Cleaning up in Zimbabwe

Jun 9th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

President Robert Mugabe has had tens of thousands of urban Zimbabweans arrested and hundreds of thousands more evicted from their shanty homes. Is it a crackdown on illegal traders, as the government claims, or an act of vindictiveness against opposition supporters?

THE presidents of Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda, meeting in Kigali last week, agreed that the rich world's renewed aid efforts in Africa offer the continent a unique opportunity to end its conflicts and sort out its economies. In Cape Town, meanwhile, business leaders meeting at a regional summit of the World Economic Forum made encouraging noises about improved investment climates and political stability. But for evidence that some African countries are still tumbling the other way, look no further than Zimbabwe, where tens of thousands of poor people have been detained in an operation to “clean up” its cities.

The crackdown, which had begun in mid-May, was stepped up last week when police used sledgehammers and bulldozers to demolish thousands of “illegal” shantytown shacks and street kiosks. According to local press reports, more than 30,000 residents of cities have been arrested, and hundreds of thousands more summarily evicted from their makeshift homes. Many were ordered to return to their family homes in rural areas, according to the Herald, a Zimbabwean newspaper, but were left stranded because of nationwide fuel shortages. Thousands are said to be still camped on roadsides.

The government of President Robert Mugabe says the campaign is designed to stamp out black-market trading and other crime in urban slums. Illegal traders, the government says, are buying up goods to create artificial shortages and drive up prices in Zimbabwe's ravaged economy. But the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) claims that the operation is politically motivated. It points out that most of the areas affected are strongholds of the MDC, whose support is heaviest in poor urban districts—though supporters of Mr Mugabe's party, ZANU-PF, say they have been targeted too.

“Overnight, Zimbabwe has a massive internal refugee population in its urban areas,” said MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. “The attacks…are part of a broad strategy to destabilise specific constituencies and to distort the voting patterns of Zimbabweans in favour of ZANU-PF.” The opposition claims that the number of people forced from their homes in recent weeks is as high as 1.5m, out of a total population of perhaps 11m.

Mr Mugabe's real reason for ordering the crackdown may be to press home his advantage after ZANU-PF's victory in March parliamentary elections, which the MDC and some western governments said were rigged, but which received the blessing of South Africa, the regional power. The official result gave Mr Mugabe's party more than two-thirds of the seats in the 150-seat parliament, allowing him to tinker with the constitution, and left the MDC with even fewer seats than after the previous election in 2000 (which was also disputed). The president may now feel that he can tighten his grip further by harassing the weakened MDC's urban support.

Now that he can meddle with the constitution at will, many expect Mr Mugabe to rewrite it to allow him to leave office without triggering a new presidential election. That would make it easier for him to handpick and then impose a successor. Mr Mugabe is 81 and has indicated that he may retire at the end of his current term in 2008. Political observers think that the recent decision to re-establish the Senate, parliament's upper house, which was abolished shortly after independence from Britain in 1980, should make it easier for him to push through these plans—and perhaps also changes that offer him protection from prosecution after retirement. Mr Mugabe is all too aware that several African leaders have faced charges of corruption and other misdeeds after leaving power.

Whether he has it all his own way will depend on the strength of opposition in the coming months. The United States warned his government that Operation Restore Order, as the latest crackdown is known, could lead to a violent backlash. There are already signs of growing unrest. In Harare, up to 3,000 people rioted as their homes were destroyed. There have been clashes in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, too. However, defiance remains relatively muted, thanks to the sheer scale of the repression. The MDC seems to many to be a crushed force: Mr Tsvangirai was accused of letting down his followers after being slow to respond to the latest arrests and evictions. The MDC has backed a two-day strike, which began on Thursday June 9th, in protest at Operation Restore Order. But this appears to have drawn little popular support.

Many opposition supporters are simply too hungry and destitute to offer much resistance. Thanks to drought and Mr Mugabe’s policy of grabbing white-owned farms to give to landless blacks, commercial agriculture has collapsed and the country faces an acute shortage of food. Indeed, it may be that the government's main reason for trying to force evicted shantytown-dwellers back into the countryside is that it has finally realised that more labour is needed to revive agriculture (most rural Zimbabweans fled to cities when commercial farming shrivelled).
The UN's special envoy to southern Africa, James Morris, met Mr Mugabe last week to discuss the food crisis. The president said he was ready to allow in several hundred thousand tonnes of food aid, despite last year ordering most UN deliveries to be halted on the grounds that his country was “choking” on its own grain.

Zimbabwe's economy has been in freefall for several years, dragged down by the botched farm reforms, cronyism and a spiralling AIDS epidemic. The economy has contracted by an estimated 30% over the past five years and is expected to shrink again this year (by 1.6%, reckons the IMF). Unemployment is over 70%—hence analysts' puzzlement at the government's attack on the informal sector, which is a crucial source of income for many families.

Fuel, food and jobs are not the only things in short supply. A shortage of foreign exchange—which has worsened since the election—has stopped businesses from buying imported components. On May 19th the central bank devalued the Zimbabwe dollar by 32%, but businessmen said it was nowhere near enough. The overvalued exchange rate has had a serious impact on the country’s exporters: in the first four months of 2005 the value of goods sent abroad fell by 14%, to a paltry US$386m. The vicious crackdown of the past few weeks is awful news for Mr Mugabe's opponents. It is also likely to deal a heavy blow to an economy that is already on the ropes.

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