18 human rights activists including Jestina Mukoko have been re-detained on terrorism charges by the Government of National Unity in Zimbabwe. Morgan lets see some muscle; lets have some freedom. Now.

Francis Fukuyama reviews The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai and Dead Aid by Dambiso Moyo.

But the truth is that these books have more in common than their authors may admit. Both women see sub-Saharan Africa’s fundamental problem not as one of resources, human or natural, or as a matter of geography, but, rather, as one of bad government. Far too many regimes in Africa have become patronage machines in which political power is sought by “big men” for the sole purpose of acquiring resources—resources that are funneled either back to the networks of supporters who helped a particular leader come to power or else into the proverbial Swiss bank account. There is no concept of public good; politics has devolved instead into a zero-sum struggle to appropriate the state and whatever assets it can control.

The topic is rather vague.  I take it to mean, for the purposes of this discussion, not spiritual crisis or domestic crisis or epistemological crisis, but economic crisis brought about by the politics of cronyism and patronage.  Anybody with a sense of history can see that power corrupts so that today’s oppressed will become tomorrow’s oppressors.  Davids are Goliaths in waiting.  I believe it is my duty as a published writer to keep detached from this ugly cycle so that I can snipe at it.

Sniping is an appropriate figure of speech for writers because they attack from a distance, not like performance artists – actors, playwrights, poet-musicians, film-makers, who engage in hand-to-hand combat and who are, consequently, living a lot more dangerously.  It was his plays in Kikuyu, not his novels in English, that got Ngugi imprisoned.

It’s not only my genre that makes me feel a little safer in our police state.  Unless you’re a commercial farmer, being white still carries a few advantages in this country.  For example, you’re less likely to be searched at a road block.   And unlike Olympic swimmers and Wimbledon tennis players, serious white writers in Zimbabwe have, until recently, been dismissed as irrelevant.  While I used to find that hurtful, I also found it curiously comforting.  I believe my phone is tapped, and I have had some threatening calls, and my laptop was ‘disappeared’ by a senior police officer; but I have yet to see the inside of a prison, and my bones are still intact.

I said earlier that writers attack from a distance.  They work at home or at the town library.  They are seldom asked to read in public because the public find their readings boring.  They are physically detached from their books.  But I have created an even greater distance by the use of satire, a form of sniping which allows me to be disingenuous, to hide behind my irony.  However, this sometimes backfires.  For example, readers think I write sonnets and odes and sestinas because I am colonial-minded, but I write them to parody colonialism.  I reject for mine what Coetzee said about Pringle’s verse: “The familiar trot of iambic tetrameter couplets reassuringly domesticates the foreign content”

The artist is notoriously egotistical, a persistent self-promoter – crisis or no crisis.  The artist would do well to heed the almost daily heroics, in Zimbabwe, of vegetable vendors, certain bloggers, certain journalists, certain human rights activists, and those who wait outside jails.

They say art thrives in times of crisis.  Where then were the artists during Gukurahundi?  Were they still too intoxicated by the euphoria of Independence to take notice?  Where today have all the writers gone? – some into exile, some into silence, some into self-censorship, some into commercial farming!

Zimbabwe’s Finance Minister Tendai Biti is struggling to get the kind of big dollar support he is hoping for to resuscitate the country’s ailing economy.

He’s gotten a few nibbles – this week Zimbabwe secured USD 200 million in credit from SADC, and another USD 200 million in credit from COMESA. The UK has promised USD 21 million in humanitarian aid. Nothing to sniff at – but nowhere near the USD 10 billion plus injection Biti has been shopping around for.

Part of the problem, of course, is the global financial crisis – countries are worried about bailing out their own economies, and aren’t as open to helping out others as they might have been a year or two ago.

Part of the problem is scepticism. The IMF turned down Biti’s request, reportedly citing arrears and financial restrictions.

But most importantly, perhaps, Western governments at least are still under pressure to not give aid to Zimbabwe – until the government stops its human rights abuses, and commits to reform.

Human Rights Watch Africa Director Georgette Gagnon said in a statement today:

Humanitarian aid that focuses on the needs of Zimbabwe’s most vulnerable should continue. But donor governments such as the UK should not release development aid until there are irreversible changes on human rights, the rule of law, and accountability.

Continued farm invasions are getting a lot of media coverage, and are cited as one type of abuse that has to stop. As Tom Porteous pointed out in the Guardian (UK) yesterday, while perhaps less in the public eye, the attacks at the diamond mines in Marange are also a brutal form of human rights abuse. Porteous warns that donors can’t guarantee that aid to Zimbabwe will go to rebuilding the country’s infrastructure to promote basic human rights. Rather, it might still end up financing the forces which actively assault them.

There is much talk of reform in Zimbabwe but, as yet, no concrete action. The process of political change may have started but it is not irreversible. As long as Mugabe’s nexus of repression and corruption remains in place, no amount of development assistance will help solve Zimbabwe’s huge economic problems. And any economic aid to Harare from the UK or other donors will help to feed the crocodiles, just as surely as the blood-soaked profits of the Marange diamond mines.

We’ve just included this poem, by Mgcini Nyoni, in our Kubatana newsletter:

Not Yet Uhuru

A retreat to the falls
by the pot-bellied  ones
As we drown
in sky high
telephone bills
zesa bills utility bills
Government of National Unity
they say
NATIONAL UNITY?
Thanks for your loyalty
My  friend here has a ministry!
Over a glass of imported  vodka
they say how does the new merc go?
Over a cup of black  tea we mutter
How the heck am I gonna  raise a thousand Rands
for  the child’s school fees?
Not Yet Uhuru
we shall sing.

It reminded me of the resolutely unacceptable way that Zimbabweans are being treated by the politicians who suggest that they are “for the people”.

Whilst the formation of the Government of National Unity is spawning expensive retreats and the purchase of new vehicles, ordinary Zimbabwean citizens have to beg and borrow and wheel barrow containers of water from homes that have bore holes, to where they live in daily thirst.

Apartments, houses, offices in the city centre and dwellings in our suburbs do not get water on a daily basis. Our dams are full but the infrastructure to deliver the water and the chemicals to clean the water are lacking.

Mugabe trashes farms and calls on the international community for aid while he lives in the lap of luxury in one of the poshest suburbs in Harare, where he’s got water in his tub and where his lawns are kept quite green.

Sell the fucking cars; stop retreating and get water to the people.

Last night in an effort to fall asleep I took a gender mentality quiz from a recent FEMINA publication. The quiz was titled, “Do you think like a man”. The questions got more interesting as I got to understand what the author considered ‘male behavior’ that ‘normal’ women supposedly shouldn’t ordinarily display.

You had to strongly agree, agree or disagree with listed statements in the quiz. Some of them were: I can programme the remote control for my TV all by myself (of course I can!). I understand how a parliamentary system works. I know the basic rules of most sports including golf and tennis. I didn’t cry when I watched the Titanic (me, I didn’t really.) I know what an AC/DC transformer is and silliest of all; the angle between the floor and all four walls of any room is probably 90 degrees. Duh! I scored a lot of strongly agrees and at the end of the quiz, fell under the category of uber-male, i.e without any hint of womanly thought and susceptible to the same kind of weaknesses of the male mind in being unable to empathize with others and communicate needs effectively. What utter rubbish. Just because I understand a few things makes me male minded? I was surprised certain things were considered a preserve only for male species.

Anyhow, there was probably an element of truth in some of the things because for instance, here in Zimbabwe, how many women actually understand or even want to understand how the parliamentary system works, let alone the constitutional reform process that is currently staring at us?

At a Gender Forum meeting I attended recently, it was noted that a trend developed amongst women during the 1999 consultative processes. The women tended to boycott such processes because they simply either did not understand the processes and the constitution itself or recognize its immediate relevance to their lives. Some women are generally ‘technophobic’ and far removed from the language used in the constitution. Others simply do not care probably because they do not think their participation would make any marked difference anyway. These factors have presided over the oppression of women for a long time.

The chance to once and for all do away with the authoritarian 1979 Lancaster House constitution that has been amended at least over 15 times is here, and it would be such a disservice if women did not grab this opportunity to advance their interests especially in line with the many loopholes that dog the current constitution.

I believe it is up to civil society to point out to many an ignorant woman that a constitution determines how they are governed, and that our current constitution does not provide for things like reproductive health and sexual rights or guarantee women’s equal access to ownership and control of property. It also has sections like the S111B that prevent the automatic application of international human rights treaties like CEDAW. This would be an opportunity to lobby for the inclusion of women in parliamentary sub-committees and also ensure that the lack of a guarantee of security of a person’s bodily and psychological integrity is done away with, especially in view of the fact that there is a lot of justice outstanding from the violence that accompanied last year’s harmonized elections.

I believe it is up to all of us as individuals to take it upon ourselves to encourage and educate our neighbors about partaking in this critical process and attend consultative meetings. It is about time we set the precedent for our own possible Obama-like election hopefully to be called in 2011. The South Africans have just had something of a democratic election, and they boast one of the most democratic constitutions on the continent. It would be nice for once to stop wishing and thinking  when we too shall see democracy skate across our land. Only we can make it happen if we start by being or neighbor’s keeper.