Zimbabwe has been lurching from one economic crisis to the next over the past 20 years. When Robert Mugabe was forced from power in November 2017 we heaved a collective sigh of relief and hoped the country had turned a corner. In the month after Mugabe’s resignation there was cautious optimism, both in Zimbabwe and among investors.
But over the past month the temperature has risen again. There have been new rounds of protests followed by a predictable government crackdown, the arrest of outspoken journalist Hopewell Chin’ono, and a letter from Catholic bishops in Zimbabwe criticising the government for corruption. Even the ANC government, traditionally prioritising liberation movement camaraderie with Zanu-PF and quiet diplomacy, has officially expressed concerns about reported human rights violations.
In 2009, I spent a month carrying out fieldwork research in a failed state. At the time, Liberia had no functioning government as everything had been destroyed in the brutal civil war between 1989 and 2003, which killed 250,000 people. Former president and warlord Charles Taylor was being tried in The Hague for war crimes, and the country was being run by the UN’s mission in Liberia.
As part of my doctoral research into African conflict and how to build sustainable peace, I interviewed professors, local journalists, international and local non-governmental organisation managers as well as government officials. I asked them about their experiences of the civil war, what caused it and how effective they thought the UN was in rebuilding a new Liberian government, economy and society.
The broad consensus from locals was that the UN was doing a tolerable job keeping the peace but an awful job resuscitating the economy and mending the collective hurt. A core complaint was that the UN had not addressed the cause of the civil war: lack of economic opportunity for the majority and the chasm between the haves and have-nots. The economic situation had deteriorated so much that when the first coup occurred in 1980 it was widely welcomed by a populous who were fed up with high food prices. But it also set a dangerous precedent for subsequent coups.
Poverty is not the problem in and of itself. The problem is corruption and clientelism, where the elites feast and the poor starve. In Liberia, corruption by elites and economic opportunity reserved for the connected eventually tore apart the fabric of society. In Zimbabwe, a safety valve to release economic pressure has been the resourcefulness of its people. Many have moved to escape economic hardship: either returning to rural areas to live off the land or emigrating to SA and further afield for those with the skills and means. However, the economic lifeline of expats sending remittances is running dry as the economic after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic hits both the Southern African Development Community region and the globe.
What should Zimbabwe do to turn back from the abyss? SA’s negotiated revolution offers a template. The Convention for a Democratic SA (Codesa) talks held between political parties in 1991 formally marked the beginning of the negotiated end of apartheid. There appear to be few options left for Zimbabwe besides trying to negotiate a similar resolution between Zimbabwean parties and civil society.
There is a precedent for talks and compromise in Zimbabwe. The late Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change served as prime minister in a government of national unity with Mugabe between 2009 and 2013.
However, Codesa-style talks need buy-in from the governing party, and this depends on the Zanu-PF leadership realising that this is the last card they have left to play, in the same way FW de Klerk saw he had no other card left to play but to bargain for a negotiated revolution while he still had time, or face a violent one.
• Dr Kuo, a former a lecturer at the Shanghai International Studies University in China, is a research associate at the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science.
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