In Zimbabwe, Reform Has Opened the Door to Ruin
BY DANIEL PEPPER
c.2006 Newhouse News Service
http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/pepper060906.html
ZHAMPALI, Zimbabwe -- As soldiers rolled past Lot Dube's land and set
up camp in late November, they brought a blunt message.
"They told us, `We are taking away your fields from you,"' says Dube,
who has farmed these 10 acres 80 miles south of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's
second largest city, since 1982.
Dube, 63, said the soldiers now forbid him from growing tomatoes,
onions and sweet potatoes -- market vegetables he sells to raise cash
for his children's school fees -- and ordered him to plant only maize.
The entire harvest, he was told, must be sold to the Grain Marketing
Board so the government can purchase foreign currency.
Landlocked in southern Africa, Zimbabwe is roiling toward anarchy,
experts believe. As the world has watched the more immediate and more
violent problems in the northern part of the continent, Zimbabwe has
slid closer to what many believe will be an economic and humanitarian
catastrophe.
The crisis may represent the final stand for 82-year-old Robert
Mugabe, the controversial president who came to power in 1980 and has
won every election since.
Having survived wars, historic drought and accusations of corruption,
Mugabe now confronts perhaps his greatest challenge: annual inflation
running near 1,000 percent. To understand that type of economic
impact, consider: Some 8,000 miles away, in New Jersey, a $3 gallon of
gasoline would cost $30 more next summer.
As pressure builds on Mugabe to leave a post he assumed after the
reformation of the former Rhodesia, he is -- perhaps predictably --
strengthening his grip, opposing activists say.
He has ordered his military to fan out across several rural areas to
ensure the government's grain silos are full. In the cities, he has
appointed military commanders to top slots at the Reserve Bank, the
Electoral Commission, the Ministry of Energy, the Public Service
Commission and other key institutions.
So far, political opposition groups say they have been unable to gain
traction and organize mass demonstrations because Mugabe's security
officials have threatened to open fire on protesters. But experts warn
that without a viable political alternative, the anger boiling over
from rising prices, shortages of goods and services and abuses by
government officials will result in widespread civil unrest.
"Militarization is an admission that things have fallen apart and
national governance can no longer continue in a civilian mode," says
Jonathan Moyo, his country's only independent member of Parliament.
Moyo warns of a possible "slide into anarchy" or "even a Somalia
situation," referring to the East African nation controlled by rival
warlords.
Zimbabwe's economy has shrunk in each of the past six years and has
depended on international food aid since 2002, according to the United
Nations' World Food Program. Eighty percent of Zimbabweans are
unemployed, food and fuel are scarcer than ever and the country now
has one of the shortest life expectancy rates in the world -- 39
years.
Last month, the United Nations distributed emergency food aid to about
one-fourth of the 12.5 million people here, and said many citizens
were surviving on one meal or less a day. This year, despite the best
rains in 20 years, the government predicts the grain harvest will be
half as large as in 2001, when the controversial eviction of white
commercial farmers began.
Mugabe has spent much of his life leading an armed struggle against
white minority rule, first from prison and then as a guerrilla
commander in Mozambique. Later he appointed many of his close comrades
to top government positions.
He then launched his controversial and widely criticized land reform
program -- a redistribution of property from white-owned commercial
farmers to poor blacks.
Mike Carter's family was run off their 3,500-acre farm in 2002 despite
a high court injunction.
"It was obviously an unequal life," Carter says, but he insists his
farm employees were better off before a land reform that was meant to
right the wrongs of previous generations, when blacks were driven from
the most desirable land.
On his property, a government-recognized school once taught more than
300 children. Today, there are fewer than 50 students and a teacher
appeared drunk during a recent visit. A brigadier general now lives in
Carter's farmhouse.
"The redistribution of land was a way of extending Mugabe's
patronage," Carter says.
He keeps in touch with his black former farm manager, Philip Mavhura,
with whom he grew up.
Standing in a fallow field of green and purple weeds on Carter's old
farm, Mavhura bemoans the rampant inflation. "We thought that things
would be good, but now it is worse than before," Mavhura says. "The
price of fertilizer, diesel, it was very cheap back then. Now it's
hardly available."
The military presence in this part of the country is no coincidence to
many.
"The army has targeted areas that are potential opposition
strongholds, those farmers that have voted for the opposition," says
Gordon Moyo, leader of an opposition pressure group, Bulawayo Agenda,
and no relation to Jonathan Moyo. "It's an act of intimidation and a
violation of human rights of those people."
Ephraim Masawi, Zimbabwe's deputy secretary for information, says
reports of soldiers destroying farmers' vegetables had "never come to
my ears."
"These people have invited the army to try to help them because some
have no collateral to go to the bank for loans," Masawi adds.
For many farmers and critics of Mugabe, the military presence is
reminiscent of the mid-1980s, when a North Korean-trained unit of the
Zimbabwean army massacred up to 20,000 Ndebele. The Ndebele are the
predominant ethnic group in the southern region, and the massacre
crushed support for an alternative to Mugabe's political party.
Earlier this month, the pro-government Herald newspaper announced a
likely constitutional amendment for Mugabe to remain in power until
2010, two years past the next scheduled presidential election.
None of this is helping the economy, critics say.
"The economy will only turn around when you get competent and
experienced people running it, not the military," says David Coltart,
a member of Parliament with the opposition Movement for Democratic
Change. "The appointment of military people to run things like the
railroads will only speed up the demise of the regime."
There is a popular joke here: A citizen offers a $5,000 bribe to a top
army general with political clout, and the official responds, "What
can I do with just $5,000?"
"It is robber baron stuff of the highest order," says John Robertson,
an independent economist in the capital, Harare. "It's a pirate ship
with Robert Mugabe as the captain. It's an exciting, profitable ride
while it lasts, but inflation is the consequence."
As evidence, Robertson says he purchased his one-story, white suburban
home in 1976 for 26,000 Zimbabwean dollars. Today it would cost a few
billion.
At the same time, tourist destinations such as Victoria Falls are
eerily empty, even as neighboring Zambia experiences a boon in its
tourism industry. A cup of tea that as recently as last year cost
12,000 Zimbabwean dollars now costs a quarter-million. Supermarket
shelves are stocked with goods too expensive to purchase.
"We are calling it a silent genocide because, like everything in
Zimbabwe, it's hidden," says Carter, the former commercial farmer.
As the economic crisis deepens, the government has responded by
printing more paper money, although in the past two years it has run
out of foreign currency for which to purchase the paper and ink on
which Zimbabwe's bank notes are printed. Experts believe the increased
printing of money is likely to spur only greater inflation. "It is a
way of buying off the soldiers," Gordon Moyo says. "Mugabe is a
terrified man."
Back in the southern fields, Dube says soldiers are threatening and
beating residents -- women as well as men -- who have not obeyed
orders.
"They don't know anything about farming," Dube says. "They say they
want to end hunger in Zimbabwe. But I think they want to take the
fields for their own use."
On a recent drive through the irrigated fields, soldiers could be seen
guarding roads and footpaths and driving tractors -- as close as they
come to farming.
Dube's neighbor, Gabrial Nkala, 55, who has been farming his plot
since 1980, already seems resigned to his fate. "We need agriculture
exports, not soldiers," Nkala says. "But it seems they are here for a
very long time."
June 9, 2006
--
"Science is the record of dead religions." -- Oscar Wilde
"There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to
whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is
impossible." -- Jack Vance
"Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net
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