A 30 Minute Introduction to the Situation in ZimbabweDinoj Surendran, August 2002.Comments to dinoj@uchicago.eduTHIS DOCUMENT IS STILL BEING WRITTEN, SORRY!CLICK HERE FOR AN UPDATED VERSION The views expressed here are the author's. Sources have been given where possible. Email me if you think any facts reported here actually aren't. When I was in high school, former students often came to visit their alma mater. Sometimes it was to see their sons now studying there, sometimes it was to show their wives where their personalities were made, sometimes it was because they were from the surrounding rural area and happened to be visiting home. One member of the last group was particularly visible when he turned up, two or three times a year, since he would come with a dozen black Mercedes and army jeeps packed with the requisite armed soldiers. Sometimes he would speak to the students. He is an excellent orator, and we hung on every word. The school was Kutama College, the country Zimbabwe, the alumni Robert Mugabe. I have mixed feelings about the man. I admire his intellect -- not many people have half a dozen university degrees in administration, education, economics and law, some of which were earned by correspondence while languishing in prison for political activities. I admire his policies of reconcialiation and major public spending on education and health when he became leader of Zimbabwe in 1980. I would also like to see him out of power as soon as possible. Many, but by no means all, Zimbabweans share this view - his nemesis, Morgan Tsvangirai, said in a BBC interview that in 1980 he "would have died for the man".
Let's be frank here: Zimbabwe only caught the world's attention because of its white farmers, a handful of whom were killed. As Zim-bred writer Doris Lessing pointed out recently, "Initially, the only stories that were reported were about the white farmers. But the black population of Zimbabwe had things a thousand times worse." How much worse? What most black Zimbabweans worry about are rising prices, unemployment and possible famine, not land. One Zimbabwean dollar was worth sixty-seven US cents in late 1979. In 1999 US$1 was worth about Z$40, and over Z$700 by mid-2002. Unemployment is over 60%. Inflation is over 110%. There are regular queues for bread, sugar, salt and maize meal, the staple food. In some rural areas people struggle to have a meal a day, and there are reports of people eating roots to survive. [10/07/02: thanks to Tom Hayes for telling me about the error, now corrected, in the third sentence of the above paragraph. I had said one Zimbabwean dollar was worth seven hundred US dollars in 2002 -- must have been wishful thinking.] [I've also realized that eating roots is no bad thing, in the sense that many common foods such as potatoes are roots! Presumably the report I read referred to roots that people would not normally classify as food sources. I think the point of food shortages was still made.]
And that's not even getting to the scourge that has reduced the average life expectancy from 70 to 35 years. One in four Zimbabweans is HIV-positive, and the country is projected to start suffering negative population growth next year. Neigbors Botswana, with a 36% infection rate, and South Africa join it as the first developing countries to ever experience this phenomenon. The fact that Zimbabwe's health care system is near collapse hasn't helped.
One reason why the world's press has demonized Zimbabwe is that it's very easy to do so, as Andrew Young points out. Young, former US Ambassador to the UN and Atlanta Mayor, is one of the few Western politicians who still has some sympathy for Mugabe, whom he feels is the victim of broken promises by the West to help with land reform. We'll see if his viewpoint is justified later.
One of Mugabe's major flaws, possibly The Flaw, is his inability to deal with dissent. His desire to keep power at all costs has led to human rights violations, press curbs, new laws designed to suppress opposition parties, public services like government media and the police becoming instruments of his party - you begin to see why demonization is easy. Unfortunately, demonizing Mugabe also backfires pretty easily. I've had Mugabe sympathizers say to me that it's very unfair of the world to focus on Zimbabwe when there are worse things happening elsewhere in the world (Congo, North Korea, Iran) that receive far less attention. Similar statements have been made by African leaders such as Thabo Mbeki. In January 2002 Mozambique Foreign Minister Leonardo Simao accused western countries of waging a propaganda war against Zimbabwe. And indeed, Mugabe wears international criticism as a badge of honor, as it proves him to be an enemy of British neo-colonialism and racism, a defender of his nation's sovereignty against foreign imperialism, or something along those lines. He has used this to distract many people from his responsibility for Zimbabwe's other problems. Hey, you're dealing with a really smart guy here. "Bonkers" perhaps (so says Desmond Tutu), but not stupid. They have a point - the Western media has been somewhat over-eager to publish anti-Mugabe stories, sometimes resulting in embarassing retractions when their sources prove less than reliable. But it is not logical to discredit the remaining 95% of news reports if 5% prove false, is it? The Western media also give the impression that everything that Mugabe's government does is incorrect. This isn't true either - very few things are 100% good or 100% bad. Some land taken from white farmers has got to ordinary black people, and a major reason that Zimbabwe's economy is such a mess is the reform program it was ordered to carry out by the World Bank in the early 1990s. And it is taking things a little too far to compare Mugabe to Hitler or Pol Pot. Remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can satisfactorily be explained by incompetence." On the other hand, what do these guys expect? Some kind of rating system where countries are ranked by the amount of Bad Things happening, and then the world to start looking at the Worst Place and steadily work down the list? Get real. This isn't a perfect world. Whether the world is watching or not doesn't change the fact that something is bloody wrong in Zimbabwe. So let's look at the following issues in detail, in some order:
Land Redistribution
Let's consider the land issue first. The first white settlers arrived in 1890, and the land grabbing began soon afterwards. Over the next few decades, thousands of blacks had to leave their homes, and many moved to towns or began working on white-owned farms to survive. Legislation ensured that the most of the prime land went to whites and that areas set aside for blacks had poorer soils and/or less rainfall. There was also simply not enough of the latter, resulting in serious overcrowding. In 1980, 17 million hectares or 42% of Zimbabwe's land, including 75% of prime land, was owned by white farmers. A quarter of this, or 1300 farms, were acquired by the government in the next ten years, and two years ago the figure was 29%, of which half is prime land. The other half is classified as poor land, but is often turned productive with irrigation. Large scale farmers find it much easier than small scale ones to get loans for irrigation schemes. For example, sandy soils result in the "poor land" classification, but are great for Zimbabwe's main cash crop, tobacco. Everyone, including the farmers, agree that it is unacceptable to have 5000 farmers, 0.05% of the population, owning 29% of the country. Redistribution is necessary. The government wanted to acquire 8 million hectares for resettlement and resettle 162 000 families. From 1980 to 1990, 2.7 million hectares was voluntarily sold at market value to the government by white farmers and 52 000 families were resettled. From 1990 to 1997, only 0.8 million more hectares were acquired, and 19 000 more families resettled. By this time there were 750 large scale black commercial farmers, 350 of whom had bought their own farms and 400 of whom were leasing 0.4 million hectares of state-owned land.
The COHRE document suggests some reasons for the slowdown in land acquisition in the 1990s.
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