Patrick Bond
In
Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe appears to have taken leave of his senses,
potentially plunging his country of 12 million into civil war. What does this
have to do with the mid-April protests against the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund?
Confusingly,
Mugabe excels in IMF-bashing, famously telling Fund staff to "Shut
up!" late last year. Yet from independence in 1980 until quite recently, he
followed their advice unfailingly. Indeed, just five years ago, Zimbabwe was
Washington’s newest African "success story," as Harare adopted
economic policies promoted by Bank and IMF lenders, and even conducted joint
military exercises with the Pentagon.
Things
fell apart quickly. Southern African diplomats are shaking their heads in
frustration at Mugabe’s quick-shattering Good Friday promises–made to Thabo
Mbeki and other local leaders–to tone down racial rhetoric, reverse land
invasions of 1,000 white farms, and sort out financial matters with the Brits,
IMF and donor governments.
Is
Mugabe deranged, or instead playing out a tragic logic partially of his own
making, but partially imposed from above? Under the very real threat of losing
parliament to the labor-led Movement for Democratic Change in coming elections,
he resorts to authoritarian populism: egging on a few thousand land invaders so
as to restore memories of the 1965-80 struggle against Rhodesian colonialism, a
period when his Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) truly represented a mass-
popular movement dedicated to reversing settler-colonial land ownership.
Yet
early on, perceptive ZANU watchers identified two major problems: the party’s
class character and its likely realignment towards foreign capital.
Political
scientist Rudi Murapa (currently president of Africa University, Zimbabwe’s
second-largest) wrote in 1977 of an alliance between "a politically
ambitious petit-bourgeois leadership, a dependent and desperate proletariat and
a brutally exploited and basically uninitiated peasantry."
Forecast
Murapa, "After national liberation, the petit-bourgeois leadership can
abandon its alliance with the workers and peasants and emerge as the new ruling
class by gaining certain concessions from both foreign and local capital and, in
fact, forming a new alliance with these forces which they will need to stay in
power. Of course, lip service commitment, a la Kenya, to the masses, will be
made."
Accusations
that ZANU "sold out" are justifiable, technically–given not only the
steady rise in corruption, but the fact that most of the land and other wealth
redistributed since 1980 has gone to cronies not the masses–yet are deeply
unsatisfying. The same will be said of the African National Congress, as it was
in Zambia of Kenneth Kaunda and likewise his successor Frederick Chiluba.
However,
assailing petit-bourgeois acquisitiveness– which also motivated white
Zimbabweans to loot their compatriots’ land and labor beginning in 1890–risks
downplaying the second factor: the role of global financial pressure.
Once
anti-Rhodesia financial sanctions were lifted, Zimbabwe made bad policy choices
and succumbed to armtwisting by Washington. Finance minister Bernard Chidzero
(who later chaired the IMF/Bank Development Committee) borrowed massively at the
outset, figuring that repayments–which required 16% of export earnings in
1983–would, he insisted, "decline sharply until we estimate it will be
about 4% within the next few years."
The
main lender, the World Bank, concurred: "The debt service ratios should
begin to decline after 1984 even with large amounts of additional external
borrowing." This was the economic equivalent of a sucker-punch, for in
reality, Zimbabwe’s debt servicing spiralled up to an untenable 37% of export
earnings by 1987.
Loan
conditions quickly emerged. By 1985, the IMF pressured Mugabe to cut education
spending, and in 1986 food subsidies fell to two-thirds of 1981 levels.
Similarly,
genuine land reform was stymied not only by the "willing-seller,
willing-buyer" compromise with Ian Smith’s Rhodesians at Lancaster House,
but by the World Bank’s alternative: showering peasants with unaffordable
micro-loans. From a tiny base in 1980, the Bank’s main partner agency granted 94
000 loans by 1987. But without structural change in agricultural markets, the
Bank strategy floundered, as 80% of borrowers defaulted in 1988 notwithstanding
good rains.
Analyst
Ibbo Mandaza lamented in 1986, "International finance capital has, since
the Lancaster House Agreement, been the major factor in the internal and
external policies of the state in Zimbabwe."
Agreed
Thandike Mkandawire, head of the Geneva-based United Nations Research Institute
for Social Development, "It seems the government was too anxious to
establish its credentials with the financial world."
The
macroeconomic situation worsened when Chidzero persuaded Mugabe to ditch
Rhodesian-era regulatory controls on prices and foreign trade/financial flows,
liberalizing the economy through an Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP)
in 1991. ESAP was supposedly "homegrown," but World Bank staff drafted
much of the document, which was substantively identical to those imposed across
Africa during the 1980s-90s.
ESAP
brought immediate, unprecedented increases in interest rates and inflation,
which were exacerbated (but not caused) by droughts in 1992 and 1995. As money
drained from the country, the stock market plummeted by 65% in late 1991 and
manufacturing output declined by 40% over the subsequent four years. Amazingly,
the Bank’s 1995 evaluation of ESAP declared it "highly satisfactory"
(the highest mark possible).
More
vulnerable than ever before, Zimbabwe’s currency then came under fierce attack
during the 1997 East Asian crisis, falling 74% during one four-hour raid after
Mugabe joined the DRC conflict and paid generous pensions to protesting
liberation war vets.
Reacting
to growing unpopularity and two Harare food riots, Mugabe finally invoked three
pro-poor policies in 1997-98: reimposition of price controls on staple foods,
conversion of corporate foreign exchange accounts to local currency, and steep
luxury import taxes. (He also foolishly cemented the Zimbabwe dollar’s value too
high.)
The
IMF and donors are explicitly withholding hard currency until these three
policies are reversed. So Zimbabwe spends its hard currency repaying foreign
lenders, and can’t afford to import petrol. The harder the economic pressure
bites, the more Mugabe staggers politically.
What
lessons from Harare? Evade hard-selling foreign bankers. More aggressively–and
honestly–redistribute wealth and land. And avoid structural adjustment policies
that worsen inequality, stagnation and vulnerability. Will leaders in the
Movement for Democratic Change, and for that matter also in Pretoria, take heed?
Regardless,
more protesters–including Harare’s church-based, anti-debt activists–are
joining the global campaign to shut the IMF and World Bank, precisely because of
mounting evidence of this kind, from Zimbabwe and across the Third World.
Johannesburg-based
academic Patrick Bond is active in the Jubilee 2000 movement, and authored
Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment (Africa
World Press, 1998) and Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in
South Africa (Pluto Press, 2000).
Patrick
Bond email: [email protected] phone: 2711-614-8088 home: 51 Somerset Road,
Kensington 2094 South Africa work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate
School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South
Africa email: [email protected] phone: 2711-488-5917 fax:
2711-484-2729