The Zimbabwean president created an alibi for himself when hangings were reintroduced
Michael Hartnack
President Robert Mugabe flew back into Harare this week, after hangings were resumed and drastic plans to fix basic commodity prices below the cost of production were unveiled in his absence.
Just as Mugabe established a foreign alibi for himself in January 1999 when independent journalists Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto were abducted and tortured, he was away on a prolonged jaunt to South East Asia when Zimbabwe’s newly appointed hangman got busy after a three-year moratorium on executions.
Likewise, the pricing plans were unveiled before Mugabe touched down at Harare. This leaves the way clear for the president to disown responsibility should they prove unworkable. Past somersaults in economic policy were announced during his frequent trips abroad, and declared later to have been made without his consent.
While Mugabe was visiting Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, Minister of Information Jonathan Moyo and Reserve Bank Governor Leonard Tsumba dropped hints that a return to a pre-1990 command economy was imminent after 10 years of failed reforms.
Professor Welshman Ncube, secretary general of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), said he abhorred the resumption of hangings by a regime that had “encouraged killing of political opponents, and authorised murder on a wide scale”.
“You worry a great deal about the intentions in the long term. It is terrible you have a government under siege which seems to have all its priorities wrong you have a country in a mess and you start hanging people.”
More than 100 people have died in 18 months of violence centred on 5000 white-owned farms, many of them occupied by state-sponsored former guerillas.
Moyo and Tsumba said the Zimbabwean government would bridle the current 76% inflation through tighter enforcement of official exchange rates Z$55 to US$1 against black market rates of between Z$250 and Z$350 to US$1. The rand, officially at Z$6,5, fetches at least five times that amount from Beitbridge touts.
Minister of Industry and commerce Herbert Murerwa unveiled regulations to force down the price of a loaf of bread from Z$60 to Z$34, while the price of maize meal is to be pegged at just under Z$23/kg, sugar at Z$22/kg, cooking oil at Z$70 for 750 ml and beef at Z$125/kg.
The country is short of up to one million tonnes of maize needed to see it through to next year, while much of the national beef herd has been slaughtered as pandemonium reigns on commercial farms.
Eddie Cross, economics adviser to the MDC, warns basics may soon become completely unavailable. Customs officers have orders to stop cross-border shoppers going home with truckloads bought at comparatively bargain prices.
The MDC fears an official rationing system may be used to dragoon voters in the run-up to presidential elections scheduled before next April.
Malvern Rusike, chief executive of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, said the controls are “futile”, leading to shortages, hoarding and bankruptcy of producers.
Zimbabwe’s Roman Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace has conducted a prolonged campaign against the death penalty but Mugabe amended the Constitution to block challenges to hanging of those left languishing on death row. One of the latest three hanged in Zimbabwe had been on death row for more than five years.
The last public hangman died shortly after the last executions in April 1998. Mugabe’s government has sent 66 to the gallows since independence in 1980.