ZIMBABWE’S ECONOMIC CRASH

The white minority of Southern Rhodesia, present day Zimbabwe,declared themselves to be independent of the British Empire in the year 1965.Until that time, the British had occupied Zim since the previous century - the 1880s. Independence from white rule was gained in 1980 after a decade-and-a-half of civil war, upon which that great land returned to its true name – Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe and neighbouring South Africa are polar opposites when compared to the management of racial relations after the end of colonial rule.
Both Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe spent many years in prison before they were rewarded with freedom and prominent roles in the new dawn of their respective countries. Mandela approached his nation’s independence as an opportunity to reconcile differences between blacks and non-blacks.

Mugabe chose differently. Mugabe opted for the red pill. Some have described Mugabe’s corrupt regime as a ‘falling off a cliff’. Zimbabwe appears in the top 20 list of most corrupt nations in the world every year. They’ve earned it. It was a one-man show for nearly a semi-centennial (just a decade short); until the coup-that-wasn’t-a-coup in November 2017. In that time, a myriad of ill-advised policies were pursued to the detriment of social and economic conditions.The Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) of April 2001 is an example of such policy. The FTLRP was designed to help speed up a decades-long process seeking to achieve economic justice for black Zimbabweans. Excellent in concept, but the execution left much to be desired.

Redistribute

The FTLRP’s original goal was to redistribute 8.3 million hectares of land, taking it from large-scale commercial owners and redistributing it to landless, low-income farmers.The programme quickly came under scrutiny, particularly for human rights violations, including deaths of white farmers.Well, I say deaths when I mean, uhm, murders. As fate would have it, millions of hectares of Zimbabwean land transferred to as many as 237 000 households.
 160 000 families had to resettle, and an estimated 4 500 white farmers were affected. 300 000 farm workers lost their jobs.This resulted in a major production shift – not for the better if I might add.

Sunflower production recorded a sharp decrease of 87 per cent between 2002 and 2003 when compared to volumes produced during the ‘90s. Production of tobacco, wheat and soya beans fell by up to 70 per cent in the same period.The infrastructure and technologies around the agricultural industry collapsed.The FTLRP implementation left land under-used and the land redistribution itself hurt too many black Zimbabweans because land rights were politicised under the ruling party’s control. This is a cocktail for disaster. Hunger and malnutrition spiked, creating four million food-insecureZimbabweans.

Asylum

By 2006, 3.4 million Zimbabweans had fled, seeking asylum in neighbouring countries. This represented a quarter of the population and experts judged this exodus as the most extraordinary in African history for a country not at war. Speaking of war, Zimbabwe’s involvement in the Second Congo War didn’t help the deteriorating economy.
The country was facing fuel and currency shortages during what was the worst economic crisis since independence when Mugabe’s government committed USD260 million to a war with no obvious strategic advantage. Maybe the motivation was Congolese mines? Who knows?

The challenges faced by Zimbabwe are mostly self-inflicted (of course, we cannot pin HIV/AIDS on ZANU-PF). Attempts to address the challenges have taken many forms, chief of which was the printing of new money to meet currency shortages.The resulting hyperinflation is well documented. In 2008, inflation peaked at 500 billion per cent. I’ve studied Mathematics for longer than any self-loving person would, and I have never encountered a number as colossal.Stru! In the history of the world, only Hungary has botched it worse than that.

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