Zimbabwe’s economy is in a dreadful state. More than half the
population depend for survival on food assistance from the UN. A major
cholera outbreak recently killed 4,000 people. There’s no money to fix
the country’s collapsed water system. Schools are closed for lack of
money to pay teachers. For the same reason hospitals and health clinics
are nearly empty of doctors, nurses, medicine and equipment.
Unemployment stands at about 90%. In the face of this crisis the UK is
giving about 50m in humanitarian aid a year to Zimbabwe and last week
the government announced another 15m on top of that. The top-up was a
sweetener to underline the UK’s support for moderate voices like Biti
in the power-sharing government of the MDC and Mugabe’s Zanu-PF. But it
also appeared to be an effort to head off requests from Zimbabwe for
the resumption of more formal and potentially more generous
government-to-government economic assistance.
At present UK humanitarian assistance to Zimbabwe is delivered entirely
through UN agencies and NGOs. That’s how it should be. Giving aid
directly to an unreformed government apparatus in Harare risks
perpetuating the causes of the crisis in Zimbabwe which UK foreign
secretary David Miliband has correctly identified as "the misrule,
abuse, neglect and corruption of the current Mugabe regime" Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s British policymakers paid far too little attention
to the abusive tactics by which Mugabe consolidated his power and
repressed any serious opposition to his despotic rule, starting with
the massacres in Matabeleland by the infamous Fifth Brigade of the
Zimbabwean army in the mid-1980s.
Extraordinarily enough, UK political, economic and even military
support continued to flow to Mugabe right up until the late 1990s, long
after it was blindingly clear how abusive Mugabe’s government really
was. Eventually the arguments used to justify supporting Mugabe (and
which continue to be used to justify support to repressive and corrupt
leaders in Africa and elsewhere) simply ran out of credibility.
But it’s possible that with formation of a power-sharing agreement
those arguments – that the new government is "going in the right
direction", that the current set-up is "the best opportunity there is"
– might start making enough sense again for British ministers to
consider resuming government-to-government assistance. They should
think hard about that and resist repeating the mistakes of the past.
All the signs are that Mugabe remains fully committed to staying in
power by whatever means possible. He agreed to the new power-sharing
arrangements only under the greatest of external pressure and is doing
his best to limit the power of the MDC in the new government. Mugabe
and his loyalists remain fully in charge of the key security
ministries, the army and police. Many of the 29,000 so-called "green
bombers" or "war veterans", who perpetrated so much violence during
last year’s elections, remain on the government payroll.
Human rights activists, opposition supporters and dissident journalists
are still regularly attacked, arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted in a
court system that obeys Mugabe’s bidding. Youth militia are still
taking over the properties of commercial farmers. Crucially for
potential donors, the finance ministry, under Biti, has no control over
the central bank. By his own admission, Biti has been able to curtail
the bank’s influence for now only by abandoning the Zimbabwe dollar.
The bank’s governor, Gideon Gono, is responsible for funding Mugabe’s
repression – and he admitted recently that he had raided the accounts
of foreign aid groups to pay government salaries.
To cap it all, the Zimbabwe army has been doing what it does best in
recent months: killing civilians in a brutal and secret operation
launched last November to take control of diamond mines in southwest
Zimbabwe. Human Rights Watch has documented the killing of more than
200 people in just one month at the Marange alluvial diamond mines, and
the continuing implementation by the army and the police of a brutal
regime of forced labour, torture and arbitrary arrest against thousands
of others.
The aim of the operation is not to secure the revenue from the diamond
mines for the new government’s coffers – money that could be spent on
addressing Zimbabwe’s massive humanitarian crisis or on kickstarting
the once profitable agricultural sector – but, our research found, to
produce a new stream of revenue with which to line the pockets of
Mugabe’s loyalists and maintain the repressive and predatory
infrastructure that keeps them in power.
There is much talk of reform in Zimbabwe but, as yet, no concrete
action. The process of political change may have started but it is not
irreversible. As long as Mugabe’s nexus of repression and corruption
remains in place, no amount of development assistance will help solve
Zimbabwe’s huge economic problems. And any economic aid to Harare from
the UK or other donors will help to feed the crocodiles, just as surely
as the blood-soaked profits of the Marange diamond mines.
The Guardian (UK)
Post published in: News