/ 1 February 2002

Stuck in the nineties

It was fun reading Michael Hartnack’s review (“The people vs the elite”, Friday, January 25) of the book on Zimbabwe, Striking Back, to which I contributed a chapter. Hartnack seems stuck in the 1990s, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank ruled Harare to the detriment of all but Mugabe, his cronies and other rich folk.

Hartnack seems unaware that “repudiating Mugabe-era debt” to which he objects is advocated by the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development, which includes most major civil society groups, and indeed by all of the chapters of Jubilee Africa. Moreover, Harare intellectuals associated with the Poverty Reduction Forum, Institute for Development Studies and even the United Nations Development Programme recommended, in their Zimbabwe Human Development Report, that government “retire illegitimate debts, and negotiate with the creditors for the payment of the legitimately incurred debts on the principle of joint responsibility”, as well as impose tougher capital controls.

At US$5-billion, Zimbabwe’s debt is simply unrepayable. In 1998, the last year Mugabe tried, only Brazil and Burundi paid a higher share of export earnings to service debt. But nor should the debt be repaid, on grounds that the bank and IMF (the main creditors) are mainly to blame for structural adjustment’s failure, and that Mugabe did not consult the society before imposing Washington’s economic programme from 1990-97, when the debt exploded.

Whatever the outcome of the election, Hartnack should grapple with this democracy-destroying constraint instead of insinuating that my Johannesburg residence warrants Harare’s subservience to Washington. Patrick Bond, Wits University