Unmasking Chombo's sinister political agenda.

Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo can easily make it onto the list of Zimbabwe’s richest citizens if we are to believe his estranged wife Marian. She has filed for divorce from him, citing his bed hopping as having wrecked a marriage that had lasted a little over two decades. The divorce case has attracted widespread national attention, not least because it has laid bare salacious details of the minister’s ostentatious riches. He may not be in the same league as the country’s richest man, telecoms mogul Strive Masiiwa, but his net worth would make an average English Premiership footballer go green with envy.  

In the divorce papers that she has filed, Marriane claims that she and Chombo own several homes and plum pieces of land in Harare’s leafy suburbs of Mount Pleasant, Alexandra Park, Greendale, Borrowdale, among others. The bitter Marian also claims that they also own houses in South Africa. This is on top of homes in other medium and high-density suburbs of Harare. Chombo’s wife also wants a share of houses, residential and industrial stands that are scattered across the rest of the country.

Marriane also claims that the family owns a fleet of top of the range luxurious cars that include 1 Toyota Hilux truck, 2 Nissan Wolf off roaders, 4 Toyota Land Cruiser SUVs, 3 Mercedes Benzes, 1 Toyota Vigo truck, 1 Mazda BT-50 truck, a bus and 1 Nissan Hardbody. A quick check with car dealers in Harare confirms that total value of all these vehicles could easily exceed a million dollars. To top it all, Marriane also claims that the Chombo treasure dome also includes some lucrative mines and hunting safari lodges in Chiredzi, Hwange, Magunje and Chirundu. She also cites several farms located in some of the country’s prime zones.

Some of you may be asking,  ‘but Charles, what does that have to do with the price of rice in China?’ Well here is the juicy part, as Zimbabwean writer Ken Mafuka would say.  The only paying jobs that Chombo is known to have held are those of university lecturer and government minister. Zimbabwean university lecturers are some of the poorest in the world. And so are its government ministers and members of parliament. Most university lecturers struggle to acquire just one decent home and a functional motor vehicle. When I was in undergraduate school (incidentally Chombo was a lecturer at the university of Zimbabwe then) my colleagues and I used to make fun of one of our professors’ ramshackle Mazda 323. My friend Gari always used to say the professor spent more time under the car than he did riding it. The question that many have asked is how did Chombo acquire such a vast array of assets over a very short period of time. Is he such a business genius that he has managed to juggle a full time job with profitable business enterprises? How does he explain owning several homes in a country where banks can hardly finance mortgages?

Predictably Chombo has dodged all these questions. In a country where ministers’ lives are beyond public scrutiny, Chombo has found it easy to avoid answering such pesky questions. But many Zimbabweans have made the conclusion that if the minister’s wife’s claims are true, then his riches were corruptly acquired. In October 2006 the Financial Gazette newspaper reported that Chombo, in unclear circumstances, had received a top of the range Toyota Landcruiser SUV for personal use from the state-run Zimbabwe United Passengers Company (ZUPCO) acquired at a whooping cost of US$77 000. Many wondered at the time how a cash strapped state enterprise would purchase a car for a minister who has access to government vehicles. Police never investigated the allegations and no charges were laid against him.

While Chombo’s divorce case and the allocation of assets between him and his wife are matters for the courts to decide, what has irked many Zimbabweans is the minister’s disingenuousness in dealing with matters of corruption and criminal abuse of office in Zimbabwe’s local authorities. Although Zimbabweans generally abhor corruption (a majority of them are honest and hardworking people) they view Chombo’s interference in local authorities as a classical case of the kettle calling the pot black. While residents of local authorities have persistently spoken out against corruption and abuse of office by local government officials including councilors and managers, they have also detested Chombo’s malicious meddling in the affairs of most local authorities especially those that are run by the MDC.

Take the case of Harare for example. In March 2002 the residents of Harare overwhelmingly elected the MDC’s Engineer Elias Mudzuri as mayor of the capital. In no time the city began to show signs of improvement following years of dilapidation under successive ZANU (PF) run councils. Streetlights were repaired; road surfaces patched and refuse collected. Fearing that this would expose the ineptitude of previous ZANU (PF) councils, the meddlesome Chombo devised a plan to get rid of the popular Mudzuri. Firstly he blocked funds that were badly needed for improving service delivery in the city. Then he sent a rented crowd of ZANU (PF) hooligans to demonstrate against Mudzuri’s ‘incompetency”. He then fired the mayor in April 2003, replacing him with an appointed commission run by political turncoat Sekesayi Makwawara, who had served as Mudzuri’s deputy. This was to be Chombo’s strategy as he went on a nation-wide crusade to rid local authorities of MDC mayors that had been democratically elected by residents.

Chombo is at it again. Following the MDC’s takeover of almost two-thirds of the country’s local authorities in the 2008 harmonized elections, ZANU (PF) strategists have been at war trying to devise strategies of reversing the MDC’s electoral gains. They have gone on a propaganda campaign through the public media to rubbish MDC run councils as corrupt and incompetent but this has come to naught. Under ZANU (PF) management, most local authorities had been run down and were failing to provide basic services like refuse collection, water reticulation and provision of other basic social services. In the case of Harare this resulted in a cholera outbreak that claimed thousands of lives. Chombo never intervened to save these councils from collapse. Now that the MDC is in charge of most local authorities he is abusing the Local Government Act to settle political scores with the MDC.

Residents and ratepayers of local authorities need to be reminded that Chombo is no Messiah and that it is their duty and responsibility to fight corruption in their communities. Granted there have been cases of corruption and criminal abuse of office by some MDC councilors and some city mangers. But that does not give Chombo the right to fire elected councils in order to replace them with commissions that are composed of ZANU (PF) zealots.

The free flow of ideas is the hallmark of of a progressive society

The New Zimbabwe Lecture Series is a critical thinking and debating forum for ideas exchange and debate. The idea behind the series is to offer a platform for public debate on issues that confront Zimbabweans every day. The hope is that Zimbabweans can also learn from the experiences of other coutries and from time time eminent scholars and personalities are invited from abroad to share their thoughts and experiences. On Wednesday the 8^th of February the series was to host a public lecture under the theme, ‘The Global Financial Crisis and its implications for the Third World: The case of Zimbabwe’. Billed to speak were renowened Zimbabwean academic, author and publisher, Dr. Ibbo Mandza and well-known South African academic and author, Professor Patrick Bond.

As the convenors of the New Zimbabwe Lecture Series we sent out invilations and flighted advertisements in the local press for the event. Here is the full text of the invitation that we sent out to the Zimbabwean public; “There is a saying that goes, “When Europe and America sneeze, the whole world catches a cold”. As the the United States and Europe grapple with the effects of economic recesion and growth stagnation, the rest of the world including Africa have not been spared. Given the current state of globalisation and the integration of economies, the financial crisis has resulted in recession not only in the European Union and United States but across the whole globe. Markets in Asia and Africa have been adversly affected and economic growth is stuttering. Given these condtions, what are the policy options for Africa and Zimbabwe in particular? What are the policy implications and how feasible is the “Look East Policy” in the context of the emergence of China as a ‘superpower’? What lessons can Zimbabwe draw from the financial crisis and how can it safeguard itself from the economic shock? How will the financial crisis impact on internal political dynamics in Zimbabwe? For these and more questions, the public is hereby invited to this lecture”.

As is required by the police under the obnoxious Public Order and Security Act (POSA) we sent them notification more than a week ago that we would be convening this lecture. Ideally we were not even supposed to notify them as the Act only refers to political gatherings and clearly an event of this nature is not a political gathering. But because of our previous experiences where we have had the police barring public seminars on the pretext that they were not santioned, we thought it prudent to notify them. We wrote the police more than a week ago but we never heard from them until the day of the seminar when they called one of our team members to Harare Central Police Station. There he was told by one  Superitendent Gowe that the meeting would not go ahead. Gowe handed him a letter saying ‘my office regrets to inform you that it has been confirmed that you are using a false address, and hence your public lecture is not santioned’. My colleague protested that the New Zimbabwe Lecture Series was a bona fide platform that had held similar events before and that the police had been furnished with the same application details but he was was told off.

An hour before the scheduled time of the event we received a call from the hotel where we had booked space for the event informing us that they had been instructed to lock up the space. They could not confirm to us whether the people who gave the instruction were police officers but could only say they were not in police uniform. We visited the venue so we could notify people that the meeting had been cancelled. By the time we got to the hotel there was a fully loaded police truck parked in the front. Officers in full anti-riot gear had been dispatched to cordon off the hotel entrance.

We asked to address the people that had come for the seminar in order to inform that the meeting had been cancelled. The leader of the police team told us that he was under strict instruction not to let anyone address the people and warned  that if we did he would promptly arrest us. By that time a big group of people had already gathered in the hotel lobby. We defied the him and addressed the people informing them that the police had barred the meeting.

I took the leader of the group aside and I asked him how he genuinely felt about what the police were doing. I told him that this was an academic exercise and that the police had no right to stop such a meeting. He told me he saw nothing wrong with the seminar but was simply following instructions ‘from above’. “My friend, if I had a choice I would be at home with my family or maybe at the bar having a beer. But what can I do? I have been given orders and I cannot question them’, he told me.  

Later on as I drove home I felt embarassed that we had flewn a man all the way from Durban only for him to be denied an opportunity to share his ideas. Is this the Zimbabwean society we want to buid? A society that fears ideas. How can we progress as a country if we close platforms for information exchange and debate? Countries that have progressed have done so on the backdrop of robust intellectutal debate, from which new ideas emerge. Is the Zimbabwean political class so paranoid that it can send a whole truckload of police officers to bar Zimbabweans from talking about issues that confront them? The New Zimbabwe Lecture Series will be submitting another application for the same event next week. We will not rest until Zimbabweans get a genuine opportunity to search for answers to the problems that confront them every day. 

Is Mugabe running scared?

Last week I warned in this column that the African Union (AU) Summit in Addis Ababa would go down as another damp squib if the continental body did not take the opportunity to seriously reflect on lessons drawn from the Arab North revolutions and how these will impact on Africa’s democratization challenge. I also made an observation that the current crop of African leaders was caught up in a time warp and that it has failed to transform the continent into a politically stable and economically prosperous bloc that can claim its space on the international stage because it has failed to embrace change and to respect the wishes of African citizens.

Predictably there was nothing spectacular that came out of the summit, save for the electoral stalemate for the AU Commission Chairmanship.   Both incumbent Jean Ping of Gabon and aspirant Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, South Africa’s Home Affairs Minister, failed to garner the required two-thirds majority after four rounds of voting. The joke doing the rounds in chartrooms, on websites and on the streets of Harare right now is that perhaps one of candidates should have enlisted support from Zimbabwe’s Mugabe or Kenya’s Mwai Kibaki, making the election so violent that the two candidates would have been forced to go into a power-sharing arrangement after lengthy negotiations!

A fresh election will be held in June at the next AU summit in Malawi but Ping is now out of the race as is required by the AU voting procedures. His biggest undoing is that his home country is part of the Francophone bloc. In the build up to the summit there was intense lobbying by both South Africa and Gabon and it became a battle between the Francophone and the Anglophone blocs. The SADC caucus mounted a campaign for Zuma predicated on portraying Ping as a political pawn wont to taking instructions from France. Mugabe was livid that the AU had extended an invitation to French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, a man he accused of having Colonel Gadhafi’s blood on his hands. On arrival at the Harare International Airport returning from the summit Mugabe went into another tirade, accusing the Francophone countries of being used as ‘fronts by Europe’.

South Africa’s diplomatic architects have indicated that Dlamini-Zuma will run again. But she is not a shoe-in. The problem is that everyone does not trust South Africa’s intentions on the continent.  Because of its huge economic muscle, it has acquired so much political power and clout that its critics view it as wanting to have some kind of ‘United States” big brother status over the whole continent. South Africa has and is till mediating in several conflicts on the continent, from Burundi, Ivory Coast, Sudan to Zimbabwe. Ever since he was ignominiously booted out of office, Thabo Mbeki has been traversing the length and breath of the continent trying to convince warring parties to come together. South Africa’s successes and failures have created both friends and enemies. By vying for the AU Commission Chairmanship South Africa was viewed as trying to cement its hegemony on the continent.

I doubt that Mugabe would prefer Dlamini-Zuma being the Chair of the AU. In as much as his public statements have been abhorrent of the Francophone bloc, ZANU (PF) insiders have indicated that the party would prefer not to have Dlamini-Zuma as the Chairperson of the Commission as this would be diplomatically suicidal. This is because South Africa is the SADC-appointed mediator in Zimbabwe and both the AU and SADC are the guarantors of the Global Political Agreement (GPA). ZANU (PF) has not made a secret its disappointment with Jacob Zuma’s mediation. Party ideologues like Jonathan Moyo have publicly chided Zuma’s facilitation team for ostensibly meddling in the internal affairs of the country.

Clearly ZANU (PF) misses the golden days of Mbeki’s mediation. The party has fond memories of Mbeki holding hands with Mugabe and boldly declaring that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe, even after the bloodbath of the 2008 presidential election run-off. Mbeki loathed Tsvangirai and the MDC so much that his facilitation was blatantly biased. Like Mugabe he believed that the MDC was a creation of neo-imperialist forces, that ZANU (PF) was under siege from the West and that the party of revolution needed protection. Relations between Tsvangirai and Mbeki were so cold that two hardly saw eye to eye. In his book At the Deep End, published last year, Tsvangirai blames Mbeki for the October 2005 implosion of the MDC. Tsvangirai writes, “The splinter group now invoked their man in Pretoria to put me at a disadvantage. President Thabo Mbeki had shown antipathy towards me and the cause I represented on several occasions but he was now pulled directly into the MDC’s domestic dispute…”

Zuma’s mediation has been a breath of fresh air for many Zimbabweans. Never mind the fact that he has failed to break the impasse between the parties. He has not shielded Mugabe the same way Mbeki did. Witness the manner in which Zuma’s International Relations Advisor, Lindiwe Zulu, has refused to be cowed by ZANU (PF) hardliners like Jonathan Moyo. The Livingstone Troika and Sandton Summit resolutions also attest to differences in approach between Mbeki and Zuma. There has been no ego stroking, as SADC has been forthright in ordering Mugabe to stop political violence and adhere to the principles of the GPA.

But perhaps what generated more interest for many Zimbabweans at the Addis Summit were Mugabe’s rants about an alleged Western conspiracy against Africa. He berated the AU for failing to defend Libya against NATO aggression. Mugabe lamented, “Gadhafi was killed in broad daylight, his children hunted like animals and then we rush to recognize the NTC”. I warned last week that if African leaders fail to draw lessons from Gadhafi’s experience, they risked going down the same way. What Mugabe did not care to tell his audience is that Gadhafi and his children were hunted down like animals because they treated Libya like a personal fiefdom that they could loot and plunder with reckless abandon. Never mind NATO’s intervention, the people of Libya stood up and said enough was enough.

After carefully listening to Mugabe’s statements I thought one could be forgiven for getting the impression that the octogenarian is running scared. From what, I do not know. It was almost as if he was saying ‘they are out to get me”. How else would one explain this statement? “Well, well that was Libya. Who will be next?” Does the President fear that he will be next? And why would he fear that he would be next? He seemed so angry that the AU had recognized the National Transitional Council NTC) that ousted Gadhafi and one wonders whether this fear is not generated by an inane fear of his own political opponents. Perhaps to him the NTC epitomizes the MDC and he is crying out to the AU not to recognize the MDC.  

The problem is that dictators never learn from the experiences of other dictators. Since the time of Hitler they have fallen, one by one, at the hands of their own people. But the next one always thinks he is smarter than the previous one. Today Bashar al Assad is mowing down protesting Syrians as he alleges a foreign plot to unseat him. But he will sure go down the Gadhafi route. No amount of force can defeat an idea whose time has come.