Born-again democrats
It is difficult to know whether the latest entrants to Zimbabwe’s opposition to President Robert Mugabe believe that the electorate is abysmally stupid, or that they themselves are.
At their head is former vice-president Joice Mujuru, who in November last year was sacked by Mugabe from his ZANU(PF) party and the government for a wide array of serious alleged offences from treason and plotting his assassination to “promoting factionalism.”
With her were scores of other long-serving party officials whose political careers – and the feeding tube to the national patronage trough – were cut off at a stroke.
It is established practice under Mugabe’s rule for anyone facing such serious allegations to be instantly arrested, usually tortured, and kept in custody for months before going anywhere near a court. The fact that no action has been taken against this group suggests that the allegations were made up.
However, the expulsions achieved their aim of ejecting the powerful political faction around Mrs Mujuru from its position right at the door to succession to the aged Mugabe, and replacing it with another faction, led by the other vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. The writhing sack of worms in the plot and counter-plot of these developments, however, is not germane to this examination.
Over the last 11 months, Mrs Mujuru has remained almost completely silent. Then last week she broke cover. A double-page spread in the country’s two main independent newspapers declared the formation of a national plan with the acronym of BUILD (Blueprint to Unlock Investment and Leverage for Development), which is evidently to be a new political party.
Its aim is to “create a modern, democratic state, with a vibrant economy where every citizen is responsible for peace, freedom and democracy, and can prosper.” Interestingly, it is specific on issues like repealing the country’s notorious media laws, a wholesale review of Mugabe’s policy of “indigenisation” (enforcing black control of white or foreign businesses) and rights to land for “all who call Zimbabwe home” – a full rebuttal of Mugabe’s “land reform” policies that turned the country’s sophisticated agriculture, and with it the national economy and infrastructure, into another squalid Third World beggar state.
It also promises a vote for the millions of Zimbabweans in the diaspora, acknowledgement of dual citizenship and repeal of the security laws that allow authorities to deal with critics with the least possible legal hindrance.
The manifesto speaks to most of the serious failures in government, though on the thin side. Significantly, there is no provision for anything along the lines of a truth commission.
Which would be just as well for the would-be leaders of this proposed organisation who not a year ago were paid-up, long-entrenched members of one of the world’s nastiest dictatorships.
Joice Mujuru is a crook, like her late husband, Solomon, deputy commander of Mugabe’s guerrilla forces during the war for independence and who became head of the Zimbabwe national army, which enabled him to build a vast business empire, until he was burned to a crisp in an unexplained ball of fire at his (stolen) farm south of Harare.
Her tally of malfeasance started soon after independence when two of the children of her gardener were literally eaten alive by the couple’s vicious dogs. She got away with a deposit fine.
A few years later her name was among several other of the new government’s ministers who were getting boreholes drilled free of charge at their large urban homes by the parastatal District Development Fund, ordered to divert its operations from the rural poor.
By 1996 she had risen to become minister of telecommunications when a young former state telecoms technician named Strive Masiyiwa was trying to establish the country’s first mobile telephone company. He won a supreme court ruling that abolished the government’s monopoly on telecommunication services.
Soon after, General Mujuru and two ZANU(PF) ministers arrived unannounced at his office and told him to give them a controlling share in his company or they would shut him down. In a portent of the spirit that was to make him probably the most successful businessman in Africa, Masiyiwa kicked them out of his office.
It took two more supreme court orders to force Mrs Mujuru to float a tender for the right to run a mobile service. Despite the fact Masiyiwa’s company was fully operational, Mrs Mujuru gave it to a hastily drafted company of various ZANU(PF) sleazebags, including the general. She also ordered that Masiyiwa be arrested for “illegal possession of telecommunications equipment.”
Mugabe was out of the country, so vice-president Joshua Nkomo became involved. He ordered that Masiyiwa be given a licence. Thus began the remarkable success of one of the largest mobile service companies in the world, Econet.
The same year ZANU(PF) cheffes were summoned before a commission of inquiry to answer to charges that they had lied themselves blue in the face about alleged disabilities they had suffered in the guerrilla war. Mrs Mujuru claimed 55 per cent disability and was awarded nearly Zimbabwe $400,000 (about US$ 40,000), though this was modest compared with Reward Marufu, the brother of Mugabe’s wife, Grace, who claimed 95 percent disability and got US$80,000.
The commission recommended that they repay the now bankrupt War Victims Compensation Fund, but Mugabe let them get away with it – as did he himself.
In 2004, Mrs Mujuru was part of another gang of ZANU(PF) looters who contributed to the collapse of the state-owned Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Corporation (ZISCO), which at independence was Africa’s only integrated iron and steelworks outside South Africa. The National Economic Inspectorate reported that she had claimed US$11,000 for a weekend trip to Botswana that had nothing to do with ZISCO.
Five years later, industry minister Obert Mpofu was called before a parliamentary committee to answer questions about the buggering of ZISCO. He was well into his evidence, when a clerk rushed in to say Mrs Mujuru, by this time vice-president, wanted to see Mpofu immediately. He left the room and returned shortly after to aver complete ignorance about the affair. He was impeached for lying and fined US$40,000.
In late 2008, Bernd Hageman, an executive of British commodity trading company Firstar Europe, got a cold call from Nyasha Mujuru, one of Joice’s daughters, offering to sell US$15 million worth of diamonds without Kimberley Process certification, and 3,700 kg of gold of dubious origin.
The deal was so transparently criminal, Hagemann had Nyasha Mujuru publicly blacklisted. Shortly after, Joice called Hagemann and told him she would “send people to visit the company, and see what happens.” Hagemann immediately alerted the world’s media to his experience with Mrs Mujuru, and had her blacklisted as well. “My understanding was that Nyasha was doing the business, but that her mother was the financier,” he said.
However, in a parallel world Mrs Mujuru has advanced admirably since she appeared in Salisbury (now Harare) at the end of the country’s war in early 1980, an illiterate 25-year-old woman guerrilla with the nom de guerre “Blood Spiller,” telling stories about how she shot down Rhodesian helicopters with an AK47.
Cabinet colleagues say she has been a diligent, respectful minister, and in her spare time educated herself through primary school, ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examinations and elocution lessons. Last year she graduated at the University of Zimbabwe with a PhD, with an accompanying accessible dissertation – unlike the fraudulent doctorate awarded simultaneously to Mugabe’s wife. Mrs Mujuru is also a senior member of the Salvation Army church.
Through all this she lived with a drunken, philandering, violent gangster of a husband.
On one occasion since her sacking, Mrs Mujuru said she was “sorry”. She did not say what for. Her personal crooked dealings apart, she shares communal guilt with the rest of Mugabe’s cabinets for assenting to thousands of murders, of torture, terror, deliberate deprivation of the rights, food, jobs, shelter and the hopes of millions. At the same time she has pursued the satiation of a greed of elephantine proportions.
She is at the head of a cohort of supporters who have suddenly become born-again democrats. Mrs Mujuru is a nice, quaint grandmother compared with most of the rest. It will be an ugly struggle for ascendancy when the ancient one who no longer can tell which speech he is reading, finally gives up.
Jan Raath
