Harare, Zimbabwe
TO PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe, Fungayi Lameck is a piece of trash. Last summer, like hundreds of thousands of other destitute Zimbabweans, Lameck saw his home in a poor Harare neighborhood destroyed in what the government termed “Operation Murambatsvina,” Shona for “Operation Wipe Out Trash.”
Mugabe claimed the operation was a revolutionary new method of urban renewal. Families had 30 minutes’ warning before their homes were bulldozed. He labeled the campaign “a vigorous clean-up campaign to restore sanity,” which, if Mugabe’s own erratic behavior over the past year is any sign, has yet to show results. Talk to any Zimbabwean not on the payroll of Mugabe’s political fiefdom–the Zimbabwean African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)–and you hear a different story. The purpose was to drive out the urban poor, with whom Mugabe is least popular. In the countryside, their political power will be diluted, and they will likely starve. The United Nations estimates that Operation Murambatsvina affected over 2.5 million Zimbabweans.
Now Lameck–a father of four who considers himself lucky to have found a job in a country with 80 percent unemployment and where millions have fled for neighboring South Africa–earns $10 a month on a construction crew building a ZANU-PF provincial minister’s mansion. Lam eck said that he and his fellow workers “told [the minister] our plight, he saw it, he did nothing.” Lameck and his family live in a makeshift plastic shelter donated by Catholic Relief Services in the black township of Hatcliffe, an area cleared in the operation yet where many victims of the demolitions have now relocated. Until recently, Lameck could look forward to UNICEF trucks that would come to Hatcliffe three times a day with clean water; now, UNICEF officials have told Hatcliffe residents they can come only intermittently because of threats from the government. At the time of our interview, Lameck had not seen a UNICEF truck for a week. He is 36 years old, but could pass for 50.
If Operation Murambatsvina was intended to shore up Mugabe’s hold on power, then there is no doubt it was a success. Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since it won independence from Ian Smith’s white minority government in 1980, had justifiably lost a great deal of popularity with the poor here especially because of his disastrous economic policies. Beginning in 2000, he spurred on the widespread seizures of white-owned farms by veterans of the country’s war of independence. As the arbitrary and sometimes violent seizures continued unabated for years, the Zimbabwean economy–which is almost entirely agricultural– collapsed.
Zimbabwe’s rate of inflation now stands at just under 1,000 percent per month (it reached a high of 1,185 percent in June), the highest in the world. One would be hard pressed to find an economist worth his Ph.D. who thinks that Mugabe’s latest gambit to reduce inflation–lopping three zeroes off the nation’s currency and printing new bills–will do anything to alleviate the disaster.
The sad part is that Zimbabwe was not just another failed African state–at least not until recently. Mugabe resisted the temptation to expel white farmers in the 1980s, and agricultural production in this lush country soared. Genuinely committed to education, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe posted literacy rates of 85 percent, and Zimbabweans were known as the continent’s best educated. So the subsequent decline has been catastrophic.
Nonetheless, in spite of massive food and oil shortages, one does not see the signs of internal rebellion brewing in Harare. This is partly because Zimbabwe is what Natan Sharansky might refer to as a “fear society.” As I was about to call a spokesman for the opposition Move ment for Democratic Change (MDC) from a hotel phone, my guide, one of the few independent journalists left in the country, quickly intervened: “I wouldn’t advise that.”
Uniformed members of the Zimbabwean Republican Police, as well as plainclothes officers in the dreaded Central Intelligence Organization, regularly patrol Hatcliffe to deter any sort of political activity and to prevent Western journalists from interviewing its disgruntled inhabitants. A police cordon has been erected on the main road leading into the township, and young thugs, members of the ZANU-PF youth, loudly roam the roads. An eerie sense of order pervades the city. As Mugabe has a firm grip on the military and police forces (they are among the few people in the country receiving any semblance of a regular paycheck), there is seemingly small chance of an overthrow.
Foreign journalists are banned from entering Zimbabwe (officially, I entered as a student), and some high-profile detentions and deportations, most notably of Guardian correspondent Andrew Meldrum in 2003, have dissuaded foreign news organizations from basing correspondents in Harare, opting instead for local stringers who write anonymously. In the words of MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa (whom I had to interview at an empty gas station owned by an MDC sympathizer), “an iron curtain has been put around this country.”
Though Mugabe prides himself as a liberation leader who freed his people from white rule, the country today resembles apartheid-era South Africa in important respects. In November 1952, the government of Prime Minister Daniel F. Malan issued a proclamation that banned meetings of more than 10 blacks. In the run-up to the most recent presidential election in 2002, the Zimbabwean government passed the Public Order and Security Act, which has allowed Mugabe to shut down opposition meetings whenever and wherever he likes. Having quit the British Commonwealth and been hit with Western sanctions, Zimbabwe has achieved the same international pariah status that apartheid South Africa once faced–except Mugabe still counts many friends in Africa.
Closest among them continues to be South African president Thabo Mbeki. Nary a word of criticism has emerged from his lips during seven years as president of Africa’s economic powerhouse and supposed bastion of democracy. Itai Zimunya, advocacy officer for the USAID-funded Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, called South African support for Mugabe in 2002 elections “an endorsement of violence.” And the endorsements have been unceasing. On August 9, South Africa’s Women’s Day, the ANC government welcomed Zimbabwe’s vice president, Joyce Mujuru, as a guest of honor.
As a columnist in the antigovernment Financial Gazette aptly put it last month, “Robert Mugabe faces a greater risk of being savaged by a dead lamb than getting even the mildest censure from his fellow South African heads of state and government.”
Still, Zimbabwe’s problems are also Mbeki’s. His continued support for Mugabe has only exacerbated the economic crisis in the north and thus encouraged the massive influx of refugees that his own government deports at a rate of 2,000 a week. Chamisa, the MDC spokesman, says, “The tragedy of solidarity on the continent is that it’s a solidarity of the leadership rather than a solidarity of the people.” Because Mugabe aided Mbeki’s African National Congress in the struggle against apartheid, there is no chance that Mbeki or any black South African political leader of note will openly condemn him, never mind work toward his removal from power.
As for Fungayi Lameck and the hundreds of thousands of others who have been homeless for over a year, Mugabe announced a plan not long after the implementation of Murambatsvina to build new homes for those displaced: Operation Garikai, or “Stay Well.” In typical Marxist fashion, this grand state plan has produced meager, even perverse, results. Instead of building homes for those whose shelter Mugabe destroyed, it has forced men like Lameck to construct mansions for the ruling elite.
James Kirchick is a Boston-based writer traveling in southern Africa.
