What a curiousity piece, Doug! What does one do when there's so much cutting-edge truth mixed with such bad agit-prop? Can't we get some renegade-Baudrillardian lbo-talk technician to discursively fix the former in one column and the latter in another?
If I were such a technician, here's the outcome:
YES:
> The Western political
> establishment and media would like for the entire world to believe
> that Mugabe is a racist who hates white people and who wants to steal
> their land from them...
> Mugabe has been more than fair to the
> whites of Zimbabwe who only make up 0.6% of the population but who
> disproportionately own the best land.
NO:
> Specifically, the charge that Mugabe sent former Black war veterans
> to go and confiscate land from whites (most recently uttered in a
> Wall St. Journal editorial) is baseless though often repeated. No
> shred of evidence has been produced to prove the charge yet it
> continues to be hurled at the president.
PB: Oddly, the highly-politicised author doesn't acknowledge the
dynamics of nationalist signalling, nor does he acknowledge the
documented evidence that ZANU party headquarters (directly under
Mugabe's thumb) has indeed been the staging point for the war
veterans' attacks on at least one major Movement for Democratic
Change peace march, and for signing up young, homeless people to
become certified "war veterans" (replete with plastic ID cards).
Unquestionably, Mugabe has egged on the land invasions. In another
context (e.g., Castro during Cuba's revolution) this would be
admirable; in Mugabe's context it is rank opportunism bred of
desperation due to ZANU's impending electoral meltdown.
NO:
> the media fail to address
> the potential bloodshed that would result if Mugabe moved with
> physical force against these Blacks.
PB: At some point in the next couple of months, I suspect, the
author will be proven wrong, when things simmer down, when a
deal is done, and when as always the manipulated rural (and displaced
urban) poor get the shaft, as Zimbabwe's elite have so regularly
demonstrated.
YES, RATHER!:
> The real issue in Zimbabwe is not race but rather one of land and
> economic growth. But unfortunately since its independence, Zimbabwe
> has forfeited both of these issues to the IMF and World Bank. This is
> a critical factor continuously glossed over by the West and one that
> so far Britain and American officials have successfully ignored by
> positioning Mugabe as a racist.
PB: Hear hear. I've just finished a little rap on this, which I
hope the Z-Commentary folk don't mind me running here for the
exclusive enlightenment of this select crowd (below-please don't
forward it, ok?).
WELL, NO:
> Instead of going directly and exclusively to Britain - the source of
> the land problem - Mugabe has offered to trade land reform for IMF
> and World Bank financing.
PB: This questioning of M's concrete strategy contains two bogus
assumptions: a) implying there's genuine will -- beyond the
obvious opportunism to gain votes in next month's parliamentary
election -- to really resolve the land question (which would mean
redistributing many of his cronies' plots); and b) that M hasn't
already gone directly to Britain (he has many times, most hilariously
when in 1998 Blair's aid minister Clare Short told M's ag minister
that Downing St didn't owe Zimbabwe anything because she herself is
from Ireland and thus also a victim of colonialism). There is no
evidence of either a) goodwill or b) Britain's willingness to
contribute to a durable solution (beyond the classical Lancaster
House willing-seller/willing-buyer + unaffordable credit formula that
hasn't worked these past two decades).
SORT OF, YES:
> So if Mugabe is to be blamed for anything it
> should be his selling of the land reform issue and the economy of
> Zimbabwe to the IMF and World Bank but he should not be blamed for
> terrorizing whites.
PB: He does seem to enjoy targetting whitey, which is not a
particularly enlightened way to proceed with the alleged class
struggle.
WELL, MAYBE:
> No, this time it is the West which is playing the race card because
> it favors Mugabe's opponent in the upcoming presidential elections in
> the country. Mugabe's opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, who has spent the
> past week in Britain and America courting the favor of the American
> and British governments and media outlets, is backed by the 4500
> white farmers of Zimbabwe and foreigners who believe that he will
> protect their interests in the country if elected President.
PB: That's obviously Morgan's objective. But does the author know or
care about the huge working class and unemployed support base Morgan
has built since leading the Zim Confederation of Trade Unions
since 1989? Apparently not worth mentioning?
NO, NOT NECESSARILY:
> Tsvangirai has a legitimate argument when he argues that Mugabe is
> using the land issue for political gain and he is correct to point
> out the corruption and major problems of Mugabe's administration, but
> if elected president there is no doubt that his leaning against
> Mugabe will play into the hands of Britain, the IMF and the World
> Bank.
PB: If all goes well, an upsurge of civil society progressive
activism will have Morgan (as president in 2002) closely examining
the huge foreign debt the IMF and Bank foisted on Zim since 1980, and
perhaps reneging or actively campaigning against its repayment due
to obvious IMF/Bank incompetence. Morgan's repeated calls for the
IMF/Bank not to bail out Mugabe are a good starting point for
repudiation.
WELL, NO:
> A major aspect of the debate between the two men is that Mugabe
> wants the land issue decided between Britain and Zimbabwe while
> Tsvangirai wants it decided between Zimbabwe, the IMF and World Bank.
PB: This is excessively speculative. Morgan has put it simply: a
commission of Zimbabweans will work out land reform. The present head
of the MDC land desk is Zimbabwe's most brilliant young lawyer, the
ex-Trotskyist (still leftist) Tendai Biti. The land question is not a
major bone of contention, as Morgan just defers establishing a
position. But he has publicly stated (last month to me in an
interview) that he doesn't want the World Bank and IMF around over
the medium- and long-term.
WELL, YES:
> Mugabe may be doing what he is doing to win votes but Tsvangirai
> appears to be doing what he is doing to win foreign investment, which
> will come at a tremendous cost.
PB: Morgan appears to be doing what he is doing to win donations to
MDC campaign coffers. That's understandable at one level, because the
MDC is desperate to fill parliament in next month's elections, after
having only been launched officially late last year.
YES, PROBABLY:
> The Tsvangirai approach ultimately
> will fail because the IMF and World Bank will be the arbiter of any
> new relationship between Zimbabwe and the world financial community.
PB: This is up for social struggle, and it may be too soon to call
it.
WELL, SORT OF:
> And wherever the IMF fills the role of arbiter they enact reforms
> that actually drive foreign investment away. As an example, last year
> the IMF advised Zimbabwe to impose a value added tax (VAT),
PB: Zim's upcoming VAT is mainly aimed at sucking another 5%
revenue from rural folk who have avoided the General Sales Tax net
to date, according to a frank discussion I had with the World Bank's
Harare res rep in 1997.
WELL, NO:
> excise
> taxes and the withholding of capital gains taxes; the combination of
> which makes investment unattractive
PB: Taxes aren't what's driving down investment (unless you're Jude
Wanniski). Try massive effective-demand shrinkage, capital flight
thanks to financial liberalisation, the rise of alternative
speculative vehicles and huge pressure on the Zim reserve bank to run
double-digit real interest rates, both since mid-1991.
NO:
>- at a time when Zimbabwe is in
> dire need of capital.
PB: Zimbabwe has oodles of liquid capital floating around, making
the Zim Stock Exchange one of the world's fastest growing in
1999-2000, believe it or not. It's purely speculative, highly liquid
M-M' K accumulation through insurance company and unit trust vehicles
-- which could, were there political will, be easily rechannelled
(through prescribed assets such as state infrastructure bonds) into
productive or basic-consumption circuits.
YES, SURE:
> Another aim of those in the West in their attack on Mugabe is to stop
> the spread of the land issue throughout Africa.
YES, INDEED!
> The move to take land in Zimbabwe has been
> met with approval by many Blacks in South Africa who identify with
> the inequity in land distribution.
PB: For more on this, faithful readers might want to sign up for our
e-debate list, where at least one marxist technocrat from the
National Land Commission posts regular calls-to-arms (write to
majordomo at sunsite.wits.ac.za and then write in the text subscribe
debate youremail ).
NO, NOT REALLY:
> Though he has sought
> their help, Mugabe has never fully implemented all of the reforms
> that the IMF and World Bank have desired
PB: Most, though (see below).
NOT SO OBVIOUS:
> So a replacement for Mugabe has been found and financially backed
PB: The Movement for Democratic Change is not yet down the tubes. If
anyone wants I'll send offlist an article forthcoming in Southern
Africa Report where I do extensive comparative analysis of the
"social democratic" ideology of Morgan Tsvangirai, versus the "free
market" posture of the MDC economic secretary, Eddie Cross (of the
Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries); a tiny taste of this is
captured in a second wee article, below.
MOST LIKELY, YES:
> Will the lives of the people of Zimbabwe really
> improve if Tsvangirai takes over?
(And now for my own propaganda, hopefully never to be endorsed or forwarded by Cde Jude:)
Zimbabwe's Crisis Showcases Reasons for Bank/IMF Protest Z-Net Commentary, May 2000
In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe appears to have taken leave of his senses, potentially plunging his country of 12 million into civil war. What does this have to do with the mid-April protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund?
Confusingly, Mugabe excels in IMF-bashing, famously telling Fund staff to "Shut up!" late last year. Yet from independence in 1980 until quite recently, he followed their advice unfailingly. Indeed, just five years ago, Zimbabwe was Washington's newest African "success story," as Harare adopted economic policies promoted by Bank and IMF lenders, and even conducted joint military exercises with the Pentagon.
Things fell apart quickly. Southern African diplomats are shaking their heads in frustration at Mugabe's quick-shattering Good Friday promises--made to Thabo Mbeki and other local leaders--to tone down racial rhetoric, reverse land invasions of 1,000 white farms, and sort out financial matters with the Brits, IMF and donor governments.
Is Mugabe deranged, or instead playing out a tragic logic partially of his own making, but partially imposed from above? Under the very real threat of losing parliament to the labor-led Movement for Democratic Change in coming elections, he resorts to authoritarian populism: egging on a few thousand land invaders so as to restore memories of the 1965-80 struggle against Rhodesian colonialism, a period when his Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) truly represented a mass- popular movement dedicated to reversing settler-colonial land ownership.
Yet early on, perceptive ZANU watchers identified two major problems: the party's class character and its likely realignment towards foreign capital.
Political scientist Rudi Murapa (currently president of Africa University, Zimbabwe's second-largest) wrote in 1977 of an alliance between "a politically ambitious petit-bourgeois leadership, a dependent and desperate proletariat and a brutally exploited and basically uninitiated peasantry."
Forecast Murapa, "After national liberation, the petit-bourgeois leadership can abandon its alliance with the workers and peasants and emerge as the new ruling class by gaining certain concessions from both foreign and local capital and, in fact, forming a new alliance with these forces which they will need to stay in power. Of course, lip service commitment, a la Kenya, to the masses, will be made."
Accusations that ZANU "sold out" are justifiable, technically--given not only the steady rise in corruption, but the fact that most of the land and other wealth redistributed since 1980 has gone to cronies not the masses--yet are deeply unsatisfying. The same will be said of the African National Congress, as it was in Zambia of Kenneth Kaunda and likewise his successor Frederick Chiluba.
However, assailing petit-bourgeois acquisitiveness-- which also motivated white Zimbabweans to loot their compatriots' land and labor beginning in 1890--risks downplaying the second factor: the role of global financial pressure.
Once anti-Rhodesia financial sanctions were lifted, Zimbabwe made bad policy choices and succumbed to armtwisting by Washington. Finance minister Bernard Chidzero (who later chaired the IMF/Bank Development Committee) borrowed massively at the outset, figuring that repayments--which required 16% of export earnings in 1983--would, he insisted, "decline sharply until we estimate it will be about 4% within the next few years."
The main lender, the World Bank, concurred: "The debt service ratios should begin to decline after 1984 even with large amounts of additional external borrowing." This was the economic equivalent of a sucker-punch, for in reality, Zimbabwe's debt servicing spiralled up to an untenable 37% of export earnings by 1987.
Loan conditions quickly emerged. By 1985, the IMF pressured Mugabe to cut education spending, and in 1986 food subsidies fell to two-thirds of 1981 levels.
Similarly, genuine land reform was stymied not only by the "willing-seller, willing-buyer" compromise with Ian Smith's Rhodesians at Lancaster House, but by the World Bank's alternative: showering peasants with unaffordable micro-loans. From a tiny base in 1980, the Bank's main partner agency granted 94 000 loans by 1987. But without structural change in agricultural markets, the Bank strategy floundered, as 80% of borrowers defaulted in 1988 notwithstanding good rains.
Analyst Ibbo Mandaza lamented in 1986, "International finance capital has, since the Lancaster House Agreement, been the major factor in the internal and external policies of the state in Zimbabwe."
Agreed Thandike Mkandawire, head of the Geneva-based United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, "It seems the government was too anxious to establish its credentials with the financial world."
The macroeconomic situation worsened when Chidzero persuaded Mugabe to ditch Rhodesian-era regulatory controls on prices and foreign trade/financial flows, liberalizing the economy through an Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) in 1991. ESAP was supposedly "homegrown," but World Bank staff drafted much of the document, which was substantively identical to those imposed across Africa during the 1980s-90s.
ESAP brought immediate, unprecedented increases in interest rates and inflation, which were exacerbated (but not caused) by droughts in 1992 and 1995. As money drained from the country, the stock market plummeted by 65% in late 1991 and manufacturing output declined by 40% over the subsequent four years. Amazingly, the Bank's 1995 evaluation of ESAP declared it "highly satisfactory" (the highest mark possible).
More vulnerable than ever before, Zimbabwe's currency then came under fierce attack during the 1997 East Asian crisis, falling 74% during one four-hour raid after Mugabe joined the DRC conflict and paid generous pensions to protesting liberation war vets.
Reacting to growing unpopularity and two Harare food riots, Mugabe finally invoked three pro-poor policies in 1997-98: reimposition of price controls on staple foods, conversion of corporate foreign exchange accounts to local currency, and steep luxury import taxes. (He also foolishly cemented the Zimbabwe dollar's value too high.)
The IMF and donors are explicitly withholding hard currency until these three policies are reversed. So Zimbabwe spends its hard currency repaying foreign lenders, and can't afford to import petrol. The harder the economic pressure bites, the more Mugabe staggers politically.
What lessons from Harare? Evade hard-selling foreign bankers. More aggressively--and honestly--redistribute wealth and land. And avoid structural adjustment policies that worsen inequality, stagnation and vulnerability. Will leaders in the Movement for Democratic Change, and for that matter also in Pretoria, take heed?
Regardless, more protesters--including Harare's church-based, anti-debt activists--are joining the global campaign to shut the IMF and World Bank, precisely because of mounting evidence of this kind, from Zimbabwe and across the Third World.
[Johannesburg-based academic Patrick Bond is active in the Jubilee 2000 movement, and authored *Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment* (Africa World Press, 1998) and *Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa* (Pluto Press, 2000).]
***
But to concede the contradictions, this from the South African newspaper Sunday Tribune, April 30, 2000:
After "Socialism," is Zimbabwe
ready for a Worker-Leader?
Riddled with corruption, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) government led by Robert Mugabe has finally reached death-throes stage. The country's 12 million people appear restless and often furious.
ZANU's populist posturing against white farmers, British imperialism and the International Monetary Fund- -Mugabe's longstanding "talk-left, act-right" game-- cannot prevent a strong opposition vote in coming elections. The next parliament will likely seat more than half its 150 members from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), although Mugabe himself can name 30 seats above and beyond those decided in the election.
Regardless of the outcome, Morgan Tsvangirai, the celebrated 48-year old trade unionist who presides over the MDC, claims a unique status. Nowhere in Africa has a post-independence political movement been so well grounded in working-class and allied civil-society organisations.
But Tsvangirai now claims the need to quickly build a broader coalition, drawing support from far beyond the union movement he has headed since 1989. In what direction will that lead the MDC?
Some fear that by bringing white capital aboard--not just as donors, but a top Confederation of Zimbabwe Industry dealmaker, Eddie Cross, is MDC economic secretary--Tsvangirai will repeat the wretched experience of Zambia. There, trade unionist Frederick Chiluba won the 1991 election against veteran nationalist Kenneth Kaunda with a multiclass alliance, and quickly applied free-market economic policy with even worse results than his predecessor.
Mugabe has confused matters. His adoption of a structural adjustment programme authored by the IMF and World Bank during the 1990s, compounded by two severe droughts, set the country on a raw and often chaotic capitalist road. Zimbabwe became disastrously dependent upon Bank and Fund debt as well as cookie-cutter policy advice. From 1991, living standards plummeted and the deindustrialisation of a once-strong manufacturing sector caused huge job cuts and a rash of expensive imports (mainly from South Africa).
As leader of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Tsvangirai spent the 1990s defending against repeated state attacks, deepening his organisation and engagement on key socio-economic issues, and taking the union movement along a zig-zag strategic path.
He began with classically leftist opposition to structural adjustment from 1989-92. When that was rebuffed by brute state force (Tsvangirai spent two weeks in jail in 1989 simply for defending student protests and a peaceful 1992 protest against structural adjustment was broken up and organisers arrested), the ZCTU shifted into conciliatory gear.
From 1992-97, Tsvangirai sought tripartite bargaining fora: deals with big government and big business comparable to South Africa's Nedlac. But this also proved fruitless, so when a deep economic crisis began in late 1997 and was amplified by Mugabe's political gaffes, the ZCTU offered a logical base for the MDC, whose colloquial name remains "the Workers' Party."
What degree of political flexibility is required to add peasant votes and capitalist bucks to the MDC's core union and social movement networks? Given the party's lack of skilled politicians and its relatively short, undeveloped programme, Tsvangirai's ability to invoke what he calls a "social democratic" ideology follows largely from his own enormous personal influence.
In a recent Johannesburg interview, Tsvangirai explained his philosophy: "In many ways, we are moving from the nationalist paradigm to politics grounded in civic society and social movements. It's like the role and influence that in South Africa, the labour movement and civil society organisations had over the African National Congress in the early 1990s."
Does this make the MDC "post-nationalist," I enquired. Replied Tsvangirai, "ZANU's nationalist thinking has always been top-down, centralised, always trapped in a timewarp. Nationalism was an end in itself instead of a means to an end. One of ZANU's constant claims is that everyone in Zimbabwe owes the nationalist movement our freedom. It's therefore also become a nationalism based on patronage and cronyism."
So how would the MDC run the Zimbabwean economy? "Development must be genuine, defined by people themselves. We know that export-led growth is not a panacea. And we place a high priority on meeting basic needs. How could we not, with 75% of the population live below poverty? So our development strategy will highlight land, health, education and the like."
Zimbabwean workers appreciate Tsvangirai's concrete orientation, after two decades of a sparse "socialist" diet the masses, which tasted like poverty, while ZANU leaders and cronies grew fat off the lamb.
But the spectre of white capital remains. Eddie Cross told a Harare seminar last month, "First of all, we believe in the free market. We do not support price control. We do not support government interfering in the way in which people manage their lives."
In practice, this is classical IMF-type medicine. Cross continued, "We are going to fast track privatisation. All fifty government parastatals will be privatised within a two-year time frame, but we are going far beyond that. We are going to privatise many of the functions of government. We are going to privatise virtually the entire school delivery system. And you know, we have looked at the numbers and we think we can get government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to about 75,000 in five years."
The Zambian precedent is worrying, Tsvangirai concedes: "The main lesson there is that if the workers are not careful, they may give up their initiative over the party. That means that even though we need to build coalitions, the structure of MDC has to be, and is, participatory, with far more control from the base than normal parties."
This kind of advice is valuable not only for Zimbabwean workers, but because it may resonate even more clearly south of the Limpopo.
Patrick Bond email: pbond at wn.apc.org * phone: 2711-614-8088 home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa email: bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za phone: 2711-488-5917 * fax: 2711-484-2729