"Mugabe is not the problem".

Patrick Chinamasa, Zimbabwe's minister of justice, legal and parliamentary affairs, says the local opposition has been hoodwinked by the West into thinking that President Mugabe is the wrong person for the country, but he is not. "President Mugabe is not a problem in this country, he is not a dictator. He works in accordance with the current constitution, and the current constitution gives him the powers that any constitution gives to a president anywhere in the world," says Chinamasa in this interview with New African..

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New African: The UK and other Western governments claim that your last parliamentary election on 31 March this year was, to quote The Times of London, "the most fraudulent ever". What do you say?

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Chinamasa: That is nonsense. In fact, we have to be credited for organising the freest, fairest and most transparent election you can find anywhere in the world, and I think observers who are open-minded and fair-minded do acknowledge that in fact our election was well organised. Just look at every aspect of it--there was hardly any serious criticism that you could level at the process that we undertook.

NA: It is true that you introduced a new electoral regime, which included a new electoral law. And this time around, the state even provided funds for the campaigns of the two main parties.

Chinamasa: Yes. Under our political parties finance law, parties that reach a certain threshold in terms of the support they have from the electorate are entitled to funding from the state. We do this because we want home-grown political parties. We don't want parties that are funded by foreign governments and interests, because they have a tendency to undermine the sovereignty of developing countries. In fact we prohibit foreign funding of our political parties.

NA: So where does the MDC stand then?

Chinamasa: We all know they still receive foreign funding which basically makes the playing field uneven. We know they still receive funding from Western governments, Western NGOs which are basically state institutions, and Western intelligence services. We also know that there are certain radio stations--one is based in a neighbouring country I will not name, others are based in Holland and America--that beam propaganda onto our population in an obvious attempt to prop up the MDC. So we know that the playing field is not even and it is to our disadvantage. But notwithstanding that, we have been able to beat them resoundingly because our people understand that no country can get very far if its citizens do not have access and control of their own resources. And one achievement we have scored not only in Zimbabwe but also internationally is the principle that local access to resources should be in the hands of the country's citizens, and our people understand that.

So notwithstanding our difficulties--shortage of fuel, the uneven playing field in terms of financial resources and access to the world media, our people have resoundingly given us the mandate to continue on the path that we started over five years ago.

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NA: But the MDC also says that ZANUPF was funded by the South African government and intelligence service. Is that true?

Chinamasa: That is not true.

NA: So why are they saying it?

Chinamasa: The MDC should learn to be good losers. Their problem is that they will find all sorts of excuses to explain why they have lost the confidence of the people who voted for them in 2000. The truth is that the MDC lacks policies, in fact they have only one policy--to say that Mugabe must go. Now that is not even a policy. They do not offer any alternative policies on the basis on which they can be elected. They are very thin on policies and more on sloganeering and apportioning blame, that is why they have lost ground locally.

Now they have to learn the lesson that they have lost the ground here in Zimbabwe because they lost it on the land issue. They took the position of the minority, and the vote of the minority counts for little in a democracy where there is one man, one vote. What is important is to look after the needs of the majority of the people who vote, instead of the needs of a minority dwindling population or the needs of foreign governments and interests who do not vote in our jurisdiction.

During the recent elections, they spent a lot of time campaigning in the wrong constituencies abroad. They should have spent more time here with the people and understanding their needs--and their needs are basically having access to their own resources. Sure, there will be difficulties during the transitional period, but we will get over that.

NA: Going back to the recent election, the MDC claims that there were fraud in some 13 constituencies, because the Electoral Commission announced provisional figures of how many people had voted in the various constituencies before the final results came in, and there are discrepancies in the two sets of figures. How did this happen?

Chinamasa: With respect to the first question about fraud in 13 constituencies, there was no fraud! Period. The whole operation was so transparent that there was no way anybody could have tampered with the process. We had more than 8,000 polling stations all manned by representatives of the various political parties. There were presiding officers, monitors and observers. And the counting was done right at the polling stations, so there was no longer the movement of ballot boxes which had led to accusations in the past of interfering with the boxes while in transit.

And the counting was done right in front of the people who voted, and the results announced publicly at the polling stations. But remember that polling station results were then fed into a collation centre in the constituency where they were totalled to arrive at the final constituency results. Now for anybody to try and suggest that this process was tampered with is just sheer madness.

NA: But if it is not true, why are they saying it? Are they just playing to the gallery?

Chinamasa: Clearly they are trying to find an excuse to explain why they lost so badly, so dismally, so massively. They are trying to find an excuse because somehow they thought that the protest vote they got in 2000, and to an extent in 2002, still remained. But little did they know that the very people who were now voting in 2005 had benefited from the land issue. So now they were voting with their stomachs, especially with respect to rural communities. This is why when the MDC called for mass action, nobody turned up because the very people who voted for ZANU-PF knew they had voted for ZANU-PF and not the MDC. So there were no protests because the people themselves knew what actually took place.

Now, let me answer the question about the two sets of figures announced by the Electoral Commission that the MDC claims do not tally. The first set of figures, which were basically polling station running figures, were announced by the Electoral Commission before the final results came in. They arose primarily from the fact that as the results were coming in from the polling stations, they were being totalled up and the Electoral Commission was announcing them as they were coming from the polling stations. So there is no discrepancy except a deliberate misunderstanding on the part of the MDC. Those figures were not the final results. The final results were only announced after all the polling stations had been accounted for. In each constituency, polling stations were gazetted, and at each polling station, the results were signed for by polling agents representing all the political parties, so there is no chance that you have a polling station result that was not signed. And the results are still there for anyone to see.

NA: What I understand from the MDC is that the Electoral Commission had announced, for example, that 22,000 people had voted in Constituency A, but when the final results came in, 25,000 had actually voted. So there is a discrepancy between 22,000 and 25,000, isn't it?

Chinamasa: Let's be specific now, because when you go to individual constituencies, we know the final results should be the results from all the combined polling stations. You add them up and if there is any mistake in the calculation, that is a detail that can be corrected, but clearly the MDC's allegations are baseless. You know they started by saying 37 constituencies were affected. Then they said "no, not 37, but 13". Now they say it is 16.

And I can assure you that the petitions they have sent to the Electoral Court are just pure nonsense. They are not talking about the issues they have mentioned in the media. They are talking about general issues, such as why the ZANU-PF said the MDC was a sell-out. But that is a legitimate form of campaigning. To say someone is a sell-out when he is in fact a sell-out is allowed in election campaigns. If I went and said don't vote for E and K because they are sell-outs who would take your land and give it back to the people who stole it from us, the MDC's petitions call that intimidation. What nonsense! Nothing substantive.

NA: Let me take you back to the new electoral regime that you put in place. What does it consist of?

Chinamasa: Primarily, it consists of the establishment of an independent electoral commission. This is in line with the SADC Principles and Guidelines on elections adopted at its summit in Mauritius. The principles recommend that electoral management bodies be divorced from the government. Our system here until we introduced the new regime, was basically a British system where elections are run by a department of government. And I know that in Britain this is still the case. We inherited the system from them at independence.

But this time around, we ditched the British system for the SADC Guidelines. So we established an independent electoral commission. And on top of it, we also copied the Mauritian model where in addition to an independent electoral commission, they have a constitutional body which supervises the work of the electoral commission to keep it on the straight and narrow. So, here in Zimbabwe as opposed to many SADC member countries, we now have an independent electoral commission and an electoral supervisory commission.

The other change we brought in, was that in the past, we would have our elections over two days, and there were a lot of unsubstantiated claims that during the night because the ballot boxes had to be moved, there was the possibility of tampering, because we were counting the votes on the third day. So for March 2005, we decided to remove any transportation of ballot boxes by holding the election over one day, and the counting done right at the polling stations, in full view of the people, and the results publicly announced there.

Another change was that we also introduced transparent ballot boxes as against the wooden boxes of the past. So I am saying that no one could have tampered with this process. It was so transparent!

NA: As part of the new regime, you also established an Electoral Court. Why?

Chinamasa: To speed up the resolution of electoral disputes. The responsibility of the Electoral Court is basically to deal with electoral matters and disputes. Another reform we introduced is equal access to the state-owned electronic media for all the contesting parties.

NA: But there are claims that the MDC was only given token access to the media.

Chinamasa: Nonsense! Pure nonsense! There were radio programmes that were free to all the parties, for example, interviews, political discussions and so on. But there were advertisements on TV and radio that the parties were required to pay for. I understand that the MDC decided not to take its slots, so we cannot be blamed for that.

In fact, I understand that they couldn't take their slots because they hired some bad consultants from South Africa who hardly knew our terrain and the issues involved here. So when their products were shown to the MDC leadership, it was clear that they were not for a Zimbabwean audience. The issues here were land, sovereignty and the control of resources; anything else was irrelevant.

Now if they started talking about the imposition of sanctions in order to demonstrate their power over Zimbabwe, that would not wash here. It may wash in the UK. They could have talked about the imposition of sanctions, the isolation of the country, and that when they came to power sanctions would be lifted and everything would be fine. This may make sense abroad, but it would not win you votes here. So when the MDC realised that discrepancy, they decided that it was too late to run any advertisements.

NA: Talking about sanctions, some ZANU-PF supporters claim that the MDC was behind the drafting of the punitive Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act which was passed into law by the US Congress in 2001 and which subsequently led to the implosion of the Zimbabwe economy in 2002-2003. Is that true?

Chinamasa: Yes, they were. Yes, I know particular MDC people who went there to advise the State Department and the Congress in the drafting of that obnoxious Act. Yes, I know that. And they are even on record publicly to have called for sanctions against Zimbabwe and the isolation of the country. Their leader even went as far as calling for the cutting of electricity exports to Zimbabwe by South Africa. That is all on record, so it is not as if we are talking about something that they didn't do or say. No.

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NA: Still on the March election, the SADC observers' report was quite clear that Zimbabwe had moved even faster to implement the SADC Guidelines than most member countries, and that the election was not only free and fair, but also reflected the will of the people. But then when you read what Western governments and their newspapers have said about the same election, you think they and the Africans are talking about two completely different elections. How did the West get it so wrong?

Chinamasa: But that has always been the case. You have come here and you are aware of the real situation on the ground. But when you listen to the propaganda of the outside forces on CNN, BBC and the other Western media, you can hardly recognise our country. Even sometimes the way I, as justice minister, am projected in the Western media, I can hardly recognise myself. The distortions are so massive that they never bear any truth or relation to the reality on the ground here. Because of this propaganda, a lot of people outside think we are at war here, but we are not, as you've seen for yourself. They would want to finish us off through propaganda.

NA: And it is working.

Chinamasa: Yes, but we will not allow it to succeed here.

NA: Perhaps not here, but outside the country the propaganda has had an effect. People think you are running a tyrannical regime which must be changed.

Chinamasa: Yes, in fact it almost worked here in 2000 and 2002. If we were not a cohesive group with a revolutionary past, we would have been swept away. You see, I compare our situation with what happened in Ghana under Nkrumah. I was a young boy then, a student, but Nkrumah at the time in the early 1960s was a man we all looked up to for inspiration. He was our hero! And you know how they started undermining him? The propaganda started by saying he was corrupt, he had got a golden bathroom and toilet, a harem of mistresses and so on. This was to prepare for what they did to him later in 1966.

Now just compare that with our situation--the propaganda against our president. It was very clear that they were preparing the ground for their intelligence services to either assassinate him or remove him from power. And it is still happening elsewhere in the world--be it in Iraq, Iran, Cuba or North Korea. They will gang up the media and give the country a bad image, just so they can justify a regime change. That nearly happened to us here, but I am happy that it did not succeed; in fact it will not succeed here because of our revolutionary past.

NA: An idea has been floated that Zimbabwe should synchronise your two elections--parliamentary and presidential--and hold them on the same day.

Chinamasa: Yes, it is a good idea and we are in fact going in that direction.

NA: When do you think this will come into effect?

Chinamasa: It will be presumptuous of me to make a statement on it because right now, I am carrying out consultations with my colleagues on possible constitutional amendments. The party will then meet and take a position, before we put the matter to the government and parliament. But clearly, we are moving in that direction--where parliamentary and presidential elections will be synchronised.

NA: But there are people who say you only want to synchronise the two elections just so President Mugabe could extend his current term by two years--from 2008 to 2010.

Chinamasa: But I thought that the president had said this week that he was going to retire when his current term expired in 2008. He announced it on his trip in late April to the Far East. So extending his term is no longer an issue. But that is the whole basis of the MDC's failure. They have been hoodwinked by the West into thinking that President Mugabe is the wrong person for this country, and they have taken it up with a lot of enthusiasm. President Mugabe is not a problem in this country, he is not a dictator. He works in accordance with the current constitution, and the current constitution gives him the powers that any constitution gives to a president anywhere in the world. Why they want to isolate him is basically because he keeps an independent mind on international affairs. That's why he is being vilified. He hurts their consciences. Unfortunately, for our local opposition, because the West funds their activities, they think that they have to kowtow to everything the West says. But, happily, that doesn't win them elections here.