Zimbabwe opposition wins vote for top parliament position

[Dan the Roman]

This doesn't mean much. Parliament has no power, as the President can appoint the cabinet without reference to it, and pass legislation which can only be blocked by a two-thirds majority.

The big news is that the vote demonstrated how weak the "official" MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara and Welshman Ncube is. They had been bargaining with Zanu to form a government themselves despite only holding 20 seats, and ZANU chose not to run a candidate for speaker in favor of voting for the MDC-M candidate. In the event though, 8 of the party's ten MPs voted against the party's candidate.

In effect it strengthens Tsvangirai vis-e-vis Mutambara and Ncube, and makes him vital to any GNU, but a GNU isn't looking so vital any more. Tsvangirai has throughly alienated every leader on the continuant except for Ian Khama in Botswana and  Raila Odinga in Kenya, and his constant meetings in foreign capitals begging for support are begining to lend credence to charges he is a Western Puppet. If he were smart he would consider taking a vacation. Then again, had he been smart he would have let Lovemore Moyo run for President this year, since he would have been acceptable to the security forces and Mbeki. Mugabe would have been gone in that case.

Anyway, a small positive sign, but things are not looking good. Tsvangirai has screwed up badly since March.

[Dan the Roman]

Presidential systems annoy me.

Its only been that way since 1987, prior than that it was parliamentary.  Thats also when they stopped reserving 20 of the 100 seats in the Parliament for whites.

Interestingly Mugabe made a huge effort to win the white contituencies in 1985, setting up a white ZANU subsidy in the Independent Zimbabwe Group. It got crushed, winning only 5 of the seats, and Mugabe supposedly never forgive the whites for their betrayal after all he tried to do for them. Which is the real problem here.

Mugabe was not always that bad of a fellow, he just tended to personalize things too much. He felt the world and especially the west owed him for letting the Whites keep their land, and when the IMF and the UK cut off aid in 1997, and then the MDC sprung up funded by white economic interests he took it personally and decided to smash everything he had done over the last two decades to win western acceptance.

[Dan the Roman]

"Aid" translates, in this case, as "rather obvious bribery".

If a hundred million pounds a year was keeping the judiciary independent, the media free, and Whites, many of whom were British citizens, safe on their land it was a small prize to pay. Especially when compared to what Britain will end up paying to clean up this mess.

[Dan the Roman]

If a hundred million pounds a year was keeping the judiciary independent, the media free, and Whites, many of whom were British citizens, safe on their land it was a small prize to pay.

Things weren't exactly fine in Zimbabwe before the bribing stopped. But then I suppose that the Gukurahundi was also "a small price to pay" for the illusion that Zimbabwe was a stable, prosperous and free country.

And, frankly, fuck the whites. It's their fault anyway. I'm not going to go so far as to claim that they deserved what happend to them (although their plight was greatly exaggerated in the western media; the real victims were the (black, of course. No white man in that part of Africa does any work if he can avoid it) farm workers) but they came closer to deserving it than most people are happy to acknowledge. And it wasn't "their" land anyway; they stole it. That's when the problem started.

Be that as I may, I meant from the perspective of the British government it was a small price to pay. And while the 1943 land acts did steal a ton of land, many of the seized farms were bought post-1980. There was no effort at differentiation.

I will agree that the Rhodies did nothing to reconcile the majority or to really integrate post independence though.

[Dan the Roman]

This doesn't mean much. Parliament has no power, as the President can appoint the cabinet without reference to it

Indeed.

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Really? Ouch.

Yup, say hello to the brilliant 1987 Constitution. No checks or balances allowed. And the white MPs voted to abolish their own seats. They held 24 out of 100 then.