The jinx of Home Affairs Ministry

Asked what his views were about post colonial governments and their leaders, Nyerere said: “Running an African country is like riding on the back of a hungry tiger. You have to remain mou-nted by clinging to its back because if you slip and fall, the tiger will devour you.”

 An identical situation is panning out in Zimba-bwe. After years of having it their way, the ruling elite is holding onto the tiger’s back to survive.
Never in its history in post-independent Zimba-bwe has ZANU-PF gone through such turbulent and trying times.
President Robert Mugabe revealed his fear a fortnight ago of an internal party rebellion at a meeting of regional leaders meant to salvage the country’s power-sharing deal.
The ZANU-PF leader said ceding the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Movement for Demo-cratic Change (MDC) would be a risk to the party’s internal unity, according to The Mail and Guardian, a South African weekly.

In a position paper prepared for the summit, ZANU-PF said: “Each political party has its own internal political dynamics and it would be difficult to try to arrive at an outcome that reconciles the difficult internal political dynamics of the three political parties.”
In past discussions about ZANU-PF’s succession process, President Mugabe said he feared passing the baton to someone else in the party because it would spark its disintegration.
Nyerere’s analogy becomes quite stark.
President Mugabe’s entrenched position on the Home Affairs Ministry, according to the paper, centres on the 1987 Unity Accord with former rival and late PF ZAPU leader, Joshua Nkomo.
That deal ended years of civil conflict by making Nkomo one of the country’s two vice-presidents although it might come unstuck following renewed efforts by a disgruntled faction in Mata-beleland to revive PF-ZAPU and divorce it from the moribund Unity Accord.
ZANU-PF had argued that “just as they had understood that the issue of the two vice-presidents emanated from the Unity Accord, the Tsvangirai faction of the MDC should have understood this historical obligation regarding the Ministry of Home Affairs”.
But, in its own presentation to the Southern African Development Community Troika, the MDC stood by its demand that “the ministry should be allocated to the MDC to strike a balance in the security ministries. Having considered the issue of rotation and co-ministering as suggested, we reject both”.
Analysts said nowhere in the Unity Accord was there an entrenched provision on allocation of ministries. The Unity Accord is a gentleman’s agreement between feuding parties with no constitutional relevance, argued analysts.
They said just as much as ZANU-PF handed the ministry over to placate PF-ZAPU’s fear of future tribal massacres, the MDC could use similar logic after its supporters were killed, maimed or displaced in state-sponsored violence in the aftermath of ZANU-PF’s first ever electoral loss since independence.
Chairman of the Zimbabwe Liberation Platform, Femias Chaka-buda, alleged that ZANU-PF would like to cling to the Home Affairs Ministry to cover its abuses of human rights and electoral fraud.
“Home Affairs was abused by ZANU-PF to rig the elections; it is the same ministry that was used to delimitate constituency boundaries in favour of ZANU-PF and would do the same if retained for future elections,” Chakabuda, who is Masvingo mayor, said.
Chakabuda said the MDC would like a window through which it can promote the democratic process by acquiring that ministry.
“The biggest cost attached to the Ministry of Home Affairs is human life. People have been dying in pursuit of demo-cracy and ZANU-PF has used the Home Affairs Ministry to do their dirty work,” he said.
And contrary to ZANU-PF assertion, the ministry has never been a preserve of PF-ZAPU until recently.
The late Joshua Nko-mo was Zimbabwe’s first Minister of Home Affairs in the coalition government of 1980 but he was replaced in 1981 by Richard Hove, who came from the Midlands Pro-vince. For the next four years, the position was held by ministers from outside the Matabeleland region.
The late Herbert Ushewokunze held the post from 1982 to 1983 and was replaced by Simbi Mubako in 1984.
The most ruthless Home Affairs Minister during the Gukurahundi era was, in fact from Mata-beleland, Enos Nkala, who replaced Mubako in 1985 and remained in office until 1987.
Yet still, contrary to the perception that there was an unwritten understanding at the signing of the Unity Agreement in 1987 that the Minister of Home Affairs would always hail from Matabeleland, the first post-unity incumbent in the portfolio, the late Moven Mahachi, who held the position from 1988 to 1992, was from Manicaland outside Mata-beleland.
Since then the Minister of Home Affairs has always been appointed from Matabeleland.
The penultimate minister from that region before the incumbent, Dumiso Dabengwa, said of the bickering over the portfolio: “All it shows is that there is lack of goodwill among the leadership and one begins to suspect that the parties were forced into an agreement before they were ready for compromise.”
Dabengwa said it was hard to imagine the level of distrust among the principals that would make it so difficult to come up with a solution to the impasse.
Political pundits attribute deep seated fears that a government led by Tsvangirai poses a serious threat to the comforts of the ruling elite and their ill-gotten wealth as a major impediment to the successful conclusion of the agreement.
The military, analysts say, fear a campaign of retribution against them for their past misdeeds, in particular the alleged human rights abuses they wrought in the process of buttressing President Mugabe’s grip on power.
It has unsettled them in the wake of Tsvangi-rai’s statements that “the guilty are afraid”.
The mired deal is one of many that ZANU-PF has made since its founding. The party has literary gone through the mill judging by the number of similar arrangements and agreements it has entered into with others since its nationalist days in the 1960s.
And through that time, it has been neighbouring countries that have come to prod leaders to take up the plate.
The former Organi-sation of African Unity, now the African Union, battled to convince ZAPU and ZANU to form a united front in their pursuit of the independence war despite the two parties’ contrasting ideologies.
Ideologues and demagogues, fearful of losing positions in party ranking, worked day and night to try to scuttle progress towards unity just as much as what ordinary Zimbabweans are witnessing today.
In 1975, the formation of the United African National Council was a subtle compromise arra-ngement to get the two liberation forces — ZIPRA and ZANLA — to forge a united front.
Frustrated hosts of the liberation forces had to use threats at times to get Zimbabwean nationalists to agree to what was best for them when they could not agree among themselves, probably because of greed and lust for power.
And to unite the forces, the Zimbabwe People’s Army was formed only to disintegrate into two separate entities, with ZANLA relocating to Mozambi-que and ZIPRA remaining in Zambia.
It could work out if the cringe- phrase style is repeated in the current impasse to get the parties to agree.
At the Lancaster House negotiations which gave birth to independence in 1980, the timely intervention of Samora Machel helped push the talks forward, culminating in an agreement.
On their own, Zim-babweans could not have taken up the terms of the deal, preferring an uncertain, yet belligerent pursuit of a devastating bush war.