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 8th 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.
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