This week is the 27th anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence — an occasion, as often before, for President Robert Mugabe to remind his beleaguered countrymen of their many achievements.
The former schoolmaster has sought to fashion a people in his own image. Most Zimbabweans are industrious, principled and often socially conservative. For two decades they voted, overwhelmingly, for Mugabe.
In the classroom of their new nation, the country’s founding father embodies a spirit of relentless striving. His severity and unflinching resolve are hallmarks of a man who notched up six university degrees. Discipline was always a priority, enforced — sporadically — by violence of surgical precision. Educated by Jesuits, he remains an observant Catholic. He is a regular congregant at Sunday Mass in Harare — even while religious leaders, at home and abroad, denounce him.
Zimbabwe today is bereft of optimism and self-confidence. But as recently as a decade ago, Mugabe’s record was routinely cited as an inspiration to his neighbours. A nation that boasted just two black engineers at independence in 1980 has nurtured an educated middle class, which, as a proportion of population, is the biggest in Africa.
As their homeland deteriorates, these model pupils have turned against their president. The professionals and technocrats who might lead an economic recovery now swell the ranks of an ever-growing diaspora — many of them in South Africa and Britain.
The economy they have left behind is out of control. Most Zimbabweans eke out a living at the margins of the formal sector, their efforts ravaged by hyperinflation. A large proportion of the rural population survive on what they can grow from the soil, insulated from spiralling prices but perpetually hungry. Even those who have work rely increasingly on remittances of foreign currency from family and friends abroad.
Assessment
This supplement offers an assessment of what has gone wrong and what might be done to revive Zimbabwe’s fortunes. Many of its problems will outlive the 83-year-old president, and the remedies will bring more pain. The end of apartheid has fundamentally changed the economic landscape of Southern Africa, and Zimbabwe is out of step with the liberalising agenda of its neighbours.
The proud claim that Zimbabwe is the “breadbasket” of Africa is now, at best, an anachronism. For all its fertile farmland, Zimbabwe is a small and landlocked country. When a “new management” finally takes power from Mugabe, its first tasks will be to diversify an economy still dependent on a few key crops.
The contributors to this supplement are united in their criticism of Mugabe, but this supplement is not cheerleading for Zimbabwe’s battered opposition. Nor do these pages aspire to optimism. Their first purpose is to assess the prospects for lasting change. Zimbabweans are in desperate straits, but this is not a counsel of despair. As we go to press, there is encouraging, albeit tentative evidence of renewed effort to break the gridlock in Harare.
The vicious beatings meted out last month to opposition leaders appear to have been a tactical mistake by Mugabe. As Brian Raftopoulos observes in these pages, the president’s self-styled posture as a latter-day folk hero has been reduced by the television pictures of his African critics battered in police custody. The image of a brave nationalist doing battle against imperial domination is harder to sustain when the faces emerging from hospital are black.
Mugabe, of course, is determined to fight on. He plans to stand again for re-election in 2008. For him, stepping down would not be just a political concession, it would also represent total defeat — the loss of a lifetime’s accumulation of power as well as the complete deflation of a megalomaniacal sense of pride and self-importance. He would rather gamble another election to legitimate his rule.
He has long been sustained by the support of party loyalists who, given a choice, would prefer to see him retreat to a quiet retirement, if not a state funeral. That choice may at last become reality as rivals with close ties to the military and state security services contemplate a challenge — although Mugabe has outmanoeuvred them before.
An alliance of Joice Mujuru, wife of the former army chief Solomon Mujuru and probably the military’s choice, with her chief rival, the veteran securocrat Emmerson Mnangagwa, would pose a formidable threat to Mugabe. Their perspectives are regrettably absent from this survey, although not for want of trying by the editors to solicit contributions from within the ruling party.
Some analysts now see a handover from Mugabe to one or an alliance of these contenders as the best way of assuring an orderly transition and avoiding civil strife. This would provide a “dignified” exit to Mugabe, especially in the wake of a 2008 election victory. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has adopted a similar strategy for his own retirement, just months away. But even though there is rampant speculation that he will hand over to those known to covet political power, there is little evidence that Mugabe is, at this stage, ready to hand over to the contenders.
Opposition
In the meantime, the opposition has little option but to watch and wait. Divided and, until recently, subdued, the “two MDCs” have failed to learn from past mistakes. Joram Nyaathi counsels a renewed effort to bring about electoral reform, coupled with a nationwide programme of voter education. But even if they are spared the repression and retribution of Mugabe’s state security, opposition prospects rest more on the hope of mistakes by the ruling party than on any initiative or strategy of their own invention.
Jonathan Moyo, Mugabe’s former minister of information, ascribes Zanu-PF’s enduring support in rural constituencies to the influence of its “political commissars”. These are conduits for a system of political patronage that encroaches on every aspect of public life — a “de facto one-party state”, according to Moyo. If only he could be trusted to mean what he says. Moyo’s abrupt metamorphosis, from presidential apologist-in-chief to independent agitator, has more than justified Mugabe’s long-standing suspicion of this political maverick.
Such are the contradictions of Zimbabwe today. South Africa’s northern neighbour is a burlesque outpost of dead empire, a place where illusion vies constantly with reality. Officially, Zimbabwe is a functional democracy. Opposition MPs sit in Parliament and the MDC runs local government in urban and rural centres — nominally so, in most cases, as its elected officials are almost powerless. In this ossified regime, dissent becomes synonymous with treachery – a proposition that, inherently, leads to violence.
In reality, Mugabe sits at the helm of a finely calibrated system of executive dictatorship, where power is a shifting centre, located somewhere between the president, the army, the state security apparatus and a diffuse network of party patronage. In this violent and stubbornly undemocratic universe, Stephen Chan, a seasoned chronicler of Zimbabwean nationalism, detects a new irony in the likely influence of Pretoria.
Armed with a new mandate from the Southern African Development Community, President Thabo Mbeki has spoken with renewed confidence of his chances as a mediator. He is “sure” that Mugabe will retire. Mbeki’s policy of encouraging negotiation between the main parties looks certain to bring greater leverage for South Africa. A curious end to Mugabe’s lifelong campaign for national sovereignty, but some kind of progress all the same.
Western influence has not helped Zimbabwe, and never less then when Britain turned a blind eye to the massacres in Matabeleland by Mugabe’s notorious, North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade in the 1980s. But, as Richard Dowden suggests, relations with the old colonial master are not beyond repair. Once South Africa has brokered a successor, the international development agencies will return, armed with fast-increasing aid budgets. Some of the white commercial farmers, descendants of the old Rhodesia, will follow them into new, managerial roles — alongside the Chinese and Libyans, who are Zimbabwe’s new settler class.
Transition
The transition to a new kind of country will not be rushed. But such is the constitutional and economic bankruptcy of Mugabe’s regime that sweeping change has become inevitable. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel laureate, recently compared Zimbabwe to the slave plantations of the 18th century. Now, as then, a condition of serfdom cannot go on forever.
Soyinka’s comments followed a speech to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. Addressing the Commonwealth Society in London, he pointed to the sorry legacy of colonial settlement and the economic slavery apparent in the poorest parts of the developing world. The weary promises of “never again”, uttered first in the wake of the Holocaust and again after the Rwandan genocide, have proved unequal to the rape and pillage in Darfur.
During questions, a Zimbabwean regretted that Soyinka had made no mention of the recent beatings of opposition leaders in Harare. Another objected that Britons should feel proud of their country’s part in sending Royal Navy ships to stop the traffic in slaves — it was only fair, after all, to judge the protagonists of history against the standards of their own time.
Soyinka disagreed. He replied that it would be quite wrong to interpret the past according to the standards of any other era. This was the first condition of progress. Enlightenment is a critique of the past. “And that,” he added, “deals with the Mugabe question.” It is a vivid analogy, as Zimbabweans contemplate 27 years of independence: Robert Mugabe, the great liberator, a captive of his own violent history. “He is still living on a slave plantation,” Soyinka concluded. “All we can do is pray for him.”
Mark Ashurst is director of the Africa Research Institute, London. Gugulethu Moyo is a Zimbabwean lawyer who works on Southern African issues for the International Bar Association