Beatrice Mtetwa
NOTHING is going to change in Zimbabwe‚ because President Robert Mugabe and the military leaders who seized power made decisions together for the last 37 years, says prominent Harare attorney Beatrice Mtetwa.
She made the remarks on Thursday night during a question and answer session after she delivered the annual Carlos Cardoso Memorial Lecture at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits).
The lecture this year formed part of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference‚ which is currently taking place at the university.
Carlos Cardoso was a Mozambican journalist who was assassinated in Maputo in 2000 during his investigations into corruption at the country’s biggest bank and senior political figures.
Mtetwa said: “The difficulty is the people who are discussing are not people of different minds.
“The only reason that they are having this discussion is because they have had a disagreement. It’s like a husband and a wife having a disagreement and they then decide that they’ll speak to each other.”
Mtetwa added that politicians have a way of “putting cosmetics on things”.
She lambasted the current leadership for not having held a press conference since taking control to inform the world about what is happening in Zimbabwe.
“The culture of openness just isn’t there [in Zimbabwe].”
She believes things might be different if Africa supervises the transition. However‚ she believes several African leaders envy Mugabe and even consider him the “regional Godfather”.
“Do you think President Zuma would like to be Mugabe? Can you imagine him being able to do what Mugabe does and get away with it? They are in awe of him. They would love to do what he does‚” Mtetwa said.
“I look at the leaders in the region as being really more like a trade union of presidents. If you scratch my back‚ I’ll scratch your back.”