Minister of Foreign Affairs, Honourable Dr I S G Mudenge

SPEECH DELIVERED BY THE HONOURABLE I S G MUDENGE AT THE OPENING OF THE COMMONWEALTH MINISTERIAL MEETING ON THE ABUJA INITIATIVE : 25 OCTOBER, 2001

First of all, allow me to thank you for honouring my invitation for you to come and see things the way they are in Zimbabwe. Accept a warm welcome from me, which I extend on behalf of the Government of Zimbabwe, and on behalf of fellow-Zimbabweans who by tradition rejoice when visitors come. I am please to see that, in addition to all of you who represent friendly countries, Mr McKinnon, the Secretary General of a Club we all belong to, the Commonwealth, has also been able to join us.

We welcome you as Friends of Zimbabwe, an identity which each of you assumed and merited when you accepted President Obasanjo's invitation for you to be part of the Ministerial Committee he put together to assist him in his initiative to reconcile differences between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom and facilitate the implementation of Zimbabwe's Land Reform and Resettlement Programme with full, supportive participation from Zimbabwe's cooperating partners. This identity was further confirmed in Abuja, where we worked together in a respectful and constructive spirit and arrived at principled conclusions we can, and must, all swear by and act on.

Indeed, we must keep on reminding ourselves of the parameters within which we must work in order to serve both the intent and the stance of what President Obasanjo sent us to do. The postman who takes it upon himself to edit the love letter he is delivering has tragically misread his service charter. Our Ministerial Committee must, which laughing at this silly postman, be careful to eschew his wayward habit. Abuja, the love letter that this Committee of Friends is carrying to Zimbabwe, is complete as it is, and carries all the sentiments that Zimbabwe can warm up to.

By happy coincidence, we are all Commonwealth members here, but we must not get confused. Humbling though the fact may be, the Commonwealth has not launched an initiative on Zimbabwe, and perhaps it might be unfair to expect it to have launched one at a time when tensions among its members were paralysing it. Honourable Minister Lamido, my dear brother, please assure His Excellency President Obasanjo that none of us here will yield to the temptation of usurping his authority and derailing his initiative in the name of the Commonwealth. The Abuja process is not a Commonwealth initiative by President Obasanjo which happens to have Commonwealth Ministers in it. We look to him to carry it through, and we are duty bound to assist him, not to hinder him.

A key way in which we can help the Abuja process along is to protect its doctrines from heretical tendencies. Who would not want to edit the Gospel to make it easier on our consciences? But to do that is to deprive ourselves of a reliable compass, and to plunge ourselves into the abyss of relativism, where all manner of serpents and scorpions await.

As our fingers go down the pages of the document we agreed at Abuja, each one of us may be tempted to linger with creative zeal at our favourite passage. For some, it may be the one that mentions elections. Well, there is no question that that passage is there because we needed it there. But it is there in the precise shape and form it must have, and it is only in that form that it can be of help to any of us. Indeed, even as it crossed from one document to another, the principle that governs our behaviour where political processes in each other's countries are concerned has maintained its forthrightness and its purity. At Abuja, we borrowed from a definitive Commonwealth text, the Millbrook plan of action on the Harare Declaration of Principles, which defines one of the Commonwealth's sacred values as "the observation of elections, including by-elections and local elections, where appropriate, at the request of the member governments concerned." The document we adopted at Abuja focused on an obliging posture on the part of Zimbabwe's international partners should Zimbabwe request electoral assistance.

Such a posture is fully doctrinaire. The heresy comes when people are tempted to pervert the principle and use it for bartering, demanding and threatening. Some are suggesting a complicated system of extortions and bribes, using an exotic rendering of the conclusion on electoral support as currency, and the threat of all manner of unspecified measures as the bludgeon for proselytising Zimbabwe. To those brothers and sister, I say: repent. Let us go back to what Abuja actually says. Loading ballast onto the stern of the ship may be innovative, but it is poor physics.

I am so happy that you came here by invitation. When you come like that, we feel honoured, because we have played a part in your coming to see us. It is those who knock at our door with battering rams who astonish us and insult our culture of hospitality. We hear their pounding in the small hours of the morning, and we wonder why they want to see us in our pyjamas. Even the Bible says that he who wakes his neighbour early in the morning to greet him should cease and desist, for he is cultivating hatred. That is exactly how we feel when people who have been invited to observe our elections in the past come to us even before we ourselves know the date of our elections to urge, insist and demand that they should be allowed to come by such and such a date and start assessing and observing. Someone asked me the other day whether we had received any such demands and threats from African countries. I told the enquirer not to be silly, because they knew very well that that would be an un-African thing to do. I went on to inform them that this was not a colour thing either, because the Commonwealth, which has a rainbow membership, does not accept such behaviour. It is simply a thoughtless and futile thing to attempt in a world of sovereign states and agreed principles. It breeds suspicions and tempts others to ascribe sinister motives. It destabilises friendships and diminishes all of us. It is downright wrong and must be condemned by all of us.

But you are all Friends of Zimbabwe, and friends of mine, and you are here because of the work we did in Abuja at the behest of President Obasanjo and to the benefit of Zimbabwe. You want to see for yourselves the meaning, on the ground, of the centrality of the land question to the stability and prosperity of Zimbabwe as a nation unified by justice and fairness. You want to see for yourselves what we mean when we say that delays in resolving this question owing to resource constraints had created unnatural tensions among Zimbabweans, and that we had come to a pass where the matter brooked no delay. It may not be pleasant, but you must witness the paroxysms that the nation is going through as those who find themselves on too much land confront the imperative of sharing while those who were deprived of land face uncertainties as rumours of delistings make the rounds. The programme we have prepared for your visit is based on the conviction that you must see us as we are, warts and all, else how can you understand, and how can you help?

We do have problems, and it serves none of our purposes to conceal that fact. Thanks to President Obasanjo's efforts, we also do have a promising opportunity to get out of our problems and get on with the business of development, of course with the honest help of friends. This is where you and our friends come in.

Yes, you will see our difficulties, but you will also have a chance to see what we have done, and are continuing to do, to make them a thing of the past. In this regard, it is natural for you to want to know from me what steps we have taken to maximise the advantages of the opportunity represented by the document we crafted in Abuja on September 6th. We shall, of course, have ample time to say more as we go through our programme, but I thought it might be useful for me to give you an overview of actions taken by the Government of Zimbabwe to give force to the Abuja Conclusions in the six weeks since our meeting. I shall list these actions simply, so that they can be compared with the conclusions we reached in Abuja.

You may be aware that, as our contribution to the success of the initiative, we delisted some 581 farms that did not meet our criteria just before Abuja. Since Abuja, we have delisted a further 20 such farms. This information was published in the Government gazette of 28 September 2001.

Immediately following Abuja, I triggered the process of consultation between Zimbabwe and the UNDP through calls I made to the UN Secretary General and Jack Straw. Subsequently, Malloch Brown, the Administrator of the UNDP, wrote to me. I have since replied, and we expect a UNDP technical team around the 29th of this month.

I do not need to tell you that, in response to the invitation I issued in Abuja, you are here.

Immediately following our meeting in Abuja, our Cabinet considered and adopted the Abuja Conclusions. Government then sought, and obtained, the endorsement of the Politburo and the Central Committee of the ruling ZANU-PF.

The Government has set up committees for the implementation of the Abuja Conclusions. Committees made up of Ministers, ex-combatants and farmers are going around the country to explain the commitments. The Committees have been to at least five provinces, and expect to cover provinces in as short a time as possible. In addition, a permanent committee for trouble-shooting, chaired by the Secretary for Home Affairs, is on standby to respond to incidents and aberrations that are bound to occur.
Government is fully aware that, while policy pronouncements set the tone, the real work is in putting practical arrangements in place to ensure compliance with stated policies. For this reason, the top leadership of all law enforcement and security has been instructed to ensure that the commitments made by Zimbabwe in Abuja are enforced where necessary. The hope is, of course, that it will not be necessary to make arrests or drive people off properties, as the Government has embarked on a programme of information that involves all agencies implementing land reform, from national to local levels. That is why teams are currently going around the country explaining the Abuja commitment to the people, to minimize the incidence of infractions committed because of ignorance.

Well, I do not intend to tell you everything now. Although I am controlling the time, I know that my friend Minister Lamido has taken bets on how long I will speak. He put his money on two hours fifteen minutes, based on a fiction he concocted in Abuja.

Let me now introduce the members of the Cabinet Action Committee on Land Reform and Agriculture, who are here to assist us with facts and figures.