guest column:Clement Prince Addo

All over the world, the internet has provided extraordinary socioeconomic opportunities to businesses, governments, and individuals. But less developed countries still face numerous obstacles to maximise its potential. The problems range from obsolete infrastructure, the nonavailability, non-accessibility, cost, power fluctuations, policies and regulation.
Many countries on the continent still have bandwidth as low as 64 kilobits. This is in contrast to the 270 000 megabits per second in the US. Data also shows that downloading a 5GB movie took 734 minutes in the Republic of Congo, 788 minutes in Sao Tome, 850 minutes in Ethiopia, 965 minutes in Niger and 1 342 minutes in Equatorial Guinea. Singapore is the fastest, taking about 11 minutes and 8 seconds to download a typical 5GB high-definition movie.

In certain situations, bandwidths for the entire country is less than what is available to an individual residential subscriber in the United States of America.

Similarly, African countries are listed among those with the lowest internet speed yet with the most expensive communication and internet cost in the world.

Africa is on record to have had the fastest growing mobile telecommunication market over the years. But the continent still has the lowest mobile penetration. And developments in Africa’s telecommunications sector happen in cities and urban centres.

Service providers argue that it’s not economically feasible to roll out a network to cover an entire country.

But various advanced technologies are emerging to reduce the cost of internet provision and to increase accessibility. They also offer the possibility of developing communication networks in a way that does less harm to the environment.

The approach is called resource virtualisation, where multiple telecommunication services can be provided by less physical infrastructure.

Since the chunk of the cost transferred to the end-user comes from the cost of power and infrastructural management, this approach can reduce the operational cost, improve accessibility and cut the cost to the end user.

Like every architectural work, telecommunication masts must meet specific constructional requirements, including choice of location and risk analysis.

But unregulated construction is typical in many parts of Africa. Even where regulatory bodies exist, many media and communication masts are sited within very short distances and hilly grounds in big cities.

This is true in Ghana too where in an urban environment it’s possible to see 10 masts within close proximity to one another.

This does not necessarily guarantee quality service. In addition, it poses a severe environmental and physical risk.

Masts are also expensive to put up.

It stands to reason, therefore, that having fewer masts, hence using less energy and doing less damage to the environment would be the optimal way forward.

I have been involved in developing a framework along with other colleagues that can help policymakers demarcate, and zone major cities — or the whole country into zones. Each zone takes only one mast, owned by an infrastructure provider and shared by multiple service providers.

I focused on telecommunications, but the principle can be applied to TV and radio signal towers too.

My proposal involves a three-level architecture that includes a provider who owns and manages the infrastructure.

At the upper level is a Cloud-RAN macro-base station. A provider like the State regulator, can own and manage the data from the base station.

The macro base station is responsible for managing the system’s energy, bandwidth allocation, and flow management, including the handover in intra and inter mast zones.

At the middle level, service providers focus on providing tailored and quality of service to their users. The service providers will not have to spend their resources on managing the infrastructure they only have to deal with how to satisfy users.

The user on the third level has to only deal with the service providers.

This framework will bring an end to uncontrolled mast deployment seen in many African countries.

It would allow for power and bandwidth sharing among multiple service providers and would reduce the need for multiple masts. Traffic would be scheduled over limited masts or access points that reduce the system energy consumption and improve efficiency. The general impact on the environment would also be reduced.

Service providers could then focus on end-users and not on infrastructure.

guest column:Willard Chinhara

It is not surprising that the sanctions issue is also the unfinished business of the September 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA) between Zanu PF and the MDC formations. Although the parties to the GPA had about five years (2009-2013) to implement the provisions of the ill-fated GPA, whatever their shortcomings, it is safe to argue that the on-going anti-sanctions campaign is untimely because the processes of national dialogue and international engagement are still in their infancy.

This argument is neither for nor against the removal of sanctions, but the main objective is to set forth the logical equilibrium of the whole issue.

In simple terms, sanctions can be defined as punitive measures usually taken by several nations, together and at times one country, designed to put pressure on another country in order to force it to change its policies and actions or as a means to rehabilitate that country.

There are, however, various forms of sanctions, mainly comprehensive and targeted or smart sanctions. Comprehensive sanctions simply refer to wholesale or non-discriminating sanctions and are more austere than targeted or smart sanctions.

Thus, targeted sanctions can lessen the negative humanitarian impacts on innocent civilians associated with comprehensive sanctions. Targeted or smart sanctions are meant to focus their impact on leaders, political elites and segments of society believed responsible for objectionable behaviour, while reducing collateral damage to the general population and third parties. However, the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC) argues that “targeted sanctions have unintended consequences, including increases in corruption and criminality, strengthening of authoritarian rule, burdening neighbouring States, strengthening of political factions, resource diversion and humanitarian impacts.”

There are various types of targeted sanctions. According to the TSC, composed of more than fifty scholars and policy practitioners worldwide, the following are some types of targeted sanctions with varying degrees of discrimination:

Individual/Entity targeted sanctions (for example travel ban, assets freeze; most discriminating)

Diplomatic sanctions (only one sector of government directly affected)

Arms embargoes or proliferation-related goods (largely limited impact on fighting forces or security sector)

Commodity sanctions other than oil (for example diamonds, timber, charcoal; tend to affect some regions disproportionately)

Transportation sanctions for example aviation or shipping ban; can affect much of a population)

Core economic sector sanctions (for example oil and financial sector sanctions; affect the broader population and therefore are the least discriminating of targeted sanctions)
Since the year 2001 to date, Zimbabwe is said to have been under targeted sanctions imposed not by the United Nations (UN), but by the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU) who are the major players.

Historical context

In view of the sanctions concept, it is expedient to give an overview of the general history of sanctions as applied during the 20th and 21st centuries. During the 20th century, unilateral and autonomous sanctions were not as prevalent as they appear to be in the 21st century. According to Margaret Doxey, while both the League of Nations Covenant and the UN Charter directed sanctions at the unlawful use of force, in the UN context sanctions have also been linked to the defence of human rights. Prior and during the Cold War, sanctions included those of the League of Nations against Italy from 1935 to 1936 and the UN sanctions against Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1966 to 1979 and an arms embargo against South Africa since 1977 until May 1994 when democratic elections were held. These sanctions were usually comprehensive in nature.

Quoting several authoritative scholars, Daniel W Drezner submits that the origins of smart sanctions lie in the explosion of economic statecraft that started with the end of the Cold War. The UN Security Council (UNSC) voted for economic sanctions twelve times in the 1990s; between 1945 and 1990, the UN had only employed sanctions twice. “According to Hufbauer, Schott, Elliott, and Oegg (2007), there were nearly as many sanctions episodes after end of the Cold War as there were during the first 90 years of the twentieth century.

The most high-profile cases were comprehensive UN sanctions imposed on Iraq, Haiti, and former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It is worth observing that, in the end, all three sanctions episodes generated at least moderate concessions. Obviously, military statecraft was also used in all three cases, but Rogers (1996) argues that economic sanctions played a crucial supporting role in determining the outcomes.”

Analysts observe that measured in terms of cost, sanctions imposed against Iraq were, by far, the most comprehensive in history. It is estimated that Iraq lost between US$175 billion and US$250 billion in possible oil revenues from the sanctions. Further, the price for a family’s food supply for a month increased 250-fold over the first five years of the sanctions regime. It is estimated that the sanctions caused a minimum of 100 000 and up to 227 000 excess deaths among young children from August 1991 to March 1998. In view of these fatalities, Mueller and Mueller concluded that “economic sanctions may well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.”

However, according to Daniel W Drezner, Madeleine Albright — the US ambassador to the UN at the time — provided the defining sound bite for this culpability in May 1996. In a 60-minute interview, she said that even if the sanctions had killed half a million Iraqi children, ‘‘the price is worth it.’’ Conversely, humanitarian groups ranging from the Red Cross to the Human Rights Watch questioned the ethics of comprehensive trade sanctions. It is in this light that multiple UN agencies started to voice concerns about the UNSC’s implementation of comprehensive sanctions. Daniel W Drezner submits that then UN Secretary-Generals Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan both labelled sanctions a “blunt instrument” and asked whether the suffering inflicted on vulnerable groups was a legitimate means of exerting pressure on political leaders.

In view of criticism of the severity and fatalities of comprehensive trade sanctions, the idea of targeted sanctions emerged. Thus, in moving forward with the anti-sanctions campaign, it is important to avoid confusing comprehensive trade sanctions with targeted sanctions. It is also important to note that the UN has been somewhat antipathic about the idea of sanctions. Hence, we have a proliferation of autonomous and unilateral sanctions by nations and regional groups.

Pan-African solidarity

Daniel W Drezner argues that from a social science perspective, the perceived failure of the Iraq case seemed damning. The Iraq sanctions were an extreme outlier in terms of cost to the target — Iraq’s GDP was cut roughly in half. If sanctions this costly failed to yield concessions, then the entire sanctions enterprise could be called into doubt. Thus, the Pan-African solidarity is not a political misnomer, but there is total absence of sincerity in Africa’s anti-sanctions advocacy. SADC and the AU have all failed to deal with the root causes of Western sanctions.

The GPA of 2008 and the resultant Government of National Unity of 2009-2013 failed to yield a permanent solution to Zimbabwe’s internal and external dilemmas. In these circumstances, it is unfortunate that Africa pretends that there is nothing endogenous about the socio-economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe.

Polarized national psyche

Every country under the sun has a polarised national psyche. However, at the present moment, Zimbabwe’s national psyche is polarised beyond the point of reconciliation due to man-made ethnographic complexities and ideological differences. On the one hand, there is a generation of people who, on the political scale, believes in democracy and federalism. This generation considers sanctions as a valid political tool for a regime change agenda. It should be noted that historically, some form of loose pseudo-federalism existed during the pre-colonial era when Zimbabwe had the “Munhumutapa Empire” and the “Ndebele Kingdom” for example.

On the other hand, there is a generation of the radical power elite made up of mainly the liberation war veterans, the military oligarchy and the comprador-bourgeoisie. This formidable generation, believes in political power monopoly and hold the view that sanctions are a form of illegal foreign intervention in a sovereign state. The majority of the people in the latter generation are nationalist pretenders and a huge national security risk.

The third generation, are fickle-minded plebeians who believe in anything and move with the tide of affairs. They are like a football which can be used by all contesting teams to make scores and they reside in the “Eighteen-Areas” of the less powerful teams’ goals. In the case of such a polarized national psyche, there is need for a holistic program of action designed by parties to the National Dialogue. Such a program should strive to make the dialogue process as transparent as possible to convince and educate polarized political constituencies that something constructive is happening.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is imperative to emphasise that the untimeliness of the anti-sanctions campaign is vindicated by lack of convincing conditions for the removal of sanctions. The Pan-African solidarity against sanctions is necessary, but again Africa is caught up in the usual whirlwind of political rhetoric without adopting a pragmatic approach to resolve Zimbabwe’s domestic and international relations dilemma.

By Stephen Chadenga

LESS-PRIVILLEGED families in Gweru are set to benefit from a US$ 13 000 grant provided by the United States of America for the construction of toilets and a poultry rearing project.

Gweru Residents Forum (GRF) director Charles Mazorodze said 480 women in Mkoba will benefit from the poultry project while a section of Mtapa suburb, which has been facing ablution challenges for years would benefit from the construction of toilets.

“The Unites States awarded the Gweru Residents Forum a $13 782 Ambassador’s Special Self-Help Fund grant to establish a poultry rearing project for six wards benefiting 480 women and their households (in Mkoba),” he said.

“GRF will also construct toilets in the high-density suburb of Mtapa to improve sanitation. Very soon we will call a meeting to discuss the projects before commencing.”

Mazorodze said the poultry project was aimed at helping women generate income to help eradicate poverty.

He said the building of toilets would improve sanitary conditions in the low income section of Mtapa suburb.

“We will also assist beneficiaries, particularly of the poultry project on how best they can run their businesses as well as marketing strategies,” he said.

GRF’s intervention comes at time there has been growing calls for people living in urban areas to be provided with food aid as starvation wreaks havoc across the country.

Recently, government announced that food aid distribution would be rolled out in both rural and urban areas.

The programme is, however, yet to be launched.

BY BLESSED MHLANGA

OPPOSITION party leaders forming President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Political Actors Dialogue (Polad) platform have been left seething with anger after the Zanu PF leader ignored their proposals regarding steps to be followed before gazetting of the controversial Constitutional Amendment Bill.

Mnangagwa last met his Polad team at his farm last month and the 19 parties in attendance allegedly agreed that the proposed constitutional changes be debated at their platform before being gazetted and taken to Parliament.

However, Mnangagwa ignored the suggestions and railroaded the changes through Cabinet and had them gazetted by Justice minister Ziyambi Ziyambi without Polad members’ consent.

“During the last meeting of Polad, one of the resolutions read out was that the proposed Constitutional Amendment Bill should not be gazetted, but instead brought to Polad where it would be discussed and other parties input,” constitutional law expert and National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) leader Lovemore Madhuku fumed yesterday.

“It was agreed that a Bill would then be brought to Parliament with amendments also from other political parties and instead of focusing on the Zanu PF needs, we will have an omnibus Bill, but that was not followed. But they went ahead and gazetted the Bill.”

The NCA leader said he would soon mobilise other parties and use Polad and other avenues to campaign against the passing of the Bill into an Act.

“Obviously we are not happy that our first resolution as Polad was not respected. We are dealing with Zanu PF, which is in the old mode and we expected that,” Madhuku said.

“You must know that Zanu PF is not used to the culture of getting advice. But we are not pulling out of Polad because it’s the only platform that we have, because we don’t have representatives in Parliament.”

But Ziyambi defended his move to gazette the amendment, saying Polad was not part of the law-making process and, therefore, did not deserve to be consulted.

“We are shocked that they want to stop a process which is allowed by the country’s laws. They want us to sit down and consult them. Yes, they are in Polad, but if you check with Bills, we don’t take them to Polad,” he said.

“They are trying to make Polad an arm of government. If they have their views and ideas, they can discuss them there and then they are brought to Cabinet and discussed, then they become policy.

But that we, as government, to go to them to ask them on laws, policies or budgets as they want us to do, that would mean we have lost the mandate that we were given by the people to rule.”

The Justice minister said Zanu PF would use its two-thirds majority in Parliament to change the Constitution.

MDC-T vice-president Obert Gutu described the development as “unfortunate”.

“I would be lying if I said we are happy … There has been a media spin out there painting Polad as a platform for wanting to loot government coffers, wanting cars and allowances. It is very unfortunate that we lost a brilliant opportunity to show that Polad is a serious dialoguing platform. We are not happy,” he said.

“Our question is why not give us an opportunity to ventilate this issue? If Polad is going to be an effective dialoguing platform, those in authority should take it seriously. It would have been progressive to show the right degree of seriousness by giving us an opportunity to discuss the amendments.”

Eighteen fringe opposition parties were represented at the Kwekwe meeting, among them the People’s Rainbow Coalition leader Lucia Matibenga and the Thokozani Khupe-led MDC-T.

These parties garnered less than 2% of total votes cast in the 2018 elections.

The Nelson Chamisa-led MDC, which has refused to be part of Polad, said the latest development had vindicated their decision to stay out of the platform.

At the weekend, Chamisa said joining Polad would be giving the nation false hope, and instead demanded real talks mediated by a neutral person and guaranteed by Sadc and the African Union.

“We saw Polad 1 when Ian Smith had talks with (the late former Prime Minister Abel) Muzorewa, giving the nation false hope. We saw how Zanu PF acts when there are no guarantees, especially what happened during the GNU [Government of National Unity],” Chamisa said.

“Now I will not join Polad 2 and give the people false hope because if results don’t come, people will lose hope in national processes and we don’t want that to happen.”