Skip to main content

Home/ Zimbabwe Mugabe land reform/ Group items tagged corruption

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Arabica Robusta

Pan-Africanists: Our collective duty to Zimbabwe - 0 views

  • ZIMBABWE AND THE QUESTION OF IMPERIALISM First, there should be an attempt to clear the landscape of certain obstacles. Zimbabwe was in growing trouble before the sanctions imposed by the governments of Britain and the United States. Still, the attempt to bully a small country’s ruler who was in turn bullying his compatriots draped Robert Mugabe in the role of a hero against imperialism. The attempt encouraged a blundering ruler to stay on course. The ZANU-PF forces and sympathizers have blamed the disastrous economic situation on the sanctions. Yet, the political leaders have accumulated wealth in such a conspicuous manner that their consumption of luxury goods stands out in a country where more than 80 per cent of the eligible workers are unemployed. Millions more Zimbabweans have been rendered as economic refugees in Africa and beyond.
  • Zimbabwe‘s situation has some striking parallels with that of the recent history of Guyana in the Caribbean, where rivalry between anti-colonial forces started long before independence and was only draped in flags at the moment of Uhuru, without serious attempts at a deep resolution of the difficulties. Once in power the Burnham regime did nothing to resolve the ethnic conflict but superimposed on it a parliamentary dictatorship.
  • In 1987 the fusion of ZANU with the Patriotic Front led by Joshua Nkomo was done in such a way that the post-colonial world knew little about it, except that it led to the virtual silencing of the section of the liberation front that had been led by Joshua Nkomo.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Of late the western media and certain forces within the United Nations have been reporting the possibility of talks of power sharing, and the arrangement of some form of a transitional authority. While the spirit of these discussions may be guided by the search for social peace, it is urgent that these discussions between the various elements are not carried out behind the backs of the people and do nothing to undermine the political will of the people. But above all there must be an engagement by all to ensure that the elections and its aftermath does not deteriorate into the kind of violence and destruction that was witnessed in Kenya after the elections of December 27, 2007. At all costs, war must be avoided. The present leadership cannot expect to be supported when it terrorizes its own people and unleashes the very same Rhodesian military apparatus (the Joint Operation Command) against the opposition and unarmed civilians.
  • President Robert Mugabe has been a heroic figure in the continent of Africa, the Diaspora, among African observers and well-wishers. And he would have remained so, if the Pan African world had assisted Zimbabweans with friendly criticism of the government when the flaws began to show. Instead, the whole movement and the international left, including us, remained silent, some longer than others, hoping that such a well-resourced government would correct its own shortcomings. Earlier we had special cause to be partisan to Robert Mugabe, who had extended solidarity to our colleague Walter Rodney when he was being persecuted by the Guyana government.
  • We want to go on record in saying that neither the government of Britain nor the government of the United States has the moral authority to oppose the present government of Zimbabwe. Imperialists and neo- conservatives have their own agenda when imposing sanctions and we are against sanctions in Zimbabwe. Progressive Pan Africanists must remain vigilant so that brutal oppression of the Zimbabwean peoples is not countenanced in the name of anti-imperialism.
  • Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF may be against imperialism but this group is not against capitalism or the looting of the assets of the society.
  • Those who support the working peoples of Zimbabwe must insist on transparency in dealing with transnational corporations and the integrity of the ruling personnel in their day-to-day activities. This call for accountability is especially important in so far as though we are opposed to the threat of war coming from ZANU PF we are not encouraged by the policies and posture of the leadership of the MDC. These elements have displayed an amazing level of intellectual subservience to the West and to the ideas of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Zimbabwe needs leaders who place the interest of the working people first. It is proper that all progressives support the Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative of the United Nations so that corrupt leaders cannot stash away funds when the people suffer.
  • Experiences in Guyana, in Kenya and in Zimbabwe have taught us that it is a mistake to adopt western standards of victory as our own. Victory for us must mean reconciliation of divided populations. This in each case may best be approached through widespread national conversation spelling out its purpose. Reconciliation will fail utterly if it is imposed; or allows free rein to corruption, militarism or if it ignores the choices of the people in valid elections.
  •  
    Victory for us must mean reconciliation of divided populations. Reconciliation will fail utterly if it is imposed; or allows free rein to corruption, militarism or if it ignores the choices of the people in valid elections. We have responsibility as progressives and Pan-Africanists to Zimbabwe.
Arabica Robusta

Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Power Politics of Bourgeois Democracy - Monthly Review - 0 views

  • Standards of living had crashed during the 1990s, the state withdrew—or priced at prohibitive levels—many social services, and the economy deindustrialized. State and private sector corruption were rife. In response, various urban labor and social movements—trade unions, human rights advocates, ghetto residents’ groups, militant students, church and Jubilee anti-debt campaigners, women’s organizations, community health workers, and many others—began to offer opposition.
  • But very quickly, what had begun as a working-class party resisting Mugabe’s neoliberalism, malgovernance, and repressive state control was hijacked by international geopolitical forces, domestic (white) business and farming interests, and the black petite bourgeoisie.
  • the workers would be just as badly treated by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu). With his misleading tendency to “talk left, act right,” Mugabe gave the impression to some observers that his project was genuinely anti-imperialist and capable of empowering the millions of landless rural Zimbabweans for whom he claimed to act.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Once he had permitted and nurtured the land invasions in the wake of the shocking February 2000 defeat, Mugabe came to rely upon the war veterans and their followers as a paramilitary force. And yet notwithstanding the resurgence of populist rhetoric and a few material concessions from the state, poor and working people saw their incomes—and even their ability to gain access to the staple food, maize—under unprecedented threat by the time of the recent (March 9–10, 2002) presidential election.
  • Geopolitical pressure on Mugabe is mediated primarily through these suspect sources. But for all the Western hypocrisy, the Mugabe victory was nonetheless the product of brutal force. And the division between the observer missions did not break down cleanly along North-South, national, racial, or class lines.
  • One government stands ready and anxious to mediate an elite solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, if one can be found: South Africa. The same government has positioned itself as the main third world arbiter of globalization, in arenas such as trade, finance, aid, sustainable development, racism, non-aligned politics, and many others.
  • In 1976, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was summoned to meet South African premier John Vorster and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger in Pretoria. In an uncomfortable encounter, Smith was told that his dream of delaying black majority rule in Zimbabwe for “a thousand years” was over. Accommodation with the liberation movements would be necessary, both for the sake of the West’s legitimacy in the struggle against the Soviet Union and simply because Smith’s position—defending legalized racial domination by a quarter of a million white settlers over more than six million indigenous black people, of whom fifty thousand were in the process of taking up arms, at a time of unprecedented economic crisis—was untenable. Smith resisted the inevitable with a mix of ineffectual concessions and heightened repression, but the power that South Africa held over imports and exports was decisive. Simultaneously, guerrilla war intensified and Smith could no longer count on Pretoria’s military backing. Three years after the ultimatum from Vorster and Kissinger, Smith and his conservative black allies were forced to the Lancaster House negotiating table in London, where Zimbabwe was born. Thanks to what Smith termed “the great betrayal” by South Africa and Britain, Zanu and its allies laid down their arms and swept the first democratic election in February 1980. A quarter of a century after that fateful meeting in Pretoria, an analogous moment reappeared in the relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe, thirteen million black Zimbabweans suffer under the rule of an undemocratic, exploitative elite and of a repressive state machinery serving the class interests of a few tens of thousands of well-connected bureaucrats, military, and paramilitary leaders. And this is in the context of unprecedented economic crisis. In South Africa, meanwhile, it is not difficult to posit a similar trajectory of material decline, ruling-party political illegitimacy, and ascendant opposition, as the rand crashed by more than 50 percent over a two-year period and trade union critiques of neoliberal policies harden.
  • Vorster, Kissinger, and ultimately the British managers of Zimbabwe’s transition together hoped for a typical neocolonial solution, in which property rights would be the foundation of a new constitution, willing-seller/willing-buyer land policy would allow rural social relations to be undisturbed, and nationalization of productive economic activity would be kept to a minimum. A black government would, moreover, have greater capacity to quell labor unrest, strikes, and other challenges to law and order.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Long-term neo-colonial project ...
  • To misread Zimbabwe’s situation so blatantly and self-servingly was not new in Pretoria. As another example that gets to the heart of the exhausted nationalist contradiction, consider the case of former ANC Land Minister Derek Hanekom, who also used Zimbabwe as a whipping boy beginning in 1997. At that stage, land hunger was causing organic land invasions (not war-veteran induced) and farmworker strikes in several areas of rural Zimbabwe. In November, of that year, Mugabe announced that the Land Designation Act would finally be implemented. For South Africa, the specter of large-scale land reform in Zimbabwe would have been terrible for investor confidence at a time when Mbeki’s own Washington-centric structural adjustment program—the misnamed Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy—was already failing noticeably.
  • around February 2000, two options emerged: hunker down and mindlessly defend the Zanu government against its critics; or move into a “constructive engagement” mode that might serve as the basis for an “honest broker” role on some future deal-making occasion. A third option—active support Zimbabwe’s social-justice movements, so as to ensure Mugabe authorized genuinely free and fair elections—presumably did not warrant attention; no doubt for fear that the last bullet would inspire South African trade unionists to do the same, and in the near future.
  • Mugabe’s “huge social spending spree” was, in reality, a brief two-year period of rising education and health expenditures, followed by systematic cutbacks and deprivation under IMF and World Bank guidance. The needs of trade unionists were as little respected as were those of any other sector of society.
  • The romance of Southern African liberation struggles made it logical for radical activists across the world to intensify pressure first for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique (1975), then the former British colony Zimbabwe (1980), then Namibia (1990), and finally South Africa (1994). That kind of solidarity was colony specific. Something more universal has subsequently emerged: North-South unity of progressive activists fighting a common scourge, international neoliberalism. What is most needed, in this new context, is a set of processes that help identify and implement popular solidarity.
  • At the fore of those who would repel both the kleptocratic elite and the generalized economic crisis associated with globalization are progressive civil society groups.
  • what lessons does this confusing period in Zimbabwe’s post-independence experience provide to other third world progressive social forces? The appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of strengthened state sovereignty as a short–medium term objective. Instead, aligned simultaneously with international popular struggle against Washington and transnational corporate headquarters, the goal must be the rekindling of nation state sovereignty, but under fundamentally different assumptions about power relations and development objectives than during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only be changed sufficiently if the masses of oppressed people contest those comprador forces who run virtually all their nation states. To do so will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist political program, grounded in post-neoliberal economic formulations.
  •  
    Once he had permitted and nurtured the land invasions in the wake of the shocking February 2000 defeat, Mugabe came to rely upon the war veterans and their followers as a paramilitary force.
Arabica Robusta

Lessons of Zimbabwe: An exchange between Patrick Bond and Mahmood Mamdani | Links Inter... - 1 views

  • Mugabe's ``popularity'' within the electorate at election time is less than half, and has been since 2000 (assuming that his voters are genuinely free to cast their ballots, which they are not). Elections Mugabe supposedly ``won'' -- such as June 28, 2008 -- have not been free and fair, and coercion has been characteristic of his rule, especially in rural areas where pro-opposition forces (e.g. pro-Movement for Democratic Change teachers) have been bullied and in many cases disappeared or killed.
  • Rather than confuse matters with the Uganda comparison (which related mainly to urban Asians and those in commercial circuits), the following is more ``likely to be said'' of the situation prevailing in February 2000:
  • There are a wide variety of such rulers who used a fake anti-imperialism and anti-neocolonialism to rally support, from Marcos in the Philippines to the Argentine generals, back to the characters Frantz Fanon described in Wretched of the Earth in 1961. It's an old trick.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • (There follow some contentious points on land reform, which I'll leave to others to rebut. I'm most concerned that Mamdani amplifies what can be considered Mugabe's greatest myth: economic destruction and inflation unprecedented in recorded human history is due to ``sanctions''.)
  • Perhaps this is the most bizarre sentence. Land reform will again be needed in Zimbabwe, to dislodge Mugabe's cronies who have merely taken over existing plantations. But land aside, the September 15, 2008, [``powersharing''] agreement is a disaster in many other respects, as it combines the worst of both worlds: looming neoliberalism if the business faction of the MDC influences economic policy (the MDC gets the finance ministry), and ongoing crony capitalism through Mugabe's extensive patronage system within the Zimbabwe state; plus a relegitimised repressive arm of the state for those in civil society who would protest the new elite transition.Fortunately, it's so very bad that civil society have persuaded progressives within the MDC not to accept the deal. The main problem is that with all the elite negotiating going on, there's really no Plan B for popular insurrection.And Mahmood Mamdani's otherwise politically inspiring work does not help the Zimbabwean people there, at all.
  • Zimbabwe has seen the greatest transfer of property in southern Africa since colonisation and it has all happened extremely rapidly. Eighty per cent of the 4000 white farmers were expropriated; most of them stayed in Zimbabwe. Redistribution revolutionised property-holding, adding more than a hundred thousand small owners to the base of the property pyramid. In social and economic – if not political – terms, this was a democratic revolution. But there was a heavy price to pay.The first casualty was the rule of law, already tenuous by 1986.
  • A deeper capitalist malaise engulfed Zimbabwe since around 1974, the year that per capita wealth began to decline, based on overaccumulation of capital and, by the time of structural adjustment in the early 1990s, a turn to the speculative/parasitical mode of not only capital accumulation but also state management. These are not Mugabe's ``policies'', but problems all state managers have faced, nearly everywhere in the world.
  • Mugabe had much more leverage -- because politically he is a dictator -- to adopt a unique zig-zag technique between market liberalisation, crony-capitalist corruption and state interventions, leaving Zimbabwe with the highest inflation ever recorded in human history, at a time when neighbouring states' inflation was declining substantially due to more pure versions of neoliberalism. In comparison to such processes, ``sanctions'' have played a very small part in the present manifestation of this long crisis.
  • Land transfers to the majority were necessary and long overdue, since the free market model agreed at Lancaster House [the independence agreement between the liberation movement and the British government] and in subsequent World Bank loans wasn't working (nor was it meant to), and since structural adjustment had generated vast profits for tobacco, horticultural and other (mainly white) agro-exporters, while peasants lost economic ground during the 1990s (a point important for understanding what fueled so much resentment against wealthy white farmers)
  • Mugabe allowed far too many of his cronies to get good farms (as even a state investigating commission conceded), and didn't set up proper agricultural support systems for those millions of landless who should have benefited from redistribution, leading to a huge decline in agricultural output, food aid dependency on Western donors and NGO distributors, and the prospect now of mass starvation (points that Mamdani skirts).
  • 2000-03 was the moment when -- reminiscent of the early/mid-1980s in Matabeleland -- Mugabe used brutal violence against his opponents, terrorising the society and vindicating those who claimed Mugabe's rule would necessarily end in dictatorship, hence leaving the early 2000s the definitively ``exhausted'' state of Mugabe's ultra-nationalism
  • ``Settler colonialism'' easily transformed into post-settler neocolonialism nearly everywhere, and Zimbabwe is no exception, for while the society may now have only a quarter (or even less) of its former peak of white inhabitants, the economy is still oriented to activities that, if not controlled by white Zimbabweans or white South Africans or white Brits, mimics that control through compliant local black ownership -- in finance, commerce, mining and residual manufacturing especially (while a preponderance of white senior managers remains).
  • If this barb is aimed at white farmers, US/British diplomats and the world's conservative media, it is technically true. If it is aimed at those in civil society who consistently supported poor people both through radical land reform (minus the problems caused by Mugabe's rural ploys starting in 2000) and through ``rights to the city'' projects such as informalisation of survival activity, then it's misplaced.
  • In 1998 Mugabe was supporting Laurent Kabila (who came to power in part through mining interests), and his own allies' and generals' personal interests in that process are well documented. No doubt some geopolitical factors related to control over the eastern DRC were also in play, with the US lining up with Uganda and Rwanda for medium-term control of the region's resources. But Mamdani forgets that the IMF explicitly allowed huge financial transfers from within the Zimbabwe fiscus to the war (so long as cuts in other programs paid for it), and expressed much more concern about a new set of economic policies (the following from my co-authored book Zimbabwe's Plunge):
  • Britain announced a review of arms sales to Zimbabwe and, after the conference, again disclaimed any responsibility for funding land reform. Again, nothing new. The US also ended its military flirtation with the Zimbabwe army in the late 1990s.
  • The following year the IMF suspended lending to Zimbabwe, By then, Mugabe had stopped paying IMF loans back, and was violating several of the neoliberal conditions placed on earlier loans.
  • the uptick in state repression, Mugabe's zigzagging away from neoliberal economic policies, and a sense that Mugabe would soon lose to Tsvangirai in an election. But a great deal more donor aid continued to flow during the 2000s; the door was not shut, by any means. US AID in particular was prolific in sending out its food support, replete with branding logos all over the maize bags and cooking oil tins.
  • Surprisingly, Mamdani does not mention the most profound reason for the IMF's above decisions: Mugabe's failure to repay overdue loans. Moreover, when in 2005-06, Mugabe (egged on by Mbeki) tried to clear $210 million in extreme arrears (with more than $1 billion in other arrears to the IMF and World Bank still outstanding), he had not put in place neoliberal economic policies required by the IMF for ongoing support. My own understanding is that at no time did the US have to exercise the veto over IMF loans it has been notorious for in other cases. The ``sanctions'' Mamdani describes were simply not a factor -- Mugabe had himself imposed sanctions on himself by not repaying the Bretton Woods Institutions starting in 1999, and by adopting non-neoliberal economic policies. In any case, ``sanctions'' by the Bretton Woods Institutions should be no barrier to a country's growth, if it is managed properly, as Argentina showed after its 2002 default on $130 billion in foreign loans including IMF loans -- following which it led Latin America in recovery from the ``lost'' 1980s-90s neoliberal era
  • But instead of Mugabe following a principled strategy linked to other Third World leaders in a debtors' cartel, as Jubilee South (and Julius Nyerere and Fidel Castro) advocated, there was a simple reason: Mugabe ran out of forex. In 1998, Zimbabwe paid more in debt servicing than any country in the world (as a percentage of GDP) aside from Brazil and Burundi. Having stopped repaying -- except for the silly strategy of partial IMF repayments in 2005-06 -- naturally arrears increased dramatically.
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20 items per page