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Can
Robert Mugabe ever be persuaded to give up?
The Economist
October 07, 2010
http://www.economist.com/node/17199688
If you take
President Robert Mugabe's recent declaration at face value,
Zimbabwe will have another general election by the end of next year.
That will be three-and-a-half years after his long-ruling Zanu-PF
party indisputably lost to the rival Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC) led by Morgan Tsvangirai (right, above), but then refused
to concede. Mr Tsvangirai, as compensation, became a distinctly
second-fiddle prime minister. Next time, despite all the tricks
Mr Mugabe and his party are sure to play, they could well lose again.
There is at least a chance that the president will step down and
that, at last, less fettered power will be handed to Mr Tsvangirai.
Many—perhaps
most—perceptive Zimbabweans think such a prospect fanciful.
Why, they ask, should the thugs round Mr Mugabe behave any differently
next time, especially when their own ill-gotten gains are at stake?
And yet, though the economy is still in ruins, politics messy and
human rights persistently violated, the picture is definitely less
bad than it was two years ago. It is widely considered, with good
reason, that Mr Mugabe is running rings round Mr Tsvangirai and
is preventing the MDC and its allies from enjoying their rights
as a majority in parliament. All the same, a steady momentum is
growing for change—and against Mr Mugabe.
Moreover, though
recent reports of the 86-year-old leader's impending demise
were based on his occasional sleepiness at official functions and
a stumble or two on ceremonial steps, plainly he could drop dead
tomorrow. Behind the scenes, feuding within the ruling party over
the succession is getting hotter.
Last electoral
time round, at the end of March 2008, the playing field was so heavily
tilted against the MDC that few thought it could win—yet it
did so clearly, albeit by a narrow official margin. Mr Mugabe also
decisively lost the first round of the presidential poll, held on
the same day, to Mr Tsvangirai. Only after a bizarre five-week silence
from a terrified electoral commission did Mr Mugabe, bolstered by
his security men and their lethal machinery of repression, declare
that Mr Tsvangirai had fallen just short of the required 50%. The
shaken president then set about bludgeoning the challenger and his
MDC into submission—resulting, after the murder of at least
200 MDC supporters, in Mr Tsvangirai's withdrawal from the
run-off some three bloody months later.
After that,
while the MDC and its allies had a slim majority in the lower house
of parliament, Zimbabwe's slide into ruin continued. Within
months of Mr Mugabe's re-election as president, inflation
had reached several billion per cent a year. Eventually, early last
year, Zimbabwe's own currency was abolished altogether, to
be replaced by the American dollar.
Shortly afterwards,
a government of national unity (known jokingly as the Gnu) took
office. Five months earlier the two main parties, plus a breakaway
from the MDC under Arthur Mutambara, had signed a "global
political agreement" (GPA), spelling out how power would
be shared. Mr Mugabe remained president and Mr Tsvangirai became
prime minister, with Mr Mutambara as his deputy.
Since then,
things have undoubtedly improved. The economy's dollarisation
is by far the biggest factor in Zimbabwe's fragile recovery.
As the Zimbabwe dollar gradually became worthless, civil servants,
including teachers and doctors, saw their pay shrivel until there
was no point in working. Now, though many—perhaps most—Zimbabweans
are still on the breadline and 80% have no jobs, at least those
in work can predict their income. Inflation is officially running
at 5% a year. After years of contraction, the economy is growing—at
8.1% this year, says the finance minister, Tendai Biti, an MDC man.
Health care
and education have improved markedly, from rock-bottom. Hospitals
that had run out of the most basic medicines, as well as staff,
have begun to function again. More recently more than 13m textbooks,
paid for by Western donors, have started to be delivered under the
eye of Unicef to all the country's 5,600-odd primary schools.
Sales of beer
and beverages are sharply up on a year ago. Other indicators, such
as sales of roofing material, point to busier economic activity.
Traffic in downtown Harare is a lot more clogged than a couple of
years ago—and not just because many of the traffic lights
are still not working.
The decline
in some types of farming may have bottomed out. Tobacco production,
for instance, which peaked at around 230m kg in 2000, just as the
mass expropriation of white farms got going, slumped to around 59m
kg last year. But this year's sales suggest that output, thanks
in part to a rise in smallholder planting, may have risen to around
120m kg (though that figure may include smuggled imports). Some
minerals are also beginning to do better again, notably gold and
platinum. And though the ruling party and its military backers plainly
hope to filch the diamonds from newly developed fields in the Marange
area, Mr Biti is determined to ensure that the Treasury also benefits.
With recovery,
the proportion of Zimbabweans needing food handouts has dropped
sharply. Two years ago the UN's World Food Programme found
that at least half the country's 8m-9m people relied on them.
This year probably only 15% of rural folk will do so.
Breadbasket
no more
But the economy
as a whole is still in dire straits. Driving for 140km (87 miles)
along the main arterial road eastwards from Harare, you pass mile
after mile of derelict and seemingly empty farmland that was once
among the most productive in Africa. Not a single pedigree cow is
to be seen—nor, for that matter, one white face. Grass along
many of the verges has been burnt, apparently because hungry people
have been trying to flush out rodents for food. Milk production,
though well up on last year's figure, is seven times smaller
than it was. Beef production has fallen nearly fourfold. You see
the same desolate picture across the country, once the region's
breadbasket as well as one of the world's largest producers
of top-quality tobacco.
Of the 4,500
white farmers who owned 6,800 farms, barely 150 still hold their
original tracts, according to John Worsley-Worswick, who runs Justice
for Agriculture, a lobby that stands up for commercial farmers and
their employees. Another 200 or so have stayed on at least a portion
of their land, often as managers or leaseholders. (At least 75%
of the country's white farmers, he notes, bought their land
on the open market after independence in 1980, having acquired certificates
to show that neither the government nor black Zimbabweans wished
or were able to buy it.) The invasions are still going on, despite
the GPA's assurance that they would stop, with white farmers
still subjected to assault and arson as the police look on. Around
278,000 whites once lived in Zimbabwe; now, at a guess, there are
around 12,000.
A large majority
of the 350,000 permanent black workers and 270,000 seasonal ones
who worked on white farms, with at least 1.5m dependants between
them, have lost their livelihoods as a result of the expropriations.
Most of them were denied land elsewhere in the communally owned
rural areas (formerly known as "tribal trust lands")
because they or their forebears came from poorer neighbouring countries,
such as Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. Fewer than 2% of them have
benefited from the confiscations. Thousands have been reduced to
living in shacks on the edge of towns. Many were among the 700,000
victims of Operation
Murambatsvina, when Zanu-PF decided to sweep away entire shanty-towns
in 2005.
The exodus of
Zimbabweans abroad, especially to South Africa, has yet to be stemmed,
though nearly 420,000 people have been helped to return this year.
Figures are disputed, but economic chaos and political repression
may have caused a good 3m Zimbabweans to emigrate. The UN's
refugee agency counted 149,000 of them applying for political asylum
in South Africa last year alone, quite apart from the much larger
number who have slipped over the border for work and melted into
the population.
Despite the
country's surge in economic activity, a drastic decline in
manufacturing will be hard to reverse, as cheap Chinese goods flood
the local market. Mr Mugabe's law on "indigenisation
and economic empowerment", enacted in 2007 but due for implementation
only this year, has deterred all but the boldest firms, at home
and abroad, from investing.
The aim of the
law is to ensure that all businesses worth more than $500,000 should
be majority-owned by black Zimbabweans. The definition of "indigenous"
rules out native-born whites—and, for that matter, rich black
South Africans, though Zanu-PF is always liable to make exceptions
for people who pay enough. Mr Mugabe and his allies are candidly
racist in espousing the bill, which they promote as complementary
to the land-confiscation policy: large-scale property as well as
land should belong only to blacks, however liberal individual whites
may have been during the struggle for independence.
The human-rights
picture is less horrible than it was two years ago, when Zanu-PF
conducted a reign of terror, particularly in the countryside, in
response to the MDC's election victory. And that itself came
only a year after thugs presumed to be operating under the aegis
of Zanu-PF nearly killed Mr Tsvangirai, breaking his skull, and,
in a separate incident in prison, beating him to a pulp, before
he was charged with treason, a capital offence. (The mutilated body
of Edward Chikomba, the cameraman who conveyed the picture of Mr
Tsvangirai's battered head to the wider world, was found by
the roadside outside Harare, the capital, two weeks later.) Thousands
of villagers who were thought to have voted for the MDC were displaced,
their houses often burned down. Hundreds were killed.
Short
sleeves, long sleeves
But though violence
on such a scale has ended for the moment, fear is growing again,
partly because Zanu-PF senses that another election may be in the
offing. In the past few months a Constitutional Parliamentary Committee,
known as COPAC, has been sending "outreach teams" around
the country, in theory to discuss a new constitution that is supposed
to be drafted in parliament, then endorsed in a referendum. More
than a thousand meetings have been held. Many have been peaceful,
but Zanu-PF thugs, in an exercise known as Operation Chimumumu ("dumb
person"), have been beating up and in a few cases killing
suspected MDC supporters who disagree with a so-called Kariba
draft favoured by Mr Mugabe. It would, among other things, allow
the old man in theory another ten years in office.
"We don't
have short sleeves, long sleeves any more," says an opposition
leader near Macheke, east of Harare, referring to the way the Zanu-PF
thugs treated those suspected of voting for the MDC: "short
sleeves" meant that their arms were axed above the elbow,
"long sleeves" at the wrist. "But the fear is
growing." "All that our people want is food and peace,"
says a worried priest in a rural area north-east of Harare. "But
these [Zanu-PF] guys are starting to come back." A queasy
feeling persists that, while the violence is mostly low-key and
confined to the countryside, it could erupt in the run-up to another
election. Jabulani Sibanda, a leader of the so-called "vets",
most of whom are far too young to have been true veterans of the
guerrilla war against Iain Smith in the 1970s, has recently been
terrorising villagers suspected of MDC sympathies in parts of central
Zimbabwe.
Although the
terror
of mid-2008 subsided once it was clear that Mr Mugabe was still
pretty much in charge, many leading human-rights campaigners have
fled the country: Jestina Mukoko, abducted in late 2008 and held
in secret for several months; Noel Kututwa, director of the Zimbabwe
Election Support Network, whose band of 8,000-odd brave volunteer
monitors prevented Zanu-PF from wholesale ballot-stuffing at the
polling stations; Gertrude Hambira of the farm workers' union;
and, most recently, Roy Bennett, the MDC's white treasurer
and deputy agriculture minister-designate, re-elected as an MP in
a landslide in an entirely black constituency, whom, for that very
reason, Mr Mugabe still refuses to appoint. After Mr Bennett's
eventual acquittal this year on a trumped-up charge of terrorism,
for which he spent months in prison, the police say they want to
interrogate him on new unspecified charges; he is in hiding abroad.
Tsvangirai's
travails
The political
picture is patchier still. Plainly, Mr Mugabe has abided only by
those parts of the GPA that suit him. A few advances can, however,
be chalked up. Commissions on the media, human rights and elections
have been set up under decent chairmen. The media has more space,
with new licences approved for eight publications, including NewsDay,
which offers a far more rounded picture than the Zanu-PF-controlled
Herald. The Daily News, by far Zimbabwe's best newspaper until
its presses were blown up in 2001, may revive soon. The very fact
that Mr Tsvangirai and Mr Mugabe sit down together in cabinet every
Monday, apparently without rancour, marks a dramatic turnaround.
But on a range
of issues Mr Mugabe ensures that his prime minister is often kept
out of the loop, in blatant defiance of the GPA. He has refused,
among many other things, to remove the central-bank governor, Gideon
Gono, or the attorney-general, Johannes Tomana, both leading authors
of the country's economic and human-rights disasters. Above
all, he has kept his hands tightly on the levers of hard power:
the courts, still largely in the hands of Zanu-PF judges, and in
particular the army, the police and the feared Central Intelligence
Organisation (CIO). By various means, including dirty tricks, deaths
and suspensions, the MDC's wafer-thin majority in the lower
house has been whittled away, though it technically still has control
if the unreliable Mr Mutambara's small slice of the party
votes with the main bit.
Owing partly
to the MDC's own lack of guile, the country's three
most repressive laws, the Public
Order and Security Act (known as POSA), the Access
to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) and the
Criminal Law
(Codification and Reform) Act, are still in force. The sole
broadcaster is still under Mr Mugabe's thumb—and full
of hate-speak. Even when some of his closest aides and MPs have
been arrested or accused on spurious charges, Mr Tsvangirai has
been unable to prevent the police or CIO from obeying Zanu-PF's
orders to hamstring his party, disperse meetings and beat up its
members.
Yet he remains
incorrigibly hopeful, refusing to criticise Mr Mugabe even for his
patent foot-dragging and abuse of the terms of the GPA, which states
that the security forces and courts should be politically neutral.
"He's an old man who wants to let go," he says
of the president. "He's looking for an exit strategy
that restores his legacy in Zimbabwe and the world."
Mr Tsvangirai
has been accused of weakness and dithering by some of his supporters,
who want him to express the people's outrage more forcibly.
Even on such core issues as the land confiscations and the indigenisation
act, he sounds emollient. "We can't reverse the land
reform," he says. "But there should be a one-family-one-farm
policy" and "we must provide for compensation [for the
white farmers] as a matter of principle." "We have modified
the [indigenisation] law," he says, without demanding its
removal. New "sectoral thresholds" must be laid down,
so that in some parts of the economy, for instance in mining, maybe
only 5% of the company would have to be allocated to black Zimbabweans—"on
a willing-buyer-willing-seller basis, at proper value". This
is a far cry from Mr Mugabe's ferocious insistence on 51%
of all mid-sized companies and all land going willy-nilly to blacks.
But it does not signify flat-out opposition to drastic, race-based
redistribution.
The whites have lost everything—and so has she
Mr Tsvangirai's
apparent aim, rather than demanding in vain that the GPA's
terms be met, is to entrench his MDC in government and prepare the
road towards a fresh round of elections by the end of next year.
That involves preparing a new voter roll and ensuring that, for
a change, the election is properly monitored. In the past, the Southern
African Development Community (SADC), an influential 15-country
regional club which South Africa unofficially leads, has whitewashed
flawed polls in Mr Mugabe's favour. Now, thinks Mr Tsvangirai,
SADC and South Africa, especially its current president, Jacob Zuma,
having accepted him as a legitimate prime minister rather than an
upstart or a traitor, are likely to give him a fairer wind.
Mr Tsvangirai
also calls for the lifting of the personal sanctions imposed by
the European Union, the United States and a few other countries
against Mr Mugabe and 200 or so of his closest colleagues, who blame
these measures entirely for Zimbabwe's misfortunes. But in
return the president must, he says, guarantee that the coming election
will be conducted fairly.
Is this mere
wishful thinking? Mr Tsvangirai, noting that against the odds the
MDC still managed to win the previous general election, evidently
thinks he can pull off the feat more decisively next time. He has
also let it be known that he would, if given the chance, form a
government of all the talents, including the less venal members
of Zanu-PF. He has promised not to impose a policy of retribution.
He even thinks
he can accommodate the "securocrats", as Zimbabwe's
high-ranking military people and police are known, who have become
ever more powerful and rich (from the proceeds of diamonds, among
other things) since the sullied election of 2008, and who are now
considered Zanu-PF's most important constituency. Undoubtedly,
the security people are jockeying behind the scenes as the succession
draws near. These men with guns probably think they can keep Mr
Tsvangirai out of power altogether—and for good. But the prime
minister is a survivor, and may be cannier than he looks.
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