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Zimbabwe a 'pirate ship' - and sinking farms, economy in worsening crisis
Daniel Pepper, San Francisco Chronicle
June 19, 2006

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/19/MNG48JGFJV1.DTL&hw=zimbabwe&sn=001&sc=1000

Zhampali, Zimbabwe -- As soldiers rolled past Lot Dube's land and set up camp, they passed along a blunt message.

"They told us, 'We are taking away your fields from you,' " said the 63-year-old farmer, who has farmed his 10 acres in the south of the country for a generation.

The soldiers forbade him to grow tomatoes, onions and sweet potatoes -- market vegetables he sold to pay his children's school fees -- and ordered him to plant maize. He was told, he said, that the government's Grain Marketing Board planned to buy the entire maize harvest and sell it abroad to obtain foreign currency.

Replacing food with a cash crop aimed at the foreign market is just one of the increasingly desperate measures the government of President Robert Mugabe is taking to ease an economic crisis so severe that inflation for many consumer goods is running at more than 1,000 percent a year.

Mugabe, who has held power since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, has ordered his military to fan out across rural areas to ensure that the government's grain silos are full. That, in turn, affects the livelihoods of small landholders like Dube, whose farm sits 80 miles south of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city.

"They don't know anything about farming," he said. "They say they want to end hunger in Zimbabwe. But I think they want to take the fields for their own use."

To bolster his hold on power, Mugabe relies increasingly on the military. Not only do soldiers carry out his farm policies, he has appointed military commanders to top slots at the reserve bank, the electoral commission, Zimbabwe railroads, the Ministry of Energy, the Public Service Commission, the national parks and other key institutions.

"It is robber baron stuff of the highest order," says John Robertson, an independent economist in the capital, Harare. "It's a pirate ship with Robert Mugabe as the captain. It's an exciting, profitable ride while it lasts, but inflation is the consequence."

Zimbabwe's economy has been shrinking for the past six years, and the nation has been dependent on food aid since 2002. Eighty percent of Zimbabweans are unemployed, and food and fuel are scarcer than ever.

Last month, the United Nations distributed emergency food aid to an estimated one-quarter of Zimbabwe's 12.5 million people. International aid officials say many are surviving on one meal a day -- or less. Despite the best rains in 20 years, the government predicts this year's grain harvest -- in a country once known as the breadbasket of southern Africa -- will be half the size of the 2001 harvest, when the eviction of white commercial farmers began.

"The economy will only turn around when you get competent and experienced people running it, not the military," said David Coltart, a white member of Parliament with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. "The appointment of military people to run things like the railroads will only speed up the demise of the regime."

Critics of Mugabe say the presence of the military in the southern part of the country, but not in the north where Mugabe draws most of his support, is no coincidence.

"The army has targeted areas that are potential opposition strongholds, those farmers that have voted for the opposition," said Gordon Moyo, leader of an opposition pressure group, Bulawayo Agenda. "It's an act of intimidation."

Critics also say such moves will do little to help the economy, or Mugabe's increasingly beleaguered regime.

Militarization "is an admission that things have fallen apart and national governance can no longer continue in a civilian mode," said Jonathan Moyo, a former secretary for information who is currently Zimbabwe's only independent member of Parliament.

The signs of economic decay are everywhere. Tourist destinations such as Victoria Falls are empty. A cup of tea that last year cost 12,000 Zimbabwean dollars now costs 250,000 dollars. Supermarket shelves are stocked with goods too expensive to purchase.

On a recent afternoon in Harare, ABC Auctions was selling off every last wine glass, fixture, table and chair of the Acropolis Taverna, a restaurant that had been in business for more than 30 years. Altogether the store went for 4.2 billion dollars, or about U.S. $14,000.

"When most people go out of business, they simply sell their goods immediately," said Jo Zwoushe, an auction supervisor.

As the crisis deepens, the government prints more and more paper money, even though it has run out of foreign currency with which to purchase the paper and ink on which Zimbabwe's bank notes are printed.

Some of that new money has gone to the military. After graffiti calling for Mugabe to be ousted appeared in the bathrooms of an army barracks, the government announced a 300 percent pay increase for soldiers and teachers.

"It is a way of buying off the soldiers," said Moyo. "Mugabe is a terrified man."

Yet the president appears to have little to fear from the political opposition. He maintains an extensive internal security network to keep tabs on unrest. The Movement for Democratic Change, the main opposition force, is split. The organization's leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, periodically threatens to take protests to the streets, but most observers predict such demonstrations would be crushed by the country's powerful security forces.

Back in the southern fields, soldiers can be seen guarding roads and driving tractors, which is as close as they come to farming.

"We need agriculture experts, not soldiers," said Gabrial Nkala, 55, who has been farming on the same plot since 1980. "But it seems they are here for a very long time."

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