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Mugabe untouchable
Tony Hawkins, Financial Mail (SA)
July 05, 2005

http://free.financialmail.co.za/05/0701/currents/acurrent.htm

Appeal for security council action unlikely to succeed

Harare - Spare a thought for Anna Tabaijuka, Tanzanian economist and UN secretary-general Kofi Annan's special envoy to Zimbabwe. She has the task of writing a report on the impact of President Robert Mugabe's Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out Trash). Whatever her report says, she will be in trouble.

On Monday, British prime minister Tony Blair, describing the situation in Zimbabwe as "a disgrace", said he hoped her report would be the basis of referring the matter to the UN security council. In other words he, along with some UN top brass, is hoping for a sufficiently damning assessment to force at least some African leaders to abandon their support for Zimbabwe's government.

For his part, in announcing a Z$3 trillion (US$320m) urban regeneration programme, Mugabe hopes he has stolen the initiative in the clean-up controversy by promising that the 250 000-300 000 people who lost their homes and, in many instances, their livelihoods, will in fact be better off.

Last weekend, he promised a "positive and corrective campaign" to provide "more decent accommodation and business shells and stalls". The government says it will provide 1,2m new homes and residential plots by 2008. Except for "a few negative people", he says, the operation has been "well-received by the majority of our people".

With hundreds of African and international and human rights organisations putting forward a very different picture last week - describing the campaign as one of "gross and widespread human rights violations and appalling human misery" - Tabaijuka will find it impossible to produce a report that both sides will accept as objective.

That she is in Zimbabwe at all is a measure of the pressure on Annan from the West to "do something" about Zimbabwe. But because the African Union believes the clean-up campaign is a purely internal matter that has nothing to do with the UN, or for that matter with the New Partnership for Africa's Development, Annan has little leverage. Even were Tabaijuka to produce a damning report, which is unlikely, the probability is that the operation will soon fade from the headlines and public consciousness.

Nor is Zimbabwe likely to feature as more than a footnote at next week's G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland. British foreign secretary Jack Straw and EU Commission president Manuel Barroso have already been warned off by Pretoria, while for all his Downing Street bluster on Zimbabwe this week, Blair has put his personal reputation on the line to secure a deal of 100% debt cancellation and the doubling of aid to Africa's poorest countries.

Neither he nor President Thabo Mbeki can allow events in Zimbabwe to derail their grand design for Africa.

Though all this might suggest yet another victory for Mugabe, it overlooks his Achilles heel - the economy.

No-one knows just how much the "clean-up" is costing. Mugabe has put a value of Z$3 trillion over three years on his reconstruction programme, but the longer-term cost of unemployment, reduced spending power, and an estimated 300 000 pupils no longer attending school has not been assessed.

There is no official estimate of the size of the informal sector in Zimbabwe, but a 2002 World Bank study suggested informal activity made up 59% of GDP - the highest in sub-Saharan Africa.

Some economists believe that, at most, the informal economy is no more than half that, putting a value - at current exchange rates - of around US$1,8bn on informal activity.

Yet even on the most conservative estimate the campaign could cost 7% of GDP, compared with the 5% government promises to spend on reconstruction - in a year in which the IMF team that visited Zimbabwe this month believes GDP could fall by as much as 7%.

The surge in government spending and borrowing comes at a time when government's domestic debt has quadrupled in six months and when - in one day last week - the central bank tried to float Z$2,3 trillion in treasury bills, equivalent to almost 4% of GDP, at interest rates of 140%-156%.

Inflation, at 144%, is forecast to accelerate, while the economy slows in the aftermath of the drought and Murambatsvina. Even if Mugabe manages to salvage a political victory from Tabaijuka's visit, his economic problems are steadily worsening.

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