Harare,
Tel/fax: 263 4 735441/2, 733486, E-mail: monitors@icon.co.zw,
Web: http://www.icon.co.zw/mmpz
Feel free to respond to MMPZ.
We can not reply to everything but we will look at each
message. Please feel free to circulate this message.
MEDIA UPDATE No. 2000/9
FEBRUARY 28th - MARCH 5th
Farm Invasions
The coverage of the countrywide invasions of white-owned farms
by war veterans illustrated the worst failings of the publicly
funded media. Both ZBC and ZIMPAPERS ignored the illegality of
the action and largely failed to report the voices of those
most affected. The opinions of farmers, farmers'
organisations, farm workers and the man/ woman in the street
were obliterated by those of War Veterans, the Head of State
and other senior government officials. ZBC did not report the
Minister of Home Affairs' press conference on March 2nd in
which he stated that the invasions were indeed illegal and
would be stopped by the police. Instead the main bulletins led
with an interview with the President, in which he stated:
No, we will not put a stop to the invasions which are a
demonstration, a peaceful demonstration and a lawful
demonstration by the ex-combatants. Its just the aspects of
law and order that we would want to see observed. If these are
observed we will not interfere at all.
ZBC's reporter failed to challenge the President on the
obvious anomalies of this statement. That the general public
have fewer qualms and a better understanding of the law
concerning trespass, was made clear from the live phone-ins
during ZBC radio's current affairs programmes Spotlight and
the Heart of the Matter. ZBC television's 2 main so-called
current affairs programmes avoided any of the critical issues
affecting Zimbabwe at the moment and concentrated on CITES. In
terms of providing a voice to the public, ZBC radio is
performing a service far in advance of ZTV and ZIMPAPERS.
ZIMPAPERS followed the same trend of giving prominence only to
the voice of the government, the war veterans and their
leader. In a total of 23 ZIMPAPERS' articles on the subject,
government officials were quoted 20 times, War Veterans 18
times and the affected farmers and their respective
organisations twice and 4 times respectively. Farm workers had
no voice at all.
ZIMPAPERS repeatedly quoted war veterans stating that the farm
invasions were the result of the rejection of the draft
constitution. Whites in general were accused of having
vigorously campaigned for a 'NO' vote. The invasions were
justified because of the landlessness of the majority. Similar
sentiment was expressed in The Zimbabwe Mirror (March 3rd)
comment.
None of the publicly funded media examined the lack of a
sustainable land redistribution policy as being the root cause
of the problem. None challenged the statement from war
veterans saying that they would also target Ministers' farms.
None pointed out that Clause 57 could have been implemented
through an act of parliament at any time over the last 13
years -- nor analysed the announcement that government now
plans to do exactly that.
This material is being reposted for wider distribution by the
Africa Policy Information Center (APIC). APIC's primary
objective is to widen international policy debates around
African issues, by concentrating on providing accessible
policy-relevant information and analysis usable by a wide
range of groups and individuals.
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