Mugabenomics

BY ITAI DZAMARA

HARARE – During the late 1990s, the Zanu (PF) regime was increasingly feeling the effects of sustained warped economic systems – Mugabenomics – yet faced growing opposition to its rule.

Robert Mugabe’s desire to safeguard his power saw him spending ever-increasing resources on entrenching his stranglehold on power – behind closed doors.

“In the run up to the year 2000, the boiling pot was about to explode. Clear signs of Mugabe’s misrule were now showing in the national economy,” said ZAPU leader, Paul Siwela.

“He had wasted a lot of funds in the DRC and stolen from the national coffers to give his war veterans, in addition to habitual looting. The effects of all this inevitably became too powerful.”

Democratic Party leader, Wurayayi Zembe, believes increased political opposition forced Mugabe and his party to resort to desperate survival tactics, including “daylight robbery from the national coffers”.

The formation of the MDC in 1999 on the shoulders of labour unions, students’ movements and civic society triggered a more pronounced practice of the economics of survival by the Mugabe regime.

“The truth is there was no longer serious or proper economic planning,” said a former minister. “The majority of policies were reactive – such as the land reform debacle and the propaganda projects spearheaded by former minister of information, Jonathan Moyo, which gobbled huge funds, without budgeting, planning or even accounting.”

To inflict more damage, the regime pursued hard-line international diplomacy especially with Europe and the US, causing isolation that compounded a dropping ability to earn foreign currency through exports emanating from the destroyed agricultural backbone.

The Zimbabwean heard from former parastatal heads how the Zanu (PF) regime lsank its teeth into the parastatals, looted and left them for dead.

“In addition to the huge loses we were forced to incur through providing service to the president, his subordinates as well as other top officials, we were also occasionally asked to take from the airline’s coffers and fund various activities that had no returns whatsoever,” said a former Air Zimbabwe boss.

At ZESA a number of programmes, including a workers’ pension fund, were also invaded by the long fingers of the regime. “We saw the parastatal gradually limp towards its death as government did whatever it pleased with its funds,” said a former senior ZESA official.

Today, parastatals – still tasked with providing vital services – survive by begging and draining the national fiscus, a factor contributing immensely to the economic collapse.

In 2003 Mugabe’s personal banker, Gideon Gono, was thrust into the driving seat at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and obliged with all the demands from the dictatorship.

Gono reinvented the principles of economics and the central bank become the treasury department for the party, parastatals and individuals like Mugabe himself, who increasingly dipped their fingers and fished out whatever they required for political campaigns, international trips and other programmes of patronage.

“The central bank has really played a major role in accelerating this economic meltdown, especially in the latter years under Gono, who has behaved more like a chief executive officer of Zanu (PF) and Mugabe than a central bank governor,” MDC spokesman, Nelson Chamisa said. “Gono’s indulgence in quasi-fiscal activities is unparalleled but has really helped in dragging the economy to the grave.”