WOZA leader Jenni Williams on Question Time

SW Radio Africa journalist Lance Guma speaks to Jenni Williams who leads the Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) pressure group. Williams responds to questions sent in by SW Radio Africa listeners using facebook, twitter, skype, e-mail and texts. Will protests as seen in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya ever take place in Zimbabwe? She also responds to accusations that WOZA are not team players and won’t engage with other pressure groups.

Interview broadcast 02 March 2011

Lance Guma: Good evening Zimbabwe and welcome to Question Time, the programme where you the listener get to ask the questions. Our guest this week is Jenni Williams who leads the Women of Zimbabwe Arise, WOZA pressure group. Jenni thank you for joining us.

Jenni Williams: Thank you for having me on the programme even though you are going to question me so harshly.

Guma: Now the last two weeks have been dominated by the arrest of close to a hundred activists and WOZA members have also been locked up by the regime. Let’s start the programme with an update on what has happened so far.

Williams: Yes, we are a little bit upset or depressed right now because we believe that magistrates are to be on strike in Bulawayo and unfortunately their timing is bad because my seven colleagues who were just on their way to appear in court and we also believe that the police are being very nasty and wanting to deny my colleagues bail even after torturing them and abusing them and denying them so many rights in these last 48 hours.

Guma: What do you think is the motive for this crackdown? Because it started in Nyanga, they arrested Douglas Mwonzora, they arrested Gwisai and the other 45 activists, Job Sikhala, WOZA members. Why is this happening?

Williams: Well this is not something new. This is ZANU PF that everyone should know, operates on violence, the campaigns are always motivated by violence and propaganda issues and this is a regime that is sanctioning the liberties of their own people and so they will target civil rights activists, they will target human rights defenders because they know that those people are the ones educating and empowering people with their knowledge of their rights and getting them to begin to imagine a Zimbabwe where there’s no fear, no violence, where they can actually leave home at 8 o’clock and go to a job and come back at 5 and know that they are planning that on Friday they will do this or that, they will enjoy this or that with their families and this is a regime that doesn’t want that. They don’t want empowered people.

Guma: Lawton Bhila from Bulawayo wants to know from you whether protests seen in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya will ever happen in Zimbabwe and if not, why?

Williams: Well I can’t say whether they will happen in Zimbabwe or not because I would need a crystal ball for that but what I can say is that from what I understand of what is happening in north Africa and what is happening right now in other parts of Africa is a sign of ordinary citizens becoming empowered, getting knowledge and understanding of a deeper kind of democracy and then that deepening in that global village, people then begin to say we want this and they begin to look at options of how they are going to get it.

And the world is becoming more and more conscious of the power, people power, of the power of non-violence, of the power of numbers, human resources, people committed to binding together in unity to deliver something and people are also becoming aware that it’s not only an election where you go and you give power or you remove power but it’s also through voting with your feet in peaceful protest.

And I feel that people have to understand that the events that we see on the television are not just things that started when we started seeing them on the television. This is years of mobilisation, it’s years of work-shopping, meetings, it’s educating people, it’s providing forums for people where they can begin to discuss and understand issues.

And so its not a one time event, it’s years of mobilisation and we need, in Zimbabwe I feel that civic society, social rights activists are not as committed to that hard underground work that needs being done. They just think that if they just send an email saying Million Citizen March that people will suddenly just be millions in the streets. It doesn’t work like that and it did not work like that in Tunisia, Egypt or any of these other African countries.

Guma: Now you’ve just raised an issue that we obviously would like to ask – the Million Citizen March that was organised on FaceBook. The regime of course deployed soldiers, police, they made quite a presence to try and pre-empt this – in your view, why do you think that failed? If at all someone was behind that who was genuine, why did it fail?

Williams: Well I would really question whether the person behind it was genuine. If they were genuine they would have started to do mobilisation on the ground which there was no evidence of in any way, shape or form, so I really wouldn’t want to say a Million Citizen March, if it was genuine because we are questioning that, why it failed because I don’t think anything was ever done.

You know a lot of people do not have access to internet, FaceBook, cell phones and even if they are, Zimbabweans are extremely stressed and busy committed to surviving on a day-to-day basis. You have to get by them on these issues and so I would say it was failed mobilisation.

Guma: Martin Mabandla emailing from Hwange has issues with WOZA and accuses you of not being team players. His question is why a prominent group like WOZA doesn’t seek to work with other pressure groups like the NCA and others?

Williams: We do work with NCA. We have worked with NCA for many years. We are very disappointed that when push came to shove and we started our constitutional reform process, NCA dumped WOZA and said they were not going to be involved and we tried to persuade them. We said at least, if you are not going to be involved, help us with civic education because you are our partners on constitutional reform, but they were not interested in doing that so I think he is, number one, un-informed.

I think he also needs to understand that we are part of many different networks but I would want him to question, maybe clarify his question more because I can only respond as I’ve responded because we work with many other organisations.

Guma: NCA aside, in terms of your interaction with the other groups, are you satisfied that you seek to engage the others?

Williams: Absolutely satisfied but maybe he would want to see us in the streets with banners saying we are WOZA, we are this, we are that and if that is what he wants, can we please engage those organisations and ask them why they are not in the street with us and not ask us.

Guma: And the next question obviously is a follow-up from Norman Mudarikiri and I suppose the point he is trying to make is that Zimbabwean groups in general, not specifically WOZA, do not work together, so his question is, is it a question of competition for resources? His text message says – all these pressure groups are more interested in looking better than the others so they can receive funding on their own. Do you see that being the case, Jenni?

Williams: Well you know unfortunately I think he is, you know there is some truth to that and I remain engaging and in meetings and speak to many different civic leaders to say let’s put competition and personalities aside and let’s try and get by in and come up with a group of issues that we can all buy into equally and we can then come up with a combined plan of action and implement those things but it’s not very easy, especially I think, the international donor community sometimes make it difficult, they also play divide and rule games so it’s very difficult, I can’t completely discount that that is a problem.

Guma: You’re almost prophetic in your answer there because the follow-up question is centred on donors. We have a question from the UK, comes from a guy called Amos who says – don’t you think donors themselves are the problem? He says they are guilty of funding duplicate projects which are mostly non-confrontational and he says this is where the lack of focus comes from.

Williams: Yes, I mean it’s also unfortunate that even in this last week, people just become excited, they see things like the Million Citizen March, they see posters created and all sorts and they get excited, thinking oh someone is finally doing something and they forget that they should go and scratch beneath that pretty surface and see whether there’s any mobilisation on the ground.

And I think sometimes maybe the donors are also frustrated by us Zimbabweans and the blame should be mostly on us as Zimbabweans – we are not doing enough but we constantly want others outside or international to do more for us. We must do more and then somewhere along the way there will be a shift in the way the donors engage us as Zimbabweans.

Guma: We have the ZCTU, ZINASU, Crisis Coalition, WOZA and the NCA who among themselves represent a sizeable mobilisation front, it should surely be obvious no one group can make an impact on their own, so why are there no attempts at changing the dynamics and creating a united democratic front of sorts?

Williams: Well there are many attempts that are happening behind the scenes to do that. I think the only problem that we have as WOZA is we remain 100% apolitical and non-partisan and in the past for example, the Save Zimbabwe campaign was a coalition of civics and the MDC and so we could not be a part of that process because we would have been violating our mandate to remain a watchdog and that becomes a challenge for us.

So I think we remain trying to engage other people as they try to talk about forming these platforms and say to them that if we are going to form a proper platform styled in the way the UDF was, we need to make sure that we are solely membership-based and the membership of civic organisation-based and believe me, MDC or the other political parties who call themselves pro-democracy parties to fight on their platforms and leave us to fight on a civic, people driven platform.

Guma: Do you think also maybe within some of these groups, there’s a lot of in-fighting which has weakened the groups? Like ZINASU for example – you have two factions there. So is the in-fighting, and we even see this within the MDC where we have I think four MDC factions now, is this the problem – in-fighting?

Williams: Yah there is too much in-fighting but also people lose focus too easily. They remain talking about positions and power and they forget that the mandate of what they do and how they do it should be coming from membership and I think that’s the problem – there’s a lack of balancing of the scales between what the executives, the programmes they are driving and how the memberships input into those programmes.

It’s very, very sad to see, very sad indeed. For example, civic society its very sad that we allowed ourselves to split over who is taking part in the constitution and who is taking charge. Some of those things I think are unnecessary, those issues that divided us.

Guma: Now Priscilla in Mutare says there is a suggestion that pressure groups in Zimbabwe do not want the crisis to end as this would mean an end to their funding and her question to you is – do you buy into that argument?

Williams: Well I don’t know, I can’t answer for others but hey, I’m really looking forward to my three children having grandchildren and I want to be sitting in the sun watching my grandchildren playing so I can’t imagine why I would want a crisis to continue.

Guma: Tinashe from Gweru has a question on the WOZA membership and wants to know whether it’s meant for women only?

Williams: It initially started for women only because we feel that it is women who are marginalised in Zimbabwe and we also felt it was women who didn’t have space to speak out on bread and butter or bread and roses issues as we call them and women still remain marginalised, still remain having an unequal voice in all government and civic platforms and so they remain our one priority of people to mobilise, to capacitate so that they take their place equally in society alongside the men.

But we have a lot of male members who are long-term human rights defenders with us; we sometimes even call them our sisters in a respectful way and so yes, we have allowed space for men to be part of the movement because we will not discriminate on them as we have been discriminated as women by a long-term patriarchy.

Guma: Do you find that women are more willing to participate in street actions than men because when we usually see pictures of your protests, there are usually more women demonstrating? Where are the men in Zimbabwe?

Williams: Yah women unfortunately in my experience are more able to grasp practical issues and to be able to have those issues be dominant in the things that they do and so they will march and they will overcome fear, to be brave because they will know that what is at stake is my family’s future. And in some way the makeup of a woman, it seems that she is more capable of overcoming fear, to balance and to be in the street on issues that she thinks affect the family.

Sometimes our brothers and our fathers don’t have that capacity to balance the scales of issues and overcome fear and sometimes also they end up being too quick, because of their egos, the way God made them, to respond to violence with violence whereas to a woman she immediately will look at a non-violent method and so the style of non-violence, we feel, is more in character with a woman but that’s not to say that there can be men who also are trained, who also commit and who also can be 100% very active civil disobedience and non-violent activists.

Guma: We have a bit of a sour email here from Jacob in Chegutu who says WOZA is not made up of genuine activists but paid activists. He says at every demonstration, activists are paid so this is the motivation, you are not a grassroots movement. What’s your answer to him?

Williams: Please can Jacob send me a text message or send me an email. I will invite him to join one of the next demonstrations and then he can be face to face, shoulder to shoulder, hand to hand with the real genuine activists who have the issues at heart who are not motivated or have money in their mind. And that is a challenge I will give to him and only then will he either re-phrase his question to me or else then I will be willing to ask him what he saw himself.

Guma: Now final question Jenni comes from Masvingo, this is Tonderai. Tonderai says you have been demonstrating for years now with the same outcome which is beatings and arrests and nothing has changed, so is it not time to change your strategy?

Williams: Yes we are currently looking at escalating the methods of non-violence, the methods of civil disobedience we are doing. We will do that but I think sure, one must not forget one major thing about WOZA and the work we do, we are not fighting a revolution, we are fighting an evolution. He is not looking at the change in the human rights defenders we have capacitated and empowered in all our nine years of operation.

He’s not looking at the confidence and personal development and increasing of knowledge and understanding of democracy that has happened in the hearts and minds of our activists over the years and our growing membership because people understand the need for personal empowerment, to be able to understand how governments should work and that is what people don’t understand.

We may be in the street and you may feel that we have just been beaten and arrested and you don’t understand the opportunity we have given people to exercise their rights and to taste for that moment that they are in the street, for that moment they are arrested, that they have done something to uplift themselves to be free, to feel free by doing something that equates to freedom.

Guma: Now Jenni people who want to take part in the WOZA activities, how do they do that?

Williams: They can email us giving us their full names, physical address, phone numbers. They have to be brave enough to be upfront with us about who they are, where they live, what their phone number is and what it is they want, feel they can contribute to WOZA or what they require us to help them with.

If they don’t send an email and they are as clear as that, we’ll assume it’s an intelligence employee or a CIO sending us an e-mail. If they send us that email and we detect they are genuine, there will be someone who will visit them and explain about the very important values that we have in our organisation and explain about strategic non-violence.

Guma: Well Zimbabwe, that was Jenni Williams who leads the Women of Zimbabwe Arise, WOZA pressure group taking your questions on Question Time. Jenni, thank you so much for being our guest this week.

Williams: Thank you very much for having me and I appreciate the questions and look forward to continued engagement.

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