Inflation in Zimbabwe is over 100,000 percent and rising. Unemployment is estimated to be as high as 80 percent. Mugabe blames the economic collapse on “racist” sanctions imposed, as he sees it, in response to the seizure of some 4,000 white-owned farms.
The sanctions have undoubtedly not helped this once-prosperous country. However, the seeds of economic collapse post-2002 lay in the farm takeovers. Efficiently run on prime agricultural land, the farmers were the mainstay of the economy, exporting great quantities of food and tobacco. The new farm owners, among them close supporters of the president, lacked the skills and experience to maintain agricultural output. Some, indeed, looked no further than the return of tribal lands that white colonialists had taken from them in the 1900s, and resumed subsistence farming. The result is that the former breadbasket of Africa has become a basket case that cannot now even feed itself.
With such an economic record, most politicians would fear standing again in an election. But Mugabe will today bid for a further term as president and his fellow ZANU-PF politicians will seek victory in concurrent parliamentary and local elections. It is widely expected that as in past polls, the results will be rigged. Indeed, Mugabe went on record last month saying that he had no intention of giving up power, even if the election went against him.
The fact that in theory he could lose is the oddity about what in every other respect looks like the typical dictatorship that bedeviled many African countries after the colonial powers quit. Though seriously trammeled by the authorities, Zimbabwe has an established opposition: the Movement for Democratic Change, led by Morgan Tsvangirai. There is even an independent presidential candidate, Simba Makoni, who was once Mugabe’s finance minister. Maybe the president’s calculation is that he prefers to have his political enemies where he can see them.
Despite past opposition agitation and civil disobedience, the ZANU-PF regime has been little bothered. It has complete control of the police and the elite army Fifth Brigade which, trained by North Koreans, has been used to crush any serious dissidence that threatened its power. Yet despite their own privileged economic position, many of the men around the aging president can see that as Zimbabwe sinks ever further into economic chaos, it will become difficult even to feed the majority Shona population who are ZANU’s powerbase. At that point, the regime may need to throw aside any pretense of political pluralism and enforce its rule dictatorially on anyone who protests, be they Shona or the Ndebele supporters of the late Joshua Nkomo whose Popular Front was lured into government with ZANU and then neutralized. The Fifth Brigade thereafter allegedly killed 20,000 Ndebele “dissidents”.
Today may, therefore, be the last time that Mugabe and ZANU-PF bother with an election, in which case political change can probably only come about through violence.
