Independent Zimbabwe turns 30 years old on Sunday with the majority of its populace finding very little to celebrate.
None more so than the people of Matabeleland who have been told that those responsible for training the killers of 20 000 of their brothers and sisters, children and parents, will be returning to the country.
The North Korean national football team represents a country that provided instructors to Robert Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade, which terrorised Matabeleland and the Midlands in the 1980s during the Gukurahundi. The team has agreed to camp in Zimbabwe for two weeks before the start of their 2010 World Cup campaign.
It is an insensitivity that insults both the survivors and the memories of those who died in the Gukurahundi. It also reflects the callousness of the governments of the two countries and highlights their similarities — they care very little about international image, diplomatic standing or the plight of their people.
Heartless as it may be, the chances of exploring the emotional trauma of the Gukurahundi victims is minimal when those who suffered cannot even acknowledge this dark past — raising the issue of the 1980s ethnic cleansing has been criminalised in Zimbabwe. Recently an artist, Owen Maseko, was arrested after he exhibited his pictures of it and a filmmaker pursuing the subject narrowly escaped being abducted.
But, as we point out in our special coverage of the 30th anniversary of the independence of Zimbabwe, it is a marker of betrayed dreams and the creation of a ruling party elite, the financial interests of which are intertwined with that of the state, rather than any celebration of freedom and egalitarianism.
A betrayal of democracy starts with small compromises and concessions, usually to realpolitik. It is consolidated when there is revisionism of and amnesia concerning traumatic histories. And this was the case this week when the Movement for Democratic Change which, despite owing much of its legitimacy to the Matabeleland electorate, would not comment on the North Koreans being hosted in Bulawayo.
There are lessons here for South Africa: The racial tension exposed in recent weeks by demagogues like Julius Malema and, posthumously, by Eugene Terre’Blanche is symptomatic of a deeper, self-inflicted amnesia by South Africans about our own past. We have not reconciled with our history. Nation-building and social cohesion come not, as the government believes, from spending money on campaigns to raise awareness about national symbols or from distributing flags to schools. It comes through using the sweet fruits of adversity to be honest with ourselves.
The North Koreans’ invitation to Zimbabwe remains an opportunity for the MDC to make a strong statement in a government in which it is floundering and to restore the dignity of thousands whose wounds have still not healed.
We, too, need to examine the unhealed wounds inflicted by our past and work to salve them. This will not be done by grand rhetoric or slanging matches but from rolling up our sleeves and addressing pertinent issues — like land reform, labour relations and our relationships with one another.
Banking big bucks
The Mail & Guardian first wrote in 2005 about the dangers of the ruling party stake in Chancellor House and how the ANC-led government would be both player and referee. We said “for the party to have corporate interests skews the playing field and distorts fair game. What chance would other companies have if they came up against Chancellor House, a company linked umbilically to the ruling party?
“It distorts BEE because benefits flow to the politically connected or directly to the party and not to the broad base of beneficiaries envisaged in the law. The larger corrosion though, is of democracy.”
We sketched out the complexity of the Chancellor relationship. Since then, the party’s top brass — Kgalema Motlanthe and Mathews Phosa — have acknowledged that it was incorrect.
Recent events have confirmed the fears we raised and it is surprising that the likes of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan are only now waking up to the reality and wanting the full facts to be established.
What facts? The conflicts of interest are clear and the party leaders themselves have articulated them.
Again it takes us back to the open party-funding policy we have long campaigned for. The law needs to require all political parties to disclose their sources of funding.
But the opposition parties have a point when they ask whether we can have a fair and open election if the ruling party is about to put R1-billion in its coffers.
The ANC said this week that the principle of whether a company with a remote relationship to the ANC should ever be involved in the public sector should be clarified. But it is now a win-win situation for the ANC which will profit handsomely from its stake in Hitachi Power Africa whether it sells out or not.
The ANC’s involvement in winning Eskom contracts is unacceptable in any form. While our energy sector could be guided by efficiency, the diversification of inputs and suppliers and the use of renewable technologies, it is far from that.
The unhappy truth is that the ANC is banking big bucks derived from a sector which it is managing badly.