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Regime change in Zimbabwe is critical for SA labour and business
Moeletsi Mbeki, The Cape Argus (SA)
March 05, 2008

http://www.zwnews.com/print.cfm?ArticleID=18328

Once seen as a progressive and dynamic movement that was going to deliver Africa from bondage to modernity and prosperity, African nationalism has turned out to be a huge disappointment. Half a century after its liberation from colonialism, Africa has dropped so far down the development scales that experts refer to Africans as mankind's Bottom Billion that can only come out of the black hole they have dug themselves into through interventions by the rest of the world. There is no better illustration of the failure of African nationalism than Zimbabwe under the leadership of liberators Zanu PF and its leader, Robert Mugabe. In the past decade Zimbabwe shows how an African country travels from relative prosperity to a basket case. At independence Zimbabwe was one of the most diversified economies in Africa, today it is breaking every negative growth indicator one can think of. Life expectancy at birth has fallen below 40 years; a quarter of the population has fled; inflation has reached numbers that boggle the mind; and agricultural and manufacturing output is a fraction of what they were only eight years ago. Zimbabwe's commercial beef herd fell from 1.68 million in 1999 to only 0.53 million in 2002. Incomes per head in Zimbabwe have fallen to where they were before World War 2. Zimbabweans are not the only people who are suffering from Zanu PF's follies. South Africans are also taking a beating and so are several other countries in the region.

South Africa's exports to Zimbabwe reached their peak around 1997-98 when Zimbabwe's per capita incomes also peaked. After a few years of a steep decline South Africa's exports have stagnated throughout the present decade at about R7 billion a year. Before we can answer what must be done to find a solution to Zimbabwe's crisis and by whom, we need first to understand who is affected and how they are affected by the failures of the Mugabe regime. The people of Zimbabwe have clearly been the primary victims of Mugabe's repressive misrule and economic mismanagement. Thousands have been killed and many brutalised by Mugabe's security machine. Over a million people have been uprooted from their homes in the regime's Operation Clean up Rubbish and in the confiscation of commercial farms.

The second group of casualties has been South African workers, especially the poor and the unemployed. The meltdown of the Zimbabwe economy has led to declining exports from South Africa to that country. In practice this meant loss of jobs by South African workers whose companies were exporting to Zimbabwe. Secondly, due to repression and the meltdown, millions of poor Zimbabweans have fled to South Africa and have been compelled to live in South Africa's slums, thus putting further pressure on the limited resources South Africa's slum dwellers have access to. The third casualties were South African companies that, besides losing export markets have lost their investment which became devalued in the meltdown. Many of the South African companies invested in Zimbabwe are listed at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and several of their shareholders are ordinary South African workers whose pension savings are invested in these listed companies. South Africa's workers have thus taken a triple blow from Mugabe's attempt to impose his dictatorship. They have lost jobs; they have had to share meager resources with fleeing Zimbabweans and they have had their pensions undermined.

What must be done? Mugabe's attempt over the past eight years to impose a dictatorship has led to major losses for South African businesses and especially for South Africa's black workers. The slow death of Zimbabwe can be reversed, but it cannot be reversed as long as Zanu PF and Mugabe retain power and carry on along their destructive path. South Africa's government elite is not motivated to take practical action to change the situation in Zimbabwe because it does not feel that its interests are affected by the crisis in that country. It is, therefore, up to South African business and South African workers to assist the people of Zimbabwe to bring about regime change in Harare. South Africans must be educated by business and labor that the poor Zimbabweans that have fled to South Africa are not their enemy and that attacking them, as is becoming increasingly frequent, will not solve the damage to South Africa caused by the Mugabe regime.

* Moeletsi Mbeki is deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs, an independent think-tank based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg

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