‘President dwarfs his colleagues intellectually’

Commerce professor Welshman Ncube (WN) about this and other issues.

LG: We are three years into the inclusive Government, what are your impressions so far?
WN: Well, like everything in real life, there are the good things and the bad things. There are things, which have been done well, there are things which have been done badly. There have been times when there was good co-operation in Government. There are times when there was indifference as well as times there has been lack of co-operation where the spirit of competition has replaced the spirit of co-operation. All of it is there. I guess that is to be expected in any coalition Government.
There are things you can say in the economic front up until now, we had been doing relatively well in terms of the performance of the economy. The capacity of people to make a living is much better now than it was three years ago. Yes, there are people who still have very limited income but I believe it’s still a lot better than it was that time.
By the end of 2008 we had relatively high levels of insecurity in the country. There were arrests left, right and centre, detentions. There was extensive violence. Today, in spite of the fact that we might still quarrel about many things, there is relative peace. Yes, there is occasional arrests, yes there is occasional decisions by the police to disallow meetings, but its nowhere near the situation as it pertained at the commencement of the Inclusive Government three years ago. So, I will say Zimbabwe has moved on. Progress has been made.
There is quarrelling and quibbling over a whole range of things — the road map to elections, the space of political reform, the space of media reform, the continuation of policing by the police in a manner which renders many of us still unhappy. So, all of those things still remain, but they are not comparable to the near chaos that we had in 2008.
LG: As one of the people who negotiated the GPA, are there any agreements that you wish would have been done differently?
WN: Well, maybe not agreements, I think there are clauses that we could have written better with greater clarity, you see when you are negotiating and you are trying to work together you always think that everybody will act in good faith. In real life it turns out that not all of us always act in good faith, so there are provisions where we should have been stricter, we were not. Let me give you an example in the issue of the electronic media, I believe we could have done better. We could for instance, have created an independent broadcasting authority in the same way we created the media commission.
I believe if we had done that the reform agenda in the electronic media would have been much faster and more effective than it is, so that is one area where personally I regret we couldn’t do as well as we could have done. There are clauses for instance where we assumed good faith. Let me give you examples, we always assumed that if we state that a particular number of ministers will come from this party, deputy ministers from this party and the President will swear them in.
We always assumed that the President will always swear in people given to him by that particular party which had been given that position in the GPA. That has not always happened, maybe, if we had worded that more strictly, we would not have had cases such as that of Roy Bennett. So those are some of the areas where I think we could have improved on the text and the spirit of the GPA itself.
LG: We have had discord from this Government on several issues. What have been the areas of convergence and divergence?
WN: Well, I think on economic policy, on all aspects of economic policy generally speaking, there has been more convergence than divergence. We have been able to agree on a raft of policies. STEP 1, STEP 2, the MTP, the Industrial Development Policy, the Trade Policy, the Science and Technology policy etc. I think there has been a great deal of convergence on policy formulation and, to some extent, on policy implementation particularly, in the first two years of the Inclusive Government.
Implementation has been much more difficult in the last one year, in the last six months principally because at the moment everyone is looking at elections. You have parties, ministers looking more at the electoral advantage any decision or implementation will give to their party instead of looking purely on whether or not this is a correct policy and whether this is in the national interest.
There have also been areas of convergence, the electoral reforms for instance, there was convergence there, when it was negotiated, there was convergence around issues relating to the Human Rights Commission. Yes, naturally if you have three political parties which have divergent starting points, everyone ultimately has to give up something and compromise and there have been compromises, which many people might think should not have been made, but were made in the interest of progress. If you take for instance the compromise on whether or not the Human Rights Commission should be able to investigate things which happened before it came into being.
If we had allowed a deadlock to remain on that, you would have never had the Human Rights Commission start working, indeed the deadlock on that even though we had initially agreed, the deadlock in Parliament has lost us one year, for the last one year the Human Rights Commission should have been doing work, it has done no work because its enabling legislation had not been passed.
People should never forget that yes while it is important for us to look back into the past and deal with the past, it is equally important to look into the present and look into the future. If we disable ourselves from an ability to look into the present and the future because we can’t agree on the past, it basically means, you have neither saved the past nor have you saved the future at the end of the day.
There have of course been instances where we make compromises, painful, unhappy compromises and then we backtrack on them, again causing delays. There are instances where I think there has been lack of sincerity among the coalition partners. For instance in my view in respect of ensuring we completely with one voice speak against violence and act against it. I think there has been lack of sincerity in ensuring that the police are made to be completely 100 percent professional, non partisan so that they enforce the law without fear or favour and without regard to the political affiliation or beliefs of particular individuals accused of breaching the law.
There has been lack of sincerity in implementing media reforms, particularly in the electronic media, there is no reason why it has taken us three years to set up independent players in the electronic media, whether its radio, whether its television, something we agreed to without coercion, everybody said, “this is a good thing”.
Zimbabwe was the only Sadc country, in fact, remains the only Sadc country without independent radio stations, without an independent television station, yes there are new players, but they are not independent because they are entities owned by the State directly or indirectly and so forth and so on, so those are some of the things that we could have done better but in terms of convergence and divergence, those are some of the key areas.
LG: You have worked with the three principals since the Inclusive Government came to life. What are your impressions about the three gentlemen, starting with the President?
WN: I only know two principals, as I have said the leadership of Zanu-PF, the leadership of the MDC-T, we have been working together in the inclusive Government. They have all sought to contribute to the turnaround of the country. They have all sought to lead their parties to a point where sometimes agreement is difficult.
They have provided leadership to implement compromises and decisions that have been made but at the end of the day all of them are leaders of their political parties. I have found out that through experience when push comes to shove, they would all stand for their party interests as opposed to what might be in the national interest.
LG: Individually, President Mugabe what kind of a leader is he from a Government perspective and as a leader of his party and of the country?
WN: As a person, well I have said this in another context before, among his colleagues from Zanu-PF in comparative terms, it is clear that intellectually, President Mugabe dwarfs all of them. There is no doubt about that, which probably explains why they think they cannot do without him even though he has done his 32 years. The other aspect, which I think is relevant to the question that you posed, of course, within the framework of Cabinet, he has a very high command of detail.
LG: And Prime Minister Tsvangirai?
WN: I am not sure whether I am the right person to even answer that question, all I can say is that as a person, as a human being, the Prime Minister is a very nice, kind person and easy to work with as a human being. I don’t think I am qualified to comment on other aspects as to his capacity to command and lead 
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