No price was too high to allow Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to step down, Mail & Guardian publisher Trevor Ncube said in Johannesburg on Wednesday.
”If that means giving Robert Mugabe immunity from prosecution, let that be done,” he told a public debate on leadership in Zimbabwe at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Letting Mugabe go would give Zimbabwe the opportunity to start again, he said.
Ncube, who also publishes Zimbabwe’s only two independent newspapers, the Standard and the Independent, was on a debating panel with Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition activist Eleanor Sisulu, and Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa executive director Tawanda Mutasah.
The debate was facilitated by the Platform on Public Deliberations and was part of a series titled Which way next? Conversations on African leadership.
Ideally, Zimbabweans should reject both the ruling Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), as both sought power for power’s sake and neither offered hope for the future, said Ncube.
That left the question of where a new leader would come from.
”I doubt that leader is going to come from the MDC. … For now we might find ourselves looking for leadership within the Zanu-PF,” he said.
However, Mutasah said Zimbabwe deserved free, fair and legitimate elections ”in the truest sense”.
No matter who ever was elected — even if that was Mugabe — ”let them run Zimbabwe and govern the country, because it is what the people chose as their leadership”, he said.
Mutasah criticised the Southern African Development Community (SADC) crisis talks being facilitated by President Thabo Mbeki because they excluded the Zimbabwean people.
”We need to make sure these talks do not happen in a closet. If ordinary people are excluded from the table, I have a problem with that,” he said.
He said even more importantly than ensuring an election in 2008, these talks had to result in a Constitution.
Sisulu, meanwhile, disputed the notion that ordinary Zimbabweans were timid and doing nothing about their plight, blaming the total media blackout in the country for a lack of news about their protests.
Had there been no protests there would have been no need for the government to put in place the oppressive media laws it had enacted, she suggested, adding that media freedom was not esoteric but ”a matter of life and death”.
The Zimbabwe crisis also raised the issue of how all leaders on the continent could be held accountable for their actions when the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was not prepared to throw its own rule book at them.
Cynicism about the human rights abuses of the other SADC member states was no excuse. Unless things changed SADC would end up declaring yet another flawed Zimbabwean election free and fair, she said. – Sapa