The people of Zimbabwe were still fighting a war of independence almost thirty
years after it was nominally granted in 1980 with the signing of the Lancaster
House Agreement. The negotiating team for the newly unified Patriotic Front led
by Robert Mugabe's Shona dominated ZANU and Joshua Nkoma's Ndebele dominated
ZAPU received verbal assurances from the then chairman of the discussions, Lord
Carlisle, that the British Government would provide compensation to white
farmers whose farms were required for redistribution among the colonially
dispossessed black population. A ten-year hiatus was agreed upon whereby the
bitter pill of the 'willing-seller' clause could then be constitutionally
amended by the Zimbabwean government. By the time the right to compulsorily
purchase was introduced in the 1992 Land Acquisition Act, 70% of the richest and
most productive land still lay in the hands of only 4,500 white commercial
farmers while six million African farmers eked out a precarious existence on
small farms averaging 3 hectares in the increasingly barren communal areas,
formerly known as the 'native reserves'. Thomas Packenham in the Scramble for
Africa gives us his description of how this state of affairs came into
being;
"In October 1893 British troops and volunteers crossed into
King Lobengula's core territory of Matabeleland. The entire region rapidly fell
into their hands as they inflicted heavy casualties on the Ndebele. Under terms
of the resulting Victoria Agreement, each volunteer was entitled to 6,000 acres
of land. Rather than an organized division of land, there was instead a mad race
to grab the best land, and within a year 10,000 square miles of the most fertile
land had been seized from its inhabitants. White settlers confiscated most of
the Ndebele's cattle in the process, a devastating loss to a cattle-ranching
society such as the Ndebele. The large tracts of land now run by relatively few
white settlers required workers, and the Ndebele became forced laborers on the
land they once owned, essentially treated as slaves. The Shona also saw their
cattle confiscated by white settlers, and were driven into poverty through the
imposition of onerous taxes by the new British rulers. The inevitable uprising
by the dispossessed Ndebele and Shona in 1896 was finally crushed over one year
later by the British at the cost of 8,000 African lives. The region was
established as a new colony in the British realm and named Rhodesia in honor of
Cecil Rhodes "
Greg Elich in Zimbabwe Under Siege
continues the story;
"Passage of the Native Reserves Order in 1899
created reserves on the most arid land, on which the indigenous inhabitants were
to be herded. By 1905, nearly half of the indigenous population was confined to
reserves. From 1930 onwards, Africans were not allowed to own land outside of
the barren reserves. During the twenty-year period beginning in 1935, the
Rhodesian regime forced an additional 67,000 African families from their homes
and transported them to the reserves. As the Africans were beaten and herded
into trucks at gunpoint, their homes were levelled by bulldozers. The reserves
soon became overcrowded with people and cattle, and the colonial government
decreed in 1944 that 49 of the reserves were overstocked. During the next
thirty-some years, well over one million cattle in the reserves were either
killed or confiscated for use by white settlers. As the long liberation struggle
grew, Rhodesian Security Forces became increasingly repressive, executing
civilians, burning villages and crops and shooting cattle"
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/elich004.html
'Independence'
therefore, was always somewhat illusory as long as these structural disparities
in land ownership sustained the economic hegemony of an elite non-indigenous
kleptocracy whose interests were safeguarded by the UK and US via IMF and World
Bank policies. Powerful white landowners included members of the British House
of Lords and most importantly the richest and most powerful man in Africa, who
is not a 'tin-pot dictator' but DeBeers CEO and non-executive director of
Anglo-American, Nicky Oppenheimer, who has, according to Forbes an estimated
personal fortune of $6.05 billion. He is the grandson of Ernest Oppenheimer, who
succeeded Cecil Rhodes as carteliser-in-chief of Africa's most lucrative natural
resource and founded in 1917 with John Pierpoint Morgan jnr. the Anglo-American
Corporation which at the time of his death in 1957 controlled 95% of the world's
supply of diamond production.
Today, Anglo-American, whose net income in
2007 was over $7 billion has several prominent subsidiaries including DeBeers
itself, the world's largest diamond producer; Anglogold Ashanti, one of the
world's largest gold producers and Anglo Platinum, the world's largest producer
of platinum. Anglo-American, 51% of whose shares are held by American citizens
have operations right across Africa including Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia,
South Africa and Botswana. In 2000, 20yrs after Zimbabwean 'independence' the
Oppenheimer family 'ranch', which is more of a country within a country, still
sat proudly in the midst of ten thousand square kilometres (2.4 million
hectares) of prime arable farmland. It is impossible to conceive that issuing a
compulsory acquisition order as Robert Mugabe did for this particular property
would do anything but invite all the hell and damnation that the sustained wrath
of Africa's most powerful dynasty could muster.
There is an unwritten
rule book in the case of all too many 'developing' countries whereby the
incumbent indigenous rulers can ensure for themselves a life of relative peace,
repose and prosperity merely by allowing an agreed proportion of their country's
wealth to be siphoned away by foreign interests usually in exchange for military
and financial support and the all-important collusive silence of the
international media in the inevitable brutality used to quell opposition. In the
early 90's after no meaningful land reform had taken place, and after none of
the feared pogroms against whites, and following Zimbabwe's acceptance of the
IMF's Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in 1991, Mugabe had all the
appearances of being 'our kind of guy'. So much so that he was given a
knighthood in 1994 and was much in demand by international media outlets for his
predominantly honest, eloquent and insightful appraisals of various world
events.
Of all African leaders he was the one which Europeans in
particular could most readily identify. He had a law degree from the University
of London (gained during his eleven years imprisoned by Ian Smith's apartheid
Rhodesia), spoke with a surprisingly strong British accent and had inherited
many of the affectations of the 'English gentleman'. 'All Zimbabweans should
play cricket', he once declared. 'We should be a nation of
gentleman'.
However, SAP, as for many African countries turned out to be
a disaster for Zimbabwe. It offered a far too rigid formula of deregulation,
privitisation, cuts in government spending, crippling taxation hikes and
responded to the inevitable inflationary pressures by forcing through currency
devaluations which conveniently made their exports dirt cheap for US and
European purchasers. SAP also subscribed to the theory of 'comparative
advantage' which asserts that an economy is better off 'specialising' in what
its good at instead of diversifying its export base. It was this precise policy
of cash-crop intensification to the detriment of nurturing food staples which
caused the great Bengal famine of 1770 by the British East India Company and I'm
really not in any position at present to register anything but my
incomprehension at its wholesale adoption at this point in the 20th century. As
a consequence, subsidies were withdrawn from independent small-holders and
instead focused on the development of this large-scale, heavily industrialised
water table draining 'monoculture' agriculture. This left many 'developing'
countries overly reliant on a favourable international stock price for those few
commodities which became their specialised 'comparative advantage'. With the
corporate mergers of the 90's in agro-industry and mining and the vertical
integration of the supply chain the theory of comparative advantage has only
exposed many developing countries to the price cartels of multinational
purchasers.
Staple export commodities such as sugar, tea, cocoa and
cotton were up until very recently actually cheaper in non-adjusted terms than
they were twenty years ago. If you find that hard to believe, given the
escalating prices we pay in our supermarkets for these items and their
derivatives (our clothes, half our food) just check out the historical price
record on, for instance, the Mombassa commodity exchange. The fairtrade movement
has certainly brought awareness of the immense vampirism involved here and they
justifiably point to the 'nasty' corporations, however, their critique too often
falls short of their own governments by whom they are largely funded, for it is
they after all who had nominated the very IMF and World Bank officials who had
engineered this transnational heist to begin with.
Why would 'developing'
countries such as Zimbabwe have allowed their economies to be 'restructured' in
such an evidently detrimental fashion? First of all, the newly decolonised
states of the 60's, 70's and 80's were cash-strapped either through capital
flight, wars of independence or civil wars where opposing sides were used as
proxies in the 'Grand Game' between the USSR and the United States. Some, such
as Zimbabwe, saw the futility of this stance and joined the Non-Aligned
Movement, a block of 77 countries who, through their unity and under the
chairmanship of Robert Mugabe succeeded, via UNCTAD, in setting price controls
on international commodity fluctuations until that institution was effectively
paralysed by the then G7 and replaced by the World Trade Organisation.
The oil crises of the seventies meant many Western banks were awash with
Saudi
petrodollars and were happy to find many desperate borrowers in Africa,
Latin America and south east Asia, regardless of the punitive interest rates
demanded. With the boost to neoliberalism provided by the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the fracturing of the Soviet Union, the IMF was now free to step fully
into the breach by offering 'help' with balance of payments with the caveat of
the sundry above-mentioned conditionalities necessitated by Structural
Adjustment. No longer occupying the role of Janus-faced buffer cuddling up to
one superpower and now another, the proud, newly independent nations had no
option but to sink or swim with the tide of neoliberalism.
So I have to
express some amusement when I hear the charge that Mugabe has grossly mismanaged
the economy - the acceptance of SAP, compulsory in Africa after 1990, implies by
definition the ceding of monetary and fiscal policy to IMF planners and policy
makers. Some, the truly corrupt African governments, such as Abache's in
Nigeria, saw SAP for what it was, an open invitation to corruption, and couldn't
flog off their country's resources quick enough. Just witness today the legacy
of allowing Shell, private army included, free reign in the Delta region. Most
African leaders however were dragged through the process kicking and screaming
and IMF country reports of the 90's are punctuated everywhere with the doleful
refrain that 'privitisations', 'deregulations', 'liberalisations', and various
other abominations weren't taking place nearly as fast as they should.
Many compromise formations such as semi-state parastatals began to
emerge during the decade such as the Botswana government's 50/50 partnership
with DeBeers. But the pressures on African leaders to conform shouldn't be
underestimated when a more pliant political rival can have his party's chances
of election multiplied tenfold by a timely injection of Western capital. Play
the game or pretend to play the game; this is the ignominious liminal state that
Western policy has reduced African leaders to.
Where is Africa's chair on
the UN Security Council? The only continent without one and something they have
been asking for at every General Assembly for the past 15 years. If it were
given presumably then the West would be forced to look upon a strong unified
continent instead of the media's depiction of a patchwork of failed states
marshalled by corrupt tyrants. For example, Transparency International's
'Corruption Perception Index' has followed the World Bank who first pioneered
this sort of thing by listing as one of its criteria for 'efficiency'; 'length
of time taken to set up a business' as though a long waiting period implied a
proportional level of graft when in reality its more often a government's covert
resistance to a SAP-inspired prescription to plunder.
And even if he's
working for an Abache-type regime maybe his demands to be greased are because
his real wages shrunk in half because of an austerity plan and he needs to buy
anti-retrovirals for his brother or a false passport for his sister who can
claim asylum in Europe by telling their immigration control how nasty and
despotic her president is since the Geneva Convention makes no allowance for
economic war crimes.
Which is just as well since we'd all be in the
dock.
Now that Mugabe has shown himself to be definitively not 'our kind of guy', i.e
someone who would gladly squander his own nation's resources for the promise of
peace and security and the benefit of our engorged portfolios; a prostituted
international media, with the sole exception of Al Jazeera English it seems,
commands the entire world to scream in abhorrence. And we do scream of course,
loudly and impetulantly, because we are by and large decent people who are more
than willing to do what we can to ‘help the poor' and when we are told by our
national broadcasters of a ‘corrupt dictator', of his greedy, self-serving
‘network of cronies' and how they have turned the former ‘breadbasket of Africa'
into an economic backwater with ‘floods of refugees' and 'millions more on the
brink of starvation' our Pavlovian indignation reaches a peak of frenzy.
Almost as an afterthought the Weimerian hyperinflation figure is then
typically inserted as an almost comical aside. Bread now costs $12 billion, only
last month a teachers annual salary! I know we are meant to find this a vaguely
amusing confirmation of Mugabe's incompetence and despotism. Worse still, and
this is perhaps the last straw for our now salivating triggers is that the
sacred institute of democracy itself has been defiled with the intimidation and
brutalisation of supporters of the rival political party, the Movement for
Democratic Change led by that poor beleagured black man, Morgan Tsvangirai.
Such is the general level of ignorance that this deplorably facile
propaganda is digested unquestionably. Reports nowadays don't even bother
mentioning the ‘resettlements' let alone ‘invasions' of white-owned farms.
In the mid-90's, at the height of the hardships induced by IMF-imposed
Structural Adjustment, land resettlements began sporadically by disgruntled
Zimbabweans tired of Mugabe's perceived procrastinations over land reform. Yet
to the West, Mugabe had still to maintain the impression that he is committed to
Structural Adjustment else the IMF's support for balance of payments will be
withdrawn and the economy effectively destroyed. To his supporters in the
War Veterans Association (WVA) who fought alongside him for land rights the
question of compensation payments now became a matter of urgency.
Greg
Elich describes some of the effects of SAP in Zimbabwe in 1994;
"The
rise in food prices was seen as a major problem by 64 percent of respondents,
while many indicated that they were forced to reduce their food intake. ESAP
resulted in mass layoffs and crippled the job market so that many were unable to
find any employment at all. In the communal areas, the rise in fertilizer prices
meant that subsistence farmers were no longer able to fertilize their land,
resulting in lower yields. ESAP also mandated the elimination of price controls,
allowing those shop owners in communal area who were free of competition to mark
prices up dramatically."
Tsvangirai, at this time a trade union
leader was stirring popular dissatisfaction, erroneously blaming the government
for high taxes when in fact such measures were being dictated by the IMF. It is
of course equally probable that he had no idea at the time that SAP required
almost complete IMF macro-management of the economy.
Meanwhile, Mugabe
responded to the increasingly vociferous WVA by providing a once-off settlement
and it was this unbudgeted outlay which caused the first crash of the Zimbabwean
dollar. It also signalled to international investors that the agitators for land
reform within ZANU-PF were the real power in Zimbabwe and that their stated goal
of occupying those lands, forcibly if necessary, and without providing the
compensation demanded by white farmers would become a reality.
It was
thus that the Zimbabwean dollar depreciated tenfold between 97 and 01. If
speculators could make this assessment then it stands to reason that Foreign
Secretaries and development professionals also had the necessary intelligence
from the ground to accurately gauge the mood of the country yet when the
occasion arose in 98 to intervene and prevent the inevitable 'forced
resettlement' they snorted with disbelief. With spiralling inflation and
massively depleted reserves of foreign currency Zimbabwe had to rely on grudging
support from the IMF and the occasional lifeline from China to fund fuel imports
and provide vital agricultural inputs.
Mugabe was in a position to know
more than anyone that a crisis was looming. Late in 1997, Claire Short, the UK's
International Development Secretary, enflamed the situation even further by
declaring that Britain did not regard itself as having 'any special obligations
to fund land reform'. In September of 1998 an International Donors Conference
was convened in Harare to drum up support for a viable compensation package for
white farmers. The time to act was clearly now. Speaking at the opening session
Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary General said; "The equitable distribution of
productive capital such as land is not only economically important but also
essential to ensure peace and stability".
Reiterating these concerns
President Mugabe said; "We must move forward speedily and vigorously
otherwise they will resettle themselves in a manner they deem appropriate. Such
anarchy will not be helpful to anyone. We therefore trust that the governments
efforts for orderly resettlement will receive the necessary donor support".
Nobody believed him. All the donors perceptive faculties were programmed
to make them believe that all they were listening to was the justifications of
yet another corrupt African dictator on the graft. More white elephants they
winked and yawned at themselves knowingly. And yet they didn't know. And they
still don't know - anything. $2.2 billion, half the profits of Anglo-American's
African operations in that year, and one third of Nicky Oppenheimer's thieved
fortune was the sum agreed by all parties to be capable of solving once and for
all the 100 yr Zimbabwean land question. $180,000 was eventually
pledged.
The failure of the international community to engage
constructively with the Zimbabwean government at this point, whilst totally
predictable, has led directly to the violence, refugeeism and misery that we see
today. It would moreover take a thousand Hagues a hundred years to do justice to
the roll call of morally bankrupt cretins involved in this fiasco. It seemingly
failed to dawn on any present that Mugabe's warning that they would 'resettle
themselves' might actually occur. Utterly unheard of. Could never happen. Yet it
did, and it is evident that Mugabe, tired of jumping through hoops and
attempting to satisfy the endless conditionalities required by the IMF and its
brood of vampires, that he had finally dropped the facade of pretending to be
'our kind of guy' and lent what has now been called the third chimurenga
his tacit approval. By doing so he has ensured that his person will be villified
by an utterly strumpeted Western media incapable and unwilling of providing
anything but the most superficial of analyses. In the end, they are simply
uncomprehending.
No-one will dispute that the MDC were under attack by
Zanu-PF supporters. However, the fact of the matter is that the MDC was formed
in September 1999 by prominent members of the white-dominated Commercial Farmers
Union as a direct response to the land resettlements. Behind the MDC and
mysteriously omitted by the wholly biased international press coverage who would
like us to think that the MDC are some kind of people's movement of native
Zimbabweans agitating against an incompetent despot are in fact many prominent
white Zimbabweans. David Coltart, the MDC shadow justice minister served in the
Rhodesian police force and is a legal expert who, in power, will be poised to
examine the constitutional status of the land resettlements with an obvious view
to reversing them.
In addition, Roy Bennett, the party treasurer, is a
pugnacious white landowner who once attempted to throttle a Zimbabwean judge for
calling his ancestors 'thieves and murderers' (a perfectly legitimate
accusation) and Eddie Cross, who was the MDC's newly confirmed Secretary of
Economic Affairs in September 1999 made the following policy announcement
clearly echoing the raison d'etre of SAP;
"We are going to fast
track privatization. All fifty government parastatals will be privatized within
a two-year frame, but we are going far beyond that. We are going to privatize
many of the functions of government. We are going to privatize the Central
Statistics Office. We are going to privatize virtually the entire school
delivery system. And you know, we have looked at the numbers and we think we can
get government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to about
75,000 in five years."
The unavoidable conclusion therefore among
Zanu-PF party strategists is that the gains secured in land acquisition will be
reversed if the MDC gains control and that they themselves will become the
objects of a witch-hunt by the western press.
The land seizures, by any
yardstick a sublime manifestation of natural justice, are in fact, technically
'illegal' and have been condemned in Washington and London, the financial
backers of the MDC. On the American side, this support was secured by the
signing into law by President Bush in December 2001 of the Zimbabwean Economic
Recovery and Development Act (ZIDERA) The law instructed American officials in
international financial institutions, to "oppose and vote against any extension
by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the
government of Zimbabwe," and to vote against any reduction or cancellation of
"indebtedness owed by the government of Zimbabwe." The law also authorized
President Bush to fund "an independent and free press and electronic media in
Zimbabwe".
In other words, a media network aimed at toppling the
government.
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