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Zimbabwe's Hide & Seek with the IMF: Imperialism, Nationalism & the South African Proxy
Patrick Bond
Extracted from Review of African Political Economy - Vol. 32 No. 106
December 2005

http://www.roape.org/cgi-bin/roape/show/10609.html

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Introduction
Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s 2005 fight with the International Monetary Fund illustrated adverse power relations in which financial pressure is specifically applied in the interests of economic (not political) liberalisation. However, whereas the IMF has no confessed interest in human rights and political freedom (and demonstrated as much in late 1990s Zimbabwe), Pretoria’s discourses do include good governance rhetoric. Combining pro-market and (surface-level) pro-democracy arguments allows Thabo Mbeki to serve as proxy for the IMF, which above all wants repayment on vast arrears, but which also insists on the full range of Washington consensus policy changes. To make those changes would undercut Mugabe’s patronage system, and might also generate popular unrest.

For South Africa, meanwhile, the objective appears to be an elite transition that keeps Mugabe’s Zanu(PF) party in power after his retirement, maintains the splintering Movement for Democratic Change as a token opposition, and imposes severe cuts in the social wage on the citizenry while opening the door for bargain sales of Zimbabwean assets to South African suitors. Yet contradictions in these projects occasionally appear, and it remains for the beleaguered left social forces to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunity to press home the critique of both international finance and regional subimperialism.

In southern Africa, the Bretton Woods Institutions have become sufficiently notorious within the political intelligentsia as to attract these words from leading African National Congress official Sidney Mufamadi (2005):

This quote is worth keeping in mind, in part because of its author’s own close comprehension of World Bank activity in South Africa. That point we return to in the conclusion, but it serves to introduce the question of how the region’s dominant social and economic forces intend to hegemonise political transition in Zimbabwe. One objective is to bring the IMF back into play as a policy determinant, for the first time since 1999. Indeed, recall that a decade ago, Robert Mugabe’s regime was a successful protégé of Washington financiers. A decade ago, the World Bank (1995:23) gave his government the highest possible rating in its scorecard of neoliberal orthodoxy: ‘highly satisfactory’.

This judgment followed fifteen years of arm-twisting by the Bank and IMF, leading to the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) and a crash of both manufacturing and the social wage. As a result mainly of popular resistance, things began to go badly wrong for Harare’s elites soon thereafter. From 1996 to 2000, a series of overlapping worker/peasant/student/war veteran rebellions became a serious threat to the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) party. Mugabe adopted a zig-zag political-economic ‘policy’ based on a mix of carrots and sticks, combining frontal attacks on poor and working-class urban Zimbabweans with fiery anti-imperialist rhetoric.

At the heart of Harare’s fiscal crisis are Mugabe’s expensive carrots to disgruntled sections of society: large new pensions for tens of thousands of Liberation War vets (previously ignored or repressed) from September 1997; periodic payolas of various kinds to the army and police, including licence to loot the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the late 1990s civil war; on-again/off-again price controls from 1998, in order to prevent further ‘IMF Riots’ (which had broken out periodically during the 1990s); occasional gifts to key constituents during the early 2000s, such as very inexpensive rural electricity; and statesponsored land invasions immediately following Mugabe’s defeat in a constitutional referendum in February 2000, as the opposition Movement for Democratic Change became a threatening electoral force. The sticks we learned much more about during 2005. They don’t need recounting in detail, but include, in the words of South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Blade Nzimande:

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