Zimbabwe: anarchy in four, says the West

Zimbabwe: anarchy in four, says the West

Stephen Bevan in Pretoria, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:42am BST 19/08/2007

The economy of Zimbabwe is facing total collapse within four months, leaving the country facing a slide into Congo-style anarchy, The Sunday Telegraph has been told.

Western officials fear the business, farming and financial sectors may be crippled by Christmas, triggering a collapse of government control that could leave the country prey to warlords and ignite long-suppressed tribal tensions.

80 per cent of Zimbabweans live below the poverty line and the economy is close to total collapse The stark warning of the scale of the crisis comes despite the welcome given to Mr Mugabe by fellow African leaders at a summit in neighbouring Zambia last week, where critics had hoped he might be pressurised into changing his policies.
It also follows reports that Britain's military is reviewing contingency plans to evacuate more than 20,000 Britons, were any widespread state of emergency to occur.

Speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject, one Western official said: "It is hard to be definitive, but probably within months, by the end of the year, we will see the formal economy cease to work."

He added: "One of the great dangers in all this, if Mugabe hangs on for much longer, is that the country will slip from authoritarianism to anarchy, the government will lose control of the provinces, it will lose control of the towns and you will have a situation where the central authority's writ no longer holds."

Asked which other African nation Zimbabwe might end up resembling under a worst-case scenario, the official cited as an example the Democratic Republic of Congo (the former Zaire), beset for years by famine, civil war and inter-ethnic conflict.

There are also fears that a breakdown in law and order could lead to an outbreak of ethnic conflict between Zimbabwe's two main tribes, Mugabe's own Shona and the Ndebele in the southwest.

Some political groups are already talking about regime change as an opportunity to press for independence, while more extreme elements have voiced agendas that could amount to "ethnic cleansing".

The official added that, because of Mr Mugabe's slum clearance programme, -Zimbabwe's informal subsistence economy, made up largely of street traders, hawkers and black marketeers, had lost much its ability to absorb shocks from the government's three-month price freeze, which has emptied shop shelves of stocks.
Poverty was now endemic, he said, with 80 per cent of people living "below any definition of the poverty line."

The fear among Western officials is that as Zimbabwe sinks deeper into crisis, the task of rebuilding, if or when Mugabe does go, is being made ever more difficult.
The infrastructure is breaking down after years of no investment, with both Bulawayo and parts of the capital, Harare, virtually without water supplies.
The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority generates barely a fifth of the country's needs and neighbouring countries' generating companies are now refusing to sell to Zimbabwe except for cash.

John Robertson, a Harare-based independent economist, said the prediction that the formal economy would cease to function within four months might even be optimistic.

"We could be a matter of a month or two away from that kind of collapse, and some would tell you that it's happened already," he said. "They can't pay the wages that would be necessary for people to carry on working, because the price at which they're allowed to sell goods is way below the production costs."
The most immediate effect of the worsening economic situation is escalating migration.

The Western official said that four million Zimbabweans, or around one third of the population, had already left the country, with "another two million packing their cases to leave", mostly to South Africa. The "flight rather than fight" strategy, however, suggests a mass uprising against Mr Mugabe is unlikely.

While Western governments have publicly backed attempts by South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki to mediate between the Zanu PF government and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in a bid to ease the political crisis, there was little sign of a breakthrough at last week's 14-nation Southern African Development Community summit in Zambia.

Privately, Western officials now say that "the time for talking is past", and that reconciliation between government and opposition is unlikely.

Zimbabwe's neighbours now had to decide whether they were willing to tell Mr Mugabe that his policies were not acceptable, said the official.

"We're not talking about tanks across Beit Bridge (the border post with South Africa) but they do have to decide whether there is a stick in this equation and what that stick should be," he said.

Zimbabwe's horrors

Jeff Jacoby
Zimbabwe's horrors
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist August 12, 2007
NO ONE is surprised when a Roman Catholic bishop condemns the violence of war. But when was the last time you heard of one pleading for a military invasion?

Zimbabwe's leading cleric has been doing just that in recent weeks, imploring Great Britain to invade its former colony and oust Robert Mugabe, the dictator whose brutal misrule has reduced a once-flourishing country to desperation, starvation, and death.

Given the "massive risk to life" the regime poses, says Pius Ncube, the archbishop of Bulawayo, "I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe. We should do it ourselves but there's too much fear. I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready." Millions of Zimbabweans have fled the country, and those who remain tend to be hungry, impoverished, and intimidated by Mugabe and his goons. "How can you expect people to rise up," Ncube asks, "when even our church services are attended by state intelligence people?"

The archbishop is no saber-rattler. But given the misery and murder spawned by Mugabe and his fascist Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, it is immoral not to fight them. "If you are no longer serving your people and are choosing death for them," says Ncube, "then certainly . . . stronger nations have a right to put you down."

Considering that "stronger nations" have been unwilling to put down Omar al-Bashir, head of the Sudanese regime that is perpetrating genocide in Darfur, the likelihood that they will muster the fortitude to drive Mugabe from power in Zimbabwe is, in a word, nil. Instead they will go on issuing empty condemnations, like the Bush administration's recent statement that it "deplores actions taken by the Mugabe regime," but is "ready to engage a new Zimbabwean government committed to democracy, human rights, sound economic policy, and the rule of law."

Unfortunately, hollow pieties from the free world will not end the chaos and cruelty that have turned Zimbabwe into a hellhole. In the nation once known as the breadbasket of Africa, Mugabe's deranged policies are starving millions. In a land many hoped would be a model of postcolonial self-government, opposition politicians are beaten and imprisoned and elections are blatantly rigged to keep ZANU-PF in power. In a country where a decade ago the currency traded at the rate of eight Zimbabwe dollars to $1, it now takes 200,000 Zimbabwe dollars to buy a single American dollar.

The wretchedness that is Mugabe's Zimbabwe was captured recently by New York Times reporter Michael Wines, who described what happened when the dictator -- in the face of hyperinflation estimated at more than 10,000 percent a year -- commanded merchants nationwide to cut their prices in half or face jail time and the confiscation of their businesses:
"Bread, sugar, and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean's diet, have vanished. . . . Meat is virtually nonexistent . . . Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic. Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss . . . As many as 4,000 businesspeople have been arrested, fined, or jailed."
Eighty percent of Zimbabwe's adults are now unemployed. Life expectancy has plummeted to 36 years. The death rate for children 5 and under has soared 65 percent since 1990. While Mugabe's kleptocratic cronies and thugs drive expensive cars, build elaborate mansions, and amass fortunes by manipulating the currency market, ordinary citizens are reduced to unspeakable degradation. Schoolteachers sell themselves for sex in order to feed their children, the Times of London reports. A man in Rushinga was convicted of killing his 10-year-old son with an ax handle for eating four mice meant for the family's lunch. One-time accountants, bankers, headmasters, now refugees in South Africa, survive through menial labor or begging in the streets.

Yet Mugabe, with his Hitler-style moustache and armed loyalists, remains firmly in control.
"Anyone who is ready to starve his people to death for the sake of power is a murderer," Archbishop Ncube says. "What more does he have to do?"
Countless lives could be saved, and incalculable suffering ended, if Mugabe were forced from power. A detachment of US Marines, I wrote on this page in 2002, could do the job on its lunch break. The British could do it. South Africa could do it.
But of course no one will do anything. The death toll in Zimbabwe will continue to mount; the misery will continue to spread; the horror stories will continue to multiply. Cry, the beloved country.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

Mugabe's decree on prices puts Zimbabwe economy in a tailspin

Mugabe's decree on prices puts Zimbabwe economy in a tailspin
By Michael Wines
Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Source: International Herald Tribune

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe has ruled over this benighted country, his every wish endorsed by Parliament and implemented by the police and military, for more than 27 years. It appears, however, that not even an unchallenged autocrat can repeal the laws of supply and demand.

One month after Mugabe decreed just that, commanding merchants nationwide to counter 10,000-percent-a-year hyperinflation by slashing prices by half and more, Zimbabwe's economy is at a halt.

Essentials like bread, sugar and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean's diet, have vanished, seized by mobs of bargain-hunters who denuded stores like locusts in wheat fields. Meat is nonexistent. Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic.

Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl, because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss. Businesses are laying off workers or reducing their hours.
Zimbabwe's economy has been shrinking since 2000, buffeted by political turmoil, capital flight and mismanagement. Never has it been in a more dire state than now, business executives say.
"The last seven years, I haven't panicked at all. I always figured that where there's a will, there's a way, and I'd make some sort of plan," said one Bulawayo clothing manufacturer who, like most people, refused to be identified for fear of retaliation by the government. "Now I'm not so sure. I think there's a real collapse coming."

Zimbabwe's vast underclass, the majority of its 10 or 11 million people, is perhaps less affected by this latest economic shock, simply because it has long been unable to afford most food anyway. The rural poor survive on whatever they can grow. Urban and rural poor alike stay afloat with food and money sent by the two million or more Zimbabweans who have fled abroad. Remittances are so vital that in some rural areas, the South African rand has replaced Zimbabwe's worthless dollar as the currency of choice.

Rather, it is the middle class, which had muddled through the last seven years of decline, that is likely to feel the brunt. Factory layoffs and slowdowns are bringing new poverty to the 15 percent or 20 percent of adult Zimbabweans who still have jobs. Pensioners, whose fixed incomes already have been gutted by hyperinflation, now find that no amount of money can purchase some staples.

Private doctors said in interviews that diseases of poverty, including tuberculosis and malnutrition, are starting to appear among their patients, including the minority whites who once comprised the wealthy class.

"Considerations of color have begun to blur very much," said one Bulawayo doctor whose average patient is a white business manager. "White people will tell you, a little embarrassed and shy, that they're eating nothing but sadza," or corn meal porridge, the doctor said. "They've been reduced to the diet of the rural poor."

Bulawayo, whose 700,000 or more people make it Zimbabwe's second-largest city, painfully reflects the impact both of Zimbabwe's long economic descent and of the latest price-slashing. Most of the goods available on store shelves this week were those that people did not need or could not afford - dog biscuits; ketchup; toilet paper, which has become a luxury here; gin; onions; cookies.

At city-center and suburban locations of TM, a major supermarket chain, aisles of meat coolers were empty save a few plastic bags of dog meat. Flour, sugar, cooking oil, corn meal and other basics were not to be found. A long line hugged the rear of one store, waiting for a delivery of the few loaves of bread that a baker provided to stay in compliance with the price directive.
Amid the chaos, the government remains resolute. Mugabe has cast the price cuts as a strike not against hyperinflation, but against profiteering businesses who, he says, are part of a Western conspiracy to re-impose colonial rule. In that view, hyperinflation is part of their strategy; price rollbacks are the government's countermeasure.

Mugabe's June 26 decree, much of which was later enacted into law, was draconian: businesses were ordered to reduce their prices to the levels existing on June 18, generally by about 50 percent. Shop owners who refused to comply would be jailed. Stores that closed or refused to restock goods would be taken over by the government.

"We are at war. We will not allow shelves to be empty," one of Mugabe's vice presidents, Joseph Msika, said in a July 18 speech.

Since then, gangs of price inspectors have patrolled shops and factories, imposing sometimes-arbitrary price reductions, and as many as 4,000 businesspeople have been arrested, fined or jailed. State-run newspapers publish lists of telephone numbers on their front pages daily, exhorting citizens to report merchants whose prices exceed dictates.
Ordinary citizens initially greeted the price cuts with a euphoric - and short-lived - shopping spree. However, merchants and the government's many critics say that much of the cut-rate merchandise has not been snapped up by ordinary citizens, but by the police, soldiers and members of Mugabe's ruling party who have been tipped off to the price inspectors' rounds.
In Plumtree, a hamlet near the border with Botswana, a line of shoppers gathered outside a shoe store last week even before opening hours, the area's member of Parliament, Moses Mzila-Ndlovu, said this week. As the store opened, government inspectors appeared - and the throng followed them in, buying up stock as it was marked down.

"It's theft, outright theft," Mzila said. "Some of them had big cars, shiny, sparkling double-cabs, and they filled them up with shoes and just drove away."
Notes: