Right: Unelected Minister of State national healing and reconciliation in the President's office John Nkomo
Center:Elected Minister of State National Healing and Reconciliation in the Premier's office Sekai Holland 
Left:Unelected Minister of State National Healing and Reconciliation in the Deputy Premier's office Gibson Sibanda
The SADC and AU imposed and flawed coalition government in Zimbabwe whose sole purpose was to save President Mugabe the blushes of an embarrassing defeat at the hands of MDC leader and now Zimbabwe Premier Morgan Tsvangirai has defied odds and survived an eventful 60 days since its consummation on 13 February 2009.
Because of the circumstances that imposed the coalition government in our country and the frightening reality that this government is operating without meaningful political opposition it is pertinent that its programmes are closely monitored and any early signs of variances of its actions to its stated objectives are flagged up early before they become the norm rather than the exception.
Background
The coalition government was conceived at the behest of Sadc and the AU following the collapse of the Sadc mediated March 29, 2008 harmonised electoral process.
Sitting President Robert Mugabe was thoroughly beaten into a distant second place by MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai in the crucial Presidential contest of the election.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission chaired by Justice George Chiweshe carved in to immense pressure over 35 days after the election was held, from the Joint Operations Command (JOC), a grotesque yet most powerful advisory body of Zanu PF and President Mugabe.
The pre-election rules and regulations were set aside and substituted with Presidential decrees issued through Patrick Chinamasa a Justice Minister from the previous Government dissolved by Mugabe to pave way for the harmonised election.
The decrees resulted in the declaration of a Presidential electoral outcome that justified a runoff Presidential poll between Mugabe and Tsvangirai.
Aware that he faced an even greater electoral mauling in a one on one contest with Tsvangirai Mugabe’s Zanu PF sponsors pleaded with the National Security Chiefs whose loyalty to Zanu PF and Mugabe was and still is not a subject for speculation but uncontested reality, to intercede on Mugabe’s behalf and lead his campaign for re-election.
The Military supremos obliged and rolled out a virulent and fatally vicious military campaign that claimed the lives of 300 known MDC activists and left 300 000 others internally displaced in the MDC Party Offices, Civic Society Safe Houses, Police cells, Government Prisons and Rehabilitation centres and mountains and caves throughout the country.
Sadc which had coerced Tsvangirai to contest the runoff and promised it would be held in similar conditions that prevailed before March 29 tried hard to get Mugabe to adhere to the agreed electoral guidelines but failed dismally as Mugabe was no longer in charge but the shadowy JOC that had morphed out to be a Junta government following Zanu PF surrendering Mugabe’s campaign strategy to them.
Three days before the runoff Tsvangirai’s MDC sponsors pulled him out of the Presidential runoff contest throwing the process into an uncontrolled tailspin.
The ZEC transformed itself from a national elections convener and supervisor of last resort to an electoral court and declared the withdrawal of Tsvangirai null and void. In tandem with that decree the ZEC staged the runoff Presidential poll as planned on 27 June 2008.
President Mugabe was pronounced landslide winner with 85% of the vote two days later and hurriedly sworn in as the defacto President of Zimbabwe.
Hitherto dependable allies in Sadc and the AU refused to legitimise his electoral victory after their observer missions to the runoff castigated the Presidential runoff electoral process and outcome as a sham that did not reflect the will of the Zimbabwe electorate.
To save the long serving Zimbabwean President the ignominy of a humiliating exit from power they cajoled him to accept the alternative of forming a coalition government with the MDC if he could reach agreement with them to that effect.
It is not clear on what other basis they resolved that the Zimbabwe electorate preferred the coalition government headed by Mugabe other than that they felt pity for him given his legacy as champion of the Liberation struggle that freed the country from colonial bondage.
On the basis of that resolution by the AU Mugabe came back from Egypt to bow down to the embarrassing process of negotiating with Tsvangirai and to make the process a bit comfortable SADC decided to draft Professor Mutambara into the negotiations despite that his renegade faction of elitists had been swept aside by the angry Zimbabwe electorate.
The negotiation process produced the objectives that would guide the performance of the inclusive government the first and foremost of which was;
Attainment of national healing
Because of the trauma and polarisation the virulent Presidential electoral runoff campaign by the militant supporters of Mugabe and Zanu PF had visited on perceived and real MDC supporters, the MDC pushed for a commitment by the government to extinguish any form of political violence and impunity before and after the consummation of the coalition government.
That commitment was secured and reduced to writing.
In practice the coalition has expanded Cabinet to include 3 additional Ministers in the President, Premier and Deputy Premier Mutambara’s office to formulate a comprehensive National healing policy coordinated by Deputy Premier Thokozani Khupe.
President Mugabe, Premier Tsvangirai, Vice President Mujuru and Deputy Premier Professor Mutambara have set the tone for reconciliation and national healing by calling for an immediate end to politically motivated violence confrontations among supporters of various political formations in the country.
Known abductees have all been brought to court and all have been granted bail but three are still in custody following the prosecution opposition of their granting of bail using a section of the law that many believe is being exploited to persecute MDC supporters.
Near to the grassroots, the Ministry of Youth has organised a national Youth conference to explore the national healing strategy which reportedly ended in violent exchange of fist fights and damage to hotel property.
At the grassroots there has been an upsurge of scuffles on commercial farms and several commercial farmers have been arrested and are facing charges of refusing to vacate acquired State land.
In Communal areas there have been several incidences of violent scuffles between Zanu PF and MDC-T supporters over demands for restitution by victims of the political thuggery that anchored President Mugabe’s June 27 runoff election campaign.
The truth is that the MDC-T supporters have unresolved politically motivated deprivations spanning over a decade wherein they have lost property and relatives’ lives to Zanu PF violence.
Home Affairs co-Minister Giles Mutseyekwa has confirmed that the Ministry is investigating the causes of an upsurge in commercial farms violence and is actively pursuing known violent political activists who hitherto have escaped prosecution for unexplained reasons with a view to bring them to justice.
The Ministry of Information and Publicity has with the aid of JOMIC severely curtailed open and unrestrained biased reporting and inflammatory hate commentary in State controlled media and in turn privately owned media has toned down on sensationalised reporting.
The Minister of Justice who was at the forefront of the violent campaign has confirmed that victims of political violence are entitled to restorative justice and can achieve that by mutual consent or through the judiciary system of the country but may not take the law into their hands to achieve that end.
Taking these facts into consideration and objectively comparing the incidences of sporadic violent clashes being reported it is clear that the incidences of physical political confrontation have been dramatically curtailed.
The incidences of psychological political persecutions using the judiciary are still as prevalent as they have been throughout the penultimate 2 decades of Zanu PF hegemony leading to the coalition government.
Other forms of this violence have been recently exposed in the Prisons of the country.
The coalition has a long way before it can achieve National healing and reconciliation.
Psychological legal persecutions are as traumatic as physical persecutions. There is need to identify the weak sports in the judiciary system that are responsible for the legal persecutions and neutralise them by either bringing them to justice or dispensing with their unhelpful services.
Containment and reversal of the impending Humanitarian catastrophe
The coalition government was to a large extent motivated by a shared vision in political leadership of the country of the need to preserve lives of the people upon whom they can preside.
At the time the coalition government was consummated, the Junta regime it succeeded had realised that there were imminent political changes that would not support its past policies of unrestrained political profligacy and fiscal dereliction.
A budget relaxing unnecessary State controls on economic activities had been presented to parliament wherein controlled trade in multiple currencies was opened up.
International food aid agencies were permitted to resume humanitarian feeding activities that had been banished for political expediency by the Junta.
Imported foods were beginning to trickle back into the country’s retail outlets but were priced out of the reach of many poor families in the country.
Two months down the line the coalition government has managed to fill up retail outlets shelves that had been emptied by the Junta policies.
The country’s hyper inflation has been tamed by the relaxation of restrictive monetary policies.
The country’s official mint has been rendered useless and of no value following the policy shift to allow economic activity to be carried out in multiple currencies.
The health services that had shut down due to lack of medicines and health delivery staff have been resuscitated and are once again admitting and curing patients.
Schools long closed due to teacher boycotts over pay disputes and conditions of service as well as unavailability of teaching equipment were reopened and all Civil servants are now being paid monthly stipends in foreign currency pegged at US$100 per month.
State services which were priced out of the reach of many are being reviewed downwards starting with import duties and charges for school fees, health services, energy and water supplies.
For some unknown reasons it appears Ministries headed by Government freshmen and women from the MDC formations are making more headway responding to pricing concerns than those headed by the experienced counterparts from Zanu PF.
The Cholera epidemic that had threatened to decimate the country’s urban population has been contained and is receiving urgent attention from the coalition government with international aid from developed nations as well as SADC neighbours of Zimbabwe.
There is no argument that the onset of the coalition government has averted a humanitarian catastrophe that was about to happen in the country.
Sustenance of efforts and improvement in many areas is still required but for now there is hope that the coalition is 100% better in looking after the basic social needs of nationals than was the case with the previous successive Zanu PF regimes.
The best way to sustain the momentum gained in this area is to now focus on stimulating national productivity through a conducive business environment and rational and defensible pricing policies for State services which will impact positively on industrial pricing.
While for now the humanitarian catastrophe has been averted or is it temporarily deferred there are signs it is still lingering over Zimbabwe and may implode at any moment if urgent steps are not taken to normalise thawing international relations that are waiting for signals that real change of policy direction has taken root in Zimbabwe.
Halt economic decline and resuscitate the dead economy
The coalition government has set itself the onerous task of halting the economic slide and resuscitation of the country’s economic performance.
An encouraging start has been achieved with the liberalisation of economic activity and deregulation of harsh fiscal controls that criminalised internationally accepted trade in foreign currency by nationals other than government officials.
The Zimbabwe economy has been traditionally agro driven. The once profitable commercial farms are but a pale shadow of the economic asset they were two decades ago yet there is agreement that there will be no attempt to intervene in the flawed process that rendered most of them derelict.
The only agreed position is that commercial agricultural land acquired by the State must be audited in terms of who is now in possession of which tract of land and if anyone is found to be in possession of more than one piece of land then they will be relieved of ownership of the excess land and it will be allotted to the next willing bidder.
But that is a timid approach in approaching a critical production resource’s allotment in a country where it is not necessarily in short supply but rather has been entrusted to incompetent farmers with disastrous consequences on national productivity.
It is no exaggeration to state that the threatening humanitarian crisis in the country is directly linked to failed agricultural enterprise.
The State has no business acquiring commercial farms as the State in its geographic definition means all the land in the internationally recognised political division named Zimbabwe.
The role of the State is to see to it that all land within its political jurisdiction is put to optimum use by professional farmers with the ability to produce commercially not just for national requirements but also surpluses for export to other less agricultural land and climate endowed countries.
The nonsense of legislating to nationalise the country’s lands as State Property when politically it has always been accepted as such must be reversed and property rights extended to owners past and present upheld.
Where land has been allocated to incompetent farmers who have produced nothing out of it over the past 8 years but are now causing mayhem on the farms that are still showing signs of acceptable productivity, anyone seeking to own such land must be stopped until after the audit is complete whereupon such claimants can be offered the alternative derelict lands in the ownership of greedy yet unproductive beneficiaries.
Parliament must play a crucial role in this respect for it was the same institution that legislated for the chaos that reduced the country from agricultural produce exporter of repute to international food and agricultural beggar of sorts.
The land revolution must come to some logical end which allows focus to be directed to land productivity as opposed to land possession dispute settlement.
What has happened on the land needs to be visited with robust policies that ensure the land is being used to the optimum by beneficiaries and those that did not benefit have a right to flag land underutilisation to the State which will intervene to bring production to acceptable standards by any means possible.
We will not improve agricultural outputs by continuously depriving viable producers’ access to land and allocating that land to incompetent farmers.
What is needed is a policy shift that guarantees land rights to competent investors locally and internationally. No investor is capable of transferring our land outside our geographic boundaries. They can only transfer produce there from and the onus to stop that in cases where the country is in short supply of such produce is mandated to government.
It is not the people’s mandate for government to curtail land productivity through unplanned land invasions but rather to encourage productivity and build strategic grain reserves for the nation before considering exporting any surpluses to earn forex that will be used to acquire products the country is not competent to produce at present and technologies to produce those in future.
That policy shift must be extended to all productive sectors of the economy in our mortuaries. We cannot indigenise a dead economy needing rebirth through legislating for impunity.
We can do so by encouraging massive investment in productive enterprise like farms, mines, manufacturing industries and retail outlets.
Foreign direct is what has built great nations like Japan, China, United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, France, Australia, Canada, USA and many emerging economic giants in Asia and South Africa to name but a few.
In some cases these successful nations have engaged in undisguised imperialism to plunder and steal resources including human resources necessary to drive their economies where they felt it was in short supply.
It is not a coincidence that South Africa faced with the possibility of reverse immigration by skilled Zimbabwean refugees it has been exploiting and refusing to grant legal residential statuses for a decade has moved swiftly to grant the hitherto hapless refugees official status for at least six months.
By extending that benefit South Africa is identifying the potential labour gap that will be created if just 20% of the hitherto illegal Zimbabwe refugees working in its borders decide to return to their country of origin and develop contingency plans to fill it.
Meanwhile we are busy chasing the little expertise we still have out of mainstream productivity lines and hope to turn around the economy?
Another serious obstacle facing economic turnaround in Zimbabwe is the failure in our system of governance to attract international aid and credit lines.
The hype about sanctions is exactly about realisation of that failure. We can turn around our economic fortunes with Zidera and other sanctions instruments in place if we address the reasons on which those restrictions are premised as opposed to making snobbish noises about the restrictions.
Why does it take half a year for an arrested criminal to appear in court and another six months to be granted bail then thereafter the case is never pursued?
Why does it take more than two months for a nominee of a party to the coalition to be sworn into his nominated role before he has been precluded by any written law on our statutes?
Why is it taking more than a month for the Premier’s preferred staffers to be attested as Civil Servants on the State Payroll?
In contrast why was it possible to swear in Provincial Governors within a week of SADC conceding to the request to convene Parliament, a day to re-appoint the Reserve Governor and Attorney General as well as 34 Permanent Secretaries?
Why is it possible to have 16000 Youths transferred onto the Civil Service pay roll without defined positions on the establishment?
Why has the function of a Ministry set up before SADC mediation been transferred to another that at the time of negotiation was found to be divorced to the function?
Why does it take a few hours to arrest people claiming restitution for their stolen properties but a decade to arrest a Public Servant accused of murdering political opponents in cold blood?
Why does it take hours to arrest and bring to court farmers refusing to vacate State land they have occupied for decades and yet it is impossible to arrest people moving onto the farms before the agreed land audit has been undertaken?
How can we seriously expect foreign countries to trust our newly found unity of purpose and fund projects to improve our country if our DPM says he will divert their aid to pay salaries and wages of messengers of this kind of impunity?
The worst performance of the coalition government is not in its failure to produce an economic turnaround blueprint but in its inactions on fundamental confidence building opportunities waiting to be exploited.
Democratise the country’s governance
The coalition government set itself the crucial objective of setting up a new democratic governance system for the country.
A crucial step in that initiative was agreed would be the production of a New Constitution to replace the Lancaster house Constitution that has been patched up on 19 instances to date.
The New Constitution, it was agreed, should be in place and operative within 20 months of the consummation of the Coalition government.
Preliminary consultative work so far taken seems to suggest that the government is on course to meet its key step objective of setting up a parliamentary committee to steer the process within the set time.
There are reported disputes on the leadership of the committee still to be resolved.
Another worrying development is the Civic Society view led by National Constitutional Assembly that seems to suggest that a Constitution making process driven by a Parliamentary committee is not the same as a people driven process.
These are trivial issues that should never arise at a time when all interested parties should be pushing for the Constitution that has been at the centre of political disputes since the 2000 Constitutional referendum that defeated the attempt to impose a constitution on the people.
Indeed there are reasonable grounds to suspect political motives in the Constitution making process if politicians are at the helm of the initiative but at the moment there is none more qualified than an elected MP to lead the initiative.
Retired judges may have retired due to age limits but in many instances if they had not retired they would have been forced to resign by an Executive that felt they were compromised in favour of colonial interests.
That Executive is very much part of the coalition government and will not yield to the suspect colonists driving sovereign Zimbabwe’s constitution making process.
The Civic Society led by the NCA is not mandated to drive critical national projects like the Constitution making process as it is not a nationally regulated representative of any political interest but rather a voluntary advocacy campaigner for changes to be made to the Constitution and would save the process better in a representative capacity than as its driver.
Elected Parliamentarians have the mandate to represent grassroots interest at National level and much as we may not like how they go about executing that mandate in many instances they nevertheless have the greatest legitimacy to drive the process.
The problem is that the party leadership in Zanu PF and MDC-M has this unpalatable disrespect of elected leaders whom they have so far bypassed in favour of unelected Party loyalists and they will more than likely second one such appointee to co-drive the process giving credence to NCA fears of political manipulation of the noble programme.
Be that as it may, the project is too crucial to be derailed by concerns of impartiality by political figures representing sectarian interests.
Full marks so far to the Constitutional and parliamentary affairs for remaining steadfast consistently seeking to complete the crucial exercise within the time constraints set out by the GPA.
The Constitution is not the only aspect needing attention for the democratisation agenda to gain momentum.
There are some key personnel that need to be weeded out of the current system of governance and replaced by people with lower resistance to change.
My overall assessment is that despite the teething problems in the way of the new political order towards attainment of objectives they set out to achieve they have responded to the challenges admirably.
The objectives are too crucial to be missed and efforts need to be doubled to attain them whatever the odds are.
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