What went wrong with Zimbabwe?

“You have inherited the crown jewel of Africa. Please look after it”, the late former president of Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, is famously reported as having counselled his young protégée Robert Mugabe when he assumed the mantle of leadership in Zimbabwe in 1980. Indeed, Zimbabwe was the crown jewel. It had everything – a prosperous and functioning economy, well educated and hard working people and ethnic diversity. The country had one of the most advanced and efficient transportation systems – rail, air and road, a vibrant hospitality and tourism sector which made it the hub of travel into and out of eastern and southern Africa. Most of the major airlines such as Qantas and Lufthansa flew into Harare bringing lots of tourists.

Agriculture was the backbone of the economy with highly efficient and mechanised large scale farms producing everything from cash crops such as tobacco and cotton, to cereals including maize and wheat, to livestock and game. Even the small scale and peasant farming sector was doing quite well with many households living well above subsistence levels. Social infrastructure and services were efficient if not excellent and hospitals and schools provided the people with well admired and envied services and facilities. The Zimbabwean dollar was strong and in demand with an exchange rate stronger than the US dollar and even much stronger than all the currencies of neighbouring countries.

Twenty eight years later, Zimbabwe has been reduced to a wasteland and basket case. More than four million of its people are now exiles and refugees in neighbouring and other far flung countries. The economy has collapsed. Inflation is estimated in millions of percentages – there are no official figures because the office responsible for providing such information gave up doing so a long time ago when the rate had hit sextuple figures. Unemployment is well over eight percent; more than seventy percent of the people are classified as poor and depending on some handouts for sustenance. The shops are empty, the hospitals are in dire shortage of drugs and qualified staff, schools are limping towards extinction. And the once venerated Zimbabwe dollar is being exchanged at a few trillion to a US dollar (it is actually about 3 billion but I have factored back the three zeros which were knocked off the currency in 2006).

What went wrong in the short twenty eight years? What led to this calamity and pestilence? I have been exercising my mind on this for a long while and I can now hazard some explanation. I believe there are four things that went wrong in Zimbabwe and these are ideology, greed, incompetence and intransigence. There may very well be other reasons why Zimbabwe is where it is today but, in my considered view, these are the top four reasons. I will explain each of these issues in a little more detail.

When Zanu-PF came into power at the cessation of hostilities in 1980, it pronounced itself as a Marxist-Leninist party and sought to transform a well functioning free enterprise system into a centrally controlled egalitarian system. The Marxist-Leninist ideology was intended to serve both political and economic objectives. Politically, it was intended to drive Zimbabwe into a one party state in which Zanu-PF would rule on its own and in perpetuity. It was a grand scheme to abolish all opposition parties and secure unopposed rule. Economically, it was intended to redistribute the wealth from the white minority to the black majority especially through nationalising some strategic industries.

In pursuit of this doctrine, Zanu-PF embarked on a systematic decimation of Zapu-PF which was then the strongest opposition party controlling the western half of the country. The North Korean trained Fifth Brigade militia was unleashed on Matabeleland to force the people to support Zanu-PF. The manner they went about doing this is now a matter of shameful record. By some estimates, more than twenty thousand people were massacred, thousands more brutally assaulted, raped and displaced. By the end, Zapu-PF capitulated and agreed to be absorbed by Zanu-PF. Peace was consequently restored in Matabeleland and, with the near simultaneous abolition of reserved seats for whites in Parliament, Zimbabwe became a de facto one-party state. Some small opposition parties emerged after Zapu – notably Zimbabwe Unity Movement in the late eighties and Forum Party in the mid nineties but they were small and of no real threat to the Zanu-PF hegemony.

At the economic front, the Marxist-Leninist ideology resulted in a significant onslaught on the private sector. There was government interference in almost all aspects of business enterprise through control of incomes and prices. Many small businesses closed or were taken over because they could not afford the prescribed minimum wages in the face of price controls on their products. Throughout the eighties and into the early nineties, the shape of the private sector in Zimbabwe changed from many small family owned enterprises to a few large holding companies – such as TA Holdings, Apex Corporation and Delta Corporation which had the financial muscle to acquiesce with government dictates and which had significant influence on government policy makers. The death of the small and medium enterprises resulted in a significant contraction of the private sector and consequently on its capacity to generate employment.

The second problem for Zimbabwe was greed and corruption by the ruling elite. I remember in the early eighties that many of the government ministers and senior officials went on a buying frenzy acquiring all sorts of choice properties and farms around the country. I remember visiting the homes of some of the politicians and thinking that most of them had got too rich too quickly for people who had been in the bush fighting a war. This acquisitive rapaciousness began to manifest itself in various high profile scandals such as “Willowgate” scandal in which ministers were caught abusing their positions to buy vehicles from a government owned assembly plant and reselling them at astronomical profits on the black market. A number of ministers were forced to resign and one committed suicide as a result of these revelations. The other high profile scandal involved the abuse of war victims’ compensation fund by high level politicians.

These scandals were, perhaps, a tip of the iceberg. By the mid nineties corruption was so rampart and endemic in high political circles that the erstwhile allies of the ruling elite, the so-called ex-combatants who had fought the war of liberation began to violently agitate for a share of the spoils. Led by the late Dr Chenjerai Hunzvi (who incidentally was a key player in the war victims compensation fund scandal referred to above), the ex-combatants won a large payout from government which was not budgeted for. This payout precipitated a run on the Zimbabwe dollar triggering an economic recession that has morphed into the crisis that we are all now sadly witnessing.

The third problem for Zimbabwe has been incompetence leading to significant policy failures. The payout to ex-combatants which I have just referred to was one such failure but there were many other notable ones. The intervention in the war in the DRC which benefited no one but the army generals and politicians was another. So was the whole fiasco of land redistribution and, more lately, the reckless printing of money by the reserve bank. The one unintended and undesirable outcome of Zanu-PF’s one party state agenda was that the president became surrounded with incompetent hangers-on who lacked the intelligence to provide adequate policy analysis and the courage to advise President Robert Mugabe against precipitous and unworkable policy actions.

The last problem is that Zimbabwe embarked on a confrontational and isolationist route in which fought against international institutions and opinion. Because of his Marxist inclinations, Mugabe was always suspicious of international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. While he recognised that he needed their support, he believed, quite wrongly as it turned out, that such support had to be on his own terms not on theirs. This intransigence and belligerent attitude led to an estrangement with the western countries around which the country’s economy was inextricably linked. The rest is, as they say, now history.