The secret talks in progress between Morgan Tsvangirai and Robert Mugabe are not a “new dawn” for Zimbabwe, as some South African media seem to imagine. And they have very little to do with President Thabo Mbeki’s diplomacy.
Mugabe has been forced to the negotiating table by Zimbabwe’s visibly disintegrating economy and his growing isolation in Africa and the region. He has few remaining friends, no legitimacy and no answer to the profound crises he has precipitated.
With famine knocking on the door and inflation now estimated at 2,2-million percent, it will not help him to jail the business executives he accuses of conspiring against him or hand over Western companies to the Chinese, as he has wildly threatened to do. He can use violence to decimate the opposition and steal an election, but his thugs cannot feed the Zimbabwean masses. If he saw any way of avoiding negotiations, he would surely have gone for it.
As the endless parleys between Israel and the Palestinians bear out, the talks will not necessarily bring a meaningful settlement. Given Mugabe’s addiction to power, his aim is almost certainly to incorporate opposition elements into a government he continues to dominate, as a ploy to buy legitimacy and economic aid.
Power-sharing on its own will solve nothing — the first step must be to strip him and his securocrats of executive power and place management of the economy in different hands. There must be agreement about the immediate repeal of oppressive laws, the dismantling of Zanu-PF’s apparatus of violent repression and the drafting of a new Constitution that will entrench human rights, including property rights, and the rule of law.
It is almost impossible to envisage Mugabe agreeing to such measures. But anything short of them will not permit the outside world to recognise a new Zimbabwean government and weigh in with the economic assistance the country so desperately needs.
There should be no illusions: whatever the shape of any settlement it will be years before the country regains economic and political health. This is the main charge against Mbeki: through years of appeasement — let’s call “quiet diplomacy” by its correct name — he has been complicit in the systematic destruction of Zimbabwe’s democratic institutions and an economy that once fed much of the region. The South African argument against harsher inducements has always been that ordinary Zimbabweans would suffer. Could their suffering have been worse?
The hope is that the leaders of the MDC will not be seduced by the promise of government employment into an “elite pact” that betrays the interests of the Zimbabwean people. Mbeki no doubt wishes to parade a quick settlement before the world as a vindication of his diplomacy. One can expect him also to be less than scrupulous about the democratic substance of what is agreed. He has always been more interested in shoring up Zanu-PF, albeit with more moderate policies, than in the wishes of ordinary Zimbabweans.
Whether the talks yield an agreement within the scheduled two weeks is not the issue. If they fail to lay the foundations for meaningful change, they are not worth the candle.
Stop sweating it, Tito
With household debt levels standing at about R1,1-trillion, being the Reserve Bank governor is a sweaty job. If Tito Mboweni gets the base interest rate wrong, even by just two percentage points, the difference is R20-billion a year in unnecessary interest households have to pay.
Mboweni does sweat, and apparently feels this is beneath his exalted status. Since a photographer snapped him mopping his brow, no one has been allowed to take pictures of him. This followed an earlier edict that allows photographers to shoot him only on the podium.
To find a way forward on the vexed issue the Reserve Bank held a lunch last month with photojournalists where it proposed appointing a professional to snap monetary policy committee meetings. The idea was that vetted pictures will then be made available to the press.
The Exalted One got hot and bothered again this week, publicly chastising Investec for raising concerns about Stats SA’s re-weighting of the inflation basket, which, it said, could change the official inflation data. Analysts estimate that CPIX will be between 1,5% and 2% lower than the figures Mboweni has been using to set rates, implying that interest rates also could be two percentage points lower.
Investec was merely ventilating an issue that had already prompted considerable discussion between commercial banks, Stats SA and the Reserve Bank. Its point is that there is no need for Mboweni to further raise rates next month, as official inflation is expected to be lower.
Nedbank, meanwhile, has put out a report showing that since January last year South Africa has had the most hawkish interest rate policy of 24 countries worldwide.
Mboweni told a radio station that Investec would be called on to explain itself and sure enough its chief executive, Stephen Koseff, was summoned to the Reserve Bank the next day.
Who exactly does Bra Tito think he is? People are losing their homes and livelihoods because of high interest rates while he sweats about whether his left or right profile looks best and uses swagger and bombast to suppress a debate of major public concern. Political bling at its most embarrassing!