Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Friday rebuffed calls to declare a state of emergency to stop the country’s economic freefall as it ”would send the wrong signals”.
Instead, the cash-strapped country will ”soldier on” and pursue its policy of finding financial partners in Asia, rather than depend on Western aid, Mugabe told the state-owned Herald newspaper in an interview.
”The government did not declare a state of emergency to arrest the economic decline as this would have sent wrong signals to the country’s enemies and even to its friends,” the veteran leader said.
”We decided to soldier on, seeking assistance from our friends, looking more East than West and getting assistance to sustain ourselves.”
Zimbabwe is grappling with hyper-inflation and severe fuel and foreign-currency shortages.
Once the breadbasket of Southern Africa, Zimbabwe has seen its economy contract by more than a third over the last seven years and inflation soar to 1 200% — the highest in the world outside a war zone.
Unemployment stands at 70% and four million of the country’s 13-million inhabitants face food shortages, according to United Nations agencies.
Harare has blamed the country’s woes on drought and targeted sanctions, especially those imposed by former colonial power Britain. London has slapped sanctions on Mugabe, who has been in power since independence in 1980, and on his inner circle.
Critics largely blame Zimbabwe’s economic catastrophe on the government’s controversial land-reform programme, which start in 2000 and resulted in the seizure — often violently — of white-owned commercial farmland for redistribution to landless blacks.
The government says the land reforms were necessary to address colonial imbalances.
”Our economy is under siege, an economy really which should have had a political environment protecting it,” Mugabe said.
”This is because of [the] actions of our enemies, led by Britain, who have imposed sanctions on us … Britain has been going around asking its allies not to continue the usual economic cooperation with us.”
He accused Britain of intercepting ”arrangements that we have put in place for the supply of fuel and intercepting these ships — not militarily but waving the pound, trying to divert these ships to some other destinations after offering them much higher prices”.
Political analyst Takura Zhngazha said that Mugabe’s comments were part of an ideological war he was waging with the West.
”He thinks we are in a war situation, not a military war but an ideological one with the West,” Zhngazha said. ”He is also trying to play the blame game, saying our problems are from the West — yet they are homegrown.”
Zhngazha said the president had failed to clarify how a state of emergency might buttress Zimbabwe’s failing economy. — Sapa-AFP