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Zimbabwe: Public Servants

asked Her Majesty’s Government whether they will assist those who served the Crown in Southern Rhodesia before the unilateral declaration of independence, and in many cases afterwards, for whose pensions the Government of Zimbabwe took responsibility under the independence constitution but who are no longer receiving any pension. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for coming to the House at this hour to reply to this short debate. He will know that I have raised this matter on a number of occasions. Every time I have raised it, I have been treated with the utmost courtesy by the Ministers who have replied—I have no complaint about that—but the Foreign Office has got itself stuck in an entirely untenable position. It has been defending a case that lacks all moral integrity, and I have confidence that a new Minister with great experience and a reputation for finding his way through thickets of obscurantism will go back to officials and tell them that they have fought manfully over the years, but now is the time for them to abandon their crumbling earthworks, recognise the facts and do what is obviously right. I must declare an interest: I am president of the Overseas Service Pensioners Association, which seeks to represent the interests of those who worked overseas in our colonies as Crown servants. I am speaking tonight because my members are in despair at the refusal of Her Majesty’s Government to lift a finger to help Crown servants who held office in Southern Rhodesia, some of them staying on after the birth of Zimbabwe, but who have been robbed by Mugabe of the pensions guaranteed to them under the independence constitution of 1980. Let me be clear: Britain has taken over responsibility for the payment of pensions to people who served in other colonies under the powers given by the Overseas Pensions Act 1973, but the British Government say to those I represent, ““Bad luck. When you picked Southern Rhodesia, you picked the wrong colony, old boy, and you, unlike those who served elsewhere, must survive on social security and charity””. That is something that I do not think any of us here should be prepared to put up with. I can comfort the Government with this thought: to give help to these people will not exactly break the bank. In 1997, there were living in Britain 800 people who were recruited through Rhodesia House in London to serve in Southern Rhodesia and the annual cost of the pensions payable to them was put at £6.9 million. Now the number of those pensioners has dwindled to 350 and paying them that to which they are entitled would, we estimate, cost about £4.5 million. We arrived at that figure after taking account of the decline in numbers and the 35 per cent in the RPI since 1997. To put this into perspective, I should say that last year DfID paid out £113 million to pensioners who served in other colonies, but to look after my people would not increase DfID’s bill even by £4.5 million because the bill for the other pensioners is declining at the rate of £2 million per year because of deaths. So it looks as though it will only have to find another £2 million a year to do justice by my pensioners. That sum, of course, would decline rapidly as the number of my pensioners fell also as a result of deaths. I will just give a few facts. Back in 1979 legality was restored in Southern Rhodesia, and only after that was independence granted to Zimbabwe. It is difficult to find anyone who thinks that the Government did not adopt the right course at that time. The fact remains that it was not the archangel Gabriel who granted independence to Zimbabwe—it was the British Government. What has happened since to those who worked in Southern Rhodesia as servants of the Crown, and in particular what has happened to their pensions, has happened as a direct result of Zimbabwe becoming independent and of the terms under which it was granted independence. How on earth in those circumstances can the Government say that what has happened to the pensions is nothing to do with them? That is completely ridiculous. What is so different about our pensioners which make them so unworthy of consideration when other former Crown servants have their pensions paid by Her Majesty’s Government? Some of the arguments advanced may have some legal validity, but none of them has anything whatever to do with fairness or morality. First, it is said that if anything were done it would have to be done for all Rhodesian public service pensioners—all public servants, including those who worked for the power corporation, the railways, universities and local government. That is complete nonsense. Paragraphs 112 and 113 of the Zimbabwe independence constitution specifically provide for the protection of the pension rights of public officers, and ““public officers”” are defined as persons holding a paid office in the service of the state. In other words, the British Government decided that Crown servants had pension rights deserving of protection. The British Government insisted on their rights being safeguarded in the constitution when the rights of other pensioners were not. Secondly, it is said that if the Government accept responsibility for my pensioners, they would have to accept responsibility for everyone who worked in the public service in Rhodesia, whether or not they were recruited in Britain before they took up their appointment and whether or not they returned to Britain after completing their service and are living here now. Again, that is nonsense. Surely any fair-minded person would concede that the Government have at least a moral responsibility towards those recruited in Britain to go and serve the Crown overseas and who returned to Britain after completing their service—an obligation quite different from any responsibility they might have to someone native to the territory or who came to Southern Rhodesia from elsewhere and chose to work in the public service rather than, say, in a factory or on a farm. Next it is said—I find this almost the most objectionable of all the arguments—that although Britain has accepted responsibility for the payment of pensions to those who have worked as Crown servants in other colonies, Southern Rhodesia was not like other colonies; it was a self-governing colony. It was enough of a colony for Britain to refuse to accept UDI as a legal act, and of course from December 1979 until independence in April 1980 it was far from self-governing—it had a British governor, Lord Soames, who was, in the words of the relevant Order in Council, "““required to make provision for the Government of Southern Rhodesia, according to such instructions as may from time to time be given to him by the Secretary of State””." ““Ah,”” say our Government, still wriggling. ““These Crown servants who worked in Southern Rhodesia were not recruited and appointed by the British Secretary of State. They were recruited by Rhodesia House””—admittedly, of course, with the knowledge and apparent approval of the Secretary of State. That, say our wriggling Government, makes them—wait for it—““local employees, like many thousands of former local employees in other colonial public services””. There is only one word for that—baloney. My people were recruited here on expatriate terms broadly similar to those of colonial service officers in other dependent territories. Their passage out to the territory was paid, they took their leave entitlement back here, and at the end of their service they retired here. Local employees, my foot. They were Crown servants appointed with our Government’s knowledge and approval to work in a British colony. When other colonies became independent, colonial officers had their position protected by specific public office agreements, and clearly in retrospect it would have been better, and would have left the Government with less room to try and evade their responsibilities, if there had been a POA in the Rhodesia case; but whose fault is it that there was not a POA? It was the Government’s fault—the Government saying at the time that the absence of a POA should not give anyone cause for concern, one not being really necessary because in the words of the then Minister: "““The independence constitution would contain full safeguards for public service pensions and their remittability””." For the Government to rely now on the absence of a POA is like a defendant in a criminal case asking the court to take note of and rely on his own self-serving statement. Ministers have often claimed that, because of our colonial past, it is very difficult for them to do much to help the victims of Mugabe. But there are some people who are part of that colonial past who the Government can help—British people who went out to a British colony as servants of the Crown and have suffered terrible loss following the decision by Britain to hand over responsibility for these people’s pensions to Zimbabwe. I beg the Minister to go back to officials in the Foreign Office and tell them that their attitude is quite unacceptable. If the Government are not now prepared to do their duty and make some realistic payment to my people, I will go on about this as long as I have breath in my body and as long as a single one of these pensioners remains alive.