At least 300 refugees have deserted holding camps in Zimbabwe in the past two months raising fears that illegal immigrants are using the country as a transit point. "We are worried about this trend and feel Zimbabwe is being used as a transit point for irregular migration into other countries," the newspaper quoted Chief Immigration Officer Elasto Mugwadi as saying.

Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has distanced himself from Movement for Democratic Change members who registered as election candidates. This week 26 MDC members registered to stand in Senate elections next month. Mr Tsvangirai had earlier announced the MDC would not field candidates. The dispute over the Senate election has left the MDC in its worst-ever crisis. Mr Tsvangirai's spokesman, William Bango, said state security services were sowing divisions in the MDC.

Teachers in Zimbabwe have urged the government to provide free AIDS treatment after a survey revealed the profession was struggling with the highest infection rates in the country. According to a report by the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ), the country lost 566 teachers to AIDS-related illnesses last year. In the first six months of 2005, the death toll had already hit 362. "We have lost more than 1,000 teachers across the country in the last 18 months. Many more are infected or affected and are suffering in silence. It is estimated that 25 percent of teachers are living with AIDS. The majority of schools in Zimbabwe have lost at least one teacher to the disease and at least two to three teachers are on AIDS-related sick leave," said the report.

Reporters Without Borders has voiced relief that the Zimbabwean authorities have abandoned the prosecution of 44 Daily News journalists who were to have been tried by a Harare court on 12 October on charges of working without an accreditation issued by the Media and Information Commission, the government-controlled body set up to regulate the news media. The 44 journalists and their defence lawyer, Beatrice Mtetwa, went to the court on 12 October but none of the court officials including the judge in charge of the case knew about the hearing.

The Zimbabwean government is well known for its repressive treatment of critics and independent journalists. A crackdown on the press over the past five years has left the country with no independent daily newspapers, no private radio news coverage, and only two prominent independent weeklies. What is less documented is the toll that this crackdown takes on the country's journalists, including those who flee overseas and struggle to rebuild their lives in exile, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

“A Tragedy of Lives: Women in Prison in Zimbabwe” takes us through the lives of female prisoners in Zimbabwe. Edited by Chiedza Musengezi, founder and director of Zimbabwe Women Writers and Irene Staunton, publisher at Weaver Press, the format of the book brings together prisoners and writers, as each woman interviewed was done so by a member of Zimbabwe Women Writers. Tracked down by a writer, these women were often difficult to find, and the process of interviewing them was indeed also difficult, as recalling their past proved painful for many.

Categorized according to the type of crime committed, “A Tragedy of Lives” does a wonderful job of allowing outsiders into the lives of female prisoners. While each woman’s experience differs, general themes prevail - poverty, abuse, violence and the difficulty of providing for family member are pervasive, but each woman’s story culminates in the hope for a better future, and the means of attaining that future do not always coincide within the law.

Reproductive rights (or the lack thereof), domestic issues, fraud, commercial sex work, dangerous drug selling (mostly marijuana – not considered dangerous to many) and shoplifting were the primary causes of arrest for these women. Most of the women came from poor families and have had difficult lives. They were left with the burdens of caring for children, husbands/boyfriends, parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles with few resources and low levels of education or skills training (many women had received little education, as their parents before them could not afford the fees). Given these difficult situations, many of the women had simply sought out alternative, informal means of making ends meet, which just so happen to be outside of the law.

While women make only a small (2-3%) proportion of prisoners in Zimbabwe (and no doubt the rest of Africa), they are often imprisoned for criminal activities that are non-violent. Their time in prison, argue contributors to this book, could better be spent serving community sentences, so as to avoid the women’s absences from their homes and families – a situation which serves only to exacerbate the prevailing poverty from which they were originally trying to escape. Ongoing abuse and exploitation (mostly in terms of labor and access to family members and supplies) by officials were some of the main concerns of the women interviewed. But specific conditions in which Zimbabwean women find themselves facing in prison, and their particular needs as women, were again and again referenced in these interviews. Of particular concern was sanitation, especially while living in conditions not conducive to the needs of women. Dirty cells with toilets that could not be flushed from inside, a severe constraint on the number, or even complete lack of sanitary/menstrual pads*, combined with a shortage in soap (for cleaning clothes and blankets) and limitations on the number of undergarments a prisoner was allowed, all contributed to living conditions that were violations of basic human rights.

Upon their release from prison, many of the interviewed women found their reintegration difficult. A large number were not accepted by their families, numerous women returned home to find their husbands living with new women, many had missed watching their children grow up. Finding work was also a challenge. For those women who had committed petty crimes and were sentenced only to short incarcerations, they did not qualify for the training courses that some of the prisons offered (usually through foreign run charities). A great number of the women became religious while in prison, mostly due to the work of charity organizations, such as Prison Fellowship. This newfound appreciation for religion was often cited as a major motivation for these women to return to their homes and lead lives free of violence or dishonesty.

“A Tragedy of Lives” ends with interviews conducted with officials involved in Zimbabwe’s prison system. While they provide a glimpse into the policies behind the system, the interviews, in my mind, fell short of any critical analysis. Many, if not all, contradicted the very stories told in the book. The interviews with these officials are thus an interesting contrast to those held with the female prisoners – they serve to highlight the dissonance found in any institutional setting. Perhaps this is the theme of the book – what happens in reality is so often very far off from what should be going on ideally, in any given situation. That “A Tragedy of Lives” is able to convey this notion in such a personal way is impressive, and should serve as inspiration for anyone interested in justice.

* This problem is, in fact, common to all of Zimbabwe. Last week, Tabita Khumalo of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions, along with trade unions in Britain and South Africa, made an appeal for funds to purchase sanitary pads that could be sold at affordable prices to working Zimbabwean women. Currently, no menstrual products are produced locally, and foreign exchange rates are so low that importing them has become impossible. Pads are available on the black market, but the high cost means that they are worth half a months wages for most working women. This shortage has been played down by political figures, and is seen as taboo. The lack of these necessary supplies means that women are resorting to using rags and newspapers, which can lead to infections.

* Reviewed by Karoline Kemp, a Commonwealth of Learning Young Professional Intern working at Fahamu.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The announcement that Senate elections would be held in Zimbabwe on November 26 has been interpreted as a move designed by President Robert Mugabe to contain fall out from his controversial appointment of Joyce Mujuru as vice president. It has also caused tension in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change over whether to contest the Senate polls. Writer Chenjerai Hove identifies a “Zimbabwean disease” which dictates that once an institution is formed it becomes a national cause to tear it apart.

The scene is a country called Zimbabwe, and the audience, thirteen million anxious Zimbabweans. The actors: Zanu PF and the MDC. The Stage Director, Robert Gabriel Mugabe. The title of the play: The Senate Bandwagon. The Zimbabwean political audience is once again faced with an ever more confused political situation. A few elections later, the people are rather puzzled as to what exactly is happening. President Robert Mugabe has dangled a new carrot, the Senate. And one already knows why this carrot is there, in front of the two political parties and their faithful. I always wondered why this causes confusion because the Senate is supposed to last only a short time. After all, it was abolished in 1987 on the pretext that it unnecessarily delayed urgent legislation which the government wanted passed the fast-track way. With the current series of endless crises, it would seem the need for urgent passing of legislation has not died. The land issue is still fresh and causing havoc to the economy, the economic mess fraught with so many other problems, the decline of services like health, education, transport. So many urgent issues! In the midst of all this, the president wants to introduce a Senate, an expensive undertaking which a shrinking economy can hardly afford.

It is well known now that Mugabe wouldn't care less if the country was broke or not, as long as he keeps power till he dies. So, in order to accommodate his 'fellows' who had fallen by the wayside, he decides to introduce a senate which practically serves no useful purpose except to give terminal benefits to his old and sickly friends he had forgotten to take along on his gravy train of economic plunder and electoral fraud. Then comes the side show: the MDC jumping onto this worthless project on the assumption that it might be possible to contain Zanu PF in its own game. To play or not to play the Zanu PF game? That was the question facing the national council of the MDC. Surprisingly, the outcome was half-half kusenga kwedhongi. The meaning of it all is that to play the game means the MDC accepts the rules and procedures which created the game. It also means an endorsement of the political manoeuvres which have created the senate, and also an acceptance of the recent constitutional amendments as valid. That is what President Mugabe wants to happen, realizing that he created this game in order to dangle a few crumps and left-overs in order cause a splits in the MDC and possibly civil society. Mugabe's project seems to be advancing without any hitches, so far.

As far as I can see, the problem of the MDC started when they participated in the parliamentary elections whose results were already predicted and known. Now, members of the opposition are in parliament, but not all who wanted to be there. Those who could not make it to parliament would argue that the current MDC members of the august house are enjoying the benefits of the gravy train while denying others the opportunity to do so in the new Senate. That is the problem facing the MDC. They have allowed themselves to taste of the niceties offered by the devil, and everyone wants their piece of the carrot. Exactly what Mugabe and Zanu PF wants, especially in these hard times of economic collapse and struggles for survival! Everyone wants to put bread and butter on the table, never mind the source! As far as I can see, wrapped inside the carrot, Mr Mugabe and his party gurus have thrown a live snake in the house of the opposition. Some from the opposition camp only see the skin of the carrot, while others have the vision to see the snake within. Thus, the opposition party begins its own demise fired by the energies and skills of Mr Mugabe's camp. The audience, we ordinary Zimbabweans, can only look and wonder whether the opposition is serious about participating in a Senate whose introduction it strongly opposed not so long ago.

Having participated in the formation and running of several national organisations, I have come to accept that the Zimbabwean disease is one and only one in terms of organisational management. Once an institution is formed, the next crucial task for some Zimbabweans is to find as many reasons and ways as possible to tear it apart. Some people call it factionalism. Others call it 'splinterism'. What I know is that both are usually not based on any basic principle or vision. They are usually based on some flimsy excuse and rampant opportunism, a national malaise in the affairs of our country. All the noble reasons underlying the formation of the organisation are soon forgotten. Every one for himself, and God for none of us! It is sad that the MDC is split and probably destroyed over a worthless carrot (Senate) dangled in front of them. Every citizen can see clearly that the Senate serves no useful purpose except to function as some kind of old-age pension and gratuity for Mugabe's loyalists and friends. Everyone knows who the new senators will be: old men and women discarded by either design or mistake by the Mugabe gravy train. Why anyone with a national vision and some kind of realization of where the country is going should join, I have no clue. In the end it also becomes a question of personal integrity and dignity. Zimbabweans are used to national abuse, especially by the ruining party, Zanu PF.

Sadly, it seems the MDC, having raised people's hopes, has also now embarked on this national malaise of thinking that they can earn good salaries from a national purse which does not exist. They can join the dance of Zanu PF pensioners and then wake up in the morning to call themselves the opposition. In Shona it is called 'kudziya moto wembavha'.(Warming themselves from the fireplace of a thief). As the Zimbabwean disease of splits and factions engulfs the political realm of the country, the decay continues, and more political parties will be formed in order to split again and again while Mugabe continues to destroy the country. The national vision dies, only to be replaced by financial greed and illusions of boundless power. In the end, national political fatigue creeps in, and no one wants to vote for anyone, knowing only too well that there is no Zimbabwean politician interested in shaping a genuine national vision devoid of greed for power and money.

* Chenjerai Hove is a leading Zimbabwean author and has several published books and poems including the aclaimed novel BONES. This article appeared on the www.newzimbabwe.com website and reproduced here with permission of the author.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The Zimbabwean economy has contracted by 50% in the last five years, inflation stands at 255% and unemployment hovers at 75%, say economists. Recently, there was much controversy over a proposed $500m loan from South Africa to Zimbabwe in order to prevent Zimbabwe's suspension from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, South Africa made it clear that the loan was available only if Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe reformed economic policies and changed his politics. Patrick Bond critically examines the politics surrounding the proposed loan agreement and South African president Thabo Mbeki's vision that the IMF can be used as a tool for "normalisation" of Zimbabwean society.

Consider these wise words from a leading African National Congress politician: ‘As we speak, the neoliberal orthodoxy sits as a tyrant on the throne of political-economic policymaking. The dominant social and economic forces are doing their utmost to hegemonise the discourse - both materially and in respect of how developmental processes are to be institutionalised and theorised. Among other things, they use such transnational governmental organisations as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation to shape the discourse within which policies are defined, the terms and concepts that circumscribe what can be thought and done.’

This quote, from an April speech, is worth keeping in mind; its author (revealed at the end of this article) knows well of what he speaks. In between, though, we will consider the main way in which the region’s dominant social and economic forces intend to hegemonise political transition in Zimbabwe. The objective seems to be to bring the IMF back into play, for the first time since 1999.

It may surprise some readers, but a decade ago, Robert Mugabe’s regime was in fact a successful protégé of Washington financiers. In 1995, the World Bank gave his government the highest possible rating in its scorecard of neoliberal orthodoxy: ‘highly satisfactory’. This followed fifteen years of arm twisting by the Bank and IMF, leading to the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP).

Things began to go badly wrong for Harare’s elites soon thereafter. From 1996-2000, a series of overlapping worker/peasant/student/war veteran rebellions became a serious threat to Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu(PF) party. This in turn resulted in a zig-zag economic policy based on a mix of carrots and sticks, combining frontal attacks on poor and working-class urban Zimbabweans with fiery anti-imperialist rhetoric.

At the heart of Harare’s fiscal crisis are Mugabe’s expensive carrots to disgruntled sections of society: large new pensions for tens of thousands of Liberation War vets (previously ignored or repressed) from September 1997; periodic payolas of various kinds to the army and police, including license to loot the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the late 1990s civil war; on-again/off-again price controls from 1998, in order to prevent further ‘IMF Riots’ (which had broken out periodically during the 1990s); occasional gifts to key constituents during the early 2000s, such as very inexpensive rural electricity; and state-sponsored land invasions immediately following Mugabe’s defeat in a constitutional referendum in February 2000, as the opposition Movement for Democratic Change became a threatening electoral force.

The sticks we have learned much more about these past months. They don’t need recounting in detail, but include, in the words of South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Blade Nzimande, ‘the wanton destruction of homes and community facilities’ for more than a million of the urban poor, and ‘anti-democratic legislation, including legislation directed against the right to assembly and against media freedom’.

Durable nationalism

Mugabe’s alliances have generally been maintained the past five years, and both external and internecine rebellions have been crushed. Regular predictions that the ruling party will fragment - mainly due to ethnic factionalism - never reach fruition. After three decades of control over Zanu(PF) and six years’ experience harassing a strong opposition party, Mugabe has an even stronger grip on his politburo. Evidence of his dominance during this period includes the expulsion, demotion or jailing of figures with substantial regional or sectoral powerbases.

However, with Mugabe apparently now unable to raise basic hard currency for importing petrol, food and other vital necessities, the time is ripe for the next stage of what might be termed ‘exhausted nationalism’. When Simba Manyanya and I began using this phrase in 2002 as shorthand for Mugabe’s incapacity to deliver a higher standard of living, it was not clear that the nationalist project could be reinvigorated, at least in a manner the masses would find compelling.

We cited Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: ‘A bourgeoisie that provides nationalism alone as food for the masses fails in its mission and gets caught up in a whole series of mishaps. But if nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a blind alley. The bourgeois leaders of underdeveloped countries imprison national consciousness in sterile formalism.’

The problem of ‘exhausted nationalism’ also applies to South Africa, where SACP deputy secretary Jeremy Cronin once translated it as the ‘Zanufication’ of the African National Congress (he was hurriedly forced to apologise). In turn, this is why the vigorous debate now underway on lending to Mugabe is so revealing. For it appears that Mbeki and the IMF have, to borrow the quote above, successfully shaped the discourse within which policies are defined, and indeed a proposed loan of $500 million from South Africa to Zimbabwe may circumscribe what can be thought and done.

There is no better example than Pretoria spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe’s comment that the loan could ‘benefit Zimbabwean people as a whole, within the context of their program of economic recovery and political normalisation.’ Much of the debate in South Africa concerns whether Pretoria is putting sufficient – or indeed any – pressure on Harare to reform, as Netshitenzhe refuses to comment on speculation that both political and economic liberalisation are conditions for the proposed loan.

Mugabe spokesperson George Charamba revealed the process on August 14: ‘We never asked for any money from South Africa. It was the World Bank that approached Mbeki and said please help Zimbabwe. They then offered to help us.’ According to the World Bank’s own press service, a Pretoria-based Bank economist, Lollete Kritzinger-van Niekerk, confirmed that her institution ‘is not ready to thaw relations with the ostracised Harare’, hence Mbeki’s backchannel. A reported $160 million out of Pretoria’s proposed loan was meant to repay the IMF, with the rest earmarked for importing (from South Africa) agricultural inputs and petroleum.

But in Zimbabwe there is, in reality, no ‘normalisation’ under way, if by which is meant Mugabe’s agreement to hold serious democratisation talks with the Movement for Democratic Change, to run genuinely free and fair elections, to unban the media and revoke extremist laws, to recall fascistic security forces to the barracks, and to provide emergency food and shelter in a non-politicised manner to the millions who urgently require it.

In any case, Mbeki has repeatedly shown that these objectives are unimportant: by propping up Mugabe in the United Nations Human Rights Commission, by public commentary downplaying repression and vote theft, by silence at key junctures and by sending biased observation teams to monitor elections. Mugabe himself publicly rejected even the idea of negotiating with the MDC.

Setting the fake ‘reform’ rhetoric aside, what is instead revealed by the current crisis is another of Fanon’s insights, namely that Zanu(PF)’s sterile formalism now sharply contradicts further capital accumulation by Zimbabwe’s parasitical ruling class, a key faction of which desperately requires foreign exchange.

For the impoverished Zimbabwean masses, there is no economic bailout on the horizon, much less democratic leverage, only a choice of which financiers will worsen austerity in future years: the predictable money mandarins of Washington, or the new subimperialists of Pretoria, backed by a gullible media and superficially critical opposition parties, or both.

IMF squeeze on the Zimbabwean poor

Consider the first lot, the Bretton Woods Institutions. Beginning in September 1980, when Zimbabwe formally joined, the role of the IMF was never to benefit ‘Zimbabwean people as a whole’. As York University’s radical economist Colin Stoneman explained, ‘In encouraging borrowing, the IMF recognised that it had as yet no means of exerting leverage on Zimbabwean economic policy.’ What was that leverage? Five examples are illustrative:

- By early 1982, finance minister Bernard Chidzero – later to head the IMF/Bank Development Committee – denied that ‘the IMF would impose any conditions as Zimbabwe was already restructuring its economy.’ Though it was ‘a sensitive issue not for public debate,’ Chidzero made statements to Parliament claiming ‘devaluation of the dollar is not imminent and is not being contemplated.’ Less than three months later, Chidzero announced a 20% decline in the currency, admitting it ‘had been under consideration for some months.’

- In late 1982, interest rates were raised dramatically, a move Chidzero pointed out with pride to the World Bank in private correspondence.

- In March 1983, an editorial by the government-owned Herald observed that ‘Zimbabwe has a democratically elected people’s government and therefore, the people, its supporters have the right to know what the IMF asked of this country.’

- By 1984, Zimbabwe was paying vast proportions of export earnings to cover foreign loans, in part because of apartheid destabilisation of the region. As Stoneman put it, ‘there can be no doubt that Zimbabwe’s payments crisis was partly caused by South Africa, and that this was the means whereby the IMF gained a lever on Zimbabwean economic policy’.
- The IMF soon terminated its $315 million line of credit due to Harare’s budget overruns, forcing more painful austerity. By early 1985, Mugabe complained of ‘pressure from the IMF to cut government spending on education and defence but the government has a way of overcoming this pressure’. Yet within a few years, Zimbabwe’s vaunted education programme was indeed under threat as Bretton Woods cost-recovery policies gained momentum.

The Bretton Woods Institutions applied neoliberalism across a variety of sectors, and applied heavy pressure on Mugabe to continue his ineffectual ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ rural land policy. At last month’s land summit in South Africa, Mbeki told the audience that Zimbabwe’s failure to embark upon land redistribution prior to the chaotic takeovers of 4000 white-owned farms from February 2000, was because ‘They slowed down to get the negotiations in this country to succeed’ since South Africa’s white farmers would be ‘frightened’ about the transition to democracy.

In reality, Harare’s 1993 Land Designation Act was ‘shelved,’ as Zanu(PF) member of parliament Lazarus Nzarayebani complained in late 1994, because ‘it is not in conformity with the World Bank and IMF’ and instead served government only ‘to save its face’. In fact, South Africa’s first ANC land minister, Derek Hanekom, invited the same World Bank team that was preventing Zimbabwe’s land reform during the early 1990s, led by Robert Christenson, to guide post-apartheid policy. (That policy was also characterised by willing seller, willing buyer neoliberalism, and in August was publicly recognised as a failure at a major state-sponsored land summit.)

What of the last batch of IMF credits to Zimbabwe? Did these contribute to the welfare of all Zimbabweans, and promote peace and democracy? The opposite conclusion is more logical. The IMF’s $53 million loan in 1999 was meant to release another $800 million from other lenders. The IMF’s stated objectives were straightforward: reversal of both the luxury import tax and price controls on staple foods.

Details were confirmed in a March 1999 statement by leading IMF negotiator Michael Nowak, ‘There are two issues outstanding and these have stopped the IMF from making the standby credit available to the country. These issues are, one, we want the government to reduce the tariffs slapped on luxury goods last September, and secondly, we also want the government to give us a clear timetable as to when and how they will remove the price controls they have imposed on some goods.’

Five months later, the IMF agreed to increase the loan amount to $200 million, but two more conditions were reportedly added: access to classified Democratic Republic of Congo war information and a commitment to pay new war expenditure from the existing budget. According to an IMF official, ‘The Zimbabweans felt offended, shocked, but they all the same agreed to give us the information, we got all the clarification we wanted. They had no choice... We have had assurances [that] if there is budgetary overspending, there will be cuts in other budget sectors.’

In sum, the IMF gave permission to penalise health, education and other badly-defended sectors on behalf of Mugabe’s military adventures and business cronies, and also ordered Mugabe to immediately reverse the only redistributive policies he had adopted in a long time: a) a ban on holding foreign exchange accounts in local banks (which immediately halted the easiest form of capital flight by the country’s elites); b) a 100% customs tax on imported luxury goods; and c) price controls on staple foods in the wake of several urban riots.

That deal quickly fell apart, however, when fiscal targets were missed. Harare was, quite simply, broke. The previous year, Mugabe had spent an historically-unprecedented 38% of export earnings on servicing foreign loans, exceeded that year only by Brazil and Burundi. With foreign debt at $4.92 billion, fully $980 million was repaid to foreign creditors, while donor aid fell from its 1995 peak of $310 million to just $150 million. But due to compound interest rates, barely a dent was made in the total foreign debt outstanding.

The IMF continued giving advice to impose austerity, both from its Harare office and via periodic high-level missions from Washington. The 2000 mission called for ‘tight monetary and wage policies… privatisation, civil service reform and trade liberalisation,’ according to the Herald newspaper.

By mid-2001, finance minister Simba Makoni confessed to the Southern Africa regional session of the World Economic Forum in Durban, ‘We are committed to fulfilling these obligations, but it’s clear that our economy is in no state to generate sufficient funds to clear these arrears.’ As a result, by mid-2005, Mugabe had run up repayment arrears of $295 million to the IMF, and more than $1 billion to other lenders, including the World Bank and African Development Bank. The total foreign debt that is either in arrears or will come due in the next decade is $4.5 billion, far more than the national GDP in a given year.

Was Zimbabwe punished for failing to make most foreign debt payments since 1999? To almost everyone’s surprise, Mugabe was able to get away with the de facto default. No new long-term credit has been available, to be sure, but nor did the US Marines or other hostile military forces invade so to collect collateral, as was the practice a century earlier against defaulting Latin American countries.

Instead, once Zimbabwe fell into deep arrears to the IMF, a convoluted official procedure began, culminating a few months ago in the threat of expulsion. From 2001, the Zimbabwean finance ministry scrounged $1.4 million each quarter to make token payments on the debt, but from mid-2003 through 2004 found $16.5 million to send the IMF. This was also the point at which Zimbabwe ran out of petrol and many other essential imports.

Diplomatic scuffling

By August 2005, Mbeki assumed that his offer of a $500 million credit could influence the course of an elite transition, aiming at installing a neoliberal, low-intensity democracy regime. That model would slightly sideline Mugabe by 2008 at the latest; permit Zanu(PF) to retain power – possibly in a government of unity by coopting MDC leaders - with the friendlier face of a technocratic president (former neoliberal finance minister Simba Makoni is usually tipped for the job) even if Mugabe still controlled the ruling party itself; and then open the economic borders up much more to Johannesburg capital.

Mugabe didn’t play along. Showing an impressive resilience and desire to hold on to maximum power at all cost, he visited China in August and then snubbed Mbeki in a brutal diplomatic manner. At an African Union (AU) meeting in Addis Ababa, according to the Sunday Independent, Mugabe built an alliance of other leaders to ‘defeat a South African tactical move to win two permanent seats for Africa on the United Nations security council… Mugabe, Egypt and others spoke out against a compromise deal which South Africa had helped forge between the AU and the so-called G4, a coalition of four other nations seeking permanent seats on the security council - Germany, Japan, India and Brazil.’

‘Mbeki argued strongly at the AU summit in Addis Ababa in favour of the compromise as the only realistic way to get Africa permanent seats. But the Mugabe camp prevailed. The summit rejected the compromise deal that AU and G4 foreign ministers, including SA’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, agreed on at a meeting in London… Mugabe and others argued against this, saying the lack of a veto would relegate African permanent members to “second-class status”.’ Fortunately, the second-class citizenship he sought in the UN Security Council was not offered at the September heads of state summit. Hence a more serious fight can be waged at some stage, instead of legitimising a UN under Washington’s thumb.

This brings us back, though, to Mbeki’s vision that the IMF can be a vehicle for normalisation. As Nzimande reported to a Congress of SA Trade Unions central committee, the SACP was ‘extremely concerned about the danger of a loan amounting to little more than extending the crisis-ridden shelf-life of anti-worker, anti-poor authoritarian policies and practices. We call on our own government to show the maximum resolve in ensuring that there are very clear requirements attached to any loan. These requirements must include guarantees that the loan will not be squandered on elite consumption or repression. But the requirements must also embrace a much wider package of commitments with clear time-lines… These wider issues are, in fact, essential for resolving the present financial crisis.’

And then Mugabe pulled a card from his sleeve no one thought he had: in September he came up with $135 million from having scrounged all foreign currency available, and he paid the IMF a substantial downpayment, enough to earn a six-month reprieve on the expulsion threat. Mugabe promised $50 million more by March, and vowed to repay the full amount. (No one outside Pretoria really believes the IMF would expel Zimbabwe, given that China and many African regimes would oppose this in the IMF executive, where 15% of the vote would be enough to veto such a move.)

By all accounts, this was an insane gesture. Even the white business spokespeople who are most aggrieved by Mugabe’s dirigisme were opposed to the payment. The only explanation is Mugabe’s ego: it is so gargantuan that, under pressure from Pretoria, he ignored the extraordinary sacrifices being made by his citizens these past months, with every commodity in short supply, simply to massage his pride at repaying the IMF.

South African government officials were also surprised, and continue to maintain that negotiations for the additional $500 million are on track, merely delayed a bit. The Cabinet had made one other similar loan to a country so as to repay the IMF, three years earlier. It was Joseph Kabila’s unelected regime in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the $45 million loan by Pretoria allowed Kabila to clear enough of the old Mobutu arrears. Those debts should be declared ‘Odious’ in international law, but their payment by Pretoria gained Kabila a new IMF credit at the cost of renewed IMF control over the Congolese people.

The extent of Mbeki’s own commitment to getting the IMF back into Zimbabwe was revealed on October 15. Addressing a forum of African Editors, he explained, ‘We had indeed said that we were ready to assist, and the reason we wanted to assist was because we understood the implications of Zimbabwe's expulsion from the IMF. What it would mean, among other things, is that everybody who is owed something by Zimbabwe would demand immediately to be paid. You would even get to a situation where they would seize anything that was being exported out of Zimbabwe because of that debt.’ This is utter nonsense, as the IMF has never acquired much less used such power. Many creditors presently dealing with Zimbabwe have various forms of security, because the government’s likelihood of nonpayment has been demonstrated for six years already.
By the way, returning to our opening quote, it was Pretoria’s local government minister, Sidney Mufamadi, who in April this year warned that the IMF molds ‘the discourse within which policies are defined, the terms and concepts that circumscribe what can be thought and done.’ There is no better example of this than Pretoria’s latest subimperial gambit in Zimbabwe, combining high finance and venal politics.

But let’s also pause to consider Mufamadi’s own borrowing from the World Bank, in a loan that directly places Bretton Woods advisors in dozens of municipalities. The World Bank website gives away Mufamadi’s game: ‘The Municipal Financial Management Technical Assistance Project, totaling $15 million is the only active World Bank loan to South Africa. It supports the building of financial management capacity in more than 40 key municipalities around the country. The World Bank country office is also supporting the government in … [its] oversight role in municipal public/private partnerships.’

On the same site, the Bank brags about its ‘support to Johannesburg’s iGoli’ (the city’s privatisation policy), allegedly a ‘model’ for South Africa. In reality, Africa’s largest water corporatisation quickly became a world-renowned site of brutal disconnections, prepaid meters and substandard sanitation for low-income townships – as well as heroic resistance by the Anti-Privatisation Forum and Jubilee South Africa, which combined to protest Paul Wolfowitz’s Johannesburg visit in July.

In contrast to activists, the key politicians prefer to ‘talk left, walk right’. Once we dispense with the rhetoric, this surreal financial game of hide-and-seek from the IMF unveils imperial/subimperial/dictatorial power relations uniting Washington, Pretoria and Harare. It remains for critics of the regimes to pursue a democratic, anti-neoliberal strategy – and too, for international protest against the Bretton Woods Institutions to now intensify.

* Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society: he is author of ‘Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment’ (1998) and coauthor of ‘Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice’ (2003). This article is excerpted from a longer version in the US journal ‘Against the Current’.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The third and last day of the Southern African Social Forum (SASF) dealt with the crisis in Zimbabwe and presented resolutions produced in the different topical workshops. Starting off with presentations from Zimbabwean activists on the crisis in their country, the Forum closed with a way forward for struggle in the whole southern African region. One of the reasons why Zimbabwe had been chosen to host the SASF was that so much focus was placed on the country, and activists wanted to come here to see with their own eyes what is happening, organisers of the Forum explained to Indymedia/South Africa. While it was a challenge to organise the logistics of the Forum, especially since the lack of fuel in the country made transportation of delegates difficult, Zimbabwe is a key country in the struggle against imperialist oppression causing poverty and social under-development, as well as the struggle against internal repression and lack of democratic rights. As such, the SASF was held in the midst of a place where all the reasons for struggle exist too obviously. For the rest of this article and other reports from the SASF, visit http://southafrica.indymedia.org/

Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is set to visit all of the country's ten provinces in a bid to bolster support for a boycott of next month's senate elections, his spokesperson said on Monday. The move by the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) comes amid a deepening crisis in the party, with the majority of members in the party's national council in favour of participating in the polls for an upper chamber of Parliament.

Zimbabwean lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa is among the recipients of this year's International Press Freedom Awards by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The other recipients were journalists from Brazil, China and Uzbekistan. Zimbabwe has in recent years closed newspapers and introduced increasingly strict laws restricting the media.

A Zimbabwean failed asylum seeker has won his battle against deportation in a ruling that was seen as a crucial test case on this issue. The tribunal found that although the claim for asylum was unfounded, there was evidence that failed asylum seekers returning to Zimbabwe faced persecution. The Zimbabwean, who cannot be named, won his appeal on the basis that as a result of having claimed asylum in the UK in the first place, he had a "well-founded fear of persecution" if he returned to Zimbabwe.

This study examines the causes of Zimbabwe's brain drain focusing on college and university students. 77% of students said that they were being encouraged or strongly encouraged to leave the country by their families, so that they could send remit funds, just for survival. The paper concludes that a coercive approach to the brain drain would only intensify the level of discontent and for most of the students would make absolutely no difference to their emigration intentions. It suggests that the best way to curb the high rates of skilled labour migration lies in addressing the economic fundamentals of the country in a way that will ultimately improve living standards.

Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, has fixed a November 26 date for elections to a new house of parliament criticised by the main opposition, state television reported October 12. Mugabe had already said the election would take place late next month. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which since 2000 has posed the biggest challenge to Mugabe's quarter-century rule, has not yet decided whether it will contest the Senate elections. The MDC has said the Senate is designed to accommodate Mugabe's supporters, and the party, like many Western governments, accuses Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF of rigging elections over the past five years. Mugabe used Zanu-PF's two-thirds majority in parliament to push through constitutional amendments in August, including provision for the Senate. Fifty members of the 66-seat Senate will be elected and the remainder appointed.

Zimbabwean civic action group, Sokwanele - (http://www.sokwanele.com/) reminds us that the “crisis” facing Zimbabwe today is not one single issue but many. There is a severe crisis in the economy for instance, as in manufacturing, as in agriculture, in education, health care and so on. In fact just about every sector of the national life is plunged into deep crisis right now.

Health is of particular concern and while the main focus here has been on AIDS, there are in fact other health issues that have been neglected such as Sleeping Sickness spread by the tsetse fly.
This is a slow, wasting illness characterized by fever and inflammation of the lymph nodes, leading to profound lethargy that frequently ends in death; in other words, a most unpleasant way to die. However it is not just a case of “sleeping sickness as sleeping is the sickness”.

Egyptian blogger, Baheyya – Baheyya (http://baheyya.blogspot.com/) has a last word on the re-election of Mubarak - YOU ARE NOT WANTED – YOUR TIME IS UP.
“A decrepit regime faces off with a society in movement. Egyptian society is debating, organising, learning, mobilising, demanding, manoeuvring, grumbling, watching, transforming, and of course, sulking”.

Jewels in the Jungle - Jewels in the Jungle (http://jewelsnthejungle.blogspot.com) reports on diamond mining in the DRC via a photo essay in this months Foreign Policy magazine.

“A Trail of Diamonds” by photographer Kadir van Lohuizen who followed the trail of the diamond trade around the world. This trail is dirty, oft-times violent and bloody, and littered with the destroyed lives of marginalized and victimized children, young people, and adults from Africa to India who work as underpaid labourers and unpaid slaves in the mining, cutting, and polishing of billions of dollars ($$$) worth of diamonds every year.

Telegraphic Congolais - Telegraphic Congolais (http://kivu.blogspot.com/) is the only blog I know reporting from the DRC (periodically at least). Unfortunately it has not been regularly updated so its not clear who the author is (journalist, activist or both or neither). In his latest post he mentions the Goma film project which is producing a documentary “Heal My People”.

The film “documents the lives of rape survivors in the Congo as they work with medical staff and counsellors to regain their health and dignity. Documentaries like this require extreme sensitivity and one hopes that the voices of the women are presented without distortion and from an Afrocentric perspective.

Finally Mzansi Afrika - Mzanis Afrika (http://mzansiafrika.typepad.com/mzansi_afrika/) has a report on how AIDS is causing a dramatic increase in school dropouts.

“According to the report (HRW) millions of children in southern and eastern Africa are dropping out of school as a direct result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. “Other experts on this issue have made the obvious observation that the effect of Aids in the classroom will have long term consequences by dampening economic growth across the continent. One of the solutions that springs to mind would be for government to provide special grants to orphaned children who can't afford uniforms and school fees”.

The World Bank says it may withhold financial aid to crisis-torn Zimbabwe to "set an example" saying allocating money to President Robert Mugabe's government would be a "terrible waste of funds." World Bank boss Paul Wolfowitz said on Tuesday the financial institution would be allocating funds "very, very carefully, and in the case of Zimbabwe perhaps not at all. My Africa experts say that with the kind of misgovernment that is taking place in Zimbabwe, it is not clear that development is possible at all.”

We are looking for a highly motivated and resourceful individual with a genuine commitment to development and advocacy, seeking to work in a cutting edge development agency. The postholder will be responsible for managing the programme in Zimbabwe, en- suring the delivery of programme plans. S/he will have pivotal role in defining development policy and priority areas for CIIR's work in the country, working together with partners, de- velopment workers and other stakeholders.

"Reports in the month of July were considerably fewer due to the continuation of Operation Murambatsvina as most NGOs are involved in relief work for the victims of the Operation. As the Operation continued, perennial victims, Porta Farm residents, were again targeted for eviction. Reports are that the residents were evicted and asked to go where they wanted to, but many of them had nowhere to go. Others were reportedly taken to Hopley Farm but before they could settle down, the Minister of Local Government, Dr Ignatius Chombo is said to have told them that there were no longer any available stands at the Farm so all the other people had to move on elsewhere. The Human Rights Forum condemns the manner in which the evictions at Porta Farm continue to be executed and notes that it is the duty of the Government to provide housing for its citizens." The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum has released its political violence report for July. Contact [email protected] for a full copy of the report.

Barely two months after being removed from Killarney and Ngozi mine squatter camps by police during the internationally condemned government exercise, Murambatsvina, close to 200 people have returned to these shanty towns in the periphery of the city. Those interviewed say they were dumped by government in the ‘middle of no where’ in rural settings alien to them as most of them are of foreign origin and the only place they call home are the shacks that were razed by government agents.

In what appears to be a political move to thwart the business growth of the Zimbabwe Independent and Standard newspapers, the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) has for the past six months kept under lock and key a satellite dish and accessories belonging to the group at its container depot in Beitbridge. Zimra is demanding that the equipment must first be licensed before it is released. The equipment does not require licensing since it is used to receive news, not to transmit it.