Volume 30 2003 Issue 98

Review of African Political Economy No.98:535-537 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2003 ISSN 0305-6244 Zimbabawe Out in the Cold? Ray Bush Acute food insecurity has returned to much of Africa in its acutest form – famine – or is it simply that it never went away because western eyes have focussed too much on the consequences of 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the continuing US and Iraqi fatalities that blind commentators to Africa’s continuing poverty? A food crisis seems most acute in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan where people are at risk from death resulting from illness, malnutrition and hunger. Ethiopia’s longest drought in living memory has led to higher than normal incidences of preventable illness like measles and malaria and economic collapse in the Horn, and more generally the failure to promote sustainable economic growth elsewhere in Africa makes immediate famine prevention, recovery and long term resistance to its recurrence seemingly impossible. International financial agencies declare the significance of sub-Saharan Africa’s real GDP growth of 3.0 per cent in 2000 and 2.9 per cent in 2001. Yet the UN millennium goals of reducing poverty and improving access to basic amenities require sustained growth of 7 per cent per annum. And average regional figures mislead. The non oil producing countries suffer worse than the evidence for regional averages suggests and negative growth is more common among poorer countries. Yet the extent of Africa’s systemic crisis that continues to undermine recovery is revealed by evidence from the World Bank’s old favourites like Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and Zimbabwe that languish in economic crisis. Zimbabwe’s continuing political, economic and social upheaval is dealt with in this issue by Chaumba, Scoones and Wolmer. Commonwealth pressure on Mugabe to reform politically and defend basic human rights has left Zimbabwe’s dictator using racist language to promote xenophobia and hide behind the coercive and brutal forces of law and disorder. Mugabe’s humiliation by the Commonwealth after the announcement that Zimbabwe was to have sanctions continued against it led the President to say his country was withdrawing from the ‘Club’ he described as an ‘Anglo Saxon unholy alliance’. The pity of course was that the Mugabe issue dominated the Commonwealth meeting. It conveniently denied even a limited opportunity to discuss strategies to combat HIV/AIDS, promote growth, social development and poverty alleviation that were not merely a repeat of the international financial agency panaceas for African development. Whatever the shortcomings of the Commonwealth, and there are clearly many that run deep to its core, the Commonwealth’s stance – to seek the end of Mugabe’s abuse of human rights – needs applause. The crisis might never have become so intense if the UK, the Commonwealth and Zimbabwe’s neighbours, especially South Africa, had acted sooner and in different ways: inter alia the UK had delivered the finance to ensure an orderly transfer of land and South Africa and other neighbours had actively criticised the deplorable demise of Zimbabwean human rights. Zimbabweans themselves struggle against tyranny and against the 525 per cent inflation, food and 536 Review of African Political Economy currency shortage, attacks on opposition politicians and dissent. Organised working class unrest has recently intensified leading to mass arrests of activists. The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions for example, has repeatedly called for national strikes, to defend worker interests in the face of nakedly corrupt mis-government and promote political reform. Yet there is little chance of that reform coming quickly as Mugabe’s exit strategy, if not unrehearsed has not yet reached a conclusion. ZANU- PF for instance, at its annual conference in Masvingo in December 2003 did not formally debate the succession but rumours abound about whether the President can hang on until 2008 when his current term of office will end. The article by Chaumba and his co authors explores an under-researched area of Zimbabwe’s crisis ridden political economy. It goes beyond a concern of exploring the consequence of land seized from white farmers to explore the fascinating consequences of seizures of state owned land and the dynamic interactions between people’s livelihood strategies and the political and social institutions that emerge and help structure them on the newly occupied land. They examine new tensions that emerge between the regime’s authoritarian nationalism and ethnic politics and the way in which mechanisms for governance among settlers challenge existing state structures. They also document the emergence of a patrimonial politics and the consequences of this for social differentiation and political power. This case study helps understand the fluid and dynamic process of political and economic transformation in Zimbabwe that does not reduce a documentary of the country’s crisis to the actions of individual corrupt leaders, or simply the machinations of the international community intent on ridding the continent of the President’s malign influence. There is good and bad news in this issue from Uganda. Tangri and Mwenda explore corruption in that country’s military. They document examples of corrupt military procurement and illegal business activities of commanders in neighbouring DRC. They also explore how issues of corruption became increasingly a worry of Uganda’s parliament, the press and opposition to the NRM government and how it featured as a contentious issue in the 2001 presidential election. They stress that corruption was possible because politicians, government and the military are insufficiently account- able to the public for their actions. But Brooke Schoepf in an upbeat, although cautious tale, explains how Uganda has had a relatively successful strategy in reducing HIV prevalence from 15 per cent in 1992 to 5 per cent in 2001. At a time when Vatican zealots deny the importance of condoms in preventing HIV/AIDs (but many Catholic priests flout the Pope’s concern to promote abstinence instead of improved sexual knowledge and health), Schoepf explores the significant way in which sexual behaviour has been modified and how a vibrant civil society has mobilised education to combat disease spread. She also, however, guards against complacency. She stresses the need for better and improved funding to help improve testing regimes, support for women and the need to improve mechanisms that reduce sexual violence in relationships and not the least among these, those that expose women to HIV infection. She also argues for the need to develop mechanisms that will improve economic wellbeing of women, of the need to establish reforms in rights of inheritance to land and other property that would help provide material support for women. That extra support might help protect the vulnerable against destitution, immiseration and prostitution. In stressing these broader concerns of women’s poverty and access to resources she situates debates about reducing HIV/AIDS infection to a fundamental shift in thinking, of the need to situate the causes of disease spread to people’s rights, entitlements to wellbeing and to gender equality. Editorial: Zimbabwe Out in the Cold? 537 Also in this volume, Deborah Wheeler details the potential and also the contradic- tions evident in the development of Egypt’s information technology strategy. She notes the ambition of building a knowledge economy as a strategy to produce sustained economic growth in the twenty first century and also highlights that while projects attempt to make the information society more inclusive, innovations in the form of a knowledge economy and an information society as they are currently conceived, will widen the gap between rich and poor. And in exploring the case of the use and appropriation of new information and communication technologies by Muslim Mourides in Senegal Guèye notes how the technology acts both an instrument to integrate Touba with the rest of the Senegal and for them to gain a broader international presence. Finally, we return to the question of oil in Daniel Volman’s article on the Bush administration and the security implications of US energy policy. The smokescreen which had characterised US foreign policy is now being unravelled in a series of systematic global links between energy supplies and the privatisation of the military. A document published by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in July 2003, notes that ‘within a generation, Britain will become completely reliant upon energy sources supplied via pipelines from politically unstable countries thousands of miles away … and will be forced to source supplies from West Africa, the Middle East and the former Soviet Republics … The UK would have difficulty maintaining the security of its energy sources that are located in pipelines thousands of miles away and that are vulnerable to mechanical failure, sabotage and terrorist attack’. ‘If future gas supplies were interrupted’ it continues, ‘the UK would have major difficulty in keeping the lights on’. Justification for expansion of US ‘bases’ combined with a closer integration of joint Marine and Navy, intelligence that began in Iraq, point to the beginnings of a new imperialist agenda: Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the ‘Functioning Core … But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder and – most important – the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the non-integrating Gap … The real reason I support a war [in Iraq] is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment (Professor P.M.

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