Mugabe’s Dangerous Path to Impeachment

Rejoice Ngwenya, Harare, Zimbabwe

Exactly twenty-nine years into our ‘independence’ many Zimbabweans are worried about the resurgence of property rights violations. The renewed plunder is ostensibly spearheaded by President Robert Mugabe in disregard for the Global Political Agreement (GPA), and is more poignantly an affront to the ‘person’ of the Joint Monitoring Implementation Committee

While Minister of Industry and Commerce Professor Welshman Ncube, also co-chairperson of JOMIC argues that the entity still has an ‘effective monitoring mandate’, public posturing of Mugabe and Didymus Mutasa, a ‘state security minister’, sound a high decibel in ultimate contradiction.

Mutasa, the author of Zimbabwe’s obnoxious ‘offer letters’ that ZANU-PF activists use to occupy farms, tells the world that Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirayi’s protest against the latest land invasions are from a man ‘who does not live in Zimbabwe’.

One might also question why ZANU-PF Foreign Affairs Minister, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, vigorously denies that there are political prisoners in Zimbabwe! Meanwhile Mugabe, for the second time in three months, has publicly insisted that land invasions disguised as ‘reforms’ will continue. When this high level diatribe is interpreted at grassroots level, it becomes a license for organised decimation of what is left of property rights in Zimbabwe’s commercial farming sector.

What this does is to cast doubt on credibility of Tsvangirayi and his team, who, for good reason, appear mere junior partners in an increasingly hollow political union.
Mutasa is a ‘minister’ of sorts, so technically is subordinate to Tsvangirayi and in terms of rules of natural justice, he should be censured for insulting his immediate superior.

But the reality on the ground is that of a parallel reporting system that places Mugabe at the helm of political ministries which act in an orbit external to the GPA. The question therefore is: if Mugabe’s utterances are against the letter and spirit of the SADC-brokered GPA, why is it that the ‘new’
Parliament does not impeach him?

The biggest challenge facing MDC, as I have always insisted, is their ideological misalignment on the subject of land reform. The GPA puts a clearer perspective on this dichotomy: “RECOGNISING and accepting that the Land Question has been at the core of the contestation in Zimbabwe and acknowledging the centrality of issues relating to the rule of law, respect for human rights, democracy and governance.

The Parties hereby agree to: (a) conduct a comprehensive, transparent and non-partisan land audit, during the tenure of the Seventh Parliament of Zimbabwe, for the purpose of establishing accountability and eliminating multiple farm ownerships; (b) ensure that all Zimbabweans who are eligible to be allocated land and who apply for it shall be considered for allocation of land irrespective of race, gender, religion, ethnicity or political affiliation; (c) ensure security of tenure to all land holders;

The rest include: (d) call upon the United Kingdom government to accept the primary responsibility to pay compensation for land acquired from former land owners for
resettlement; and (e) work together to secure international support and finance for the land reform programme in terms of compensation for the former land owners and support for new farmers.”

On any clear day, it is therefore impossible to comprehend why MDC, realising the incapacity of JOMIC to guarantee the democratic rights of citizens, is not evoking the clause that binds the implementation of this agreement to be guaranteed and underwritten by the Facilitator, SADC and the AU.

My submission is that Deputy Prime Minister Professor Arthur Mutambara and his anti-sanctions MDC team have landed their strategic capsule way outside the waters of good political judgement. If, as Mugabe always says, ‘sanctions’ were imposed on Zimbabwe because of ‘successful land reform’, given that, according to him again, the reform continues, what makes MDC troopers believe that the ‘sanctions’ can be lifted?

To argue, as the GPA alleges, that land is at the core of Zimbabwe’s struggle for independence is to diminish the significance of human liberty. Land ownership comes under a bevy of many political, economic and civil rights.

Therefore, if, as Mugabe and Professor Mutambara claim, Zimbabwe is under land-reform instigated sanctions, surely they can only be lifted if once again the country acknowledges the supremacy of human rights.

According to electronic news source ZimOnline, in its annual report on human rights, the U.S. State Department concluded that during 2008, along with the injured and more than 30,000 people displaced, Mugabe's government "or its agents" killed more than 193 citizens in political violence and engaged in "the pervasive and systematic abuse of human rights."

If we add on the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres, unconstitutional military foray into the DRC in the late 1990s, Operation Murambatsvina, and displacement of millions of Zimbabweans during elections and finally, Zimbabwe’s slide into politically-instigated abject poverty, President Robert Gabriel Mugabe is a genuine case for impeachment.

Rejoice Ngwenya is director of Coalition for Liberal Market Solutions in Harare and an affiliate of www.AfricanLiberty.org