Professor Burke on Zimbabwe

He writes:

: Don’t Pet the Hyena: The main question with Zimbabwe now is the question we used to ask about Sani Abacha’s regime in Nigeria: namely, how bad can it get? As low as Zimbabwe has sunk lately, there are still further depths to mine. It is depressingly possible, even plausible, that events will continue to that point: mass starvation of the people lately forced out of the cities is conceivable. At the very least, many of them will redefine the standard of rural wretchedness if they are compelled to remain in rural areas.

One of my major jobs for this summer is to finish work on the chapter of my manuscript that deals with African nationalism and sovereignty in Zimbabwe. As I write, I continue to be haunted by the foreseeable nature of the current disaster. The mass evictions of recent weeks are no surprise at all to anyone familiar with Zimbabwe: they are neither a sudden or unanticipated development. Since the mid-1980s, before important international events, including the state visit of Queen Elizabeth II, the government has evicted or harassed squatters in Harare’s townships. Traders active in the informal sector have often been the target of arbitrary police action and confiscation of their property.

When I was working at the National Archives of Zimbabwe in 1990, another researcher asked me why maize was growing wild in so many parts of the city. I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes and replied that it wasn’t growing wild, that people were cultivating it in open fields and vacant areas as a cash crop or for food. The other scholar vehemently objected: “That can’t be: I’ve seen city workers burning the corn! Why would they do that?”

At the time, I just thought that response was an individually naïve one—-and that the abusive actions of officials in the case of maize burnings or squatter harassment were largely idiosyncratic activities of brutal, inefficient or rule-bound bureaucrats. I should have known better, not just because there was already ample evidence of the nature of the ruling elite of Zimbabwe but also because government mistreatment of urban populations and informal sector traders was a part of life in other postcolonial African nations.

The truly depressing thing is watching individual men and women who have previously simulated some degree of decency or political conviction sell that away so easily: people like former academic Jonathan Moyo, who sold away his soul so he could declare that a free press is undesired in Zimbabwean society and otherwise act the fool in his shameless pursuit of power. Now the scales have fallen from his eyes after he was cast aside for showing his political ambition openly. Mugabe pegged Moyo pretty well in a mocking speech after the minister’s fall: “Jonathan, you are clever, but you lack wisdom”. That sums up not just Moyo, but almost all of the scholars who wrote about the nationalist struggle and ZANU-PF in the 1970s and 1980s. Norma Kriger and a precious few others come out looking like they understood what was going on: the rest of us clever, not wise...

I understand the logic of state-building: reward your supporters, punish your enemies, make it clear that enthusiastic support for the government is the road to personal wealth and prosperity, and make it clear that opposition makes you poor, imprisoned, or dead. This is the way it worked under Henry IV or--in a much kinder, gentler way--George III. And it is clear that an era of state-building is not likely to be one of rapid economic growth: too many of the enterprising and entrepreneurial will not be supporters, and their wealth is one of the things that can be plucked and transferred to make supporters happy. Only states that are strong enough not to need to strain every nerve to assemble the coalition needed to survive can afford "soft rule," can relax control of resources now in order to provide incentives for growth that will produce a much more prosperous economy in a generation.

But what's going on in Zimbabwe today does not look anything at all like the logic of authoritarian state-building. Robert Mugabe is not Henry IV or George III or Pyotr the Great or even Dread Ivan. He's a character out of "Apocalypse Now":

Kurtz: "What did they tell you?"

Willard: "They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound."

Kurtz: "Are my methods unsound?"

Willard: "I don't see any method, at all, sir."

Comments

[JR]

I recall very clearly the election of Robert Mugabe to the presidency of Zimbabwe in 1980. Mugabe had been one of the leaders of the decades-long war against Ian Smith's Rhodesia, which had declared independence from Britain in 1965. It was a time of rejoicing in Zimbabwe and of satisfaction for westerners who had supported sanctions and worked for equal rights. Mugabe was the candidate of progressive reformers, over Joshua Nkomo, who everyone believed would be a thuggish dictator.

Now I wonder whether the ordinary Zimbabwean would have been better off if the whites had won the war and Mugabe had been captured or killed.

[otto]

"The main question with Zimbabwe now is the question we used to ask about Sani Abacha’s regime in Nigeria: namely, how bad can it get?"

Well, there are lots of other questions. Like, given that there is the same demand to remove the white farmers (and others) in South Africa as there was in Zimbabwe, is persistent one party rule for the ANC the only way to suppress this demand? Would a more competitive election system, otherwise much to be desired, encourage political parties to compete for this sort of support?

And how has evidence

[anne]

We follow the sadness as closely as we can. Thank you for this post.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/international/africa/21zimbabwe.html?ei=5070&en=0d1141bbd38bc626&ex=1120276800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

Zimbabwe, Long Destitute, Teeters Toward Ruin
By MICHAEL WINES

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe - In the weeks before parliamentary elections in March, the leaders of this threadbare nation threw open the national larder, wooing voters with stocks of normally scarce gasoline and corn and a flood of freshly printed money.

It may have helped: the ruling party, President Robert G. Mugabe's ZANU-PF, was installed for another five years. But Zimbabwe's Potemkin prosperity has evaporated since the elections, replaced by penury and mounting signs of economic collapse.

Here in the second largest city, lines of cars stretch a quarter mile and more at fuel-parched service stations, and drivers spend the night in their cars' back seats lest they lose their place in line. Milk, cooking oil and, most of all, corn, the national staple, are a distant memory at most stores. At one downtown grocery, tubes of much-prized American toothpaste are kept in a locked case.

Zimbabwe's currency, which traded on the black market at 120 to the dollar in April 2002, went for 6,200 to the dollar last December, 12,000 on April 1, and 17,000 in early May. By mid-May a single American dollar brought as much as 25,000 Zimbabwean dollars, though the rate has since steadied at about 20,000....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/11/international/africa/11zimbabwe.html?ei=5070&en=f5a4539cf224fab4&ex=1120276800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all

Zimbabwe's 'Cleanup' Takes a Vast Human Toll
By MICHAEL WINES

HARARE, Zimbabwe - The government abruptly began demolishing shanties and roadside markets here three weeks ago, evicting thousands of people and bulldozing homes or burning them to the ground, in what officials call a cleanup of illegal slums and black-market vendors.

But as the campaign, directed at as many as 1.5 million members of Zimbabwe's vast underclass, spreads beyond Harare, it is quickly evolving into a sweeping recasting of society, a forced uprooting of the very poorest city dwellers, who have become President Robert G. Mugabe's most hardened opponents.

By scattering them to rural areas, Mr. Mugabe, re-elected to another five-year term in 2002, seems intent on dispersing the biggest threat to his 25-year autocratic rule as poverty and unemployment approach record levels and mass hunger and the potential for unrest loom.

The United Nations estimates that the campaign, Operation Murambatsvina, using a Shona word meaning "drive out the rubbish," has so far left 200,000 people homeless and 30,000 vendors jobless. Human rights and civic leaders say the numbers could be several times that, a view that seemed plausible during a four-day visit to Harare and Bulawayo, the nation's second-largest city, and points between....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/international/africa/28bishop.html?ei=1&en=da9dc96b2e79e72b&ex=1120617701&pagewanted=all&position=

A Humble African Cleric Fiercely Protects His Flock
By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe

MUTTERING softly, a man in a priest's collar, baggy sweater and pants two inches too short for his legs puttered distractedly about the office of Pius Ncube, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo, one recent Saturday, getting things in order for the archbishop's next meeting.

He swept papers off one corner of a cluttered desk to create writing space. He searched the dust-covered bookshelves for the archbishop's résumé. He fixed a stubborn electrical outlet. He answered the telephone when the receptionist failed to pick it up.

He was so completely the image of a preoccupied assistant that nearly 10 minutes passed before it finally dawned upon a visitor that the man was no assistant at all, but the archbishop himself. That drew a small smile. Archbishop Ncube is accustomed to being underestimated.

For years, Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, treated the archbishop as beneath his notice, even when he called him a liar, a cheat and a despot willing to starve his own people to stay in power. Mr. Mugabe left it to aides to pityingly characterize the clergyman as "quite unwell" or "mad."

But that was before this winter, when the archbishop began an all-out assault on Mr. Mugabe beyond Zimbabwe's borders....

[b]

When you see "F..CK" written on the side of the barn, do not doubt the barn - doubt the message.

[Russil Wvong]

"I understand the logic of state-building: reward your supporters, punish your enemies, make it clear that enthusiastic support for the government is the road to personal wealth and prosperity, and make it clear that opposition makes you poor, imprisoned, or dead."

Fascinating. Could you recommend a good book on the subject of state-building, Brad?