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Showing posts with label Zimbabwe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zimbabwe. Show all posts

Sunday 19 November 2017

This is redistribution for Zimbabwe’s elite, not revolution in a ruined nation

Jason Burke in The Guardian


Drive any distance anywhere in Zimbabwe beyond the upmarket Borrowdale neighbourhood in Harare, where Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace are detained in their sprawling mansion, and the scale of the challenges facing what was once one of the wealthiest countries in Africa is evident.

In the capital, the roads are potholed, outside they are cracked and crumbling. Banks are so short of cash that people wait hours to withdraw even tiny sums. The only jobs are in government service, yet salaries are rarely paid. The best and the brightest have long fled abroad. Warehouses are empty, fields lie fallow. The busiest store in rural villages is the “bottle shop”, selling dirt-cheap spirits.







Zimbabwe has famously abundant natural resources but resuscitating the economy after 20 years of disastrous mismanagement and wholesale looting by corrupt officials is a major undertaking. The banking system needs to be rebooted, faith restored in the national currency and government finances somehow replenished. The vast debts incurred by Mugabe’s regime need to be rescheduled or waived and new funding arranged to rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure.

Investors have long been interested in Zimbabwe but put off by the significant risk that any funds will be stolen or any successful venture appropriated. Can they now be sure that will not happen? Old habits die hard.

The ruling Zanu-PF party and allies in the military launched their takeover to purge an ambitious faction that threatened their position, not because they wanted to see structural reform that would shut down their own lucrative rackets and rent-seeking.

There are immediate practical problems, too. The police are seen as creatures of Mugabe by the military and allies, but someone needs to patrol the streets. There is the fate of Comrade Bob and Grace, when they are no longer president and first lady, to decide. There is a government to form, possible elections to hold.

It is this political process that poses the greatest challenge. The people of Zimbabwe have high hopes of a new democratic era. But the ousting of Mugabe was a redistribution of power within the ruling elite of Zimbabwe, not a people’s revolution.

Emmerson Mnangagwa, the ousted vice-president, who is most likely to succeed Mugabe when he finally leaves power, is no committed democrat. He was Mugabe’s chief enforcer, with a long history of human rights abuse. Mnangagwa, 75, will need to make some concessions to public opinion within Zimbabwe and the hopes of the international community, not least to get the donor and diaspora money the country so desperately needs. However, he will seek to do this while reinforcing, not weakening, the grip of the party.

But how long will Zimbabweans tolerate the rule of a clique of septuagenarian veterans of an armed struggle that took place before most of the population was born?

A similar question has been asked elsewhere in Africa over recent decades. It is being asked today in neighbouring South Africa, where the lustre of the African National Congress has steadily diminished over its 23 years in power.

The eventual demise of parties like Zanu-PF is inevitable. But so, too, is the trauma that accompanies their passing.

Tuesday 22 December 2015

Zimbabwe to make Chinese yuan legal currency after Beijing cancels debts

Yuan becomes the latest currency to be approved for public transactions in Zimbabwe, as the southern African nation seeks to increase trade with Beijing


 
The yuan will become legal tender after Chinese president Xi Jinping visited Zimbabwe in early December for talks with president Robert Mugabe. Photograph: Huang Jingwen/Xinhua Press/Corbis


Agence France-Presse


Zimbabwe has announced that it will make the Chinese yuan legal tender after Beijing confirmed it would cancel $40m in debts.


“They [China] said they are cancelling our debts that are maturing this year and we are in the process of finalising the debt instruments and calculating the debts,” minister Patrick Chinamasa said in a statement.




Robert Mugabe greets China's Xi Jinping as 'true and dear friend' of Zimbabwe



Chinamasa also announced that Zimbabwe will officially make the Chinese yuan legal tender as it seeks to increase trade with Beijing.

Zimbabwe abandoned its own dollar in 2009 after hyperinflation, which had peaked at around 500bn%, rendered it unusable.

It then started using a slew of foreign currencies, including the US dollar and the South African rand.

The yuan was later added to the basket of the foreign currencies, but its use had not been approved yet for public transactions in the market dominated by the greenback.

Use of the yuan “will be a function of trade between China and Zimbabwe and acceptability with customers in Zimbabwe,” the minister said.

Zimbabwe’s central bank chief John Mangudya was in negotiations with the People’s Bank of China “to see whether we can enhance its usage here,” said Chinamasa.

China is Zimbabwe’s biggest trading partner following Zimbabwe’s isolation by its former western trading partners over Harare’s human rights record.

In reaction veteran president Robert Mugabe adopted a “look East policy”, forging new alliances with eastern Asian countries and buttressing existing ones.

In early December, Chinese president Xi Jinping stopped over in Zimbabwe in a rare trip by a world leader to the country, and presided over the signing of various agreements, mainly to upgrade and rebuild Zimbabwe’s infrastructure such as power stations.

Wednesday 16 January 2013

Ministers accused of exploiting royal veto to block embarrassing legislation

Bills on Iraq, Rhodesia and hereditary titles were blocked by Queen - on advice of ministers who had political objections
Tam Dalyell
Tam Dalyell, the sponsor of a 1999 bill that aimed to give MPs a vote on military action against Saddam Hussein, said he is 'incandescent and angry' that it was blocked by the Queen under apparent influence from Tony Blair’s government. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Government ministers have exploited the royal family's secretive power to veto new laws as a way to quell politically embarrassing backbench rebellions, it was claimed on Tuesday.

Tam Dalyell, the sponsor of a 1999 parliamentary bill that aimed to give MPs a vote on military action against Saddam Hussein, said he is "incandescent and angry" that it was blocked by the Queen under apparent influence from Tony Blair's government. It also emerged that Harold Wilson used the Queen's power to kill off politically embarrassing bills about Zimbabwe and peerages.

MPs and republicans have complained the little-known power to veto or consent to new legislation grants the Queen and Prince Charles unwarranted powers and is undemocratic. Detail about its application is only now emerging as a result of a freedom of information campaign by a legal scholar, and the Guardian revealed on Monday at least 39 different laws have been subject to the secretive royal consent arrangement.

Dalyall's military actions against Iraq bill would have given parliament sole authority to sanction strikes on Iraq, and he alleged Blair's government told Buckingham Palace the Queen should withhold her consent. The bill was introduced a month after the US and UK operation Desert Fox air strikes against Iraq.

"The issue as far as I am concerned is that Buckingham Palace was used by Downing Street," said Dalyell. "I don't blame the palace … this was entirely the handiwork of Downing Street. It was about snuffing out a measure they feared would have a lot of support. It was a sneaky way of avoiding an issue that should have come before the House of Commons."

Dalyell said he had been contacted by one of the Queen's aides following the blocking of his backbench bill and he understands the government instructed the Queen to refuse consent in order to kill off a proposal that was gaining Labour support among MPs opposed to military action in Iraq.
That appears to be supported by a Buckingham Palace statement on the application of the veto, which said: "The sovereign has not refused to consent to any bill affecting crown interests unless advised to do so by ministers."

A Cabinet Office spokesman said it would not "discuss any discussions between us and the royal palaces". Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's communications adviser at the time the bill was quashed, said he could not recall the case.

Dalyell said he was concerned that the power could be used to prevent parliament from intervening in future war plans through private members' bills.

"This could happen again," he said. "The palace has to be very careful not to do the government's dirty work. They blocked my bill because the government thought they were threatened in the House of Commons. This is relevant today. I was angry then and I still am."

At least two other bills have been blocked by the Queen, it emerged , both on the advice of ministers who had political objections. The first came in 1964 in the case of the titles (abolition) bill, which was embarrassing to Harold Wilson's newly elected Labour government, which had a slender majority and did not want any legislative debate about the desirability of titles such as lordships and damehoods.

The other was the Rhodesia independence bill of 1969 which sought autonomy for the African colony which Wilson's government was opposed to while it was in a state of rebellion. The examples were identified by Professor Rodney Brazier, a legal academic and informal constitutional adviser to the Queen's private secretary, in an academic paper published in the Cambridge Law Journal in 2007.

Chloe Smith, the Cabinet Office minister, said the Queen and Prince Charles had not vetoed any bills in the past decade, but it remains unknown which, if any bills, have been altered during the consent process. MPs and peers have been calling for greater transparency over the application of the royal powers of consent, but Smith this week told parliament the government would not publish a full account of which bills have been subject to royal consent because it would be too expensive.