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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mnangagwa is widely mistrusted due to his responsibility for (and refusal to acknowledge) 1982-85 “Gukhurahundi” massacres of more than 20,000 people in the country’s western provinces (mostly members of the minority Ndebele ethnic group, whose handful of armed dissidents he termed “cockroaches” needing a dose of military “DDT”); his subversion of the 2008 presidential election which Mugabe initially lost; his subsequent heading of the Joint Operations Committee secretly running the country, sabotaging democratic initiatives; as well as for his close proximity – as then Defence Minister – to widespread diamond looting from 2008-16. Mugabe himself last year complained of revenue shortfalls from diamond mining in eastern Zimbabwe’s Marange fields: “I don’t think we’ve exceeded US$2 billion or so, and yet we think that well over US$15 billion or more has been earned in that area.”

Mnangagwa had fought Rhodesian colonialism in the 1970s, and soon became one of Mugabe’s leading henchmen, rising to the vice presidency in 2014. But Mugabe fired him on November 6, signaling Grace’s ruthless ascent in spite of Chiwenga’s repeated warnings since early 2016. Three years ago, with Grace egging him on, Mugabe sacked another close revolutionary-era ally, vice president Joice Mujuru (62). (Mujuru subsequently launched a new party which subsequently showed no capacity to influence events, but she was expected to eventually forge an alliance with democratic opposition forces to contest the scheduled 2018 election.)

What with both economic and political degeneration accelerating, Mnangagwa’s firing was the catalyst for an emergency Beijing trip by his ally, army leader Constantino Chiwenga (61), for consultations with the Chinese army command. Mnangagwa received military training in China during Mao’s days, and China today has substantial assets in Zimbabwe, including repeated weapon sales and stakes in tobacco, infrastructure and mining, as well as its retail imports that continue to deindustrialize Zimbabwean manufacturing.

Beijing’s Global Times, which often parrots official wisdom, was increasingly wary of Mugabe. According to a contributor, Wang Hongwi of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “Mnangagwa, a reformist, will abolish Mugabe's faulty investment policy. In a country with a bankrupt economy, whoever takes office needs to launch economic reforms and open up to foreign investment… Chinese investment in Zimbabwe has also fallen victim to Mugabe's policy and some projects were forced to close down or move to other countries in recent years, bringing huge losses.” (Hongwi did not mention whether Sam Pa represents the ethos of such Chinese investors.)

A sense of such new benefactors’ potential generosity must have played a role in the coup plotters’ calculations. For Mnangagwa is not only being toasted in Beijing, but also by Tory geopolitical opportunists in London. Although many Britons object, their ambassador to Zimbabwe Catriona Laing has for three years attempted to “rebuild bridges and ensure that re-engagement succeeds to facilitate Mnangagwa’s rise to power” with a reported “$2 billion economic bail-out.”

As the coup plan – initially scheduled for December prior to Zanu-PF’s next congress – was pushed forward, on November 13 he cautioned against “reckless utterances by politicians from the ruling party denigrating the military” – whom he termed “counter-revolutionary infiltrators” – and he insisted that Mugabe’s “targeting members of the party with a liberation background must stop.” Snubbing this warning the next day, the G40 maintained control of Zanu-PF’s machinery and issued a provocative statement highly critical of Mnangagwa and Chiwenga.

Mugabe’s erratic spin-doctor for most of the last two decades was Jonathan Moyo, a former US-trained academic. Moyo was responsible for some of Zanu-PF’s most extreme rhetorical attacks on political opponents, including media crackdowns a decade ago. But his prolific twitter feed suddenly went quiet on November 14 once ZDF tanks rolled into the city. The army rapidly occupied Mugabe’s main office and the national broadcaster, announcing to the country that the ZDF was in command and would ‘protect’ Mugabe while searching out the ‘criminals’ surrounding him. Moyo had repeatedly angered Chiwenga, even alleging several times that his 2015 doctoral thesis in ethics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal was authored by someone else.

Moyo and another G40 leader once considered potential presidential material, Saviour Kasukuwere, were apparently picked up early on November 15 and taken to the army barracks. According to an insider interviewed by journalist Sipho Masondo, “People are romanticising the coup and saying it was not bloody. It was damn bloody. People are being beaten badly.”

That nightmare – Mnangagwa’s new-found ability to relegitimise Zanu-PF with army support – is now unfolding, with only an economic meltdown to compel him to negotiate.

If donor aid to the new regime is not forthcoming, a desperation mentality will rapidly emerge, for economic barriers to bureaucratic looting are periodically reached in Zimbabwe. For example, when the world’s worst hyperinflation (500 billion percent) wiped out the former currency in 2008, new arrangements were required: in that case, the turn to the US dollar and rand. The only other option is recovering looted wealth by Mugabe and his cronies – but such an asset search might prove highly embarrassing to Mnangagwa and Chiwenga, too.

t appears that in this context, only the Zimbabwe government’s full-fledged relegitimation can attract sufficient foreign aid to avoid an economic meltdown. For this purpose, an ideal-type ‘national unity’ scenario – which appears unlikely, but nevertheless worth contemplating – would have Chiwenga quickly return his troops to the barracks and Interim President Mnangagwa appoint two Zanu-PF vice presidents: Mujuru and, for ethnic balance, Dumisa Dabengwa (77) from the Zimbabwe African People’s Union party. The latter party is a revival of one Mugabe had crushed and coopted in 1987, when he unsuccessfully attempted to establish one-party rule. Another Mnangagwa ally anticipated to rise to the top tier is Sydney Sekeramayi (73).

But most importantly, the unity regime would need to include at least three recently-reunited Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leaders: Tsvangirai as prime minister (his 2009-13 role), Biti in the finance ministry to raise support from Western donors, and Welshman Ncube (56) who enjoys widespread support among the Ndebele people.

Not only are donors required, international tolerance will be needed on the country’s foreign debt and profit-repatriation arrears.

Zuma is also criticised for not halting periodic upsurges of anti-Zimbabwean xenophobic violence in South Africa, which in 2015 led to angry protests at South Africa’s High Commission in Harare.

Even before a new aid package is negotiated, two of the most crucial economic decisions a national unity government will face are whether to continue introducing $300 million worth of fast-devaluing Reserve Bank currency into the banking system this month, and whether to pay a massive fine to the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin (formerly of Goldman Sachs), is demanding immediate payment of $385 million – down from an initial $3.8 billion – by the country’s largest bank, Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe, following more than 15,000 separate cases of sanctions busting that date from the Bush and Obama regimes’ punishment of Mugabe for human rights violations.

n a third financial controversy, Biti suspects that his 2013-17 successor, Patrick Chinamasa (who was reshuffled from finance last month, into a new cybersecurity portfolio), fraudulently issued Treasury Bills and backed up the new currency with illegitimate African Export-Import Bank loans. Biti is calling for a full debt audit.

democratic activists are concerned that what once had been a formidable set of progressive civil society organisations – trade unions, urban community groups, women and youth – back in 1999 when their “Working People’s Convention” launched the MDC, can no longer influence this transition. The last attempt in 2016, a “This Flag” meme launched by local pastor Evan Mawarire, soon ran out of steam.

it becomes s even more vital for progressives committed to democracy and social justice to redouble grassroots organising and generate crystal-clear demands, especially in the urban areas. (The rural peasantry suffers far tighter systems of socio-political control by Zanu-PF, so have never been reliable allies.) If not, says International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe leader Munyaradzi Gwisai, “There’s a potential that the Mnangagwa, MDC elites and the military could be part of a national unity government. Ultimately they are also scared of the working class, because austerity could lead to revolts.”

As Harare activist Tom Gumede wrote me privately on November 17 just before the masses hit the streets, “This is the time for workers, students and the poor of Zimbabwe to build a formidable unity for the future beyond Mugabe. A fractured population will lose the battles of the future… Another Zimbabwe is Possible. Through mass action the resistant Mugabe will finally be dislodged. His current cover under the Constitution will be blown up when people have spoken beyond the military takeover… Viva People Power and No to Elitist Transitions.” *** POSTSCRIPT: After I wrote this article, investigations of the new rulers’ wealth were published by a Citizen reporter. The Johannesburg newspaper’s Gosebo Mathope is drawing public attention to a crucial question: will the new rulers – especially Mnangagwa and Chiwenga – repatriate their ill-begotten wealth so as to relieve the country’s extreme financial pressure, including pressure emanating from the belly of the imperialist beast, Donald Trump’s Treasury Department? Or instead, will they continue their traditions of looting Zimbabwe as an unpatriotic bourgeoisie, and then follow persistent IMF advice to impose austerity and cut the civil service – as did the prior incumbent during the 1990s, to his ultimate regret?

(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.