Jonathan Steele A second Look Now that the furore over Zimbabwe’s election has abated, let’s draw a deep breath and admit it: Zimbabwe is an African good-news story. At about 90% the country has one of the highest literacy rates on the continent. Its race relations are excellent. The attempt to fan black hostility against white farmers during the election campaign was a failure. The political tension that once divided the country’s two main ethnic groups, the Shona and the Ndebele, has almost disappeared. Zimbabwe’s civil society is vibrant. A plethora of civic groups deal with issues from gender equality and human rights to job creation and poverty reduction.
Zimbabwe’s judiciary is as firm and unbowed as it was during the colonial era. There are powerful trade unions and, though the ruling party maintains iron control over broadcasting and rejects licences for independent radio stations, there is a thriving independent press. The elections have given the country a two-party system with a strong opposition for the first time in its history. Zanu- PF’s terminology may have an antiquated feel with its politburo, central committee and comrades, but a series of government ministers and officials are welcoming the arrival of pluralism. Nathan Shamuyarira, Zanu-PF’s secretary for information, expects it to “produce lively debates in Parliament”. This change of official tone has already had an effect on the state-owned media with unprecedented space suddenly being given to opposition views and criti-cism of the government. Few other African states can rival Zimbabwe’s natural advantages. It has a tourist potential that is bound to revive as the election images of intimidation fade. The dams are full and the country is not going to starve. Still, there is a downside. Zimbabwe faces three serious problems, and only one can plausibly be blamed on President Robert Mugabe. It is suffering from the Aids crisis more than almost every other country in Africa. About a quarter of the adult population, both rural and urban, is infected, and 1 000 people are dying every week.
One key reason for Zimbabwe’s vulnerability is the colonial system with its preference for migrant African labour. One of the last great crimes of the racist Ian Smith regime is the town of Chitungwiza, built 30km from Harare to keep the workforce well away from the European suburbs. The huge number of men forced to live on their own produces a sex industry and a climate ripe for Aids. Controlling the disease is not helped by Zimbabwe’s second strategic problem. It is an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, where women still curtsy to men. HIV- positive men go home to their villages and soon infect their wives. Only a massive expansion of sex education in schools and a shift in gender relations will have an effect.
The third difficulty is the weakness of the economy in the face of global tendencies, including the ideological havoc caused by the first wave of neo-liberal thinking in the 1990s. Zimbabwe began life as an independent state a decade earlier. The massive spending on health and education in the 1980s resulted in a high budget deficit, which was not helped by lower-than-expected foreign investment and poor prices for export commodities. This was not a case of government mismanagement but of adverse factors beyond its control. In 1991 the government accepted an International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programme that devalued the Zimbabwean dollar, opened the way to more imports, and cut the government deficit by charging for welfare services, including schools and medicine. The infant mortality rate in Harare shot up. The economy’s liberalisation did not attract the investment the IMF predicted. In the mid-1990s, the IMF and World Bank shifted their emphasis to poverty reduction and sustainability. But in Zimbabwe the damage was done and the Zanu-PF government reacted with a volatile love-hate approach to the international financial institutions.
The crisis over white-owned land is the climax of these frustrations. But, as many Zimbabwean NGO experts on land reform point out, the government’s plans are dominated by statist thinking. Therein lies Zimbabwe’s current tragedy. It is run by a generation of elderly men who have not been able to move on from the liberation struggle. Challenged for power, they fall back on a single issue, and increasingly on racism. The intimidation in the latest elections was the reflex defence of people threatened by loss of power and too inflexible to find ways of achieving consent through dialogue and compromise. But Zimbabwe is in transition to a new generation, a new style of government, and perhaps to a president from a new party. Coupled with its many inherent advantages, this is a story of African success.
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