Here it is, E.
COMMENT & ANALYSIS: A bitter harvest: With real wages lower than at independence and food shortages looming, Robert Mugabe is gambling everything on next year's election, write Tony Hawkins and James Lamont:
Financial Times; Aug 18, 2001
Twenty-one years after independence at the end of a bloody civil war, and liberation from white minority rule, Zimbabwe is almost back where it started.
Its economy is in a state of collapse and average real wages have slumped below the level of 1980. Unemployment is running at 40 per cent of the working population, at a conservative estimate. Three-quarters of the black population is living below the poverty line.
Its hard-won institutions of democracy, its judiciary and its independent media are being treated with arrogant disregard by the government of President Robert Mugabe, the man who led the liberation struggle and won the first independence elections.
Even the rhetoric of the war has returned to the propaganda arms of the government.
This time, of course, the government is black and the white minority has largely joined forces with a growing black opposition. But the parallels between Mr Mugabe's Zimbabwe and the Rhodesia run by Ian Smith, the former prime minister, are grimly apparent.
The campaign launched by the government to redistribute agricultural land by expropriating 5m-6m hectares of property owned by some 5,000 white farmers (without full cash compensation) is glorified in the state-owned media as the "Third Chimurenga" - or liberation war.
"Zimbabwe is ours," says a senior member of the ruling Zanu-PF party's politburo and close confidant of President Mugabe. "We shall never give it up. If need be, we will go back to a peasant economy."
That is a prospect regarded by Zimbabwe's neighbours in southern Africa, above all in South Africa, with deep foreboding. They fear a dramatic food shortage in the country towards the end of the year, and a potential exodus of population from border areas.
They are alarmed by Mr Mugabe's apparent disregard for the institutions of democracy and the rule of law. But they are also profoundly reluctant to intervene in the political problems of a neighbouring state, not least because it is locked in conflict over the explosive issue of land hunger. South Africa faces the same pressure from its landless black population.
So far Pretoria has resisted pressure to intervene in Zimbabwe, for example by threatening power rationing or trade sanctions, preferring to stick to a policy of quiet diplomacy. Against charges of impotence in regional affairs, President Thabo Mbeki insists that South Africa's caution is because it cannot risk stoking the crisis in its northern neighbour.
Mr Mbeki's biggest fear is an exodus of people from Zimbabwe. Another is that it might precipitate black land seizures from white farmers at home. The border between the two countries is porous and poorly policed. Should the economy deteriorate further, South Africa would become the most likely destination for many starving black people and fleeing whites.
Essop Pahad, the South African minister of the presidency, says that white Zimbabweans would not leave Zimbabwe for the UK but would want to settle in South Africa like many of their predecessors did after black majority rule in 1981.
While much international media attention has concentrated on the plight of those white farmers being driven from their land, it is the black majority in Zimbabwe that has suffered far more.
Per capita incomes today are lower than in the heyday of Mr Smith's white minority government in the early 1970s. Average real wages are lower than at independence, while between 125,000 and 150,000 jobs have been lost in the past 18 months. In July the United Nations reported that Zimbabwe was one of just five countries in the world whose human development index - measuring social and educational standards as well as prosperity - was lower than in 1980.
It has the world's third highest adult infection rate of HIV-Aids, at 25 per cent, and Timothy Stamps, the health minister, says there will be zero population growth in 2002. Yet real spending on health will be down by a third this year, with the health delivery system ranked bottom in a survey of 191 countries by the World Health Organisation.
At the same time the country is keeping 8,000 troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while promising to spend millions of unbudgeted dollars on land resettlement.
Inflation is running at an annual rate of 70 per cent, foreign investment and foreign aid have totally vanished and the currency has collapsed. In two months the parallel market rate for the Zimbabwe dollar has doubled to ZDollars 300 to the US dollar, nearly six times the official rate of ZDollars 55.
That is the background of economic chaos against which Mr Mugabe is gambling everything on re-election as president in March next year. His response has been to play simultaneously the land issue and the race card.
The government's political strategy hinges on exploiting the rural-urban divide. At last June's election, Zanu-PF was wiped out in urban constituencies by Morgan Tsvangirai's trade union-backed Movement for Democratic Change.
Promises of free land with ZDollars 15bn (USDollars 272m) in handouts of seed, fertilizer, pesticides and farm implements to work the newly allocated plots cut little ice with urban voters.
One of the government's worries is that even in rural areas the enthusiasm for land resettlement is less than wholehearted. It claims to have resettled already 130,000 families - about 700,000 people - on white-owned farmland but the farmers themselves put the figure at between 25,000 and 35,000 people.
For its land-for-votes strategy to have any chance at the polls in March, the government must get settlers on to the land in their thousands over the next few weeks in time to plant crops for
2002. But the land takeover is snared in legal tangles in the courts and there is no foreign currency to pay for farm inputs, such as fertiliser and machinery.
This poorly planned and underfunded exercise in social and economic engineering coincides with a growing food supply crisis.
Following the 35 per cent fall in maize production this year - partly induced by the new settlements but also due to poor weather - Zimbabwe faces a 600,000-tonne cereals shortage between now and the next harvest in May, according to aid agencies. Most of this - about 500,000 tonnes - is of maize, the country's staple food.
Imports, which will be needed by December at the latest, will cost USDollars 110m, which Simba Makoni, the finance minister, admits the country does not have. He has appealed to aid agencies for help but donors are wary lest food aid be used by Zanu-PF to win votes.
South Africa is the most obvious country to which a desperate Zimbabwe would turn if faced with such a food crisis. It is the only country in the region to have a forecast surplus of maize this year, estimated at 180,000 tonnes. All the others are facing a shortfall.
Hitherto, Pretoria has insisted that next year's presidential elections in Zimbabwe are the best road to transition. Aziz Pahad, deputy minister of foreign affairs, says South Africa's policy remains unchanged. Mr Mbeki has hinted, but never publicly admitted, that food aid might not be available without reforms in Zimbabwe.
In South Africa and in Zimbabwe the realisation is dawning that the political and economic crisis may come to a head much sooner. Then the international community will have to take a decision whether to rush aid to the country, even if it means bolstering Mr Mugabe's rule.
On the other hand, if the country did limp through to elections and Zanu-PF were to lose the poll, Joseph Msika, the vice-president, has warned of the consequences: the government supporters will "return to the bush" and resume "the liberation struggle".
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited
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