IRIN Special Report - A growing political and economic crisis highlighted by an unpopular war

Zimbabwe’s costly military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is widely seen by the public, western diplomats and other analysts as a catalyst for the country’s growing political and economic crisis. Two decades have now passed since the euphoria of the liberation war when President Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party came to power after finally shaking off white rule, and going on to win every legislative and presidential election since with resounding majorities. Nowadays, however, cracks in this popularity are starting to show. A thriving opposition press regularly blasts his tenacious refusal to pave the way for retirement. It cites examples daily of how the man and his party are in fact tightening their grip on power with little regard for the plight and rights of the ordinary citizen. Yet, the printed press remains free to criticise, even if the broadcast media are tightly under ZANU-PF control. When these issues were put directly to his spokesman, George Charamba, one of the few government officials still willing to receive reporters with unwelcome questions, he said: “I suppose we are defensive, that we are over-protective. It is our liberation war psychology.” The Congo intervention, a catalyst for change Zimbabweans are quick to point out that they supported the country’s seven-year military intervention in neighbouring Mozambique, where Charamba says, Zimbabwe helped bring peace to Mozambique enabling it to climb out of a vortex of war and violence which had engulfed the country for some 20 years after independence in 1975. Western diplomats largely agree. But the anti-Mugabe sentiment in Zimbabwe rose after September last year, when the country sent troops to DRC intervene on behalf of President Laurent-Desire Kabila. “I remember advising my government a year ago that the country was on the brink of a major change, that Zimbabweans had had enough, and that was before the DRC intervention,” said a western diplomat. “I still find myself saying that something is going to happen, that it simply cannot carry on this way. Yet people here are resilient, resourceful and peaceful. There is unlikely to be a revolution or an overthrow, but come the election next year, if it is free and fair, the chances of a ZANU-PF victory remain to be seen.” The next presidential election is scheduled in 2002. When asked in May this year whether he intended to run, Mugabe discounted reports that the ZANU-PF Politburo had agreed that he would not contest the next presidential election. “I know the door through which I came into politics and I know the door I should use to go out of politics.” No-one, he added, would dictate the way he should retire. In Zimbabwe, there is currently no viable opposition to the governing party and its leadership. Analysts told IRIN that the cracks now showing have been widened by inflation currently running at 70 percent, unemployment estimated at 55 percent, rising rural poverty in the countryside where most of the country’s 12.8 million people live, low productivity, a debt trap and structural problems with the economy. All are problems, they say, which were there before the Congo intervention. The military intervention, however, has given the opponents of Mugabe and ZANU-PF a new platform from which to raise these issues and heap on the criticism. The intervention in figures According to official government figures given to IRIN this month, Zimbabwe currently deploys in DRC about 10,000 troops, armoured vehicles and aircraft, making up roughly a third of its defence force. The government says 39 Zimbabwean soldiers lost their lives in the conflict. The Zimbabwean army is holding an estimated 300 prisoners of war (POWs) at various base camps in Congo. A further 49 Rwandese POWs have been transferred to Zimbabwe where they are held in military detention. A total of 36 Zimbabwean POWs are being held in Rwanda. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it has been visiting the POWs. Controversy over the cost and donor concerns Charamba told IRIN the operation was costing US $3 million a month, with most of the expenses met by the DRC government, and that a series of economic deals had provided Zimbabwe with favourable business opportunities and access to the country’s mineral wealth. But the major donors such as the European Union (EU), and international lending agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have said they were concerned that the cost of the Congo operation was in part responsible for outstripping the country’s ability to sustain development in key social sectors such as health, farming and education. Last month, the IMF and the World Bank put aid programmes together worth over US $340 million “under review”. An IMF team, headed by Anupam Basu, deputy director of the Africa Department, left Zimbabwe last week saying only the matter would be discussed at follow-up talks in coming months. “A lower budget deficit than that presented to parliament is needed for 2000 in order to reduce upward pressure on prices and interest rates and increase the resources available to finance private sector activities,” the IMF office in Harare said. In a terse statement, it added: “Another fiscal issue covered in the discussions (Basu held with Reserve Bank, Central Bank and finance ministry officials) was the need to assess and clarify the costs of the war in the DRC.” An EU diplomat in Zimbabwe told IRIN: “Aid for structural budgetary support could be a problem. It is likely we would follow the lead here set by the IMF and the World Bank. What we do not know is how much the DRC intervention is costing or when it will end. There is no doubt that this is a complicating factor.” The controversy reached a head with the publication last month of a report in ‘The Financial Times’ of London quoting leaked finance ministry documents disclosing a cost closer to US $27.7 million a month. “This figure remains very difficult to verify independently,” a diplomat said. The IMF should “shut up” - Mugabe On learning of the IMF decision, Mugabe reacted by telling a news conference in Paris last week: “The IMF should shut up its mouth. Yes, we have spent money in DRC, but we have not died because of that. We continue to be productive.” Mugabe also accused the IMF of attacking Zimbabwe’s presence in the DRC even though it was not the only country which had sent in troops to save Kabila and his government in a war against Ugandan and Rwandan-backed rebels. Charamba, explained that that intervention had full SADC backing, and that it was launched as assistance to a fellow SADC member invaded by external powers, in this case Uganda and Rwanda. Mugabe also told the news conference that IMF and World Bank-backed economic programmes since 1991 had caused “untold suffering for the majority of Zimbabweans”. No date for a withdrawal from Congo “Our soldiers will go out of the DRC when the right stage comes for us to get out,” Mugabe said. “There is very little fighting in the DRC now, but we need a facilitator for more dialogue in which the people of Congo must also participate.” The budget and the economy These statements coincided with the release last month of the country’s national budget for the year 2000. Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa said the 70 percent inflation rate had become the “number one enemy” in the fight against poverty and unemployment. He denied media reports in recent weeks that the government had misled the IMF on the cost of its DRC intervention. At a current exchange rate of 40 Zimbabwe dollars to the American dollar, Murerwa said the budget deficit for the year 2000 would be 3.8 percent of GDP or 11.4 billion Zimbabwe dollars. Defence spending would rise 58 percent to 8.2 billion Zimbabwe dollars, second only to the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture which was allocated 14.6 billion Zimbabwe dollars. Health and Child Welfare was allocated 6.2 billion Zimbabwe dollars. Western economic experts in Harare told IRIN they feared that the finance ministry was often overruled by higher government authorities on key fiscal and budgetary spending issues, and this was another reason for the reticence of the big lending agencies. At the same time, an analyst in Zimbabwe said the country’s ability to service its foreign debts was under threat from a “critical” foreign currency shortage. Dumisani Ndlela, said this shortage “has plagued the market of late amid reports the country’s foreign reserves, which should be ideally at three months’ import cover, are now almost depleted”. Although banks were said to hold over US $120 million on their foreign currency accounts (FCAs), this was not a component of Central Bank-held reserves. Currency held in FCAs was only available to the market once it had been exchanged for the Zimbabwe dollar. The central bank, he added, had not been able to build “meaningful” foreign currency reserves this year from the country’s main export earner, tobacco. The tobacco trading season ended in September. The impact The situation in Zimbabwe has resulted in a series of strikes, leading to clashes on the streets of Harare. These are predominantly over salaries that fail to keep pace with spiralling inflation, and regular food, electricity, and fuel price increases. Ndlela said the foreign currency situation was being felt by big national import corporations such as Noczim, the national oil procurement company, and Zesa, the main electricity supplier. In May this year, the SADC Regional Early Warning Unit raised another problem. It said that Zimbabwe’s food security was hanging in the balance because of the economic crisis and drought in areas producing the country’s staple, maize. Once a net exporter of maize, Zimbabwe is currently importing grain from South Africa and was expected to import maize from the United States at an estimated cost of US $260,000. Zimbabwe was forecast to produce about 1.5 mt of maize this year, short of its 1.8 million requirement. The country’s millers have complained that they are being driven out of business by government attempts to control the politically sensitive price of maize meal. Another economist, John Robertson, told IRIN the problem lay with the government’s “interference with prices over the last couple of years”. Farmers have responded to low maize prices set by the Grain Marketing Board by switching to more lucrative crops, forcing the government to import maize. The response from workers is likely to be still higher wage demands. “Wage demands of 50 to 60 percent may sound extravagant, but workers need that sort of increase to put them back to where they were a year ago,” Robertson said. “Average wages in the country have slipped by 70 percent since 1990.” The health crisis In an action which graphically illustrates the crisis, wage demands by striking doctors, angry at the shortage of drugs and medical equipment brought the country’s public health system to a virtual stop. On 21 September, 400 of the country’s junior and middle level doctors - there are 800 doctors in Zimbabwe altogether - staged a six-week strike. The government has pledged a review, but insisted that doctors would not be paid for the period they were on strike. Meanwhile, the Community Health Working Group (CWGH) has said that the national budget had failed to allocate sufficient funds for Zimbabwe’s basic health needs. Dr Rene Loewenson of CWGH said there “is little to give confidence” in a health and child welfare budget which allocated approximately US $13 per capita against defence spending of US $19 per capita. “It is inconceivable that in a country which has faced a cholera epidemic, severe malaria outbreaks, among other serious and fatal environmental diseases, that we continue to give so little priority to preventive health services. An allocation of about 14 percent of the health budget would have been closer to appropriate levels, reducing the share allocated to administration,” she said. According to estimates by UNAIDS, local health authorities, and Mugabe himself, about 1,200 people are dying weekly in Zimbabwe of HIV/AIDS-related causes. The number of people getting infected is calculated at 2,000 per week. Zimbabwe now has a population of approximately 300,000 so-called AIDS orphans. The government announced a new 3 percent “AIDS levy”. But its critics in the health service, besides the media and opposition politicians, view the move as simply passing the burden onto the taxpayer without transparent, democratic accounting, Loewenson said. Referring to the Congo intervention, she added: “The problem is with our priorities. We could surely afford to do without the expenditure on the Congo war.” Simeon Mawanza, of Zimrights an NGO funded by the international donor community, asked: “Why do I need US $19 for my defence next year? This is a country at peace, we don’t have a quarrel with anyone and I don’t need any defence. But if someone outside here gets hit by a car, will there be a doctor at the clinic to treat that person? Will the necessary drugs and equipment be available?” A crisis in the countryside In a country where 70 percent of the population is rural, another major issue of contention is over the allocation of land. Since Mugabe came to power on pledges of allocating the rural community land once owned by wealthy white farmers and corporations, the programme has been flawed from the start, according to those questioned. To this day, two decades after independence, some 11 million hectares of prime land is owned by around 4,500 mostly white commercial farmers. Over six million black Zimbabweans are crowded onto barren communal areas, reinforcing rural poverty and reflecting an unchanged colonial legacy. Last year, the government threatened to requisition 1,471 listed farms and pay only for infrastructure but not the land itself. At a land conference in September, donors pledged financial support for reform if government policy met transparency and poverty-alleviation criteria, with the land purchased at market rates. A new Inception Phase Framework Plan, to be part funded by donors, calls for the resettlement of 77,700 rural families on a million hectares over two years. “The crisis in the countryside is getting worse by the day,” said Mawanza of Zimrights. A new political movement is born In a bid to boost the chances of what political opposition there is in Zimbabwe, a new coalition was established in February this year. Called the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), it is led by Morgan Tsvangirai, a 47-year-old father of six and onetime nickel miner whose rose to become the secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). Tsvangirai is widely viewed by western diplomats as the most vocal, if not the only serious opposition leader even though the MDC still lacks the organisational and financial clout needed to bring the government down in legislative elections scheduled next year. He has publicly urged the EU, the IMF and other donors to get tougher with the government. Any further aid grants, he said in an interview with IRIN, should be conditional on good governance, transparency, the rule of law and human rights. He cited widespread corruption, a lack of accountability, and rule by a presidency which had vested itself with too much power. It was “wasting” millions of dollars of taxpayers money on an “unpopular and unwanted military adventure” in Congo. “The trouble is that after 20 years of rule under President Mugabe, we have no idea where the country is going or what there is to show for it. We are dealing with a government which rules by force and fraud. Corruption is now the biggest scourge.” He said the country’s economy was not simply in a state of crisis, but in a free fall, with 75 percent of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people living below the poverty line. He also said there was a growing “militarisation” of government in Zimbabwe which had manifested itself through the appointment of army generals to public office positions such as the head of police and the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). Tsvangirai accused Mugabe, 74, of using the CIO and state institutions to try and undermine the MDC. “The man loves power, he won’t give it up. Now that Nelson Mandela has stepped aside, and Julius Nyeyere has passed away, he no longer feels eclipsed by them and is more concerned about his destiny as the ‘grand old man of Africa’ than the interests of this country. These are things I tell him when we meet. I have told him he is betraying this country, that the small ruling elite has betrayed the hopes of the liberation movement in Zimbabwe which overthrew colonial rule.”