by Robert Guest
After 2000, the Zimbabwean economy started to contract at the sort of pace you might expect during a war. Farmers, who provided the largest portion of the country’s exports, were paralyzed. No bank would lend them money because their collateral was liable to be confiscated at any moment. Nor was it easy to cultivate crops with hostile squatters vandalizing their irrigation pipes and breaking their workers’ legs. Farmers’ woes in turn affected their suppliers and customers, from tractor-repair shops to bakeries. Farm-related businesses, which accounted for perhaps half of Zimbabwean industry, were crippled. The country was undergoing an industrial revolution in reverse.
Mugabe’s campaign of terror also – unsurprisingly – destroyed the tourist trade. Since the violence was not random but directed at the opposition, tourists were actually quite safe unless they visited farms or attended political rallies. My wife Emma and I, for example, went canoeing on the Zambezi River at the height of the troubles and suffered no frights except from the wildlife. While on foot in the bush, we interrupted two lions at an intimate moment. The male roared his annoyance. If we had run away, he would doubtless have chased, caught, and eaten us. But fortunately our guide stood his ground and roared back. The cats slunk off. In two weeks, we encountered no human hostil-ity at all. But our guide told us he had had no other customers for months and expected none.
The shortages of fuel and foreign currency hurt every firm in Zimbabwe. The lights stayed on only because South Africa supplied electricity on credit to avert an economic collapse and a flood of refugees across the border. (And perhaps on the assumption that, when the dust settled, South Africa would end up owning the Zimbabwean power grid.) Hundreds of companies went bust. Mugabe accused them of deliberately sabotaging the economy.
How to rig an election
The Mugabe regime has come to resemble a tapeworm infestation in Zimbabwe’s stomach, feeding off the fruits of other people’s labor, sapping the nation’s strength. Unlike tapeworms, however, Mugabe and his cronies have proven fiendishly hard to flush out. At the election in June 2000, I saw at first hand the lengths to which they were prepared to go to stay in power.
It was a parliamentary election, not a presidential one, so Mugabe’s job was not at stake. But the old man was worried, nonetheless. The MDC had only been around for a few months but looked set to wrest control of parliament from ZANU. Mugabe responded by offering free land to his supporters and bicycle spokes to his opponents.
It was a brilliant strategy. Many landless Zimbabweans dreamed of owning a plot to grow corn on. And many resented the fact that a handful of white commercial farmers owned about a third of the nation’s farmland.7 There was a genuine historical grievance: some white farmers were descended from British colonists who had stolen land from black Zimbabweans with official blessing.
In the run-up to the election, thousands of people calling themselves veterans of the liberation war (though many were too young to have fought) invaded white-owned farms. The invasions were portrayed in the state-owned media (which had a monopoly of radio and television) as a spontaneous expression of land hunger. But the invaders arrived in ruling-party pick-up trucks, were paid and fed by the security forces, and organized by CIO officials with cellphones. Zimbabwe’s courts ruled the invasions illegal, but Mugabe told the police not to intervene.
In fiery speeches, Mugabe accused the MDC of being a front for racist whites, whom he blamed for all the country’s ills. It was not a plausible story. White Zimbabweans may be richer than their black compatriots, but they account for less than 1 percent of the population and have little political power. There are, in fact, more elephants than whites in Zimbabwe.8
During the campaign, ZANU enjoyed the advantages of incumbency. State-owned newspapers applauded the party’s unrealistic manifesto – free land, free houses, jobs for all, cheaper food, and so on – while “uncovering” MDC plots to bring back forced labor and colonialism. ZANU received state funding; the MDC did not. Constituencies were gerrymandered to favor Mugabe’s ethnic group, the Shona. By one estimate, a quarter of the names on the electoral roll were of dead people, who usually voted for the ruling party.9 Mugabe had the right to appoint a fifth of the members of parliament. A ZANU hack was in charge of the count. And the war veterans were shuttled at taxpayers’ expense from one marginal constituency to the next, to beat up anyone suspected of supporting the MDC.
In the weeks before the vote, the terror grew systematic. Farm workers were a prime target. With their families, they numbered 2 million – almost a fifth of Zimbabwe’s population. They had good reason to hate Mugabe, for his land policy threatened their jobs. So the war veterans were ordered to thrash them into line.
I visited several occupied farms and heard stories that spoke of meticulously planned thuggery. The veterans appeared to have been ordered to scare as many people as possible, without actually killing too many. They typically arrived at a farm armed with sticks, pangas, and a few guns. They claimed the land and divided it into plots but spent little time trying to cultivate it. Instead, they ordered the farm workers to stop work and forced them to attend political “re-education” sessions.
At one farm I visited, only one worker out of 300 was prepared to speak to me, and only on condition that I did not use his name. He said that the veterans had forced everyone to spend hours each day listening to revolutionary lectures and singing ZANU campaign songs. Those who sang with insufficient ardor were whipped until they fell unconscious. Several women were raped, and the veterans warned that worse would follow if ZANU lost the election.
There were only a few thousand so-called war veterans but they were better armed than the farm workers and had the tremendous advantage that no matter what they did, the police were under orders not to arrest them. However, if a farm worker so much as punched a veteran, he was immediately hauled off to the cells.
The veterans set up road blocks on rural roads. They waved down each passing bus and beat up passengers who failed to show ZANU membership cards. Teachers, nurses, and others who, because they could read and write, were assumed to be opposition supporters, had their identity cards shredded, their homes burned down, and their bodies beaten with hoes or seared with molten plastic.
At least thirty people were killed, thousands were forced to flee their homes, and the MDC was prevented from campaigning in large swathes of the country. In no-go areas, opposition activists pinned up MDC posters stealthily by night or dropped leaflets from light aircraft. The violence eased during the actual ballot-casting, but it did not stop everywhere.
I spent the election weekend in Mberengwa East, a rural constituency 400 kilometers south of Harare. The polling stations I visited seemed calm and orderly. Lines of people stood patiently outside, waiting their turn. Officials with official-looking badges matched voters’ identity documents with names on the voters’ roll, and voters marked their ballots behind wooden screens. A passing European election monitor glanced at one calm scene, concluded that all was well, and sped off in his Land Cruiser.
An MDC polling agent named Hlupo Nkomo pointed out to me a couple of details that the monitor had missed. Several “officials” standing outside the polling station were war veterans who had been terrorizing the area for months. The men handing over ballot papers to each voter were widely known as torturers. The war veterans had kidnapped dozens of local MDC activists, dragged them to a nearby occupied farm called Texas Ranch, and jolted their genitals with jumper cables. Small wonder that none of the people in the line wanted to talk to a stranger like me. When I asked them which party they favored, they looked away and gestured gently that they wanted to be left alone.
Nkomo took me to see the charred husk of his welding shop, which he said had been torched by ruling-party thugs three weeks previously, along with his house. As he stood amid the rubble, I crossed the dusty road and asked two neighbors if they knew anything about it. Flustered, they said they had seen nothing and denied even knowing who Nkomo was. As we drove away, Nkomo
remarked that these two had been his neighbors for ten years. His wife and children were in hiding, he said, and he feared that he would never again be safe in his home town.
At a safe house, I met dozens of equally terrified MDC campaign staff. About 150 of them were living squashed into a three-bedroom bungalow, seeking safety in numbers. The fittest and least seriously injured young men stood guard. The owner’s furniture stood outside to make way for all the extra people inside. They cooked communally and slept in shifts. One young woman had given birth there – she had been too afraid to go to hospital. Many of those huddled inside the safe house wore bandages, hastily applied to eye and leg wounds. Many had lost their homes. All spoke with fear of the local war veterans and their leader, a knife-juggling karate expert who went by the nom de guerre of Big Chitoro.
Some MDC people were so badly injured that they had to check into a hospital, despite the risk of being attacked again while in an open ward. One bed-bound man I spoke to was mourning his brother, who had been tortured to death a few days before. He was in no state to pursue the murderers because his buttocks had been slashed half away with a rhino-hide whip. It pained him to move, but he insisted on unwrapping his bandages to show me. Such injuries were common during the election campaign, but Zimbabwean journalists were discouraged from reporting on them. When one independent newspaper published a page of photographs of dissidents’ mutilated behinds, the editor was arrested for “obscenity.”
I snatched a beer, some grilled beef, and a chat at a pub with Sekai Holland, the MDC’s candidate for Mberengwa East. She was a large, matronly woman with a red shawl wrapped around her shoulders and a voice that grew shrill when enraged. Six of her polling agents were missing, presumed dead, and 120 were in intensive care. She called the ruling party “parasites” and “barbarians.” She reserved even more vitriolic epithets for Big Chitoro who, as it happened, was a distant relative of hers.
I met Big Chitoro outside a polling station. He was having a busy election day, driving around in a pick-up truck with a dozen youths in the back waving ZANU flags and iron bars. A massive man, resplendent in cowboy boots and combat trousers, he strutted into the hall where the ballots were being cast, brandishing a steel-tipped cane. He beamed at the line of people waiting to vote, shook hands with a few war veterans, and swapped jokes with the local policemen. The voters looked at the ground and avoided his gaze. Mercedes Sayagues, a small but feisty Uruguayan journalist I was traveling with, walked boldly up and asked for an interview. “There’s no violence here,” Big Chitoro said with a smile. “And of course anyone is free to support any party they like.”
ZANU “won” the election, in Mberengwa East and nationwide. The MDC received more votes and swept the cities. But because the constituency boundaries were drawn in such a way that urban votes counted for less than rural ones, the ruling party won sixty-two seats to the opposition’s fifty-seven. With thirty MPs picked by Mugabe, this gave ZANU a comfortable majority.
An exit poll commissioned by the Helen Suzman Foundation, a liberal South African think tank, found that 12 percent of voters voted not for the party they liked but in a way they thought might end the violence. In other words, the terror campaign worked. When Mugabe’s men burned down peasants’ houses and threatened to come back and kill them if ZANU lost, a lot of peasants took the threat seriously. Observers sent by other African governments, including South Africa’s, declared the poll free and fair. No one else did. Two years later, Zimbabwe held a presidential election, which was even more violently rigged. Mugabe “won” by a wide margin, despite opinion polls suggesting that his opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, enjoyed the support of 70 percent of Zimbabweans.
Wanted – a second, genuine liberation
Contrary to what many people assume, a change of government in Zimbabwe could mend matters. To stop Zimbabweans from drowning, the most important step is to remove Mugabe’s foot from their heads. Investors, whether local or foreign, will never feel safe putting money into Zimbabwe while he is still in charge, but if a new government promised to stop the seizure of private property, many would be reassured.
Mugabe cannot rule forever, and though there is no guarantee that his successor will be any better, it would not be difficult to improve on the old man’s record. A new government could end the shortages of fuel and hard currency at a stroke, simply by allowing the prices of fuel and hard currency to reflect what these things actually cost. To curb inflation, a new government would simply have to avoid spending beyond its means and printing money to fill the gap. A new government that did these things would attract torrents of aid and debt relief.
Zimbabwe still has a sizeable middle class, an independent press, a functioning civil society, and the most diversified African economy outside South Africa. If Mugabe’s successor were to turn out not to be a despot, Zimbabweans could soon start farming, manufacturing, and entertaining tourists again. It would take years to repair the damage Mugabe has inflicted on his country, but Zimbabweans are up to the task. All they need is a less vampiric government.
The same is true of other Africans. Each country is different, but most African leaders since independence have shared at least some of Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian instincts. Botswana has been consistently democratic and well run, but in most other countries, the revolutionaries who promised “liberation” replaced the old colonial shackles with even heavier ones. Some African countries fell under the rule of military dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, who bluntly claimed that “democracy is not for Africa.”10 Other countries, such as Tanzania and Zambia, were subjected to one-party socialist rule, which was supposed to foster development but didn’t.
In Tanzania, president Julius Nyerere tried to build a state-planned economy, a difficult task under any circumstances, but even more so in a country that had, at independence in 1961, only sixteen university graduates.11 Nonetheless, Nyerere nationalized local industry, expropriated foreign businesses, shut down Indian and Arab traders, and tried to replace them all with bureaucrats. For some reason, the bureaucrats proved less adept at putting goods on shelves. Before long, it was hard to buy matches that lit properly in Tanzania.
Like Mugabe, Nyerere favored price controls. Peasants were obliged to sell grain to the government for as little as a fifth of its value, which was like a supertax on Tanzania’s poorest citizens. Nyerere also forced two thirds of the rural population into collective farms. This was a policy that had caused millions of people to starve to death in China, Ukraine, and Cambodia, but in Tanzania it was less disastrous. Unlike Mao Zedong, Nyerere was not prepared to shoot peasants to make them stay on the collective farms, so many escaped and ran home to tend their own fields.12 Ethiopian peasants were not so lucky. After their ruler, Mengistu Haile Mariam, forced them into collectives, a million died of hunger.
The World Bank describes African leaders’ despotic urges in typically dry terms:
By 1990, half of Africa’s states had military or quasi-military governments. In parallel with authoritarian military governments came a trend towards single-party rule under autocratic civilian leaders, largely pursuing interventionist economic policies, in some cases under the banners of socialism or Marxism. Especially when combined with external shocks, the resulting economic decline and politicization of the bureaucracy eroded much of what remained of institutional governance capacity and undermined many of the accomplishments of the 1960s.13
During the Cold War, outsiders often assumed that Africa’s “socialist” and “capitalist” regimes were utterly different from each other, like their sponsors, America and the Soviet Union. African leaders, hungry for aid, energetically promoted this idea. “Pro-Western” leaders, such as Mobutu, Samuel Doe of Liberia, and Hastings Banda of Malawi, spoke earnestly of their loathing for their socialist neighbors. But the chief difference between them was that the pro-Western despots allowed Western firms to operate on their territory, whereas the socialists tended not to. Otherwise, as George Ayittey put
s it, whether they claimed to be leftists or rightists, “the relevant ideology always has been statism.”14 Mobutu “indigenized” large firms, grabbing every shop and factory worth stealing, and sharing them out among his chums. Banda made whole industries off-limits to firms without permits, which he usually awarded to his political allies, or to himself.
When the Cold War ended, Africa became slightly more free. Despots could no longer count on American or Soviet aid in return for allying themselves with one side or the other. Soviet aid ceased, and Western donations started to become conditional on governments allowing their people more freedom. Hundreds of millions of Africans won the vote, and dozens of governments promised liberal economic reforms.
Sometimes these have been successful. In Mozambique, for example, the civil war ended in 1992 and the government decided to ditch socialism and start welcoming investors. The economy grew rapidly in the late 1990s, albeit from a low base. In South Africa, meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Union prompted the African National Congress, the main black liberation movement, to renounce Marxism. This reassured white South Africans that black rule would not mean having their shops and houses confiscated and so emboldened them to agree, in a referendum, to give blacks the vote. The apartheid regime was replaced, in 1994, by the more liberal ANC government.
During the 1990s, virtually every African state held elections of some sort. If one ignores countries that only became independent after 1990, such as Eritrea and (de facto) Somaliland, the sole laggard was the inaptly named Democratic Republic of Congo.
All this is admirable, but there is more to liberty than voting. Few African elections are truly free or fair. In Togo, for example, the main opposition parties boycotted the 2002 parliamentary election largely because of the government’s habit of locking up their candidates. In Swaziland, elected members of the tinkundla (parliament) have no powers other than the right to advise the unelected and absolutely powerful king. With few exceptions, African ruling parties still use the apparatus of the state to keep themselves in power. Public radio spouts their propaganda, public money pays for bags of grain to hand out on polling day, and the police arrest their opponents for jaywalking. Few African governments are peacefully voted out of office.
