Finance Minister slugs it out with Times columnist
On Tuesday last week Finance Minister Trevor Manuel gave the government response to a number of statements by opposition MPs on the situation in Zimbabwe.    

He was reported by various newspapers as saying that "the problems in Zimbabwe must be solved by Zimbabweans. There can't be any regime change from anywhere outside of Zimbabwe."

He also said that South Africa could do no more than "encourage" Zimbabweans in this regard; because they would be the ones who would have to carry these decisions "into perpetuity."

On Monday this week Justice Malala commented in The Times (Johannesburg) that Manuel "should know better." In making these assertions, Malalala wrote, Manuel "joins his president and a plethora of other leaders who now want to whitewash the true history of Zimbabwe...[H]e wants to pretend that there is no right or wrong in Zimbabwe."   

This provoked a letter to the newspaper from Manuel devoted largely to lecturing Malala on how to do his job. If Malala were "true to the spirit of journalism," Manuel wrote, "he would, in the interest of establishing the truth," have "sought a record of what I said from Hansard and he would have contacted me for comment."    

If the Hansard office had been contacted, Manuel continued, Malala would have "confirmed that I spoke of collective memory to illustrate the point. I would hazard that he did not bother to establish the context but merely sought to amplify what he had read in the press."    

He concluded with the highly sarcastic comment that Malala must have been "far too busy with the hard labour of restaurant reviews to be expected to do justice to more serious topics."    There is no mention of the term "collective memory" in the unrevised transcript of Manuel's remarks. Indeed, he barely alluded to the concept. According to Hansard, following his initial remarks, as reported, Manuel stated:    

"In the history of Zimbabwe, it's important to recognise that Lancaster House Agreement was facilitated by outside agencies. Zimbabweans have to knuckle down and resolve their own problems. The position of the government in South Africa has consistently been - and this is the view of all of SADC - that we must encourage Zimbabweans to solve their own problems. And that is the most that we can do because the solutions have to be durable and sustainable and the decisions have to be carried by Zimbabweans into perpetuity. That is the essence of democracy!"    

It is also difficult to see how putting the reported remarks in context detract in any way from the point Malala was trying to make. Later on Manuel seemed to suggest that Mugabe was a democratically elected leader. He informed one opposition MP, who had described the Zimbabwean regime as "despotic," that he was going to ask President Bush to recruit him, and other "loud mouths", and "send them to Iraq. Then they will understand about regime change."   

He informed another, who had talked of the suffering of the Zimbabwean people, that under a democracy "people decide the government that they want and the leaders that obtain in the Southern African regions are the choice of the people."    

As any fule would kno almost all these assertions are rather questionable. The Zimbabweans did attempt in 2000 and 2002 to "solve their own problems" by trying - in the usual manner, and as was their democratic right - to vote in a new government for their country. This is, some might say, the essence of democracy.    

They were thwarted by ZANU-PF which only held onto power through violence, thuggery, intimidation, fraud, and vote rigging. Mugabe did this with the active connivance of the ANC (and SADC) which thought it knew better than the Zimbabwean electorate what was good for their country.    

In his remarks Manuel also stated that "we can't sit this side of the Limpopo and decide what kind of economy the Zimbabweans must have." Again, this would ring less hollow, if the ANC of Mbeki had in the past left the people of Zimbabwe "to take decisions about their own country." They did not.  

In numerous statements from 2000 onwards President Thabo Mbeki insisted that the overriding priority of Zimbabwe should be to implement a final solution to the ‘land question' in that country.  

In one speech in parliament that year he stated: "What we have to help address in Zimbabwe is...the land dispossession of the majority of the people of Zimbabwe that took place as a result of the colonial system." He added later:    "I know there are many people around the world who think that we should do something else, who think that our principle task is to stand on platforms and denounce the government of Zimbabwe. The reason we are not going to do that is that it is not going to result in addressing this colonial legacy."    

However, Manuel is right on two points, though not perhaps in the way he intended. The decision by the ANC to prop up Mugabe earlier this decade is one which will, indeed, be carried by Zimbabweans into perpetuity.  And, as he put it in his letter, where solutions are driven from the outside - as Mbeki clearly did with his malign interventions in the affairs of Zimbabwe - "nations remain lukewarm and blame remains with the interveners."