The Agony of Zimbabwe

For many of us from Southern Africa, Zimbabwe evokes conflicting memories and emotions: the heroism of the liberation struggle against settler colonialism, the hopes of reconstruction and social transformation in the early post-independence years, and the descent into tyranny and economic decline from the late 1990s. Today, Zimbabwe is in deep economic and political crisis, a once proud country held to ransom. Risky-Business by a bankrupt and authoritarian regime whose revolutionary credentials look ever more tattered from the ravages of unproductive power and the ills stalking the land from widespread food and fuel shortages, to high levels of unemploymentWall-Street-Layoffs and inflation, to general discontent and even despair. Tens of thousands of Zimbabweans vote with their feet to the neighboring countries or overseas, a development unimaginable in the early euphoric years of independence. What went wrong?

There are no shortages of explanations for Zimbabwe’s current agonies. To the ideologues of the regime and its ardent external supporters Zimbabwe is a victim of an orchestrated plot by Western countries—led by the devious Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister—bent on frustrating African progress. Charges of western and British complicity and duplicity in the Zimbabwe crisis are not entirely without merit. Some have pointed out that the vitriol poured on Zimbabwe in the western media has less to do with the country’s state of governance—which is far from the worst in Africa—than lingering western empathies for settler colonialism that the Mugabe regime is ostensibly trying to dismantle through the radical land reform program of forcible land seizures from former white settlers.

To its critics, the Zimbabwe government uses the rhetoric of nationalism, of an unfinished revolution, to cling on to power, as a mask to hide its political intolerance and economic incompetence. Again, there is a lot of truth in this indictment: the regime became more autocratic and adopted a more radical land reform program as it faced a growing and credible political opposition, coalesced around the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and as its capacity to manage let alone rescue the economy from its structural deformities declined.

A more comprehensive accounting of Zimbabwe’s economic and political crises would have to consider the contexts and conjunctures, processes and patterns of Zimbabwe’s trajectory and transition from settler colonialism to a developmental postcolonial state, the challenges and constraints of late decolonization. The country’s current crisis is rooted in the failures of that transition todate. As any postcolonial state, the new Zimbabwe government in 1980 was confronted with the complex challenges of turning the triple dreams of Uhuru—nation building, development and democracy—into reality. And having waged a protracted war of liberation, which entailed the mobilization and politicization of the peasantry, these dreams went beyond the aspirations of the urban elites and working class for neo-colonial transformation that had bedeviled decolonizations elsewhere on the continent.

But unlike many countries that got their independence in the 1950s and 1960s, Zimbabwe attained its independence during a period characterized by global economic crisis and the ascendancy of neo-liberalism. The first severely limited primary commodity and export driven economic growth Trillion-Dollar-Experiment enjoyed by many of the newly independent countries in the 1960s, while the second entailed the “rolling back” of the state and severely curtailed the developmentalist ambitions of the new government. To be sure, in the early post-independence years Zimbabwe’s record of achievement in the provision of social services especially education and health was very impressive. But it was unsustainable following the imposition of structural adjustment programs, which, as in much of Africa, took a heavy toll on the economy particularly social services and formal and public sector employment. In fact, the austerities of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) galvanized the increasingly pauperized urban middle classes and the rural masses still awaiting their fruits of Uhuru into the wave of protests and agitation that crystallized into struggles for democratization, for the “second independence.”

If structural adjustment dented the revolutionary credentials and developmentalist capacities of the Zimbabwean state, the struggles SAPs engendered diluted the state’s democratic claims and exposed its authoritarianism. The monopoly of power enjoyed by the liberation movement, notwithstanding its fierce internal conflicts, began to crack in the 1990s as the working and professional classes in the cities, the weakest link for the liberation movement, turned into a noisy civil society demanding the full rights of political citizenship to promote civil liberties and protect their declining economic fortunes. However, structural adjustment was not the source of all the problems for the political class and the state they had inherited from the Rhodesians.

The liberation movement had inherent spatial and social contradictions that became increasingly evident. The spatial divisions were between the rural and urban areas as well as regional in nature between Matabeleland and Mashonaland and within each region. The merger of Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) into Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front) in 1988, after a five year violent campaign in Matabeleland, sought to defuse the regional tensions, although they did not disappear. In fact, they mutated into new forms. No less critical were the urban-rural divisions in so far as it was the rural peasants who had largely fought in the liberation war but the leadership and immediate beneficiaries of independence were the urban professional elites. The latter had a class interest to consolidate their power by promoting their own accumulation, to fashion an economic base for the political power they had acquired.

The biggest opportunities for accumulation were in land—real estate in the cities and farms in the countryside. Land was of course central to the peasantry, the backbone of the liberation struggle, and to the nationalist memories of violent dispossession by the forces of settler colonialism, and the imaginary of independence. But land resettlement for the peasantry especially for the poor peasantry was not pursued aggressively until the late 1990s. This has often been attributed to the constraints imposed by constitutional safeguards of the Lancaster House Agreement that favored market-based land transactions and resettlement. Also, shortage of resources and the failure of the British government to provide sufficient funds to honor its pledges have been faulted. It would seem that at stake were the accumulative interests of powerful segments of the political class. They wanted the land for themselves.

This balancing act—land for the masses and for the aspiring national bourgeoisie—found succor in the increasingly empty ideological language of socialism, a rhetoric that was not only out of touch with the realities in Zimbabwe and the interests of the political class itself but also with the intolerant demands of neo-liberalism and structural adjustment and the unfolding demise of global socialism. By the late 1990s the comrades in power could no longer fool their beloved masses in the rural areas, the restive armies of unemployed educated youths in the cities, and the workers flexing their industrial muscles and discovering a new political voice through mushrooming civil society organizations and the MDC.

It was in this context that a radical land reform program was embarked on from 1998 and especially after the government lost the constitutional referendum in early 2000. Its aims were multiple and varied: to resettle more peasants and rekindle ZANU-PF’s revolutionary credentials both locally and regionally, locally with a new generation including the unemployed youths who were too young to be war veterans—in whose name the land seizures were undertaken—and in a region now dominated by a reformist post-apartheid South Africa where the governing ANC coalition had abandoned any pretensions to a project of revolutionary socioeconomic transformation. The radical land reform program sought to bolster ZANU-PF and weaken the MDC ideologically and operationally by undermining the nationalist claims and character—still a compelling card in a post-settler society—of the MDC and its rural appeal where the bulk of the population lives.

These measures, augmented by violence, intimidation, and voting irregularities enabled ZANU-PF to win the parliamentary elections of 2000 and 2005. Predictably, monitors from SADC pronounced the elections “free and fair”, whereas western monitors cried foul. The elections of 2000 were more violent than those of 2005, an indication to some of the continued popularity of ZANU-PF. More likely, it reflected the effectiveness of ZANU-PF political terror and the ineffectiveness of the MDC, its inability to articulate a credible message of national transformation.

All this raises difficult questions as to the forces and strategies that can effectively bring Zimbabwe’s nightmare to an end, that can facilitate a transition from the commandist politics of the liberation movement to the democratic politics of a post-liberation society, from Mugabe in power now for twenty-eight years to a new leader. Clearly, elections are not enough, but street action provokes violent retribution from the state. And concerted regional pressure seems unlikely. The regime’s strength and Achilles heel is in the rural areas, and the opposition must find ways of mobilizing the rural population, of bridging the rural-urban divide, linking urban and rural struggles. The generalized economic crisis that has become more severe since the recent elections might offer a new opening.

A little remarked aspect of the farm invasions is that they led to the displacement of tens of thousands of workers from the neighboring countries, especially Malawi and Mozambique, some of whom had been in Zimbabwe for more than a generation. In effect, the rural areas were being emptied of both European and African settlers. The urban areas also boast large populations who can trace their origins to the neighboring countries, which may partly drive the attempts to disenfranchise urban residents, who constitute the backbone of the MDC. A new form of Zimbabwean citizenship was being constructed based on autochothonous rather than residential claims. This underscores what is at the heart of the Zimbabwean conundrum: how to restructure, develop, and democratize a former settler colony that relied on migrant labor from within and without, which necessitated massive land alienation and left behind legacies of high structural unemployment, racial disenfranchisement and dispossession, and militarism and the use of political violence as weapons of both control and liberation. In short: how to construct an inclusive citizenship and subject state power and the political class to democratic accountability.

Zimbabwe attracts intense political emotions as a former settler colony in search of a viable future and for the mirror it holds for South Africa. Both countries capture most poignantly, indeed painfully, the highly racialized, exploitative, and abusive encounter in modern times between Europe and Africa spawned by European imperialism and colonialism. It is not surprising that both the foes and friends of the Mugabe regime look to South Africa to provide international leadership on the Zimbabwe “question.” To some in South Africa the Zimbabwe crisis serves as a warning to the dangers of African nationalist demagoguery, to others an impetus for the country to undertake extensive land reforms and socio-economic transformation if it wants to avoid Zimbabwe’s fate.

It is arguable what motivates President Mbeki’s “quite diplomacy”—Zimbabwe as an ally in the liberation wars of the region or as an alibi for accelerated reform in South Africa. What is clear is that the agony of Zimbabwe continues to deepen and profoundly affects the entire Southern African subregion. South Africa, the SADC countries, and the rest of Africa have a responsibility to help the country chart a more productive future. Solidarity does not entail collaboration with or sanitizing the brutalities of the corrupt and self-serving autocrats in Harare who have obviously outlived their historical usefulness. Rather it requires principled support for the ordinary people of Zimbabwe struggling for a democratic and developmental state, for a society worthy of their protracted struggles against settler colonialism and postcolonial misrule.