Zimbabwe: The high costs paid for 'normality'

In photography, time-lapse exposures are a useful mechanism to make imperceptible changes unreel with new clarity before the eye. Similarly, for a journalist, a series of sequential exposures to a situation can make gradual social changes suddenly obvious in a way that microscopic study does not.

After a long absence from Zimbabwe, where I used to spend a significant amount time on business, I returned last week for the first time since 2006. It was instantly to renew a love affair with a country that I find endlessly beguiling, but whose political and economic meltdown had made it at turns frustrating, depressing and, on occasion, dangerous.

The most glaring change is how the switch three years ago to the United States greenback has brought economic stability. Inflation had reached a million percent a year; billion Zim dollar notes were being issued; the stores were mostly empty; and economic activity had been reduced to barter and hunt-and-peck shopping that consumed hours of everyone’s day.

A wry joke of the time was that the daily 27-fold average increase in prices meant that by the time a minibus taxi had travelled from Harare to Chitungwize on its outskirts, passengers had to cough up the same fare again, and a bit more, to adjust for inflation.

Now, in contrast, inflation is under control and the shelves are groaning with imported goods. Anything and everything is available at a price — but a whacking price, two to three times that of South Africa.

The air of prosperity in the spruced up northern suburbs of Harare is somewhat illusory. For the 90% who are unemployed the daily survival threshold is higher than ever, while the employed poor are pounded by the trade-off that has had to be made between stability and high prices.

Structural economic damage has been considerable, with manufacturing almost extinct and agricultural exporters crippled by the cost of dollarised inputs. The real grease in the economic wheel has been a consumer-spending boom of grey money sourced from the massive diamond finds in the east of the country.

And most of that grease comes from what has adhered to the sticky fingers of the Zanu-PF elite. They corruptly pocket astronomical sums from the Chinese, who fly out the diamonds by the planeload. Little accrues as revenue to the exchequer and there is consequently minuscule benefit to the average Zimbabwean in a nation still run as a feudal fiefdom by President Robert Mugabe.

The other stark contrast is how the Government of National Unity (GNU), brokered by former SA president Thabo Mbeki shortly before he was unceremoniously dumped by his own party, has reduced political tensions.

The inclusion in government of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change as junior partners has reduced, although not stopped, the deployment of the state security apparatus in its long campaign of detention, beatings, torture and murder of MDC supporters.

The GNU is not, however, the triumph that the Mbeki-ites proclaimed. In the same way that monetary stability has come at a price, so too with political stability. Here the trade-off has been at the cost of democracy, as the MDC is subtly absorbed into the existing machinery of government and inevitably begins to take on some of the tainted complexion of Zanu-PF.

The constitutional mechanisms supposedly fundamental to Mbeki’s ‘road map to democracy’ have mostly not been implemented. In their absence, the election that Mugabe wants to take place soon cannot be free and fair. And after such an election the popular will is likely, again, to be subsumed into an uneasy GNU compromise that no one — neither Zanu-PF nor MDC supporter — has actually ever voted for.

The real costs of these economic and political trade-offs will not be known for a while yet. On the other hand, after the past dozen years of trauma and uncertainty, for now it’s probably for most ordinary Zimbabweans an acceptable price to pay for peace and normality, however precarious.