The term of office for the United States of America (USA) Ambassador to Zimbabwe comes to an end this year. Ambassador Charles Ray took some time to reflect on his three-year term of office in Zimbabwe at a US Public Section function organized by DefZee yesterday. Ambassador Ray began his term of office in 2009 when he presented his credentials to President Robert Mugabe.  Prior to his current Zimbabwe mission Ambassador Ray served in the US army and retired with rank of Major. He held several key positions including serving as US Ambassador to Cambodia from 2002 to 2005 and Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Freetown, Sierra Leon.

In a brief speech Ambassador Ray challenged Zimbabwean youths not to restrict their learning to classrooms and textbooks but by reading widely. He also encouraged the youth not to fear failure. In his sentiments the Ambassador said taking initiatives to address some of the challenges affecting people in the community and not to wait for the government or other people to do it for them could create a better community in Zimbabwe.

In his three-year term in Zimbabwe the Ambassador highlighted how divisions have contributed to the challenges affecting the development of the country. Chief among them, the divisions in the society along tribal lines and those who view themselves as superior because they took part in the liberation war against those who didn’t, and the “born frees” against the older generation. Ambassador Ray said the best way for young people to participate in politics is by building better economic securities and this will enable youths not to be politicians but to be the power behind politicians. Responding to a question from the public on foreign trade the Ambassador concurred that every country goes into a business relationship with another for its self-benefit so there is need to exercise extreme caution in how a country does its business transactions. On how the Black community in America view President Obama, Ambassador Charles Ray said the once a president is elected into office in America he is guided by the constitution and he will be serving the American people not a particular section of the people in the country.

Commenting on the relationship between USA and Zimbabwe, Ambassador Ray pointed out that room for dialogue has been created and the two countries can now engage in discussions on how to find ways of making life better for average Zimbabweans.

From Foreign Policy magazine:

Other People Ruining Zimbabwe

It’s not just Robert Mugabe’s fault the country is such a mess. (Just mostly.)

When Robert Mugabe turned 88 in February, he celebrated with five massive cakes, a soccer tournament dubbed the “Bob 88 Super Cup,” and a beauty pageant. “The day will come when I will become sick,” Mugabe told Radio Zimbabwe, according to AFP. “As of now I am fit as a fiddle.”

Fortified with Botox, vitamin shots and black hair dye, Mugabe still seems pretty feisty, last week running down civilians with his motorcade and taking a bloated entourage to the United Nations sustainable development conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe is limping along, its economy broken and its government barely functioning. But while Mugabe continues to get all the international attention, he can’t be held solely responsible for Zimbabwe’s ongoing turmoil. Here’s a list of five people who also deserve a bit of the blame.

1) Emmerson Mnangagwa

Known as “Ngwena,” or “The Crocodile,” for his reputed brutality, Mnangagwa is Zimbabwe’s defense minister and the current favorite to succeed Mugabe. A veteran of the guerrilla war against the British, Mnangagwa went on to head the secret police in the 1980s, and he is thought to have orchestrated the slaughter of about 20,000 ethnically Ndebele civilians by a North Korean-trained army unit in the 1980s. Sokwanele, an activist group, called him “perhaps the one figure in Zimbabwe to inspire greater terror than President Mugabe.”

More recently, Mnangagwa was Mugabe’s chief election officer during the violent 2008 runoff vote, when thugs from the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), waged a bloody intimidation campaign against opposition supporters. The Sunday Telegraph reported in April on a secret pact: Mugabe allegedly told Mnangagwa he would anoint him his successor — as long as he ensured Mugabe’s victory in the second round of voting. Mnangagwa dismissed this as mere noise intended to stir up interparty conflict. But according to Zimbabwe political analysts, “The Crocodile” is fighting hard in Zanu-PF’s continuing power struggles.

Mnangagwa is also heavily involved in the construction of a military college near the capital, Harare, dubbed the Robert Mugabe National School of Intelligence, the Zimbabwean newspaper reported last year. Built by a Chinese construction company, the college has been financed with a $98 million Chinese loan, funded by a diamond deal with Chinese firm Anjin Investments. Mnangagwa recently admitted to Zimbabwean military involvement in the diamond trade, telling a university audience in Gweru that the Army struck deals with Chinese and Russian diamond firms to counter Western sanctions.

2. Saviour Kasukuwere

As indigenization and empowerment minister, Kasukuwere presides over the notorious 2010 law that forces foreign-owned companies to cede 51 percent of their shares to black Zimbabweans. This indigenization program has made Kasukuwere, 41, the youngest Zanu-PF minister, “a rising political star,” according to South Africa’s Times newspaper. He has vowed to intensify the program, claiming it will give Mugabe a boost in the upcoming election.

Kasukuwere, who in April confusingly claimed to Zimbabwe’s Newsday that he is the “Hitler of our time,” has been doing his best to terrify already nervous foreign investors. He announced that the government had unilaterally seized a controlling stake in an unspecified number of mines and threatened to take over another, owned by South Africa’s Impala Platinum, without offering any compensation. Kasukuwere said he is seeking justice for his people and a restoration of rights to national resources. “If that is Hitler, let me be a Hitler tenfold,” he told Newsday.

3. Morgan Tsvangirai

Many Zimbabweans credit Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, the former opposition leader turned coalition partner to Mugabe, for helping bring relative peace and stability to the country. But his critics say the country’s stability has nothing to do with Tsvangirai, pointing instead to Zimbabwe’s adoption of the American dollar and an increase in foreign aid. Ministries in their joint government barely function, and few of the reforms agreed to under the power-sharing deal have been implemented. In a leaked diplomatic cable, U.S. Amb. Charles Ray said in late 2009 that the party Tsvangirai leads, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), lacked strategic vision.

Tsvangirai recently got engaged to the daughter of a high-ranking Zanu-PF official, and while there’s no accounting for love, it is an odd choice given the continuing turmoil between Mugabe’s party and Tsvangirai’s MDC. His late wife, Susan, who died in a car crash less than a month after Tsvangirai became prime minister, in 2009, was hailed as “a mother of the nation.” Zimbabweans are left wondering why Tsvangirai is marrying into the Zanu-PF, the party that has brutalized thousands of MDC supporters.

4. Obert Mpofu

The mining minister Mpofu has a tight grip on the state-owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC), the company that controls the Marange fields in eastern Zimbabwe — home to an estimated 25 percent of the world’s diamonds. But little of the country’s diamond revenue has found its way into state coffers, amid allegations of widespread smuggling and plunder of Marange’s riches.

Finance Minister Tendai Biti said he only received $122 million in diamond revenues last year, money desperately needed to fund government projects, despite the country producing $334 million worth of gems. Mpofu, who calls himself Mugabe’s “ever obedient son” and also has close ties to Beijing, has been struggling to explain why he is suddenly a very wealthy man.

5. Jacob Zuma

South African President Zuma is supposed to be facilitating talks on Zimbabwe’s political crisis. After the disastrous 2008 elections, regional bloc known as the Southern African Development Community appointed Zuma as facilitator of dialogue between Zanu-PF and the MDC. Zimbabweans hoped Zuma would succeed in pushing for Mugabe to be held accountable.

But Zuma has been widely criticized for his utter lack of progress. “Revolutions have been conceived and executed and elections held, or due to be held in Tunisia and Egypt while Mr. Zuma is still trying to organize one election,” the Zimbabwean said in April. “Mr. Zuma should also understand that there is a cost in human lives being lost in Zimbabwe while this procrastination over agreed reforms is going on.”

Zuma, overdue to return to Harare to meet with leaders in the unity government, seems preoccupied with political maneuvering at home ahead of a crucial African National Congress conference later this year. A spokeswoman for the South African mediation team said Zuma isn’t there to “babysit” the process. Zuma has called for patience, but with elections nearing, political violence mounting, and the country going broke, time is running out.

Robert Mugabe, however, seems to be going strong.

- Erin Conway-Smith

It must be pretty frustrating for the ordinary guy with very empty pockets who has looked up to other people to solve Zimbabwe’s headache, a migraine that has defied the Aspirin that has come in many shapes and forms rendering it nothing but a very useless placebo. Turns out SADC has been such an Aspirin, at least faced with an obdurate headache in the form of Zanu PF. Each time SADC meets to map the way forward concerning the holding of elections, whatever communiqué is issued after such lengthy deliberations appears to be futile in that it has become predictable for the ordinary guy with very empty pockets that President Mugabe will say no one will dictate to Zimbabwe, a sovereign nation, what to do.

Mugabe has said no one has a right to interfere in the affairs of “his” country, effectively saying whatever it is that SADC recommends, he will not accept it as long it does not coincide with his own position, never mind how anti-people that position has been fashioned. You only have to listen to or read statements from party blabbermouth Rugare Gumbo, and you wonder if Zanu PF has any reason belonging to SADC. The ordinary guy with very empty pockets believes Zanu PF belongs to the dustbin of history, I heard the guy say the other day! But then the pan-Africanist shindig bringing together Africa’s “leading liberation movements” here has been cited by Zanu PF loyalists (like that beefy guy Herald guy booted out of Botswana a few years back) as proof that Mugabe is being supported by fellow anti-imperialist spirits in his calls for polls this year. It was then US President Ronald Reagan who said the memorable line back in 1985 after “terrorist attacks by Shi’ite Muslims”:  “We are not going to tolerate these attacks from outlaw states, run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.” Well, the same can be said about these folks!

Finance Minister Tendai Biti and human rights watchers in and outside the country have already said holding elections this year and without any electoral reforms is one sure way to sacrifice people’s lives as a political violence powder keg is sure to explode, recalling of course the 2008 madness where Zanu PF enthusiasts are accused of punishing political opponents with death. It ain’t alarmists who are predicting blood and gore if polls are held without the necessary conditions being set as already outlined by the GPA and as insisted by the MDC, but it is indeed safe to say the world has been warned about the political violence that has already begun in many parts of the country. Imagine then if the polls are officially called? Considering this, no one therefore can be criticised for concluding that this could yet be another African story of dead consciences where people will say they saw it coming but did nothing to stop it before it happened. There are just too many such stories that do not need any repeating.

And the painful bit is that some faith-based non-governmental organisations and Churches are already involved in activities and programmes of national healing where victims of political violence during past elections are sitting together with the perpetrators in search of peace in their hearts. What then becomes of these people in the face of yet more election violence when past scars remain unhealed? And this in a country where 1980s violence continues to hog contemporary political discourse. You just have to listen to Moses Mzila Ndlovu to get the point. And the guy is a government minister!

The generals in Zimbabwe are holding President Mugabe upright because they are afraid of the retribution that will come for what they’ve done under his regime. The same thing happens in other countries. And therefore you need to find a formula. In South Africa we settled on a formula of massive amnesty that actually went further than I wanted to go.

From: A Recipe for Freedom – Five lessons from South Africa’s transition to democracy. Excerpts from a recent speech by the country’s ex-president, F W De Klerk.

Read the article, learn the five lessons, on Foreign Policy Magazine

Months before elections, the MDC has yet to articulate its election manifesto, giving rise to speculation among observers that besides removing Mugabe from power, the party may genuinely be bankrupt of any ideas on how to move the country forward from its political and economic stalemate. In contrast, Zanu-PF has underpinned indigenisation and empowerment as its central election plank, and is going all out to boost its charm offensive among voters.

From www.timeslive.co.za

A Herald editorial in the run-up to the 1990 Zimbabwean elections is pretty telling when the 2012 buzz is that 88-year old President Mugabe (who is 5 years younger than Nelson Mandela) will again fight it out in the coming polls. In the Herald of 14 March 1990, the editorial titled “Punishing Campaign for a man of action,” wrote that: “at 66 and assured of victory in the…general and presidential election one would have expected President Mugabe to slow down a little and spare a thought for his personal health.” Calling him a “sober workaholic whose track record is as impressive as that of the party itself,” the editorial continued: “only the dim-witted would expect anyone to effectively challenge Cde Mugabe.”

And that my friend was in 1990. Go figure.