Africans are not yet free
All he did was to stuff envelopes for the opposition party, but in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, it was a hazardous job. Deligent Marowa had joined the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) because, he said, it was “time to throw the crooks out of office.” But the crooks had other ideas.
Marowa was kidnapped after an MDC meeting in a township outside Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. As he walked home in the dark, two cars drew up beside him. A couple of heavy-set men stepped out and forced him, at gunpoint, to climb in. Marowa recognized one of his captors – the man had been pointed out to him before as an agent of Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organization (CIO).
Handcuffed to a door handle, Marowa was driven to a remote patch of waste land. There, his captors threw him to the ground and kicked him until he passed out. When he regained consciousness, they pushed a sharpened bicycle spoke into his rectum and up his urethra.
They left him for dead but, somehow, he made it to a hospital. A few days later, as he lay recuperating, they found him again. After dark, they slipped into the ward where he lay, flashed a gun, and said: “Let’s go.” Fortunately, another patient saw the pistol and screamed. Nurses came running, and the kidnappers fled. Marowa can now walk again, but he will never have children.
I met him in June 2000, a few days before a parliamentary election in Zimbabwe. He was young, lean, and angry. His ordeal was intended to scare him into abandoning opposition politics but had had the opposite effect. He waved his X-rays at me like a banner of protest and promised not to rest until the ruling party, ZANU-PF, was turfed out of power – which would have happened that very week had the election not been rigged.
There is a connection, though it is not obvious, between Marowa’s tragedy and the theme of this book. Africans are poor largely because they are not yet free. They live under predatory, incompetent governments, which they have great trouble shaking off. Their governments impoverish them in many ways: through corruption, through bad economic policies, and sometimes, as in Zimbabwe, by creating an atmosphere of terror that scares off all but the most intrepid businessfolk. In theory most Africans have the freedom to vote their rulers out of office, but in practice they find it difficult to do so.
Zimbabwe’s tragedy is especially poignant because the country, which was once the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, has so much going for it. It enjoys a warm, gentle climate and is so beautiful that it should be choking with tourists. Besides the sun, wildlife, and waterfalls, it has music, art, flowers, and delicious food. In springtime, the jacaranda trees carpet the streets with blue petals. The wine may be lousy, but the beer is excellent and the beefsteaks in Bulawayo are the tastiest I have ever eaten.
The people of Zimbabwe are open, friendly, hospitable, and among the best-educated in Africa. They should be rich. There is plenty of land in Zimbabwe, much of it ideal for raising cattle or growing wheat, corn, and tobacco. Under the ground lie reefs of gold, platinum, and other precious ores. The country has a modern banking sector, skilled manufacturers, and adequate roads.
And yet Zimbabwe is a mess.
Two decades after independence, Zimbabweans are dramatically poorer and can expect to die more than a decade younger. In 1980, the average annual income in Zimbabwe was $950, and a Zimbabwean dollar was worth more than an American one. By 2003, the average income was less than $400, a Zim dollar barely bought a fiftieth of an American cent, and the Zimbabwean economy was in freefall. AIDS was largely to blame for Zimbabweans’ shorter lifespans, but the fact that they had, according to the World Health Organization, the least efficient health service in the world probably didn’t help.
So what went wrong?
For an answer, look at the portrait that hangs on the wall of every government office, in every hotel lobby, and above the cash register in every shop. A grandfatherly figure gazes back, a man with big glasses and a tiny velcro-strip moustache in the middle of his top lip. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s ageing president, is too subtle to foist a full-blown personality cult on his countrymen. But still, no one dares to remove his picture.
The hero of the chimurenga, the bush war for freedom from white rule, Mugabe has been in power without a break since that struggle ended in 1980. When he first took office, things went well. The world was glad of any alternative to the white supremacist regime of Ian Smith and showered Zimbabwe with aid. The civil war was over and sanctions had been lifted. Mugabe spoke of racial reconciliation. The rains were good and the national mood was optimistic. The first two years after independence saw startling economic growth of 28 percent. It did not last.
Though he calls himself a socialist, and even at one point invited North Korean officers to come and train his army, Mugabe never allowed Zimbabwe to become a Soviet satellite and never tried to erect a Soviet-style command economy. Even so, he has made it extremely hard for Zimbabweans outside his ruling party to prosper. The story of one local entrepreneur, Strive Masiyiwa, speaks for many.
In 1993, Masiyiwa decided that Zimbabwe needed a mobile telephone network. Zimbabweans, like most people, like to talk to each other. Back then, the only way they could do so at a distance was by using the fixed-line network operated by PTC, the state telephone monopoly, which was so inefficient that getting a line installed in your home could take ten years.
A skilled engineer and a charming salesman, Masiyiwa had no trouble raising the necessary finance. He suggested a joint venture with PTC, but its bosses refused, saying there was no call for mobile telephones in Zimbabwe. So Masiyiwa decided to go it alone.
Although PTC had no plans to provide a mobile service itself, the state-owned firm insisted that its monopoly barred anyone else from doing so. Masiyiwa hired lawyers to test the legality of PTC’s obstruction. To many people’s surprise, a judge found that there was no law that explicitly forbade Masiyiwa from going ahead. The government, which saw telephones as a means of spying on people rather than as a business, was unhappy. The Supreme Court overturned the ruling.
A faint-hearted entrepreneur would have given up at this point. Masiyiwa, who had returned to his homeland from Wales after the end of white rule, appealed to the constitution instead. He argued that PTC’s behavior violated the constitutional right to free speech. At a time when most European countries still had equally obstructive telephone monopolies, this was a bold strategy. But it worked. In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled in Masiyiwa’s favor, and Econet, his firm, started setting up base stations around Harare. At this point, the president took an interest, and life grew uncomfortable for Masiyiwa. In February 1996, Robert Mugabe issued a decree banning private cellphone operations and promising two-year jail terms for offenders. Econet’s Swedish partners were forced to abandon their expensive equipment and retreat to their hotel rooms. But still Masiyiwa persevered.
He appealed to the Supreme Court on the ground that Mugabe’s decree was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court agreed. There was a tender for a private cellphone license. By this time, however, a number of political heavyweights were interested in the business. The license was awarded to Telecel, a consortium backed by, among others, Mugabe’s nephew. Masiyiwa sued for the right to see the details of Telecel’s bid, and sure enough, it met few of the technical specifications required in the tender.
Telecel’s license was suspended, but the telecommunications minister, whose husband was an old business partner of one of the main Telecel shareholders, restored it. Two months later, there was a cabinet reshuffle, and suddenly Masiyiwa found his path cleared. He won his license in December 1997, while Telecel’s was canceled. Go-betweens tried to bribe and then to intimidate Masiyiwa into sharing his business with Telecel’s backers. Despite death threats, he refused.
Finally, his tormentors gave up and left him alone. Econet quickly became the most popular Zimbabwean mobile operator and expanded into other African markets, too.
Masiyiwa told me his story in 1998, in his office in Harare. He was only thirty-seven and looked boyish and dapper in his mauve socks and designer stubble. A devout man, Masiyiwa gave all the credit for his success to God. On a more earthly plane, it clearly helped that the Zimbabwean judiciary was still honest and independent enough in the mid-1990s to provide a check on the government’s power. But the moral from this tale is that Zimbabwe would be a lot less poor if entrepreneurs like Masiyiwa did not have to fight the ruling party to stay in business.
Unfortunately for Zimbabwean businessfolk, many ruling-party bosses dislike them as a class. Like so many African liberators, Mugabe and his ZANU comrades grew up believing that, as Lenin argued, capitalism and colonialism were two sides of the same coin. At the time they were fighting for freedom, communist Russia had an empire that spanned eleven time zones, while America had Puerto Rico. But in colonial Africa, the idea seemed to make sense. Most of the big businesses were run by whites, so many African revolutionaries came to see business itself as a white occupation.
Like many African leaders, Mugabe thought that socialism fitted well with African traditions: land, for instance, was traditionally held in common in most African communities, with the chief deciding who could plough which patch.1 Perhaps most important, the idea of a powerful central state was congenial to those, like Mugabe, who wanted to rule without too many cumbersome restraints.
When the Berlin Wall fell, Mugabe and his comrades were forced to reconsider their beliefs. Many former socialists decided that capitalism was all right, so long as the ruling party received a cut. A program of “affirmative action” to increase the number of black-owned businesses in Zimbabwe turned into a massive handout of public-works contracts and banking licenses to Mugabe’s political allies. The old man himself never seemed interested in the nuts and bolts of commerce, but he hired a number of unsavory (and often white) managers and fixers to help run the business empire that ZANU built up using its political power.
Businessfolk without connections kept quiet in the hope of avoiding being shaken down. An Asian businessman in Bulawayo, over a lunch of hot and crispy peri-peri chicken, told me how he drove a rusty and dented old Datsun to avoid drawing attention to himself. “The government are a bunch of thieves. If I made it obvious that I have money, they’d try to steal it. So I keep my head down and act poor.”
Zimbabwe is now one of the few countries where even miserably paid manual workers see eye to eye with their bosses about the source of their ills. In 1998, I interviewed a then little-known union leader called Morgan Tsvangirai, who is now head of the opposition party. It took time to get past the steel security grilles outside his office. A couple of months previously, some men he claimed were from the CIO had broken in and tried to throw him out of his tenth-floor window. When I finally sat face to face with him, he told me things that I had never heard a shop steward say before. Instead of arguing that workers were being squeezed by greedy bosses, he blamed the government for grabbing half their wages in taxes and then eroding the value of what was left by printing too much money and causing inflation.
Workers were fed up, he said, with continually being told they should be grateful to Mugabe for liberating them from colonial rule. Independence was eighteen years ago, he scoffed. The problem today was that wages were falling and life was getting harder. And it was Mugabe’s fault. “The government needs to live within its means,” he told me. “The government borrows money to spend on salaries – it should cut the number of its employees instead.”
The regime was not merely crooked; it had lousy economic policies too. For example, Mugabe often sought to control prices, decreeing that some essential goods had to be sold at prices other than those voluntarily agreed upon by buyers and sellers. Several times, he decided that gasoline was “too expensive.” Mugabe feared that rising bus fares might spark riots, so he fixed the price of gasoline at less than it cost to import the stuff. Inevitably, the pumps ran dry. Workers could not get to work, and factories crunched to a halt. Often when I visited Harare, there were long lines of stationary cars outside every gas station, blocking the road. Hawkers sold the angry motorists hot coffee and bananas, and the MDC recruited new members from their ranks.
When the prices of basic foodstuffs went up, Mugabe fixed them too. Several times, he ordered bakers to sell loaves for less than they cost to bake and wondered why the stores ran out of bread.2 When the local currency collapsed, he tried to fix the exchange rate. Anyone swapping hard currency for Zimbabwe dollars was obliged to do so at a price that hugely overvalued the Zimbabwe dollar. Naturally, no one with hard currency wanted to be robbed, so the supply of American dollars dried up. Tractors seized up for want of imported spare parts, and a black market for greenbacks boomed.
In 2000, at the official exchange rate, an American dollar was worth fifty-five Zimbabwe dollars. But you could not possibly buy an American dollar at this rate. Black market dealers charged between eighty and one hundred Zim dollars for an American one. Two years later, the official rate was unchanged, but the black market rate had shot up to more than 1,000 to one. Only the government could buy real money at the official rate, and only by using the threat of force. Exporters were obliged to hand over a big chunk of their hard-currency revenues to the government at the official rate. In effect, the government was stealing their money, pushing some into bankruptcy, and forcing others to start smuggling.3
In a free market, prices are determined by haggling. The buyer wants to pay as little as possible; the seller wants to receive as much as possible. But if the buyer wants a pair of shoes more than he wants the $10 in his pocket, and the shoe-seller wants $10 more than he wants the shoes, they can agree on a price of $10. This is the principle by which African village markets have operated since the days when everyone was African. It’s simple, it’s voluntary, and both parties benefit. Marx called it “exploitation,” and many of Africa’s post-independence leaders agreed with him.
Mugabe’s lingering socialist sympathies provided him with a moral justification for ruling the whole country in much the same way as he commanded his guerrillas during the liberation war. Rather than signing laws and letting Zimbabweans live freely under them, he issued orders and expected them to be obeyed. This is a sensible way of running an army, but not a modern economy.
Price-fixing is a bit like jumping off a tall building shouting “I abolish the law of gravity.” You cannot simply decree that something is worth more than anyone will pay for it or less than sellers will accept for it. Mugabe’s price controls never brought Zimbabwe’s dreadful inflation under control, because they failed to address the real cause: the regime’s habit of printing money to pay its bills.
Zimbabwe’s public accounts came to look like a drug addict’s credit-card statement. In 2000, for example, the government spent twice as much as it received in tax revenues.4 To make up the shortfall, it borrowed money or printed it. Mugabe’s ministers denied that this was what they were doing. The finance minister, Simba Makoni, told me that the government was “living within its means.” But a quick visit to a cash machine in Harare suggested otherwise. The banknotes came out crisp and new, with consecutive serial numbers. Inflation was about 70 percent that year and had reached 526 percent by late 2003.
To be fair, when he first came to power, Mugabe spent a lot on worthwhile things such as schools and clinics. But he also lavished funds on an absurdly large bureaucracy and on his army and intelligence service. He doubtless thought this was money well spent, as it enabled him to put down an uprising in Matabeleland in the 1980s with relative ease, slaughtering 10,000–20,000 members of the dissident Ndebele tribe at much lighter cost to his own troops. But he could only maintain his big-spending ways as long as Zimbabwe received large amounts of foreign aid. The longer the Mugabe regime was in power, the more corrupt his cronies became, and the more erratic his policies became. Donors grew tired of handing over money and seeing it wasted or embezzled, so they became less generous.
From about 1997, public finances went haywire. Veterans of the liberation war rioted because a fund intended to compensate them had been looted by ZANU bigwigs. Mugabe calmed them with huge cash handouts, which pushed the budget into the red but bought the president some muscular support.
The same year, Mugabe promised to seize, without compensation, land belonging to white commercial farmers and give it to the landless poor. The Zim dollar plunged at the news. Then, even as the country was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, he decided to send a quarter of his army to fight a pointless war in far-off Congo. The only way he could pay for all this was to print more banknotes.
It is hard to explain to someone who has never lived with massive inflation just how destructive it is. For the Mugabe regime, printing money provided one short-term benefit – it enabled the treasury to pay the army’s wages at the end of the month. For ordinary Zimbabweans, however, high inflation spelled rapid impoverishment. For savers, it was like a huge additional tax. Anyone who left their money in the bank saw it munched to crumbs in a matter of months. Workers on fixed salaries saw their buying power waste away. By 2003, a laborer earning the minimum wage in Harare could not afford a typical bus fare into work each day even if he spent all his earnings on it. That was all. No clothes, fuel, medicine, or school fees. Since half of the workforce was unemployed, each wage earner usually supported a large extended family. Everyone ate less, and children dropped out of school to grow corn on patches of wasteland. Meanwhile, Mugabe’s wife had the bits of her mansion that displeased her knocked down and rebuilt and went shopping in London, until she was banned from Britain.
Zimbabwe’s inflation, on its own, would have made the country an unappealing place to do business – when prices are wildly unpredictable, it is hard to plan for the long term. But what spooked investors most was Mugabe’s open scorn for property rights. When the government started confiscating commercial farms, every shopkeeper, factory boss, and homeowner in Zimbabwe started worrying that they might be next.5
A socialist might well say: “So what?” Shopkeepers, factory bosses, and homeowners are all pampered bourgeois types. Redistribution may hurt them, but it helps the poor and needy. Well, not necessarily. When pursued as chaotically as in Zimbabwe, it helps hardly anyone.
In August 2000, I visited a farm where fifty-one black families had been resettled. The handover had taken place two years before, amid raucous celebrations. Mugabe arrived in one of his helicopters. Cows were slaughtered, beer gushed, crowds danced and chanted, and television cameras recorded the event for posterity. The new smallholders had been selected by lot, so most of them knew little about farming. The government promised them seeds, fertilizer, and financial help to raise their crops but delivered none of these things.
A local white commercial farmer, Andrew Dawson, stepped in. He offered to plough his new neighbors’ fields and to supply them with fertilizer. They could repay him, he said, at harvest time, interest-free, in corn. Twelve families took up his offer, but only two repaid their debts. The rest failed, for the most part, to raise any crops at all, despite ample rain. I drove around in a pick-up truck with Dawson, a stocky man in extra-short khaki shorts. We crossed from side to distant side of what had once been a productive tobacco farm, and he pointed out the resettled areas, which had almost all been reclaimed by wild grass, bushes, and baboons. Most of the resettlers had drifted away.
Some of those who had been given plots were not obviously poor or needy. One was a civil servant with a mobile phone, who rarely visited his land. When apes started eating his corn, he did not have time to do anything about it himself, so he asked Dawson to shoo them off.
Dawson told me that his farm was now earmarked for seizure, too. He had 300 employees, who each supported on average about five dependants. A band of self-proclaimed war veterans, who were acting as a private militia for President Mugabe, arrived before the June 2000 election and ordered him to sign over to them more land than he actually owned. They threatened his workers with death if they carried on working. They also threatened that if any MDC campaigners were seen in the area, they would kill Dawson and his family.
The tragedy is that land reform is necessary in Zimbabwe and has worked in the past. After independence, Britain forked out roughly $102 million to buy arable land and settle some 70,000 poor families on it. The land was bought on a willing-buyer, willing-seller basis. Recipients of land were selected, at least in theory, according to their agricultural skills: those likely to make the best use of the soil were given plots. There were problems in the implementation, but many small farmers took advantage of the opportunity to work for themselves and grew more prosperous. Before long, however, the process was corrupted. Donor support dried up when it was discovered that much of the land was being given or sold for woodshavings to wealthy cronies of the ruling party.6 When Vice-President Joshua Nkomo died in 1999, he owned stakes in sixteen farms.
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.”10Other 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 puts 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.
Term limits, enshrined in several African constitutions since the 1980s, are helping to change that. As their terms have run out, bad presidents, such as Zambia’s Frederick Chiluba and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi, have been forced out. And a couple of reformists, such as John Kufuor in Ghana and (one hopes) Mwai Kibaki in Kenya, have been ushered in. Term limits can be scrapped, as happened in Namibia. But changing constitutions is harder than changing laws, so they do act as a check on the big man’s power.
Liberal economic reforms (known as “structural adjustment”), however, have been hugely controversial. Critics point out that African countries that have attempted to embrace the free market at the behest of the World Bank have not grown much less poor, if at all.
This is true, and rather depressing. The problem is not the policies themselves, which are largely sound. Donors offer soft loans to distressed governments, which in return are supposed to spend within their means, abolish price controls, stop tethering entrepreneurs with red tape, and come up with plans for easing the plight of the poorest. The difficulty is that although many African leaders promise to do all these things in return for a cash injection, they rarely follow through. Donors are in effect asking vampire governments to give up the very powers that enable them to feed on their fellow citizens. Or, as one author put it: “In most cases in Africa, [structural adjustment] amounted to reorganising a bankrupt company and placing it, together with a massive infusion of new capital, in the hands of the same incompetent managers who ruined it in the first place.”15
Good policies cannot be imposed on unwilling governments. Several African leaders have grown skilled at enacting the letter of reform while sabotaging its spirit. State firms are “privatized,” but too often this means being sold for a trifle to cronies of the ruling party. Red tape is slashed but re-imposed informally. Sound budgets are passed but not adhered to. Belt-tightening measures hurt schools and hospitals, but ministers still get their Mercedes limousines, and the military budget is never cut. Sensible laws are passed but repealed or overridden once the aid check has been cashed. Robert Mugabe has broken countless promises to donors. Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s president for twenty-four years, grew adept at “selling” the same package of reforms several times.
The African vampire state is hard to reform because most necessary reforms would reduce the power and wealth of the people in charge. And the people in charge do not, on the whole, want to lose their privileges. Even business leaders, who you might expect to favor market reforms, are often so reliant on state patronage that they actively oppose them.
In most African countries, the best chance of proper reform comes with a change of government. New leaders are not always better. Even Mobutu’s successor, to everyone’s surprise, wasn’t. But when people can freely ditch their rulers, it gives those rulers an incentive to govern a bit better. Sadly, men like Robert Mugabe fight fiercely and cunningly to resist the popular will.
As I write, Zimbabwe is undergoing a severe food shortage. President Mugabe blames the weather, which has indeed been dry. But drought is turning to famine largely because commercial farmers, who saw the country safely through all previous droughts, have mostly been driven off their land.
Half the people of Zimbabwe are dependent on grain donated by foreigners to survive. To punish those who dared to vote against him, Mugabe has barred aid agencies from operating in areas where opposition support is highest and used the government’s legal monopoly on grain distribution to make sure that ruling-party members are fed, while the MDC are not. Some of his cronies do not even bother to hide what they are doing. Abednico Ncube, the deputy foreign minister, told villagers in Matabeleland: “As long as you value the government of the day, you will not starve, but we do not want people who vote for colonialists and then come to us when they want food. You cannot vote for the MDC and expect ZANU-PF to help you.… You have to vote for ZANU-PF candidates … before government starts rethinking your entitlement to this food aid.”16
Most chilling of all, Didymus Mutasa, the ZANU-PF organizing secretary, mused that “We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle. We don’t want all these extra people.”17
The population of Zimbabwe is about twelve million.