Welcome to the zimcitizenswatch.org, a platform seeking to enhance the quality of democracy in Zimbabwe and contribute towards improved state delivery. We always felt that at some point our country Zimbabwe would be ripe for a new democratic dispensation with citizens at the centre. The work of democratisation is never complete but we believe that the country is at a critical transition which if handled well can lead to the consolidation of our democracy. But that will not happen automatically, citizens and their formations will have to dig deep and ensure that the state and officeholders make the necessary concessions. We believe that this platform can make a contribution by facilitating processes and conversations in a more deliberative manner to address the polarization that still characterizes the environment. We also believe that one of the important tenets of democracy is the effectiveness of the state and it is in this regard that we developed a comprehensive and rigorous tool within the zimcitizenswatch.org platform to track and analyse the performance of the transitional government initially as a pilot whilst waiting for the elections. We started off with a somewhat cheeky hypothesis which states that ‘the transitional government is long on promises and short on delivery’. We have so far identified more than 100 promises made by the government since President Mnangagwa’s inauguration and have been tracking if there are follow up actions to ensure that the promises become part of government program. To be fair we do not necessarily think that all these promises should have been converted into implementable actions within a space of 100 days. We have re-organized the promises into 7 clusters as per figure below.
Agriculture
Electoral & Governance Reforms
Economic Crises/Recovery
Cash Shortages
Curbing Corruption
Social Service Delivery
International Re-engagement
We will continue tracking the implementation of the promises until the final day of the transitional government. However, beyond just tracking we are also measuring if the actions adopted have contributed to positive change and where possible identify the limitations. Beyond tracking the agenda set by government we are also trying to understand citizens’ expectations on what government should be doing. Again, we start off with a cheeky assumption; ‘there is misalignment between what government is doing and what citizens expect it to be doing’. In this regard we have commissioned perception surveys initially across Harare and Chitungwiza. Thanks to technology tools we have managed to secure more than 1 000 responses to the initial perception survey. We will be carrying out more surveys at different stages of the life of this government. The surveys help us to gauge the opinions of citizens regarding their government. In the process we also learn about the citizens’ expectations of what government should be focusing on. We believe this could be an important source of information for the present government but also other political parties aspiring for office. Our surveys also help us test the level of participation or engagement of citizens with government process. Voter apathy has been used in the past as an indicator of citizen engagement but we believe that democracy is more than elections.
As already mentioned we have divided the policy issues areas into 7 and for ease of navigation we have created four easy to follow main sections as per figure below:
As already mentioned the work of democracy is never complete but in the short term we hope to achieve the following:
Thanks again for visiting the zimcitizenswatch.org platform and if you have any questions/suggestions please write to us at info@sivioafrica.org.