Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Winter 2007
An Appeal for Funding
Back in 1997, the troubled nation of Zimbabwe needed to get on the right
track. Seventeen years had passed since Robert Mugabe led the fight for
liberation and took over the government of the white minority-ruled country.
His power had grown steadily through the years and a series of self-serving
amendments to Zimbabwe’s ad hoc constitution had been put in place
to assure this situation would continue. Mugabe and his party, the Zimbabwean
African National Union-Patriotic Front, were responsible for a series
of disastrous government programs that ruined the economy of the once-prosperous
land, formerly southern Africa’s breadbasket. Reform was long overdue.
As elsewhere in Africa, Zimbabwe’s civil society began
the process of constitutional reform. The prodemocracy National Constitutional
Assembly, made up of church-affiliated groups, human rights advocates,
jurists, academics, trade unions, farmers, business groups, political
parties and others, initiated the movement — which the Mugabe regime
came to see as a threat. To appropriate the increasingly popular reform
movement, in May of 1999 the government created the Constitutional Commission
of Zimbabwe. Its official mandate called for the new constitution to be
completed by the end of November that year (an unrealistic timeframe)
and voted on in a referendum in early 2000,
putting it in place in time for the upcoming parliamentary elections.
It was this government-led reform effort that Carnegie Corporation was
asked to support.
By the time the Corporation received this request, a number of prominent funders, eager to back a process that could build the Zimbabwean people’s faith in their government, had agreed to help underwrite half the Constitutional Commission’s projected budget of $10.8 million. The United Nations Development Program facilitated support from the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and bilateral funding came from Australia, Canada and South Korea. Significantly, there were also substantial commitments from the Ford and Kellogg Foundations, two institutions Carnegie Corporation often partnered with in philanthropic ventures. The Kellogg Foundation, with a staff of 15 in the regional office in Harare, had a strong interest in seeing Zimbabwe, where they’d been since 1986, open up as was happening in South Africa at the time, according to Gail McClure, vice president of planning and programs. The Foundation considered it a “venture investment,” McClure explained, “a chance to educate the people in rural areas where our work was concentrated.”
Even with other funders’ involvement, no one knew for certain if, at this late stage, any amount of support could impede Mugabe’s power grab. Consequently, there were profound disagreements within Carnegie Corporation about whether a grant to the Constitutional Commission would be money well spent. Serious questions went unanswered: Would Zimbabwe’s civil society trust the supposedly transparent reform efforts initiated by Mugabe and his party? Could a despotic Mugabe accept a constitution that had been rewritten “by the people?” And perhaps most critically, could a new constitution reverse the concentration of power in the presidency and permit presidential term limits?