National Healing Minister Sekai Holland on BTH

Interview broadcast 09 September 2010 

Lance Guma: The National Healing and Reconciliation organ, set up under the coalition government has been described as a failure by participants who attended a workshop in Bulawayo over the weekend. One of the three ministers in the organ Sekai Holland came in for some harsh criticism from war veterans previously in the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, ZIPRA. 

Reports say there was a heated exchange between some of the veterans and Minister Holland who was officiating at the launch of a new governmental trust meant to assist victims of political violence. Behind the Headlines tracked down Minister Holland and asked her to respond to some of this criticism that the ministers leading the organ were incompetent and that they had done absolutely nothing since it was formed. 

Sekai Holland: My response is that there is an organ on national healing that is created by Article 7.1C, that our role is advisory but what we need to get every Zimbabwean at home and in the Diaspora to understand is that the question of national healing is a new thing in Zimbabwe, it’s a new thought that peace is actually an option, a choice we can work towards together as a society. 

It is a new thought and that we, the three of us agreed on a process that is inclusive where we would go to Zimbabweans at home and abroad to understand from them their opinions and sentiments on how they see the road map to national healing, reconciliation and integration in this country as we work towards getting an organised voice in an All-Stakeholders Conference next year, which comes out with a national code of conduct which goes to parliament where we then get the mechanisms that will create an infrastructure of peace in Zimbabwe. 

We need to get that message across to Zimbabweans and that is what I was trying to do in Bulawayo. 

Guma: Now that sounds all rather theoretical. Would you understand though… 

Holland: It is not theoretical at all because Zimbabweans never sat down as a people to talk about peace and how Zimbabweans together, will operationalise methodologies to arrive at peace. Our job is to really get Zimbabweans understanding among themselves that the national infrastructure of peace comes from the Zimbabwean people themselves, it doesn’t come from the organ. 

So far we have actually got some responses which are very encouraging from those ministries and institutions where we have already enabled to dialogue with them and they’ve been able to respond by coming up with programmes that align their own work policy and framework to arriving at peace. So there is nothing theoretical about this.

Guma: Well for the sceptics out there can you point out to any major achievements so far since the organ on national healing was formed?
Holland: Yes. The fact that we now have, in the past three months a process with political parties where we have met with the politburos and national executive committees of all three political parties and we are meeting with the secretary-generals again next week for us to come up with the roadmap of political parties including those that are not signatories of the GPA. 

Working with their members together, that they understand that politics is not about violence. We are really trying to, not even trying, sitting together to work out the dynamics of our how they operationalise a peaceful political process. This is the last three months we’ve been working on this, before that we were working with traditional leaders, before that churches, before that civil society. 

Many that we have worked with now really have come up with their own framework of how we get to the All-Stakeholders Conference where we come up with a national code of conduct which is an agreement among Zimbabweans on the way forward to parliament and to come up with a national infrastructure of peace which will bring us the mechanisms to arrive at truth, justice and reconciliation. 

Guma: The function you attended in Bulawayo was to launch a new organisation, the Zimbabwe Victims of Organised Violence Trust… 

Holland: They are launching their organisation, they wanted me to witness that. 

Guma: Now this organisation is aimed at assisting victims of politically motivated violence, is this alone not an indictment of the failure of your organ, that structures outside government are being formed to do something? 

Holland: You know I don’t know what we are talking at Lance. What those NGOs are doing is precisely what Zimbabweans are supposed to do. The job of the organ is to facilitate the process of Zimbabweans, really organising themselves for Zimbabwe to arrive at a peaceful culture. It doesn’t come from the organ, it comes from the people. 

I really believe that most the problems with Zimbabwe which I hope people understand and get over themselves is that we are dealing in a very Eurocentric and very divorced environment. What we need to do is to really understand our lived reality that the GPA is an opportunity for Zimbabweans to understand among themselves how we build peace together. 

Here in Zimbabwe and those that are outside really need to arrive at an understanding of how collectively they also contribute to peace building in Zimbabwe. It’s a job to be done by Zimbabweans so I really think that we need to understand how in Zimbabwe, we will build this together. It’s not the job of the organ alone. The organ is there to facilitate that discourse. 

Guma: Now in the past Mai Holland, you yourself have admitted that when the organ was set up, there was really no clear mandate drawn up and no-one knew what they really were supposed to do. Has this changed? Are you clear on what the role of the organ is?

Holland: You know the way you question me, really shows me we have failed. If you read the GPA yourself, on your own, Article 7.1C which is what gives life to the organ is very vague, so the three of us have made a major accomplishment that really if you had woken up any one of us in the past three months, we are very clear now about how to advise on the dynamics to take place for people to really arrive at peace and really how to get people to really understand that the process of peace building is a peoples’ task, that organ has no business in telling people how to arrive at peace building.

People know how to do it and more and more as we are clear ourselves, people are coming up with some of the most brilliant strategies of how to arrive there. We have been at conflict for so long in Zimbabwe that it has taken time and it will take time for people to really grasp that it is their job and that as they talk and work together, they will come up with the necessary dynamics to create a national infrastructure of peace in this country.

Guma: Now it’s been argued that the current national healing agenda is tip-toeing around confronting the real culprits of political violence and getting them to own up or offer some kind of apology because the argument, even as Prime Minster Tsvangirai said at one function it was going to be…

Holland: You said that this interview was going to be three minutes, the time of this interview was going to be three minutes. Let me say this to you we are not tip-toeing around anything. The GPA is a compromise agreement so we cannot work in a compromised environment to produce what ZANU PF wants or what MDC-T wants, or what MDC-M wants.

This is not a ZANU PF, it’s not an MDC-T, it’s not an MDC-M, it is a very compromised agreement so we have to use strategies that get us to understand the most basic common ground that we as Zimbabweans can build together to start talking about peace. This is a compromise agreement, the GPA, so it’s not an ideal situation for us to talk about what MDC wants, what ZANU PF wants, what MDC-M wants. It’s what the Zimbabweans would like to see as the road map towards building peace in Zimbabwe.

Guma: But are you not limited really by the fact that people feel Mugabe still wields…

Holland: It’s a compromise agreement, it’s a compromise agreement and it’s limited. I think I’ll go home, I gave you three minutes, I’ve given you three minutes.

Guma: OK let me just add one more question – Zimbabwe has had different parts of history where atrocities and abuses have been committed, before independence, during Gukurahundi, Operation Murambatsvina, the June 2008 presidential election to name the major one. What’s the mandate of your national healing programme?

Holland: The organ is to get Zimbabweans thinking about how to articulate the truth about ourselves, our history, how to address in a just way all those atrocities and what has happened in ourselves as a people and to arrive at forgiveness and reconciliation in a ‘never-again’ syndrome. That is what the organ is working with Zimbabweans to understand.

We are using experts in psychology, in sociology, history to also have their input so that we come with something that will really work for all Zimbabweans. So these people who are helping us to come up with really different components to the All-Stakeholders Conference also are cognisant of the fact that our history, our written history and the past history, not just for the last 200 years, for the past 600 years, for the past 1000 years, here in Zimbabwe has been a very violent and militaristic one.

So we want to understand how we bring out of ourselves that culture of violence, whether it’s institutional, domestic or whatever so that we work with that in a ‘never-again’ syndrome, get rid of that in our society and getting rid of it in ourselves. That comes from the people as they understand what the task is and believe me, the people we are working with are as entry points in our history, the institutions in Zimbabwe who we have already worked with and we have to work with all. Understand that and they are coming up with these operations of a national strategy towards building an infrastructure of peace.

Guma: But didn’t the reception you got in Bulawayo show you that people are not happy with the organ?

Holland: It’s not happiness, people have not understood that the issue of national healing is their issue which they have to understand by talking to one another. We are just a facilitator, so happiness doesn’t come in this at all. It’s us in the organ, getting our society to understand that we have peace as an option and we should start working on that together now.

Guma: That was National Healing and Reconciliation Minister Sekai Holland joining us on Behind the Headlines this week. Minister Holland thank you very much for your time. SW Radio Africa