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Zimbabwe: anarchy in four, says the West
Stephen Bevan, The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
August 19, 2007

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/19/wzim119.xml

The economy of Zimbabwe is facing total collapse within four months, leaving the country facing a slide into Congo-style anarchy, The Sunday Telegraph has been told.

Western officials fear the business, farming and financial sectors may be crippled by Christmas, triggering a collapse of government control that could leave the country prey to warlords and ignite long-suppressed tribal tensions.

The stark warning of the scale of the crisis comes despite the welcome given to Mr Mugabe by fellow African leaders at a summit in neighbouring Zambia last week, where critics had hoped he might be pressurised into changing his policies.

It also follows reports that Britain's military is reviewing contingency plans to evacuate more than 20,000 Britons, were any widespread state of emergency to occur.

Speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject, one Western official said: "It is hard to be definitive, but probably within months, by the end of the year, we will see the formal economy cease to work."

He added: "One of the great dangers in all this, if Mugabe hangs on for much longer, is that the country will slip from authoritarianism to anarchy, the government will lose control of the provinces, it will lose control of the towns and you will have a situation where the central authority's writ no longer holds."

Asked which other African nation Zimbabwe might end up resembling under a worst-case scenario, the official cited as an example the Democratic Republic of Congo (the former Zaire), beset for years by famine, civil war and inter-ethnic conflict.

There are also fears that a breakdown in law and order could lead to an outbreak of ethnic conflict between Zimbabwe's two main tribes, Mugabe's own Shona and the Ndebele in the southwest.

Some political groups are already talking about regime change as an opportunity to press for independence, while more extreme elements have voiced agendas that could amount to "ethnic cleansing".

The official added that, because of Mr Mugabe's slum clearance programme, -Zimbabwe's informal subsistence economy, made up largely of street traders, hawkers and black marketeers, had lost much its ability to absorb shocks from the government's three-month price freeze, which has emptied shop shelves of stocks.

Poverty was now endemic, he said, with 80 per cent of people living "below any definition of the poverty line."

The fear among Western officials is that as Zimbabwe sinks deeper into crisis, the task of rebuilding, if or when Mugabe does go, is being made ever more difficult.

The infrastructure is breaking down after years of no investment, with both Bulawayo and parts of the capital, Harare, virtually without water supplies.

The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority generates barely a fifth of the country's needs and neighbouring countries' generating companies are now refusing to sell to Zimbabwe except for cash.

John Robertson, a Harare-based independent economist, said the prediction that the formal economy would cease to function within four months might even be optimistic.

"We could be a matter of a month or two away from that kind of collapse, and some would tell you that it's happened already," he said. "They can't pay the wages that would be necessary for people to carry on working, because the price at which they're allowed to sell goods is way below the production costs."

The most immediate effect of the worsening economic situation is escalating migration.

The Western official said that four million Zimbabweans, or around one third of the population, had already left the country, with "another two million packing their cases to leave", mostly to South Africa. The "flight rather than fight" strategy, however, suggests a mass uprising against Mr Mugabe is unlikely.

While Western governments have publicly backed attempts by South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki to mediate between the Zanu PF government and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in a bid to ease the political crisis, there was little sign of a breakthrough at last week's 14-nation Southern African Development Community summit in Zambia.

Privately, Western officials now say that "the time for talking is past", and that reconciliation between government and opposition is unlikely.

Zimbabwe's neighbours now had to decide whether they were willing to tell Mr Mugabe that his policies were not acceptable, said the official.

"We're not talking about tanks across Beit Bridge (the border post with South Africa) but they do have to decide whether there is a stick in this equation and what that stick should be," he said.

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