Zimbabwe: Tsvangirai And Mugabe Must Sit And Talk
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The Nation (Nairobi)
6 July 2008
Posted to the web 7 July 2008
Ochichi Pharaoh
Nairobi
With President Robert Gabriel Mugabe now firmly on the driving seat in Zimbabwe, having secured another five-year term, it seems Mr Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Movement of Democratic Change (MDC), has been boxed - though unfairly - into a corner.
The chances of him emerging from there to deliver a killer bunch and become the champion are quite minimal.
But then a window of opportunity in the form of dialogue is knocking.
And for the sake of the suffering Zimbabweans, the opposition chief ought to embrace it as, perhaps, it is the only way to allay the pain that the people of the southern Africa country are experiencing.
Paranoid
The way things stand at the moment, it seems no amount of internal or external pressure is likely to move Mugabe and force him to reason differently.
The man himself has made it clear that he does not care what the International Community thinks about him.
Furthermore, those who know him well observe that if you shout at him, he digs in.
This appears to be the case because when the British criticised him over land distribution, he became completely paranoid. And this is the point where things started going wrong in that country.
Having said that, and to be fair to Mugabe, it is imperative to note that the former colonial master cannot escape blame as far as the land issue is concerned - particularly on the question of compensation. The Gordon Brown government must shoulder its fair share of blame.
So the MDC leader should look at the bigger picture, go beyond emotional wounds of the past election, put together a team of negotiators and dispatch them to the negotiating table.
Let him not look back, but forward because the past is not very significant at the moment. Mary Greenwood, in her book, 41 Rules Of Solving A Dispute, points out that the past is called the past for a reason.
UN Security Council
Even though the Western powers have taken a tough stance against the Zanu-PF leader, there is really nothing much they can do other than, most probably, to impose sanctions which might end up hurting the common Zimbabwean person more.
Already the United States has drafted a resolution text containing the sanctions which would be deliberated soon by the UN Security Council. However, whether China and Russia can accept and support the script, is another matter altogether.
The African continent is not that valuable to the West that they can opt to dispatch their troops to eject an illegitimate leader in a country. Calls for peacekeeping forces in war-torn countries in Africa have never yielded any substantive results.
No Western country is ready to send its soldiers to die in this part of the world; they can perish elsewhere, say, in Iraq or Afghanistan - not here. For that reason, it can only be sensible for Tsvangarai to embark on negotiations.
The African Union, on the other hand, is a toothless bull dog. In the recent summit at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, for example, it was extremely difficult for them to come out openly to condemn the Zanu-PF leader.
And not many political pundits were taken aback by their action, nay, inaction.
When they gathered some courage to talk about the Zimbabwe issue, they were so shy that they did so in a closed-door meeting. They did not want to humiliate one of their own in public.
But what can one expect of the African leaders? They are birds of the same feathers.
Very many of them -out of the 53 - are elected on incredible polls and some have never even conducted any political exercise resembling an election; Yar'Adua of Nigeria, Omar Bongo of Gabon, Museveni of Uganda, Bashir of Sudan, Gaddafi of Libya, Zenawi of Ethiopia, to mention but a few.
Consequently, they lack the moral ground on which to stand and castigate the Zimbabwean head of state.
As a result, the resolution the summit managed to come up with, was calling for the Mugabe government and MDC to negotiate for a unity government, with the South Africa President Thabo Mbeki continuing to act as a mediator. This declaration has two serious flaws.
Relevant Links
First. How can Mbeki remain a mediator when he has been criticised repeatedly for his ineffective, quiet techniques which tend to favour one side?
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Read comments. Write your own.
Thanks for mentioning my book: How To Negotiate Like A Pro: 41 Rules for Resolving Disputes. That and my new book: How To Mediate Like A Pro: 42 Rules for Mediating Disputes are available from Acrodile Publishers.
Sincerely, Mary Greenwood, Author, Negotiator, Mediator
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Tsvangirayi deserves to be boxed into a corner because he betrayed the people of Zimbabwe by withdrawing from the runoff election. People died fighting for him because they thought he was committed to change but he then he went ahead to reward Mugabe for the violence. Given all the legal evidence at his disposal why did he not stay in the runoff and follow the law of the country and lodge a formal legal challenge that would have prevented Mugabe from being inaugurated as President pending the resolution of the case?