The dangers of hoping to achieve excellence with outdated tools

Premier Tsvangirai pensive but is he watching his back


The danger s associated with trying to reinvent the wheel have been widely cautioned yet despite such documented warnings we always fall into the pitfalls.

It is not easy to teach old dogs new tricks, goes the old adage. Maybe it should have been worded it is possible to teach new tricks to old dogs but they will also pass their old treachery onto the trainer.

The transfer of new tricks becomes much harder in tandem with the age of the trainee. When the outmoded training methods and blunted tools are employed to demonstrate desired behaviours in the training situation the outcome is sure to be further off the mark than would otherwise be the case if desired behaviour is modelled by current best practice experts.

When the Premier achieved a hybrid government

There can be no denying the fact that Premier Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC party performed a political feat that was beyond imagination after being denied enjoyment of the electoral victory they achieved in the landmark March 2008 harmonised elections.

Indeed they fell short of reclaiming the deserved victory but they nevertheless gained access to government levers of power and have been working hard to make a difference in a system that had festered under unbridled Zanu PF corruption and impunity for decades.

It has not been easy but the achievements of the MDC Cabinet contingent in the hybrid coalition government have been nothing short of miraculous if one takes stock of where the country was on 31 December 2008 and where it is today politically, economically and socially.

But even those miraculous achievements fall far short of the expectations of the nation that has been under siege for nearly two decades for the government to relax and feel comfortable it has the situation under control.

There is no illusion among the MDC that the GPA that opened doors for its entry in government also brought with it the liability of having to accommodate election losers and detested Zanu PF and MDC-M opportunists.

It was a liability the MDC-T accepted with a pinch of salt but nonetheless the party could not avoid given the insurmountable obstacle to its ascendancy to power presented by the evil axis that JOC was, is and will forever be remembered as.

Add to that SADC and AU complicity and you will understand the extent of the obstacles the MDC-T had to move to get into government corridors and even more to have its way of governance accepted.

No matter how mediocre the achievements may appear to others for the MDC-T they are milestones never before fathomed in the country without Zanu PF and President Mugabe being pushed over the hill.

The MDC-T quest for power has not been made any easier by the lethargic failure to exploit opportunities when they arose.

The failure to claim victory after the 29 March 2008 has been correctly described by the party’s national organising secretary Elias Mudzuri as its worst political blunder and he is right.

All the sweating and pleadings before the SADC, the AU, the UN whoever else cared to listen could have been avoided if the party had used its grassroots structures to pour out on the streets in wild celebrations of the electoral victory and not calmed them to avoid confrontation with armed forces thereby allowing Zanu PF to regroup behind the cover of the security forces and steal the victory from under the MDC noses.

The Premier is aware of this blight on the leadership of the party and is trying his outmost best to salvage the pieces and prepare the party for the ultimate and undisputed final victory.

The problem though is that Zanu PF has been severely wounded and is ever on the defensive to hold onto the remains of its decimated power base.

It thus serves their cause when the Premier unwittingly allows the old government bureaucracy order to remain intact and hope that he will charm it by undue praises.

The decision to retain all the Zanu PF nominated Permanent secretaries has already started to cause tremors in the fragile coalition which must be closely watched if the MDC intends to avoid tables being turned against it come the next election.

JOMIC trivialisation

According to Constitutional amendment No 19 the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (JOMIC) has the crucial responsibility of monitoring compliance with implementation of agreed upon clauses that anchor the coalition government.
For all intends and purposes it should be the most conspicuous institution in the country at present given the number of issues from the Global Political Agreement (GPA) that are being violated and or half heartedly implemented.

If the truth be said JOMIC has turned out to be a big yawn. Its muted silence on the delayed swearing in of Roy Bennett breach is evidence of what has happened to the institution that had shown so much promise when it silenced the vitriolic Nathaniel Manheru column in the Herald and recommended the sharing of Provincial Governors by the parties based on electoral performances of the parties in the 10 provinces.

That is all JOMIC will be remembered for in terms of achievements. These are trivialised by its failure to cause the Principals to stop persecution of political opponents of Zanu PF through a Zanu PF controlled Attorney General’s office and Justice Ministry supported by a Zanu PF Police Commissioner General.

And there is the Roy Bennett swearing in omission that has been put on ice since February when he became eligible as deputy Agriculture Minister but for Mugabe’s refusal to perform a mandatory function conferred upon his office on frivolous and vexatious grounds that are not in the agreement as grounds for him to refuse or fail to perform the swear in task.

Then there is the issue of the permanent Secretaries which JOMIC advised should be left as is on spurious reasoning that the incumbents were professional when they are known to be Zanu PF political appointees.

The Premier has none other to blame on that one but himself for taking advice he knew was outrageously inaccurate both in content and philosophical grounding as they were all proposed by Zanu PF controlled institutions which require to be overhauled to be aligned with the new order.

It was and still remains a political blunder of the proportions worse than even the decision to leave Mugabe as President after the June 28 fiasco presented as a presidential runoff election.

Premier Tsvangirai did not need help on this one because all the help he needed is in the GPA and JOMIC but he decided against falling back on that.

And with that JOMIC was immobilised and the bureaucracy was strengthened as it became apparent all positions in government were safe for incumbents from Zanu PF as long as they remained firmly behind President Mugabe which signal they did not miss.

Manheru was reincarnated, the media onslaught on the MDC was revived, the persecution of MDC MPs and activists is now in fast track mode with convictions being handed down like confetti as the agreed moratorium period on by elections nears its expiration on 15 September 2008 in terms of Constitutional amendment No19.

Only the MDC leadership does not see that the bureaucracy it endorsed is working on a well planned strategy to restore Zanu PF’s lost Parliamentary majority and relegate MDC to the opposition benches it has warmed up for the past decade with limited impact on the way the country was being governed.

President Mugabe will announce by elections for all vacant Legislative seats at the end of September in terms of the powers conferred upon his office by Constitutional amendment No 19 whether or not the other coalition principals are in agreement with him and will be acting constitutionally in doing so.

His Zanu PF Party is already deploying the youth militia in preparation of the by elections while the MDC is grappling with the economic crisis. They will field candidates in each and every constituency to be contested through the by elections and no amount of protest from MDC will stop that as the moratorium will have expired without the MDC taking advantage of it.

JOMIC which is supposed to see to it that constitutional provisions are implemented at all times is silent about this because it is dominated by Zanu PF’s chief strategists who are working behind closed doors with the bureaucracy to surprise the MDC.
The bureaucracy is outperforming Ministers

It does not require rocket science to deduce that the bureaucracy has the MDC where it wants them to be –against the wall with its hands full of political waste from the courts and an over expectant electorate.

There were opportunities to dilute the Zanu PF hegemony on the bureaucracy that have slipped through the open palm.

For the Premier to stand up and openly declare that the bureaucracy was left as is because principals vetted incumbents and found them to be adequately qualified and professionally competent to execute their mandates is political blunder the Premier will live to regret.

Constantine Chiwenga, Augustine Chihuri, Happyton Bonyongwe, Paradzayi Zimondi and Justice George Chiweshe are integral parts of the bureaucracy. The Premier cannot convince anyone that these are professional than they are Zanu PF zealots. That is an undeniable fact.

The reason why the MDC capitulated on Permanent Secretaries and other bureaucracy appointments other than the Reserve Bank Governor and Attorney general is because the appointments were made prior to the signing of the GPA and any attempt to reverse them without similar action being taken in the military command would have severely exposed the powerlessness of the MDC in matters relating to the military.

It was a wise move but a tricky one to defend because the military supremos now have the brains in ministries to sustain their onslaught on the Premier and his think tank.

That is why they are now hanging in there at Chiadzwa and the torture bases are re-emerging countrywide.

There is an imperative need for the informal JOC meetings to be reigned into line before they come up with a devastating counterstrategy for the MDC-T political momentum.