In a series of weekly viewpoints from African journalists, columnist and filmmaker Farai Sevenzo considers Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s week.
In the end he arrived in the West’s capitals like a collection of many personalities:
The messenger, the fledgling diplomat, the suffering leader-turned-prime minister, the widower, the money-raiser, the prophet of hope sailing on rough seas of scepticism.
In a packed week, Morgan Tsvangirai was greeted in Washington, Oslo, Stockholm, Berlin, Brussels like the acceptable face of a country one remembers for the wrong reasons.
US President Barack Obama greeted him in the Oval Office and for the first time in a long, long time the sight of the Zimbabwean flag placed by a podium in close proximity to the host’s stars and stripes seemed to say – yes, the broken country is on its way to being mended.
Many questions
After all here is a man who has known beatings and jail standing next to President Obama, next to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and putting his country’s case to the world. Surely something is going to give?
But as usual, views about Mr Tsvangirai remained polarised:
Is he raising money for his Movement of Democratic Change party or the people of Zimbabwe? Is he in charge or is the old man, President Robert Mugabe, above him the new puppeteer?
Why is he being treated like a long lost relative by these people who have banned President Mugabe’s cabinet from travelling?
Why is he being saluted by the German defence forces as if he is the head of state? How much is all of this costing?
The questions were all over the place.
And depending on the answers you were looking for it was agreed that the man who entered into a pact with the people who once beat him, refused to salute him and killed hundreds of his supporters had gone through a kind of practical conversion in order for his broken country to be mended.
There was no time to dwell on the gruesome details of the past.
‘Wandering prophet’
All the world needed to know was that Zimbabwe was now stable – there is food in the shops, the 500bn% inflation has vanished like a witch in the night to leave 3% as the shining new number.
And the 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar note can be found in wallets from Harare to Helsinki only as souvenirs of the kind of figures which give calculators a heart attack.
But as soon the wandering prophet paints this version of peace, unity and development, Amnesty International lands in Zimbabwe and says the picture on his canvas is pure fiction:
Human rights are still precarious; citizens are still living in fear; the poor have no real hope of laying their hands on scarce foreign currency, which is the only currency in circulation.
That freedom of expression and the right protest is tied to police beatings and that human rights defenders, including journalists and lawyers, continue to be intimidated, harassed, threatened and charged.
And, tellingly, that the sweet words which laid the foundation for the unity government had not been followed by action.
“The government must give as much attention to securing human rights reforms as they are to seeking economic reforms,” Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International said.
And behold the miracle of miracles – she was saying this in a Harare press conference. Surely change is in the air?
Then the wandering prophet arrived in London.
The thousands of exiled Zimbabweans who gathered to hear from the man they have only seen on news footage fighting enormous demons in a political life that required courage and tenacity focussed their mobile phone cameras on him.
They were like music lovers at a pop concert committing a star to memory.
But when he uttered those words, “It is time to go home”, the crowd turned against Prime Minister Tsvangirai and shouted their disapproval.
“Not yet,” they said. “Mugabe must go!”
They wondered how they could return to a country with no jobs, how they could uproot their children from this exiled life to a life of uncertainty and fear.
Now, I’ve never understood this need for asylum, and perhaps I’m lucky, but I go in and out of my home country as often as the pennies permit.
But there are thousands who say they fled to the United Kingdom in search of asylum from rape, torture and persecution.
So the prime minister’s words were in one stroke killing the legitimacy of their status.
“I am not saying you have to leave today,” said the prime minister. “But you should start thinking about it.” They did not seem convinced.
They said he was speaking just like Mugabe and heckled and booed him so much that his Moses speech to the exiled children of the broken country had to be cut short.
Somewhere in a presidential residence in Harare, a man may have seen the prime minister’s week on the news, and smiled. Source BBC
