With less than 21 months to go before the expiry of his disputed presidential tenure, President Robert Mugabe last month got his beleaguered Zanu-PF government to launch yet another economic recovery plan called ”National Economic Development Priority Programme” (NEDPP) in a bid to revive Zimbabwe’s collapsed economy. This new programme is ill-fated not only because it is too similar to its failed predecessors, but also because it does not address the core of Zimbabwe’s deepening crisis: Zanu-PF’s triple trap and its consequences, which have left Mugabe like a spider trapped in its own web.
The triple trap is defined by the combined crippling effect of Mugabe’s failure to make way for a successor, Zimbabwe’s growing international isolation and its collapsed economy.
The Zanu-PF government says the NEDPP seeks to redress Zimbabwe’s economic malaise, particularly the critical shortage of forex and galloping inflation. It wants to raise US$2,5-billion mainly from the sale of failing state enterprises, reducing inflation and stimulating between 1% and 2% economic growth over the next six to eight months in an economy that has consistently registered negative economic growth over the past six years, during which it has shrunk by more than 35%. The Zanu-PF architects of the NEDPP are in denial, as shown by their failure to see that the prevailing hyperinflation and forex shortages are symptoms of a much more serious problem.
Today nothing meaningful in Zimbabwe is traded or done through the formal economy. This is one of the reasons why, in May last year, the Zanu-PF government, led by the Central Intelligence Organisation, destroyed the livelihood or homes of 18% of the population in a futile attempt to force them back into the collapsed formal economy.
The roots of the collapse of the formal economy in Zimbabwe go back to 1997 when the Zimbabwean dollar crashed after the government printed money to appease war veterans. But the real damage was done between 2000 and 2003 with farm invasions by some of the same veterans. The result was the institutionalisation of lawlessness, which not only broke down formal or legal structures in the economy but also destroyed property relations and rights and gave rise to the informal economy as a more predictable, secure and fairer trading market.
The NEDPP is ill fated because it is a formal fiction that does not address the informal reality. There cannot be any economic recovery without a comprehensive economic structural reform programme that specifically redresses the structural dislocations that happened in 1997 and went wild between 2000 and 2003.
The fact that the implementation of the NEDPP is overseen by the recently created National Security Council chaired by Mugabe and composed of his security yes-men guarantees that the programme will fail.
The disjuncture between the formal and informal economies in Zimbabwe has rendered the state bureaucracy impotent and this, in turn, has led to the policy paralysis in the government.
This is bad for the Zanu-PF government, but what is worse is that the collapse of the formal economy has happened at a time when the country is going through growing international isolation. One does not need to be a malcontent to see that exuberant portrayals of Mugabe as a hero committed to uplifting the downtrodden are becoming a hard sell, not just in Zimbabwe but internationally.
In diplomatic circles, especially at the United Nations, the African Union and the Southern African Development Community, Zimbabwe has moved from a divisive talking point to an object of pity. The international question now is when the economic meltdown will cause a political meltdown. Even in countries that the government has identified as friendly, such as Malaysia, India, China, Iran and Indonesia, there are indications that many have lost the enthusiasm either to do business or to help Mugabe because they have come to Harare and found a collapsed economy. Politicians are now seen as people who promise big things they cannot deliver because they are not in control of the situation.
The international consensus is that the country desperately needs political and economic change to a new constitutional dispensation with a comprehensive economic reform programme, supported by the international community.
The fact that the government has squandered many opportunities to deal with reform means that the international community has given up hope that Zanu-PF has the willingness and capacity to change. This also explains why Mugabe’s misplaced talk about ”building bridges” has had no diplomatic takers. This has become a second trap for the ruling elite. The fact that the NEDPP is silent on this international dimension demonstrates the irrelevance of the programme.
The biggest challenge facing the government, which is ignored by the NEDPP, is that Mugabe’s stay in power is no longer welcome. Over the years Mugabe has used revolutionary propaganda to manipulate Zanu-PF’s constitution, rules and procedures and to turn the party into his personal system for ruling unchallenged without identifying or making way for a successor. This is why Zanu-PF is now beyond reform.
In the past Mugabe has manipulated Zanu-PF systems to remain at the helm of the party and the government. He now wants to manipulate the Constitution again and has directed the drafting of a Constitutional Amendment Bill to enable him to extend his rule by at least two years.
Under this Bill Mugabe wants to use the confusion over his succession in Zanu-PF to secure an additional two years as president without having to face an election when his current term expires in March 2008. Mugabe wants to achieve this by directing that he should be elected by the House of Assembly and the Senate sitting together as an electoral college in March 2008.
Because he fears that he can no longer win a popular election given the effects of the collapsed economy and Zimbabwe’s international isolation he, encouraged by the 1987 experience, would like be elected by Parliament, where his party has a technical two-thirds in the House of Assembly and a numerical two-thirds in the Senate. Therefore there would be no election because the outcome would be predetermined through the instruments of patronage and coercion.
When this proposal was first made last year by the Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, Patrick Chinamasa, it was presented as necessary in order to harmonise presidential and parliamentary elections to cut costs. The presumption then was that the intended beneficiary of the constitutional amendment would be Vice-President Joyce Mujuru. What was overlooked then is that Mugabe is ever-scheming and that the point of manipulating the party’s constitution and procedures to get Mujuru undemocratically elevated over Emmerson Mnangagwa was that Mugabe wanted a weaker person. This person would not rise to the challenges of the presidency in terms of stature and capacity and he could elbow out under the pretext of managing divisions within Zanu-PF.
This leaves the party in a third trap, unable to deal with Mugabe’s succession. Yet Mugabe has clearly outlived his usefulness. The fact that he does not want to be succeeded until 2010 shows that he does not have a clue about what’s going on in the country from the standpoint of the triple trap that now bedevils Zanu-PF. Yet the writing is on the wall. When a spider is trapped in its own web, it dies.