Zimbabwe

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Malcolm Bruce]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The vast majority of Zimbabweans who are not in Zimbabwe would rather be anywhere except where they are. They would like to be back in Zimbabwe, but, for a variety of reasons, it is difficult for them to go back. It is not just a question of whether they are under threat, whether they can return to any assets that they have, or whether those assets are still there; it is a question of whether they can do anything functionally or economically useful.

We found that some doctors and teachers who had left the country had come back, but they were working for a fraction of the money that they could obtain in neighbouring Botswana or South Africa, let alone the United Kingdom. They were returning because they wanted to help, but they were making sacrifices. Perhaps the Minister will say something about that. One of DFID’s activities was trying to supplement those people’s salaries, just to add an extra pull, but that still left them earning well below the market rate for the southern African region.

I have no doubt that if only peace and normality could be returned to Zimbabwe, within a very short time the people would come back, economic activity would return and, indeed—this is what is surely so frustrating for everyone—Zimbabwe could provide a shining example for the rest of Africa. People have the capacity to bring that about, given the chance, but clearly they are not being given that chance.

Obviously I want to focus predominantly on DFID’s activity, but the ambassador has highlighted the difficulties that were apparent in February and are plainly still in existence. There has been very little progress towards any kind of constitutional settlement, and there are mutterings about when an election may take place. The ambassador made it clear unequivocally that

“The constitutional process needs to be completed in an orderly and well-paced way”.

He said that the Zimbabwe electoral commission and the other commissions needed “to be capacitated”, and that

“technical changes need to be made to the voters’ roll”

—and to, for instance, the electoral Acts—

“as well as the putting in place of thorough and comprehensive monitoring arrangements. All this is going to take time if it is going to be held as it should.”

This is the crunch:

“If a poll was held prematurely, it would be most unlikely to be either free or fair”.

It is important for the House to take note of that fresh advice from our ambassador.

We are in a position of compromise—a sort of limbo. The Library note refers to “limping along”. However, the position is better than it was. Few analogies stick for very long, but a slight comparison can be made with some of the hiccups along the way in Northern Ireland. The longer even a small improvement continues, the harder it becomes to go back to the situation as it was previously. There is no guarantee, however, and the big fear is that too many people in powerful positions in Zimbabwe would like to take the country back and they have the capacity to do so. We need to rely on the genuine friends of the people of Zimbabwe, and although the United Kingdom stands among them, I acknowledge that we have a difficult role to play and that we have to play it from a distance. We need to work discreetly and to recognise the legitimate role of the neighbours in Africa, especially South Africa, but also the Southern African Development Community states. In this context, it would be nice if SADC became a more effective and coherent organisation. The fact that the tribunal judgments of SADC have been denounced and ridiculed by Zimbabwe, which says it does not recognise SADC, is clearly a weakness to the south African states in the region.

The continuing situation in Zimbabwe is not only a disaster and a frustration for the people of Zimbabwe; it is a drag anchor for the whole of southern Africa. If the situation is not resolved, the capacity of many other countries in southern Africa to fulfil their potential will be comprehensively weakened. That is perhaps understood more than it was, and the mood is changing, although perhaps too slowly.

We made some specific points in our report, and I would be grateful for an update on them from the Minister. I am sure he will tell us about current DFID activities in the country. The figure was $100 million, much of it spent on health. Has there been any change in that, or any consideration of whether we could, or should, be doing more on education, or do we feel that others are doing that satisfactorily? Also, do we feel we have the capacity to increase funding?

I think the Committee was in agreement that where we saw funds being effectively spent, they were delivering real results. If we could find comparable projects on a wider scale, we would certainly support additional funding. Again, I would appreciate the Minister stating the Department’s view on that. So far as we were able to gauge, the money was going precisely to where it was intended. Great precautions were taken to ensure it did not get into the wrong hands and was not misappropriated, and that it delivered results.

The point about precautions raises the issue of the mechanism or agency used. A number of the partners, both international, local and national, said it led to bureaucratic delays, and to inflexibilities and extra expense, which for some small organisations were disproportionate to what they were trying to achieve. There was an understanding of why the precautions were in place, but if anything can be done to simplify the process and make it more flexible without losing the certainty that money is not being misappropriated, that will be widely appreciated by the partners with whom we are engaging.

There was considerable concern about the extraction of diamonds and the ownership of those diamonds by people very close to the President, and the apparent inability of the Kimberley process to function. One or two of the interlocutors we engaged with said this might be the single issue that would give ZANU-PF the mechanism to destroy the Government of national unity and to re-establish itself as a dominant one party in control, so it is important that they—whoever they may be—are unable to trade illegally in illicit diamonds and thereby secure funding for programmes of expropriation and violence that threaten the state itself. Again, it would be helpful if the Minister could say what action is being taken if not to enforce the Kimberley process, then to isolate the illicit diamonds from Zimbabwe and deny them access to the markets, where they could be used to fund the undermining of the current arrangements.

[Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

The House has been done a great service by the Select Committee’s report. What my right hon. Friend has just mentioned raises a dilemma for everyone involved with Zimbabwe. We want to persuade the international community to start to invest in Zimbabwe and to get financial institutions to start to engage with it, but responsible companies, investors and financial institutions are clearly going to be very concerned about engaging with the extractive industries and some of the other key industries in Zimbabwe, for exactly the reasons that he just outlined. How does the Committee see us squaring that circle of encouraging responsible investors to get back into Zimbabwe but doing so in such a way as not to prop up or enrich those who would continue to subjugate Zimbabwe for their own political glory?

[Malcolm Bruce]

That is a very relevant and pertinent question. The practical thing that people can do is talk to our ambassador, because he has both views on this and indications about what to do.

The next item that I was going to discuss was investment and selective sanctions. The first thing to make clear is that it suits the ZANU-PF dimension of the Zimbabwean Government to make out that the economic failures of Zimbabwe are entirely a result of the application of selective sanctions and that they are targeting the poor people of Zimbabwe and preventing economic activity. The point that the ambassador made is that only one in 70,000 Zimbabweans is at all affected by the sanctions. Of course, he also points out in his statement today that the economy of Zimbabwe has been growing since dollarisation was reinstated. So that particular argument has been nailed. I shall return to my hon. Friend’s question, but I just wish to say to the Minister that I understand that some dialogue with the EU is taking place about selective sanctions and it would be helpful if he could update the House on the current position and what the UK’s engagement is. My impression is that there is no general view, apart from among the obvious sources, that those sanctions should or deserve to be lifted. However, to be fair, Morgan Tsvangirai said that they were a constant source of friction when he was trying to engage with his ZANU-PF co-Ministers.

There is no restriction on investment in Zimbabwe. There is nothing to prevent companies from outside Zimbabwe investing, apart from one thing that was introduced earlier in the year: the “indigenisation” of business. Again, it would be helpful if the Minister could update us on the position that has been reached. That measure fundamentally said that people could not do business in Zimbabwe other than through a company that was 51% owned by Zimbabweans—those Zimbabweans would, of course, be those approved by the stronger part of the Government. That may not be a total cast-iron restriction, as there is a Government of national unity and there are Ministers who are trying to offer, with some success, a growth strategy, a development strategy and a rebuilding strategy for Zimbabwe. Businesses may therefore have opportunities to find partners who are not going to subvert the money, but clearly nobody could invest in Zimbabwe without having an assurance. The Minister may be able to provide that or our excellent ambassador may be able to give advice. My instincts are that doing business is difficult, but may not be completely impossible.

That raises an interesting dilemma in the whole issue of development. We engage in states where there is conflict, in post-conflict states and in states with dysfunctional regimes, and the easiest thing is to say, “Let’s have nothing to do with them.” Yet the one thing that might just break the cycle of poverty, repression and tyranny is some kind of economic opportunity. I do not have an answer to that point, but I am sure that we should not say that there should be an absolute block on doing businesses with countries with dubious regimes. We should find out whether there are ways of doing business that are reputable and safe.

Let me make a somewhat exaggerated comparison. People do business in Russia, which has huge question marks over it and vies with the Democratic Republic of the Congo in terms of corruption. There are probably business opportunities in Zimbabwe that have less risk and they might be worth exploring.

I believe that we should ask people to understand that there will not be a quick and easy solution in Zimbabwe. The Committee’s observation was that, imperfect though it is, engagement with the Government of national unity was able to deliver health, education and infrastructure improvements to significant sectors of the people of Zimbabwe who were denied them before. Frankly, that Government are the only thing that stands between Zimbabwe and chaos and we must use whatever influence we have to try to persuade people, wherever they are, that there is a better place for Zimbabwe to head for than back to where it was.

We might need to acknowledge that not everybody in ZANU-PF is entirely self-seeking—we met one or two of them—and that some of them realise that their country has a place to go and that they need to be part of it. That was the other issue that was made quite clear to us. Experience in government, knowledge, contacts, communication and political capacity are mostly controlled by ZANU-PF and not by the MDC. The MDC’s members might have learned something in the past year and a half—I hope and am sure they have—but if Zimbabwe is to have a longer-term future, some of the people who have been part of the problem must be part of the solution.

That point was made to us on a few occasions and at the same time it was pointed out that, for example, every Minister was allocated a 24/7 personal “bodyguard” appointed by the President. I am quite certain that that was not an entirely comfortable experience. Interestingly, one politician said that the funny thing about that was that it created a dialogue between two groups of people who had had no connection or communication with each other before and some started to understand that the other side had a more multidimensional aspect. The avenues of communication are only beginning to open. The report from the ambassador today does not suggest that things have changed very much, and they could get worse.

What is clear is that we should not collude in any early rush to an election. An early election would almost certainly bring the present inadequate partnership to an end in favour of something worse. It could not be free and it could not be fair. The measured words of the ambassador disguise the fact that there is no electoral register, which means that those who control the polling stations can write their own register. That is no basis for any kind of election. It would be a total fiction.

In conclusion, the Committee came away impressed that good things were being done that were bringing real benefits, that it was possible to reach people, that the longer we could create such space the more chance there was of people seeing a better future, and that we had to put up with setbacks, pitfalls and compromises and not walk away. Nothing can be guaranteed, but we must do nothing that allows this troubled partnership to be brought to an end and the re-establishment of a one-party state. That would set back not just Zimbabwe but the whole of southern Africa for another generation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

I should like to make three points to the House in the closing moments of the debate. First, it was extraordinarily helpful that the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce), the Chair of the International Development Committee, brought the House up to date with the views of our ambassador in Harare. That is a good precedent. Some time has passed since the Committee visited Zimbabwe in February, and it would be helpful if in future ambassadors or high commissioners shared with the House an open letter or report to bring the House up to date on their views before such debates. We are now much more used to open diplomacy, and I would have thought that that would be a genuine benefit to the House.

Secondly, the views of the three members of the Committee who went to Zimbabwe were also a great benefit to the debate. Sections of the Poujadist press seek to portray any overseas visit by right hon. and hon. Members as some sort of a jolly, but having spent a Parliament chairing the International Development Committee, I must say that there is nothing jolly about witnessing other people’s chronic and enduring poverty, or seeing people suffering from HIV/AIDS, or talking to people about the deplorable conditions in which they live because of poverty. The House benefits enormously from the first-hand experience and testament of those who have witnessed—in this case—Zimbabwe. The work done by members of the Committee is much to be appreciated, because when they go to places such as Zimbabwe they spend a week away from the House and are unable to do their constituency work, so when they return, the burden on them is even greater.

My third point has not been touched on in the debate, which is why I am keen to make it. I suspect that many right hon. and hon. Members have not insignificant Zimbabwean communities in their constituencies. Many of those people have for some time been in limbo. Comparatively few of them were granted refugee status, but for perfectly understandable reasons, successive Home Secretaries decided not to order those who were refused refugee or asylum status to return to Zimbabwe. Those people have therefore been here in limbo, and many have been unable to take up work.

I am sure that other hon. Members know of people in the same situation. I am talking about teachers, trade unionists and farmers—people who have real skills. One tragedy of conflict-affected countries is the flight of intellect, as much as the flight of capital. Such people could make a real contribution to life in Zimbabwe again. I therefore hope that Ministers will consider this proposal. There will come a time—hopefully—when those people will increasingly want to return to Zimbabwe. I do not think that we should look at my proposal in terms of giving people money to go home, because those people have real skills. Given that the total aid budget for Zimbabwe is $100 million, will my hon. Friend the Minister consider the possibility of an endowment fund, whereby talented Zimbabweans resident in the UK could apply to DFID for an endowment to return to undertake a specific project or work, whether health care for nurses, teaching for teachers, or farming for those with farming skills? That would be a positive encouragement to people. Their talents could be acknowledged and recognised, and they could go back to Zimbabwe with the finances first to give them the confidence to return, and secondly, to make a real difference.

Otherwise, we—the NHS and so on—will benefit from their talent, skills and education, but for a generation all that talent, knowledge and expertise has effectively been stolen from Zimbabwe. That is another piece of collateral damage inflicted upon Zimbabwe by its political situation. I suspect that many of those who are here—especially as they have not been granted refugee status, and given the continued unsettled nature of their lives here—would welcome the opportunity to make a contribution in their own country. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister and colleagues in the Home Office will give some creative thought to how we can enable Zimbabweans to return to Zimbabwe to make a positive contribution, rather than feel that they have to cling on here because they have no future back home.