Notwithstanding damage to the economy, loss of life, large numbers of refugees forced to leave the country, and tense inter-racial relations resulting from the bitterly fought liberation war which brought an end to white minority rule, at Independence in April 1980 Zimbabwe was widely feted as a country that had the potential to be an African success story. Although it was just emerging from 15 years under United Nations comprehensive mandatory economic sanctions against the white-minority government, as well as from a decade of debilitating guerrilla and counter-insurgency warfare, Zimbabwe was widely seen as being better placed than many, perhaps most, African countries to deliver prosperity to its citizens.
The Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 between the government in Salisbury and the two liberation movements – the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) led by Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) led by his rival Joshua Nkomo which came together as the Patriotic Front (PF) for the Independence negotiations hosted by London – resulted in a constitutional arrangement which entrenched the fundamental principles of the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, democratic multi-party elections , and a justiciable Declaration of Rights . Within the senior echelons of both liberation movements, a willingness to compromise prevailed during the Lancaster House negotiations. The Patriotic Front delegates had also been under pressure from a number of neighbouring African states interested in bringing the Rhodesian conflict to an end as quickly as possible given the negative spill-over effects on their own peoples and economies, and accepted a number of constitutional provisions which they undoubtedly saw as contentious in order to bring the talks to a successful conclusion.
Foremost amongst these was the establishment of a separate white voters roll for the elections of 20 white lower House of Assembly representatives out of a total of 100, and 10 white senators out of a total of 40. This arrangement was to all intents and purposes frozen for a period of seven years, since amendments were only allowed subject to an unlikely unanimous vote in favour of changes in the House of Assembly. In addition, the Patriotic Front accepted provisions embedded in the constitution’s Declaration of Rights which severely circumscribed the scope for compulsory acquisition by the new state of private property, and which could only be altered after a period of ten years, again subject to an unlikely unanimous vote in the House of Assembly. In those exceptional cases in which compulsory acquisition was permitted (on the grounds of national defence, public order and safety, public health and town and country planning considerations), there was to be prompt payment of adequate compensation, with owners to be granted access to the High Court to contest both the acquisition order, as well as the amount of compensation to be paid. The provisions also covered land, despite the fact that the need to address the highly inequitable distribution of this asset between whites and blacks had been a key rallying cry of both liberation movements. Both ZANU and ZAPU had to accept that these provisions hindered their ability, at least for the first ten years of independence , to trigger a process of land reform that was not based on the willing buyer, willing seller market-driven principle entrenched at Lancaster House.
In the run-up to Independence President Samora Machel of Mozambique , who had granted ZANU’s armed forces bases along its extensive border with Rhodesia , famously advised future Prime Minister Robert Mugabe to tone down revolutionary Marxist rhetoric in order not to trigger an exodus of whites as had happened in Mozambique in 1974–75 with dire economic consequences (Zimbabwe Today 2017). Mugabe went on to surprise many observers with his conciliatory speeches in the run-up to Independence , calling upon the new country’s white citizens to remain in order to help build a new country on the basis of “a common interest that knows no race, colour or creed” (Ministry of Information, Immigration and Tourism 1980, 3). In addition, during the years of sanctions and the liberation war , many of those making up Zimbabwe’s first Cabinet had lived in failing neighbouring economies, particularly Mozambique and Zambia . When they took office, they were able to bring to their deliberations direct experience of the consequences of highly dirigiste economic policies, and how important it was to maintain the institutional fabric and physical infrastructure they were inheriting.
Unlike many of its African peers, Zimbabwe was never a mono-economy heavily dependent on a single export product. Instead it boasted a diversified economy driven primarily by large-scale commercial agriculture , underpinned by Sub-Saharan Africa’s third largest manufacturing sector – after South Africa and Nigeria – a small, but diverse and profitable mining industry, and the region’s second most sophisticated financial and banking sector after South Africa . There was immense potential in tourism, and the country had an exceptionally strong human capital base by Sub-Saharan African standards, with more skilled and trained people than any other African country at Independence . Although it was to lose thousands of skilled, experienced, white citizens in the late 1970s and early 1980s,1 this outflow was offset by the return of many thousands of highly-educated and trained black Zimbabweans. After South Africa it also had the most developed and best maintained physical infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa, while health and education facilities, although historically heavily skewed in favour of the privileged white minority, were years ahead of those available elsewhere on the continent, again with the exception of South Africa.
Moreover, Zimbabwe enjoyed the benefits of being a late-comer . It was one of the last African states to achieve independence , and had plenty of experiences in terms of Africa’s post-independence trajectory, both negative and positive, which it could draw upon as it set about devising its political governance systems and economic development strategies. The new government that took office in April 1980 also enjoyed tremendous international goodwill, and the donor/international lender community also had 20 years of history and experience in Africa that it could tap into when devising development and lending strategies for the new country.
In theory then, in 1980 Zimbabwe was well placed to learn from the lessons of economic failure elsewhere in Africa. Unlike many – indeed most – of its African peers, the country was not starting from scratch, but from the sturdy platform of a well-diversified economy richly endowed with skills and expertise and with the goodwill of most of its neighbours – with the vitally important exception of apartheid South Africa – and of the international community.
Understandably – and with the advantage of hindsight perhaps even inevitably – Zimbabwe’s strengths and potential were exaggerated, especially by Western governments and a donor community avidly in search of an African economic success story. The West needed Zimbabwe to showcase how an African country could thrive as a non-racial society in the hope that this would smooth the path to majority rule in Namibia, and especially South Africa . A failure in Zimbabwe would only serve to bolster intransigence in South Africa , strengthening the hand of the white die-hards in that country. For this reason, as international pressure mounted on apartheid South Africa , Robert Mugabe’s government attained a strategic importance in the eyes of the West well beyond its punching weight, and notwithstanding Mugabe’s and ZANU’s declared adherence to Marxism-Leninism.
Accordingly, it was in a better-the-devil-you-know spirit that even conservative Western governments – the Reagan Administration in the US and the Thatcher government in Britain – threw their weight behind the new government. Western diplomats insisted that Zimbabwe was ‘in play’ in the sense that during its formative years the new government would be open to advice and technical assistance that would help the West achieve its goals of showcasing Zimbabwe as a non-racial African success story, while simultaneously, and in the context of the Cold War , detaching Mugabe from the Eastern bloc and Chinese backers that had supported his party and its armed forces during the liberation war . In these endeavours the West was enthusiastically backed by the IMF and World Bank , especially the latter, anxious to demonstrate that their advice could produce African economic success stories.
Yet the long-term outcome could not have been more disappointing. From a situation of great promise and high popular expectations at Independence , by 2008 Zimbabwe had regressed to the point where daily life for the majority was characterised by completely empty supermarket shelves and a relentless search for basic goods as people lugged around wads of worthless currency. In addition, should they fell sick they were forced to sleep and await treatment in the corridors of hospitals that had neither staff, equipment nor medicines, while many children sat in classrooms devoid of electricity, furniture, text-books and increasingly teachers. Many were so desperate to flee the country they joined a mass exodus, sneaking under barbed wire fences and crossing over into South Africa and other neighbouring countries in search of refuge. Many of those who remained inside the country became increasingly reliant on emergency food aid distributed by international organisations and local charities, while if they openly opposed the government they ran the risk of joining the growing ranks of the victims of state-sponsored violence and torture, photographs of the disturbing results of this circulating widely on the internet to be viewed only by those with strong stomachs.
Economists and political scientists will long ponder the reasons for Zimbabwe’s initially disappointing, and subsequently catastrophic, post-independence political governance and economic performance. How and why did one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s best-endowed economies – in terms of physical infrastructure, human capital and diversified production – fail to exploit the potential it inherited? Why did successive governments fail to trigger economic growth rates that attracted foreign investment, and improve the welfare of its citizens through increased employment opportunities and rising real incomes on a long-term and sustainable basis? How was initial and significant progress during the 1980s in terms of improved public services and social indicators reversed so quickly during the ‘crisis decade’ between 1998 and 2008, and from which the country is still trying to recover? How did national economic policies result in a disastrously weakened and fragile state that presided over a dramatically impoverished, cowed and alienated population, and which at the peak of the crisis had turned Zimbabweans into arguably the unhappiest people in the world?
The most plausible explanation for this spectacular, if not historically unprecedented, socio-economic collapse and growing fragility of the Zimbabwean state, is the combination of the primacy given to the retention of political power at all costs, and consequential and inevitable deteriorating political and economic governance. The two go together because in the pursuit of monopoly political power and permanent control, parties ignore the tenets of good governance on both the political and economic fronts.
As a party that had come to power through an armed struggle with the support of other single-party regimes in Eastern Europe , Asia and Africa, ZANU-PF believed – and still does – that because it had liberated the country it had earned the right to rule the country in perpetuity. Furthermore, the economy was simply seen as an asset to be used to ensure its continued monopoly on political power. This in turn often translated into the radical circumscribing of the operation of free markets and independent economic agents over which the ruling party had limited control, as the latter might become alternative centres of political power and undermine the centrality in national life of ZANU-PF as the sole source of all riches which it could distribute as it saw fit.
Zimbabwe’s post-independence path provides strong evidence in support of the work of Acemoglu and Robinson on the interactions between economic and political institutions, and their varying degrees of inclusiveness, as key explanations for why some countries prosper and others seem to be trapped in poverty and decline. More specifically, Zimbabwe’s track record lends credence to their central thesis regarding the primacy of political institutions in explaining the economic history of countries, and the role of elites in controlling and shaping these to their advantage. As they have argued:
Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under…it is the political institutions…that determine the ability of citizens to control politicians and influence how they behave. This in turn determines whether politicians are agents of the citizens…or are able to abuse the power entrusted to them, or that they have usurped, to amass their own fortunes and to pursue their own agendas, ones detrimental to those of the citizens. (Acemoglu and Robinson 2013, 24)
As this book shows,...