SPARE A THOUGHT FOR ZIMBABWE

Winston Churchill once intoned “When you are going through hell, keep going.” If you think about it, you really have no choice. Or maybe you can lie down and die.

Well Zimbabwe and its people, don’t have a choice but to keep going through the hell they are in.

At the end of last year it was reported that 60 percent of Zimbabweans do not have adequate food. 

"People are missing meals not out of some adherence to the latest fad. Drought had caused crop failure. The prices of bread and maize, staples of the Zimbabwean diet, had gone up by as much twenty times in the last half of 2019.

As if that was not enough, aggravating the already dire situation, there is a shortage of foreign currency, inflation is back up in triple digits, fuel shortages persist and livestock losses are apocalyptic.

The total collapse of the economy, on the late Robert Mugabe’s watch over the last two decades, means the country doesn’t even have its own currency. The US dollar, South African Rand and hodge podge of other hard currencies are used as everyday mediums of exchange.

This is ironic because the southern Africa’s agriculture and mineral industries are in intensive care and there is not enough hard currency to go around.

The implications for the everyday man is as described above. The government has no control of its monetary policy and they are letting people die of hunger, because they cannot muster a disaster relief effort.

In Uganda if we had a drought on the scale that Zimbabwe is now facing, in the worst scenario we can print shillings to buy relief food. The inflation we can fight later. Zimbabwe doesn’t have that luxury.

"This story is even more tragic when you remember that Zimbabwe was the bread basket of the region. With their agriculture industry deep as it was wide, with a huge commercial production and vibrant agro-processing sectors, its incomprehensible that Zimbabwe finds itself where it is now...

They got to this point because Mugabe, facing growing opposition to his rule, pointed at the while commercial sector and turned on them, as a way to win cheap political marks. In the process he gutted the pillars of the country’s economy.

It is true that the colonialist dispossessed the native Zimbabweans of their land—it was estimated that the white farmers, who made up less than a tenth of the population, controlled more than two thirds the arable land at the height of their power.

No one can argue against the historical injustices meted upon the Zimbabweans by the colonialists and white minority government up to 1980.

However, a visionary leader would have assessed the situation and worked out that to redress those injustices, they would have to leverage the productive capacity built over decades to uplift his people. 

Done effectively and efficiently, the ordinary Zimbabwean would have seen a quick enough improvement in his standard of living. Eventually a shift of capital would even things out between the races.

The populist thing of course, would be to drive the white settlers into the sea, or at least over the border – Zimbabwe is landlocked, and divide the spoils among the frothing-at-the-mouth masses. 

There would be a temporary excitement as the locals gouged themselves on their erstwhile oppressors’ wine collections, choice livestock and prance around in their finest gowns.

The reality would catch up soon enough, when they cleared out the stock and couldn’t replenish it. As happened in Zimbabwe, and Uganda before that, in a manner of speaking.

"Mugabe was spared by death. Spared from seeing how deep Zimbabweans are going to have to sink before it gets better....

We know the formula. We have experienced it first hand in Uganda.

To begin with government is going to have to go bowl in hand to foreign capitals to beg for money to feed its people. Then they are going to try and resuscitate the abandoned industries, to try and generate some economic activity. They will fail and flog them off or return them to their rightful owners. They are going to do this in context of an austerity program – minimal spending on social services. This is necessary to bring inflation under control. In order to further accelerate economic growth, they are going to have to fling open the doors to the economy, bend over backwards to attract foreign investment. Because they do not have the internal capacity to do it themselves.

There will be much gnashing of teeth and renting of cloth in the hills and plains of Zimbabwe, before the light at the end of the tunnel comes into view.

Meanwhile there will be populists and demagogues inside and outside Zimbabwe criticizing the drastic measures the government will be forced to carry out, to get the country back on track. These dissenters will propose alternative, more benign policies, that look good on paper but have no practical chance of success.

It is impossible to see how this turnaround can be achieved in the context of democracy. It didn’t happen in post World War I Germany nor post world war II Japan or South Korea.

"For Zimbabwe to pull itself up by the bootstraps, there will have to be a singleness of purpose, an unbendable resolve and immeasurable sacrifice, all of which would be hard to marshall in a liberal setting...

While we spare a prayer for Zimbabwe, let us not delude ourselves that a like implosion, cannot visited upon us if we subvert the laws of economics for political expediency.