Zimbabwe’s First 5 Years: Mixed Results

Africa’s youngest nation, Zimbabwe, will celebrate the fifth anniversary of its independence this week but with less jubilation than attended its birth.

In the cities, workers are complaining that 16% annual inflation has eaten up the raises they received three years ago under the government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. Businessmen say the bureaucracy and increasing government regulations are strangling industry and commerce.

Bankers calculate that the economy, badly hurt by a worldwide recession and further aggravated by three years of drought, has shrunk 13% since 1983 and is only starting to recover.

In the countryside, some poor peasants are asking what happened to their government’s ambitious land reform program, which was to buy white-owned farms and give them to landless blacks. When, they ask, will they get promised schools, clinics, roads and wells?

And where are the jobs for the guerrillas who fought as long as seven years in the war of independence against the white minority Rhodesian government of former Prime Minister Ian Smith?

In Matabeleland, the southwestern third of the country, the police and the army are still fighting anti-regime dissidents who seem able to freely roam the bush and the hills. Disaffection is growing among the region’s Ndebele people, and political violence seems to be endemic there.

And in anticipation of parliamentary elections scheduled for June, rivals of Mugabe’s party, the Zimbabwe African National Union, say it is destroying democracy with a plan to create a socialist, one-party state.

To many government opponents here and to some observers abroad, Zimbabwe may be slipping into what a leading opposition politician called the “Africa-doesn’t-work syndrome.” It is a judgment heard most often from the government’s unreconciled critics.

John L. Nkomo, secretary of the opposition, Ndebele-based Zimbabwe African People’s Union, said: “What has happened to all those bright hopes we had five years ago? This Mugabe government has failed to fulfill any of them, and it is repeating many of the mistakes we have seen our neighbors make. No wonder some people are so disillusioned that they say they were better off under Ian Smith.”

That kind of rhetoric, heard frequently in Matabeleland and occasionally here in Harare, the capital, is widely regarded as much too harsh. The young nation’s balance sheet, according to many observers, has more pluses than minuses after its first five years.

Edward Cross, a leading businessman in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city and hub of the opposition region, remarked: “We have to be charged against our circumstances as well as against the expectations that we and others had for us five years ago. Our failures are glaring, particularly the continuing political violence here in Matabeleland, but Zimbabwe’s achievements surpassed those of any country of independent Africa.”

Foremost among these achievements is the way that the bitter war of the 1970s has been put behind, with less acrimony and greater ease than anyone thought possible. There have been no war crimes trials, almost no retribution against whites.

The war here--15,000 people are estimated to have been killed in its last year--gave way for the most part to the national reconciliation that Mugabe pleaded for when he became prime minister in 1980.

Masipula Sithole, a U.S.-educated political scientist who is now the dean of social sciences at the University of Zimbabwe, said recently: “The war was the No. 1 problem at independence. The war was all over this land, and the country was torn by it. Independence did not necessarily mean that the fighting would stop. People had to be persuaded to put away their guns, and by and large they did. People, black and white, were fed up with the war, and they were willing to cooperate with the government almost without reservation to bring about reconciliation.”

Whites, fearful when Marxist guerrilla leader Mugabe took power, are now among his biggest boosters.

“Many whites frankly expected the worst,” said John Laurie, president of the Commercial Farmers Union, “and what has happened is not just not bad but, in the view of all the circumstances, quite good.”

Although whites continue to leave at a rate of about 1,000 a month--there are about 90,000 left from a peak of 240,000 in 1975--some are starting to return, believing that life in black-governed Zimbabwe is preferable to what they found in South Africa, Australia or Britain.

Racial segregation was ended, and even the plushest suburb and most exclusive clubs were quickly integrated without controversy.

“The end of racial discrimination is taken for granted now,” said Willie Musaruruwa, editor of the Sunday Mail, Zimbabwe’s largest paper. “But this was something that was a tremendous social change affecting every person, black and white, in this country.”

The government has tried hard to redeem its promises of schools, medical clinics and other facilities denied the black majority through 90 years of white rule. Although the expenditures have created huge budget deficits and the new services are not nearly sufficient, particularly in rural areas, education is now the right of every Zimbabwean, and health care is free for most of the population.

“If you want to see what this government has done, you should go to one of those remote places where nothing had ever been built . . . either by the old colonial administration or even by the missionaries,” said Maurice Nyagumbo, minister for political affairs and the third-ranking member of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union’s Politburo.

“Today, you will see children going to school, people getting medical care, farmers able to irrigate some of their fields and get their crops to market. We have done all this on a big scale. It is not enough, we know, but it is a start.”

Today, there are nearly three times as many children in school as in 1979, and nearly six times as many in secondary schools. About 2,500 new schools have been built to educate blacks.

“We are stretched beyond our capacity and the quality of education has dropped,” said a veteran teacher outside Harare, a city once known as Salisbury. “But that has to be weighed against giving something to those children who would have gotten nothing or four years at most. Like most things in this country today, these are really problems of success, not problems due to failure.”

Even economic development has not gone as badly as statistics suggest. The country’s total output as measured by the gross national product declined each of the last three years, largely because of severe drought, and the recession reduced demand for the minerals from Zimbabwe’s mines. But a bumper harvest this year should help the whole economy recover quickly and lay the foundation for renewed growth.

Peasant farmers, who formerly grew just enough to feed their families and to trade for a few goods, have become major producers of corn, cotton and several other cash crops as the government has provided better seeds, technical advice, credit, marketing assistance and, above all, higher prices.

In addition, about 180,000 tenants have been resettled on land the government has bought from white farmers--fewer than planned but still an attempt at land reform.

Sen. Denis Norman, Zimbabwe’s agriculture minister and a successful commercial farmer, says that these moves are starting to bring prosperity to the countryside, where three-fourths of the nation’s 8.4 million people live, and that this will ensure Zimbabwe’s ability to feed itself and provide a firm basis for overall economic development.

“With another couple of good harvests, this transformation will spread and gather even greater momentum,” said Steven Sithole, an agricultural economist. “We have the opportunity for a real economic takeoff in the countryside, I believe, if we continue and reinforce the present policies.”

Industrial development is likely to prove much more difficult, however, because of a continued lack of investor competence.

“As long as they keep talking about ‘socialist transformation’ and hinting at nationalization, businessmen--either here or from abroad--just are not going to put much money in,” a top banker here said. “That means no rapid growth, not many jobs created except in the public sector through higher taxes, not much money to be made by anyone.”

But Mugabe, described even by other ministers as the “only true socialist” in the government, tried recently to reassure businessmen, as he already had the commercial farmers, that “profit is not a dirty word” in Zimbabwe.

Although his government is against “the avid press for super-profits associated with the exploitation of man by man,” Mugabe said, “we accept and expect that business concerns should generate a surplus for the benefit of shareholders, provided the need for adequate reinvestment is also recognized.”

And despite socialist rhetoric, no property has been seized by the government, which pursued a “willing seller-willing buyer” policy both in land reform and in enlarging its own stake in the economy. Nor has any industry been nationalized in the last five years.

“We don’t have a precise word for socialism in our Shona language, so we call it cooperation,” said John Tsimba, Zimbabwe’s information director. “Characteristically, we are individualistic, entrepreneurial and competitive. Some people even say that Zimbabwean socialism is a contradiction in terms.

“Today, when we say we want the socialist transformation of the country, many people here and abroad shake their heads very knowingly and say that this is the end of democracy and prosperity in Zimbabwe. We don’t agree. During the war years, when we were in Mozambique and Tanzania and Zambia, we had a chance to look around at African socialism, and we know what we don’t want. Socialism will come to Zimbabwe very gradually, very pragmatically.”

Nyagumbo, the political affairs minister, also stressed pragmatism. “Even if we have a landslide in the parliamentary election, we are not going to establish a one-party state . . . not going to accelerate our socialist transformation,” he said. “We will need the cooperation of minor parties in Parliament, and we will continue to cooperate with the whites (who constitutionally have 20 of 100 parliamentary seats).”

Yet for many here and abroad, the governing party’s attempts to consolidate its power--in 1980, it won 57 of the 80 black seats in Parliament and expects to win 65 to 70 this year--constitute the bleak side of Zimbabwe’s first five years.

The reasons are complex--traditional tribal animosity, longstanding political differences, personal rivalries--but the Mugabe party’s feud with the rival Ndebele party has meant continuing political violence, particularly in Matabeleland. Who is to blame is impossible to say: the government accuses the opposition of plotting its ouster by force, the dissidents say the prime minister’s men are trying to eliminate it and all other rivals, again by force.

The army sweeps through northern Matabeleland two years ago, the police crackdown on southern Matabeleland last year and the current wave of political murders and kidnapings in the region have given Mugabe’s government the image of a regime holding power only by armed might. At the very least, some say, the Shona majority appears to be taking revenge on the Ndebele (about 18% of the population) in a tribal war, the roots of which go back a century and a half.

“The optimists here say, ‘Thank God, the trouble is confined to one region,’ but this (strife) just makes me heartsick,” said a nurse and longtime political activist from the eastern town of Mutare, a lovely place near the Mozambique border that was formerly called Umtali.

“Tempers get so hot that many of us sometimes fear there will be an Ndebele secession or a civil war. We are sick of war--we had more than seven years of it against the Smith government--and to fight among ourselves would be a tragedy that could destroy Zimbabwe.”