Denford Magora's Zimbabwe Blog

I attended a Mass Opinion Public Institute dissemination seminar today in Harare.

The body was presenting the results of the Afro Barometer survey conducted in May this year, barely three months after the formation of the Inclusive Government.

Morgan Tsvangirai swept the board in this survey.

Dollarisation had been introduced in January, a few weeks before Tsvangirai was sworn in as Prime Minister and things had become immediately available in the shops. With Tsvangirai in the Inclusive Government, there was a palpable air of optimism in the air and it shows in the results:

71% of the people interviewed said that the Inclusive Government was "doing very well or fairly well" on the issue of Economic Management.

In terms of trust in political leaders, the figures went Tsvangirai's way:

28% Trusted him "somewhat", while 50% trusted him "a lot". For Mugabe, 35% did not trust him "at all", 22% trusted him "a little", 19% somewhat and 18% trusted him "a lot".

In terms of job approval at that time (May 2009), 19% approved of Mugabe, whereas 36% approved of Tsvangirai. Asked further, it turned out that 45% approved of Tsvangirai "a lot", while only 4% approved of Mugabe "a lot".

Back in May this year, people where optimistic that Morgan Tsvangirai was going to get aid from the West and put the economy back on track.

This is even more evident when you look at the specifics of the asked of the respondents.

Of concern to those who attended the seminar today was the fact that governance issues, human rights abuses and constitutional matters were at the bottom of the table of concerns for our citizens.

They are worried about the economy and could not care less about the human rights, free speech and all the rest of it.

At the time, it was also not apparent that the MDC and Tsvangirai had failed to get economic aid into the country. Most people still thought the Prime Minister would unlock that aid. The situation is now different and even the organisers of the survey agreed with me on this.

In addition, we also looked closely at approval back then of the Inclusive Government by province.

Here, a pattern emerges. The people of Matabeleland were most against the Inclusive Government, with Matabeleland South and Bulawayo especially rejecting the Inclusive Government in large numbers.

In Bulawayo, 42% of the people said the Inclusive Government was not a good idea, while 47% in Matabeleland South either did "not know" or thought is a very bad idea.

I explained to the seminar today that the people of Matabeleland have been here before and that is why they are against this move. They went through it with Joshua Nkomo and Mugabe and they know from experience that Mugabe can not be trusted to hold his end of the bargain.

As I told the organisers, my main problem with the survey is that it is historical. Things are happening too quickly in Zimbabwe and this survey, as even they admitted, no longer reflects the reality on the ground.

We can not say that people are satisfied with this Government when we have 80% of teachers still on strike, 60% of doctors either on go-slow or complete strike, workers up in arms because they can not afford the food that now fills shop shelves.....

It is a nice measure of the optimism engulfing the nation in the aftermath of the formation of the coalition between Mugabe and Tsvangirai.

As one other participant pointed out at the seminar, everyone you ask now agrees that neither STERP nor the 100-day Plan have met their targets or even fulfilled a part of the promise they held out.

All this happened after the survey was conducted.

I eagerly wait for the next one.

Residents of Mabvuku and Tafara, who have gone for months and in some cases, more than a year, without water or electricity have been ordered by Morgan Tsvangirai to pay for the water they never got.

Tsvangirai was touring the area to see the allegedly new pipes being put down for the crumbling sewage system.

He revealed that Council will now enforce payment of fixed rate bills. Fixed rate. That means, you pay whether you get the service or not. Whether you get water or not. And now, Tsvangirai says they will not be asking nicely, but "enforcing" this new measure.

Speaking in Shona, Tsvangirai also told residents he addressed: "Chemahara mushana" meaning "Only sunshine is free."

Residents have been angry over the last year or so to get bills from the City Council when no rubbish was being collected (No rubbish is still being collected in most areas of Harare and residents make their own plans), no water was running from their tapes and raw sewage flowed in their front yards.

But now he has changed his tune, although nothing has changed on the ground. Water is barely available in most areas, being cut off still for days on end without explanation, apology or even advertisements in the paper.

But let us not forget that there are many mouths to feed now in the feeding trough that is this government. They need that money to pay ridiculous salaries and allowances while claiming to earn only US$300.

Here's a shocker.

Well, not really.

Banks in Zimbabwe are telling "new" farmers, beneficiaries of Mugabe's Land Reform Programme, that they do not recognise offer letters and 99 year leases given by Mugabe's government as security for loans being advanced to them for farming inputs.

Except no one had bothered to tell the banks about this. So they are chasing the farmers away from their banking halls, saying they need title deeds before they can advance any money.

But this episode merely exposes how clueless this government is about ending the suffering of Zimbabweans.

Clearly, the ministers involved were not competent enough to first consult with the banks, put an agreement in place and then go to the farmers and tell them to go and access the loans.

As it stands now, it appears that the mentality of a Command and Control economy is running deep still in both the MDC and ZANU PF.

We now also know that the presence of Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara has no effect on the way Mugabe does business. Do not be surprised if you hear that he is now going after those banks and forcing them to make those loans.

There were those who said before the Land Reform programme that he would not dare take land and not pay for it, that he would be committing political suicide and so on. He son proved them wrong.

We have come to think the unthinkable with Mugabe. The self-destructive streak seems to be strong.

Jestina Mukoko has been freed by the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe.

Mukoko was freed yesterday and the case against her quashed in the grounds that her arrest and detention were unconstitutional.

The surprising verdict, granting what is known in legal parlance as "permanent stay of execution", means that Mukoko will not be brought to trial in the case where she and others were facing banditry charges.

Mukoko told the media that she "could not believe" that people could charge her with such a serious crime.

The Zimbabwe Peace Project Director was abducted from her home in Norton at Dawn in December last year and disappeared for weeks, with the police saying they did not know where she was.

She was eventually brought to court hurriedly, just before Christmas, where she said she had been tortured. She was subsequently taken into Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison, before being transferred to the Avenues Clinic for treatment. From there, she got bail, although the charges against her still stood.

When Attorney General Gula-Ndebele was in office (Mugabe fired him barely two years ago, the Attorney General used to point blank refuse to prosecute certain cases that were purely political. Some were political vendettas.

But this Attorney General, knowing that he is prosecuting a person whose rights have been fundamentally violated, did not feel any shame at all, even as he opposed her applications to be given her passport while in bail so that she could collect prizes that she has won around the world.

How then can Mugabe continue to defend a man who sanctions such unlawful behaviour and thinks it a fit enough basis for a prosecution?

Mukoko wants to seek the prosecution of those who abducted her. When she called for the names of these people to be released in court during her initial trial, Didymus Mutasa, Mugabe's Minister of State in charge of the Secret Police wrote to the court saying he would not do so because doing so would harm national security.

Now, with the Supreme Court having decided that her rights were infringed upon and that this is cause enough to grant her relief from the prosecution, legally, it means she can now seek redress from the courts.

Whether Mukoko will remain free will depend to a very large extent on how she approaches this question.

I would caution against too much celebration too soon. Mugabe and his gang have yet to respond.

It is an update on my previous post on the subject.

Mugabe attended a UN luncheon at the General Assembly in New York on Wednesday. Also in attendance was Barack Obama, who addressed the luncheon.

So, Mugabe got to set eyes on Obama as president in the flesh for the first time.

The American president, however, was careful to avoid all contact with the Zimbabwean dictator. Mugabe had to be content with being in the same room as the man.

Those who watched the video I posted here of Mugabe's CNN interview will recall that during that interview, Mugabe was conciliatory towards Obama, saying "he inherited the sanctions from Bush, we are giving him time..." He said he did not think it possible for the American president to lift them immediately and he would, therefore, wait.

This is in sharp contrast to the words Mugabe has for Obama appointees, publicly calling Undersecretary of State Carson "an idiot". Hilary Clinton was characterised as a predatory female wild animal by the State media after her visit to South Africa earlier in the year.

I got the emails. Fungi and Paul were especially irate that I had not bothered to update you at all through the day!!

By way of explanation: I attended a Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) workshop all day today and then had to go out of town after that.

The ZESN workshop was basically an attempt by the NGO to inform intelligent input into the Constitution-making process. Focus was on the various forms of governance, the variety of voting methods around the world and pros as well as cons of all of them.

Most parties were represented, but the ZANU PF delegation only arrived ten minutes before lunch. After lunch, one of them took strong exception to one of the presenters calling POSA and AIPPA "draconian". He said his party did not think the law was draconian and that calling it this is hate language towards ZANU PF. His friend joined in and said the only people who think POSA and AIPPA are draconian are people "who are doing something wrong", before comparing the gathered to "small children who must be disciplined and they think the discipline is draconian."

The one area of intense interest was the presentation on electronic voting. We would eliminate fraud much easier with this route, and results are available almost instantaneously. Beats waiting for more than a month to hear election results.

I did point out to the workshop that Zimbabwe is not ready for this route. Even today, the vast majority of our people will, for example, prefer to deal with a human teller in a bank than trust the ATM outside.

We would likely see all manner of court cases by aggrieved parties who would not trust the machine is correct to say they lost the election.

It made sense that ZESN focused on the constitution and the electoral process only. These are the only two conditions that Mugabe has publicly backed. Should this thing fall apart and the MDC splits, Mugabe's hand will be freed to foist the Kariba Draft on a demoralised population with no will left to fight, having lost the only hope they had: the Inclusive Government thing.

Like he did in 2000, he will then declare the issue of the Constitution settled, clearing the way for new elections, in which he would then presumably stand in coalition with his politically exiled Prime Minister.

So, although Parliament is now moving with its part of the job, there is bottleneck at the Presidency and it does not look like it is going to eased or loosened any time soon.

So the Telegraph says an international organisation has discovered that Robert "The Solution" Mugabe took five farms near his Highfield Farm in Norton between 2002 and 2008.

I did not think this was news. This stuff is quite well-known and there are more farms than the ones the Telegraph report on.

Highfield is a farm that Mugabe bought on the open market before the Land Reform Programme.

When the programme started in earnest, Mugabe decided that his family should also benefit from this. So, those who wish to do a Land Audit should know that they will not be able to pin him down on this one legally.

This is because those farms are for each member of his own family. There is a farm for Robert Jnr, another for Bona, one for Chatunga, who is barely a teenager. And then there is the man himself and his wife. That makes five people. Five farms.

It has also been known for a very long time that the Minister of Agriculture in Zimbabwe, Joseph Made, acts as the Farm Manager for Mugabe, looking after the farms, ensuring the availability of inputs and a good yield.

This is the reason why, despite his dismal failure as a Minister of Agriculture, Made stayed on and on and on.....and even came back in with the Inclusive Government. Mugabe judges him not by the national results, but by the results the Minister gets on the President's farms.

Two years ago, as the nations farmers reeled under a severe inputs shortage and failed to grow anything respectable, Mugabe was boasting about his bumper harvest at Highfield Farm, mostly maize.

It is inconceivable to Mugabe that one day, his children may lose those farms as audits are taken. Which is why he is now on a mission to also compromise MDC MPs and Ministers with offers of farms of their own, which they are taking up.

Now they are in the same boat. It is in their interest to ensure that they never "reverse" the Land Reform Programme. Otherwise they also stand to lose personally.

And you wonder why the MDC is doing nothing as farmers' houses are burnt down, farmers assaulted and operations disrupted? As I said before, talk is cheap.

And it is no use to stay in the Prime Minister's office pointing at Mugabe and claiming that there is nothing you can say or do because he is blocking you. Fight as hard as you are fighting for Governors, but direct those efforts to matter such as these.

Then people will see that there is difference between you and Mugabe.

Right now, that is not happening, and it is unlikely to happen.

While Parliament and government plead poverty and refuse to pay doctors even just a paltry US$300 per month, it has been revealed today that the Speaker of Parliament has had a permanent suite at the Miekles at a cost of more than US$6 000 per month since he was sworn in.

This is happening as MPs have also gone for a year without their allowances, making it difficult for the most dedicated to see to their constituencies and giving the crooks an excuse to steal the people blind.

In a shocking revelation, it has emerged that almost 95% of the two Councils of the MDC, The National Executive and the National Council, are now so anti-Morgan Tsvangirai that it is now virtually guaranteed the man will lose his job in the next few months.

This emerged in Bulawayo two weeks ago, when the party resolved to consult its structures and "the people" on whether they should continue in government with Robert Mugabe or not.

As I have explained before, this strange move (the MDC did not "consult" the people when it decided to go into government) was only arrived at as a compromise after Tsvangirai argued against pulling out, maintaining that staying in was the only option.

Some of the Executive members in Bulawayo say that he is only saying that because HE has run out of ideas on how to tackle Mugabe.

This is where it gets interesting.

Last night, one of the senior MDC ministers informed me that they are aware that Tsvangirai had struck a deal with Mugabe in the event of this happening.

And here's what it is: The Global Political Agreement is a highly personalised document. It does NOT call for the head of the MDC to be Prime Minister.

Instead, it specifies that the Office of Prime Minister "shall be occupied by Morgan Tsvangirai".

Tsvangirai will refuse to leave government. He will refuse to vacate the office of Prime Minister. There will be nothing that his party can do about this, because Mugabe and Tsvangirai will refer back to the GPA and say their positions are legal.

The ministers who support a pull-out are understood to have said they will then resign and leave government.

It is expected that, after this, the party itself, the MDC-T, will start campaigning amongst the people with a new leader it would have chosen. They expect Tsvangirai to continue insisting that he is the head of the MDC and that only Congress can remove him and not a vote of no confidence.

He will, according to strategists for the other side, most probably go ahead and organise rallies to rubbish the "rebels".

The "rebels" themselves are saying they also expect that their rallies and meetings will be disrupted and frustrated by the police, while those organised by Tsvangirai will go ahead without incident.

Tsvangirai is expected by these strategists to tell rally after rally that this was the reason he maintained that remaining in government is the only choice. He will point to the disruption of the other MDC meetings as evidence that remaining in government was the only way they could continue to widen democratic space even if Mugabe continues to refuse to fully implement the GPA.

But the Executive and Council members say that they are certain the people are on their side and that they will prevail at Congress, which they will seek to hold as soon as it becomes clear that Tsvangirai will not leave government and refuses to vacate the presidency of the MDC.

The MDC under Morgan Tsvangirai does not seem to know if it wants the Kariba Draft, which it signed with ZANU PF, or not.

Lacking any principles, they are now seeking to play to what they believe is popular opinion against the Kariba Draft. It is a play at populism, pure and simple. There is no reason advanced as to why they signed the Kariba Draft in the first place if they are now saying "No" to it.

But the MDC, because it has no ideology, no policies, no substance, will seek to shift with the wind, trying to follow what it thinks is popular opinion in order to retain popularity.

They would campaign against their own mothers if they thought this would win them votes.

The editor of a new Zimbabwean paper published out of Johannesburg and distributed all over Zimbabwe has already suffered threats and intimidation from MDC supporters in Harare, he says in his second issue.

"..I say a big NO to threats and intimidation that came from some MDC-Tsvangirai activists last week after we published our first issue, " he writes in his current issue, which is only the second issue of the paper.

"I met a group of them in Harare who accused me of being "bought" to attack Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai because of our assessment and reporting of the political situation in the country. What came out of these responses by Tsvangirai's supporters is a dangerous trend that feeds off the Mugabe system and culture where leaders are regarded as untouchable cult individuals, who must not be criticised or brought to accountability," writes the editor, Itai Dzamara.

Because of the dearth of good newspapers in Zimbabwe, the new publication has already attracted wide readership especially in Harare and Bulawayo, the two main centres in Zimbabwe.

The newspaper is sold for US$1 per copy.

It is printed on expensive paper, better quality than that of any publication in Zimbabwe at the moment.

But, as can be expected, although the man behind it is a well-known MDC activist, he has made the cardinal mistake (in Tsvangirai supporters' eyes) of criticising the Prime Minister's continued faith in the Inclusive Government.

According to these supporters, the editor has no brains to think for himself and could only have been bought by God-know-who to attack Tsvangirai.

Mind you, the paper is also rabidly anti-Mugabe, calling him and his army officers and Generals "terrorists". But it is the attack on Tsvangirai that has managed to get him threats from Tsvangirai supporters.

It has always been like this. The intolerance of MDC supporters has to do with the fact that Tsvangirai has taken the Mugabe approach, where he rewards his thugs with material things and money.

Clearly, as far as these thugs are concerned, if Tsvangirai is ousted or is no longer popular, then they stand to lose their material gains.

But more and more people are beginning to see the truth and this time, no amount of threats are going to save the incompetent and servile MDC-T from the full gaze of the people.

The allegations first surfaced after a man was arrested in Houghton Park, a middle-income suburb of Harare as he attempted to buy goods using the fake foreign currency.

He told the till operators serving him that he believed the money to be genuine because he had got it from someone who works at the Reserve Bank.

In fact, there have been four separate arrests, as far I hear, all of which resulted in the culprit just being let out of the jail with no charges preferred.

Fake US Dollar and South African Rand notes are being presented all over Harare and other cities in Zimbabwe. The upsurge in fake notes has seen almost every denomination of the US dollar and especially the South African R500 (five hundred Rand) being faked and circulated widely.

Zimbabwe now uses foreign currency, a mixture of US dollars and South African Rand as official currency, since killing of its own currency in January in the face of runaway inflation.

To date, although there is evidence that the printing of these fake notes is a professional and organised operation, no significant rings have been smashed and police seem to be struggling to contain it.

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe owes a lot of hard currency to NGOs, businesses and private individuals whose money was "borrowed" without their permission by Gono to fund the elections and also for his quasi-fiscal operations.

Although Gono has produced letters saying that he was ordered to do this, Tendai Biti has been refusing to give him the money he needs to pay those people back. Recently, he suggested that part of the money from the IMF be used to pay back the money he took from people's accounts.

The Bank itself has been struggling to even pay its own workers and Biti eventually had to release US$3 million to fund their operations in his mid-term Fiscal Policy Review.

Sources within the MDC say that the minister has been approached to look into the matter and that he may already have started investigations without informing anyone else.

This is not a new thing in the world in the world, if the allegations are true.

The United States government has previously exposed a mass-printing exercise by the North Korean government, which was printing fake US dollars and using them to buy goods in neighbouring China.

This practise is still going on, although the Chinese and the Japanese are more vigilant now.

I contacted the Reserve Bank, which dismissed the allegations and said these were in the same vein as the allegations of yesteryear, when it was said that the Bank was at the forefront of printing Zimbabwe dollars and buying foreign currency on the black market with them.

Most shops in Zimbabwe now have fake note detecting machines, but the smaller ones and those in the rural areas remain largely exposed, relying on using the shopkeeper's eyes to establish whether the notes are genuine.

All the same, my readers in Zimbabwe should be warned in being more vigilant about examining the money given to them as change or in payment for goods and services. There is no doubt that there is now an upsurge in fake notes circulating, though, considering his position, I doubt Gono would openly sanction the printing of fake notes.

Yet, no one could have believed it if you had told them last year that a banker could withdraw his clients' money without their permission and use it for whatever he saw fit, not sure where he would get the money to pay them back.

An MDC official has told the nation on television and radio that the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA) passed in the United States Congress some years ago was actually written by the MDC Executive at a hotel in Nyanga.

Gabriel Chaibva, who subsequently broke away from the Tsvangirai MDC with Welshman Ncube and others, says some of the MDC officials present protested at the move. Munyaradzi Gwisai, a virulently anti-Mugabe member of the Socialist International and an MDC MP for Highfields at the time, is said to have walked out of the meeting in protest.

For those of you who do not know, ZIDERA, which was signed into law by George W. Bush, specifically directs US officials at the IMF, World Bank and even the African Development Bank to block any applications for finance and credit lines by Zimbabwe until the president of the United States decides otherwise.

I dare say it would be a diabolically clever move, because it will disarm the west and the MDC to hear Mugabe say he does not want the travel ban against him and his people lifted, but that he wants credit lines and aid to help the Inclusive Government.

State media has been replaying Chaibva's comments of late, commenting that the revelation "puts paid to denials by the MDC that it did not call for sanctions." They drafted the sanctions, state media points out.

Like I told you last week, Mugabe sees ZIDERA as the root cause of the economic ills of Zimbabwe.

This rise in the volume on sanctions and ZIDERA specifically signals without a doubt that this Inclusive Government is all but dead.

This is campaigning, basically. Tsvangirai, ZANU PF now knows, can not get those sanctions lifted no matter what he does and I am afraid that the originally strategy by Mugabe as I explained here last year is now unfolding.

That strategy was to get Tsvangirai in government and then tell the nation that the "sanctions" against Zimbabwe were nothing to do with human rights abuses but had everything to do with Land Reform. Mugabe intends to tell rallies that Tsvangirai was simply used and that even if they elect him as president, they would still suffer under sanctions until land taken from whites is returned to them.

Here's the latest news on Zimbabwe's feared riot police, who appear to continue behaving as though the Agreement between Tsvangirai and Mugabe, which guarantees freedom of assembly, does not exist.