Zimbabwe – Progress or regression?

Progress in Zimbabwe was the title of a four-day conference in Bulawayo last week, gathering mainly academics and also leading civil society strategists. It was organised by University of Johannesburg political economist, David Moore, and by Showers Mawowa of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) School of Development Studies and the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development.

Said Moore, For many analysts, the end of progress is signified in the political projects of Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe African Nation Union-Patriotic Front [Zanu (PF)] not to mention the Government of National Unity. It has been two years since South Africas then-president Thabo Mbeki negotiated dysfunctional power-sharing between Mugabes junta and Morgan Tsvangirais MDC.

A happy elite

Just before the deal took effect in early 2009, the local currency collapsed entirely, and is no longer used. On the upside, that move ended hyperinflation and empty shop shelves. The tiny elite is happier, as is the World Bank (not yet lending, but carefully looking over the states shoulder). Yet without any ability to earn hard currency, what is a peasant or the unemployed person (90 per cent of the workforce) to do?

A related problem: monetary policy is now set in Washington and Pretoria, since the US dollar and South African rand are now Zimbabwes core currencies. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe cannot stimulate the sickly economy because its governor, Gideon Gono, gave Zimbabwe monetary gonorrhea, a corrupting disease transmitted from his overworked printing press to the economy as a whole. A US$2 billion bill for Gonos leftover local debt is being negotiated and another US$5 billion plus in foreign debt remains unpayable.

Progressives writing the National Peoples Convention Charter in February 2008 demanded a debt audit before any World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans were serviced and, as happened similarly in Ecuador in December 2008, the right of the people of Zimbabwe to refuse repayment of any odious debt accrued by a dictatorial government.

Politically, progress against Mugabes dictatorship is terribly fragile, as the army is now being deployed in many hotly contested peri-urban and rural areas. The most likely scenario, according to leading commentator John Makumbe, The MDC will win and Zanu (PF) will again refuse to concede power. So back they will go into the cul-de-sac of renewed power-sharing talks.

History reviewed

Hence the Progress in Zimbabwe conference was devoted mainly to recording regress not progress, given Zimbabwes deep plunge. History needed reviewing, for after all the most banal measure of progress, that of the economics profession, is per person gross domestic product (GDP) and the point it began declining may surprise.

Per capita GDP didnt begin its slide in February 2000 when President Robert Mugabe lost his first election (a constitutional referendum) and unleashed war veterans on white farmers. Nor was it on November 1997s Black Friday, when the Zimbabwe dollar lost 74 per cent of its value in four hours, a world record.

If one thinks of progress in this conventional way, as GDP per person, then Zimbabwe began shrinking in 1974, as indeed was the case in most of Africa, as the world slowdown hit the poorest continent hardest, at a time when most African leaders had succumbed to neo-colonialism.

In Zimbabwe, overproduction of luxury goods, machinery and steel for a limited market left the economy with huge excess capacity at a time of shrinking confidence in Ian Smiths racist Rhodesian Front regime. After liberation was won in 1980, the economy then recovered some of the lost ground in a growth spurt from 1984 to 1990.

Income in 1990 was much better distributed than under Smiths white rule or than under Mugabes kleptocracy after it became avaricious in the mid-1990s. A small black middle class had emerged mainly through the expansion of Zimbabwes civil service, though the World Bank successfully insisted that it shrink by 25% during the 1990s. Sorting out the politico-ideological confusion in historical context requires, according to Sheffield-based Zimbabwean Ian Phimister, a distinct paradigm of radical historiography.

But Muchaparara Musemwa lamented that their discipline still lacks cohesion and purpose. Phimister recommended the new book, Becoming Zimbabwe featuring work by Alois Mlambo, Brian Raftopoulos and younger historians, which treats the contemporary degeneration in historical context.

Controlling the story

By all accounts, a central challenge in an era of Mugabes state-sponsored Patriotic History a mirror image of Rhodesias racist settler history is recovery of the liberation tradition from damage done even before Independence in 1980, a task aided by the coming publication of Wilf Mhandas autobiography.

Mhandas leadership of the Zimbabwe Peoples Army offered an alternative liberatory trajectory, one Mugabe violently suppressed two years before signing the Lancaster House compromise deal that maintained the repressive state and white-biased property relations entirely intact. Mugabes overarching need, it seems, is control of the telling of history as a way to remind his subjects there was once a time when ZANU-PF was indeed a popular force, like fish swimming in the sea of the people.

The memory of land

Another memory is of a time when indigenous Zimbabweans controlled their land. According to Blessing Karumbidza, whose recent UKZN doctorate describes post-independence land experiences, there will be a truly restructured and dynamic farming sector if and only if the support mechanisms and institutional regimes necessary for land and agricultural rationalisation are put in place.

Thats not happening, insists University of Zimbabwe (UZ) geographer Esther Chigumira: Bifurcated land ownership continues, not by race but by class, favouring elites who are politically connected. Those nationalists, recalled former war veteran and now UZ sociologist Wilbert Sadomba, emerged from internecine liberation movement feuds and hijacked that revolution, in connivance with international capital.

Added leading liberation-era intellectual, Ibbo Mandaza, There was a Zanu (PF) that we were part of, the liberation movement, and then there was Mugabes Zanu (PF), which is very different. Mugabe is essentially right wing, notwithstanding the anti-imperialist rhetoric. As for his own role, Mandaza confessed, We helped in many respects dress up an essentially right-wing regime in leftist clothing.

Raftopoulos agreed: This discourse threw off many African scholars, most importantly in the Mamdani debate. He was referring to the great Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdanis 2008 London Review of Books defence of Mugabe.

The two most prominent scholars who are supportive of land redistribution, Mamdani and Sam Moyo, were invited but could not attend.

In their place, Ben Cousins from the University of the Western Cape promoted the post-2000 land reforms changing structures of ownership and new agrarian structure, concluding, The positives probably outweigh the negatives.

Rule of thirds

In the main A1 land program, he said, about a third of the new farmers are succeeding, a third getting by, and a third getting out. The negatives in Cousins list include the collapse of large-scale commercial farms, which contributed to wide-scale economic decline; the motor force of land reform was the Zanu (PF) power grab; the decline of the rule of law; violence.

Added Zimbabwean human rights advocate Elinor Sisulu, food security, environment, HIV/AIDS, and the gender and class dimensions. No matter how Zimbabwe needed to end white domination of good farms before 2000, an overall judgment on the land invasions (which sporadically continue because 10 per cent of 4000 white farmers hung on by hook or by crook) will wait for long-term evidence.

The spate of new research by those associated with Moyo and Cousins does show a few selective sites of success, especially in Masvingo province near the ancient Great Zimbabwe Empires capital, but critics argue this is not a typical region.

MDC criticised

However, opposition policies came in for equally harsh critique. In the 1990s the motivation for the MDC was the struggle for social and economic justice and thats the crucial unique character of the MDCs origins, said Hopewell Gumbo of the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development. But the trend to neoliberalism within the MDC means we will not see progress. We need to look for new alliances and new formations.

But the terrain is uneven, Harare-based urban civic organiser Mike Davies pointed out the profusion of petit-bourgeois suit-and-tie professionals among the capitals NGO cadre: They acquire a self-preserving aspect perhaps more concerned with continuation than function.

They became more remote from their members, even elitist, losing their accountability, more concerned with meeting donor aspirations and requirements than serving the needs of their members. According to Davies, opportunistic elements make every effort to preserve their positions, often at some cost to their member organisations and undermining their stated goals.

In my opinion, we failed to identify and contain these elements as well as the vehicles that carry them. As a result, the super-NGOs captured the voices of civics and domesticated them for the consumption of an increasingly externalised audience of international donors and Zimbabweans in the diaspora.

How then can progress emerge against both a sell-out to the Washington Consensus (by either or both of the leading parties) and Mugabes fake populist language and violence-prone delivery short of awaiting his death, and then the inevitable Zanu (PF) power struggle (between the Mujuru and Mnangagwa factions) that could be even more disruptive?

Mass action, solidarity

An answer came from the leading trade unionist present, Kumbirai Kudenga: In terms of mass action, we need people without fear. If youre not used to going to the ground, its hard. Mass action is for people who are used to the ground.

She even provided a new vehicle: We have a Democratic United Front for the workers, especially for mass action. What we need is support. Can you take down our email: zimlabour@gmail.com. That is if you are serious, we are there to act.

For the rest of us, according to Raftopoulos, a renewed international labour solidarity discourse is one of the best antidotes to Mugabes rhetoric, especially the exemplary solidarity shown in April 2008 when in Durban, South Africas transport workers refused to unload 3 million bullets destined for Mugabes army from the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang.

Even if the conference was way too top heavy with talking heads and NGOers, all agreed that a new surge of such solidarity will be needed next year, when regress again trumps progress in Zimbabwe. – Patrick Bond is on sabbatical from the UKZN Centre for Civil Society. He is now based at University of California-Berkeley Department of Geography. His books include Uneven Zimbabwe and Zimbabwes Plunge. This article was first published by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal.