“What Happened to the Jewel of Africa? Political Debacle in Zimbabwe” (Salon on February 5th, 2005)

Zimbabwe was once viewed as a model for African economic management and ranked among the continent’s safest travel destinations.  The Mugabe-led national liberation war and ZANU-PF regime earned broad progressive backing and international support.  However, a combination of repression, mismanagement (a schizophrenic gyration between state controls and neoliberal policy), and corruption have brought the nation to hunger, hyper-inflation, political paralysis (including jeopardizing the independence of the judiciary and press) and the verge of mass civil disobedience.

In 2001, a long-overdue campaign of land-reform, reclamation from white commercial farmers, began.  However, instead of diverting the land to benefit the masses of farmers and farm workers, the campaign was twisted into service of the ZANU-PF party faithful.  While issues of race relations and land reform in Zimbabwe are pressing and complex ones which dominate international media coverage, the hidden agendas at play had profound consequence for Zimbabwe’s national direction.  Ruling party activists, largely youth militia, were deployed throughout the nation under the guise of land reform and were given free reign to pressure the population to support ZANU-PF in the 2002 presidential election and suppress opposition demonstrations.  President Mugabe, now in his 24th year as state leader, has passed legislation restricting foreign funding of local civil organizations and NGOs attempting to influence “governance,” an act which may cripple Zimbabwe’s independent civil society.

My goals in this discussion are to provide historical context to Zimbabwe’s current impasse and look to how we might find a way to escape the current cycle of violence and repression.  We will examine Zimbabwe’s path to independence, Mugabe’s early policies regarding race relations, the civil war of the 1980’s, the background behind and the actual impact of recent land reforms, the Lancaster House Agreement of 1980 and its implications for said reforms, and the nature of the multi-racial opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), itself a broad-based group rife with internal contradictions, whose demonstrations face state suppression via tear gas, clubs, and warning shots.  Finally, we will look towards likely and hopeful futures in Zimbabwe.

While central themes of the evening will include politics and land, I hope to use these as points of departure to a more wide-ranging discussion.

ABOUT ME: 

I work in Compliance and Operations for a fixed income securities firm in San Francisco.  I was born and raised in a farming community in northern Zimbabwe.  My father was a commercial farmer, and so I have an intimate connection to and inside knowledge of land issues and farming in Zimbabwe.