Consider two things. First,  a report from a  Reuters correspondent in Zimbabwe writing on the  4 June – in the midst of the stayaway and the ‘mass action’, “Zimbabwe strike cripples economy for  third day. Police maintained tight security in the capital Harare two days after they used tear gas, clubs and warning shots to disperse thousands of opposition MDC protesters trying to hold marches around the countries.” The correspondent is in the country and able to establish the scale of these ‘marches’, these words should not be taken lightly. Now consider the second report, this time published in Newsweek – and all together more extravagant, “Serious risk lovers can visit Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe’s country used to be regarded as a model for African economic management, as well as one of the continent’s safest and most stunning safari destinations. For the past three years Mugabe’s desperate efforts to keep in power have skidded the country into chaos, hunger and near civil war … Lines at filing stations can sometimes last for days – and that’s a mere nuisance by Zimbabwean standards. As the  collapse of Zimbabwe’s tourism industry has compounded its economic crisis, street crime has worsened.
 â€œOutside the cities travellers are advised to avoid driving at night when armed thugs like to set up roadblocks and collect ‘tolls’. At the same time, it’s best to steer clear of Mugabe’s security forces; they frequently detain travellers on flimsy charges, suspecting them of being spies or foreign journalists.
 â€œSecurity forces at a checkpoint recently shot a foreigner who was not carrying proper identity papers. And it’s also best to save your camera for the wildlife. Photographing some official buildings (the president’s house, for example) is a crime punishable by two years in prison. Two Canadians were detained in February because one a commercial photographer was spotted photographing a billboard.”
 I must record my sources, as I didn’t read either of the reports in their original: The first quote was cited in the weekly column Chatterbox, in the state run Herald newspaper (5 July 2003), the second was cited in a column by the arch neo-liberal Eric Bloch in the weekly Independent (27 June 2003). Let’s start with the first story. ‘Thousands of opposition protesters’. I scanned the press, made countless phonecalls to friends and contacts around the country and travelled extensively across the capital, Harare during the first three days of the stayaway looking for exactly such ‘marches’. On Friday, the last day of the proposed ‘mass action’  – the opposition had labelled it ‘D-day’ – I spent most of the day in African Unity Square, the stated venue of the action waiting for the ‘march’ that was going to take us to State House. There were none. The only significant action occurred at the University of Zimbabwe, were students rose up on Monday expecting similar action across the country only to be viciously beaten by the army. This was widely reported. I saw the blood stained corridors, smashed doors, and heard the testimony of battered students. I am unfortunate enough to be able to vouch for this one. Malcolm X wrote in one of his lectures to ‘young people’, that it is ‘easy to mobilise students because they never consider the odds against them.” Students are easily sacrificed. But in the cities nothing. In the townships hardly anything.
  Now the second report. I was taught to believe that too many personal anecdotes are evidence that you are losing the argument, so please bear with me. I have travelled extensively at night out of cities and into rural areas and never come across informal ‘tolls’ set up by armed thugs. I was detained in Bulawayo for conducting an interview in public (and was held for two days in Tunisia for the same thing  many years ago) and held for three hours, threatened (verbally) and eventually told that the police would be happy to accept a bribe. I did. It cost me Zim$40,000.  But you are sensible not to go by personal experiences. I haven’t after all taken photographs of bill boards and there are plenty of roads and nights that I have not travelled on. So I investigated. Perhaps Zimbabwe really was more like the reports I was reading in the international press. I contacted by same network of friends and contacts dotted throughout Zimbabwe and established that they too have not come across such ‘tolls’ or rampaging armed gangs frequently referred to. But my scientific credentials still not proved I dug further. One good friend, who lives in the large township of Mbare in Harare, did report violence and intimidation. This, he told me, comes from a vigilante group set up two years ago called the Chipanganos. The have imposed their terror on the township, he told me, “It is difficult and bloody dangerous to move around after dark. If they see you them prepare to be harassed. They claim that they are an anti-crime group and they have had some success, crime has fallen but we are all as scared as hell”. Dreadful, but verging on civil war?

The real picture?

So how do we find the real picture? On the first point I feel fairly confident that there were no major demonstrations during the MDC’s mass action, the only serious attempt was at the university. The reasons were simple. The cities were militarised, with patrols of armed soldiers on street corners and Mugabe’s ‘youth militias’ patrolling the street. It was the coming of age for the states’ ‘youths’ – one Border Gezi youth (named after the Zanu politician who spearheaded National Youth Training)  interviewed in Chegutu – a government stronghold an hour from the capital – commented “we now effectively work for the government. I didn’t travel to Harare for the stayaway but I gave the police names of local youths I knew who were organising meetings here during the stayaway”. But surely there would be no state large enough to withhold the ‘thousands of opposition protesters’ reported. There was – according to my very imperfect investigations – a vital subjective factor missing: leadership. After more than two years of prevaricating the MDC made a decision to shift towards ‘jambanja’ – mass action, which militants had been demanding for years. But wary of the past all that emerged was a paradox: everyone gave their support to the ‘action’ (with the strong conviction that it would succeed) but refused to join it – that is, to protest in their ‘thousands’. Apart from our students, who gallantly and insanely refused to weigh the odds.

Mugabe’s building blocks

 
Any demagogue needs a social base to stay in power, and Zanu are no exception. They have built theirs brilliantly (from the perceptive of ‘demagogues’). There have been three elements to it: the war veterans (funded and radicalised since 1998), the peasantry many who are real recipients of land redistribution and lastly the ‘youths’. Firstly on the latter. When I asked an MDC student leader before the ‘mass action’ – labelled the ‘final push’ (a time when most people seemed to be convinced of it’s imminent success) what he thought of the threat posed by Mugabe’s ‘patriotic youths’ he laughed dismissively, “I don’t think the training of Border Gezi youth is an obstacle … what is 15 000, it is nothing but just a small number we are looking at a programme [the mass action] which is staged.  What we are talking of [is] mass action, we are talking of bringing to town 50 000 people, we are talking of bringing 100,000s, millions of people to town. Therefore I don’t expect 15 000 youths facing the million crowd. I don’t think it will work that way…The point which I want to stressed … [is that] people are now prepared to face armed solders so surely if you are prepared to face armed solders the question of youth trained, Border Gezi  trainees falls away, because we are even prepared to face bulldozers.  We are prepared to face those who are carrying AK and riffles.  So the process we have embarked on now is to try and remove fear that has been stored in people especially the civilians who are gong to participate because they still, some still think that the Border Gezi youths are of importance which is not true they are just our brothers and sisters probably the failures in life.  So we do not think they are going to be obstacles in our struggle”
 It would be mean and cynical to challenge his complacency with hindsight, and I so wanted to believe him when we spoke. But the ‘programme’ that he talked about, and the ‘mass action’ committees that he told me had been built not only in colleges across the country but ‘also in the corridors of halls of residence’ in every college, were not much to talk of. In fact, it seems that they only really functioned as ‘distributions depots’ for whistles and red cards (football metaphors are constantly used in Zimbabwe’s political culture – the red cards were to be waved on the march to state house).
 It would be lazy, however, not to interrogate the opposition’s complacency. It goes back a long way. In February 2001 the left-wing MDC MP Munyaradzi Gwisai (now expelled from the party together with the International Socialist Organisation) addressed an party ‘leadership seminar’.  The blame for the party’s current morass he argued was the “hijacking of the party by the bourgeoisie, marginalisation of workers, adoption of neoliberal positions and cowardly failure to physically confront the Mugabe regime and bosses.” Gwisai concluded with the prophetic warning that “It is not only imperative that the party moves much more leftward … in order to relink to its base.” So let it be known that there were fraternal critics, who mapped out a strategy that may have enabled the MDC to outflank Mugabe from the left. Exposing the regimes fake anti-imperialism.
 The MDC preferred to take another route by embracing, indeed almost choking to death on a diet of neo-liberalism. This pulverised and disorientated activists. The saviours become the international community – the bombers of Kabul and Baghdad – and further structural adjustment was advocated to realign the economy to ‘global realities’. When the world was shifting to the left – under the combined influence of the ‘war on terrorism’ and the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ – the opposition in Zimbabwe could be seen waiting on the ‘good graces’ of Tony Blair and George Bush.

Economic implosion 

I don’t want the above to be seen as an apology for the regime or to understate the crisis. It is horribly real. Zimbabwe is unpleasant place. Harare is a permanent queue – for fuel, bank notes (that have almost dried up), sugar, salt, mealie meal (the main food staple). Take the case of two groups of people: children and workers. One of the most striking things about walking around the city are the children. Small and large school children, in their tatty school uniforms, hang around supermarkets and shopping centre – the sort that litter the ‘Avenues’, a middle-class area just out of the city centre and rapidly being proletarianised. They clutch sponsor forms in plastic envelops and approach people asking for a contribution towards their school fees.  School fees have risen, like everything, beyond the reach of almost everyone. In one school in Harare they increased from $30,000 to $90,000 a term (students at the Great Zimbabwe University are currently involved in a struggle to the death with the administration who have increased fees to $325,000 up from $125,000).
  The other group is the security guards. They are ubiquitous to the cities. They comprise the worse paid, most miserable group of workers in the city. They are paid to guard banks, shopping malls, house and blocks of flats.  They get paid $47,000 a month but the term ‘paid’ is purely theoretical. With transport from the townships costing as much as $1000 a day, many choose to cycle, if they can afford the hardware. The night shifts in this rotten, cold weather are the worse. The security guard – Tendai – to our block I see hunched up every night, his face covered in a make-shift balaclava. He lives in Highfield (Gwisai’s old constituency) and faced with the rocketing fares, leaves at one or two in the afternoon for his evening shift that starts at seven. He usually walks it, but sometimes borrows a colleague’s bike. The ZCTU – the main trade union federation – are now demanding a monthly minimum wage of $125,000. With inflation more than 300% even this seems measly.
 The big picture is just as bleak. The main forex earner tobacco used to raise US$500, halfway through the year it had bought in just US$30. The barter agreement that traded Libyan fuel for Zimbabwean beef, tobacco and sugar has been revived. The original one collapsed six months ago because the government were unable to keep to their side of the bargain. Although the land reform have had a huge effect on the agricultural sector, food aid that has been keeping thousands alive is being ‘substantially’ scaled down according to the World Food Programme. They estimated that 4 million people will require food aid in the coming 12 months as opposed to 6 million in the last year.
 The economic crisis that has alienated the ‘international community’ is not due to the thorough-going Marxist policies of in embattled and principled regime. On the contrary. The regime lurches backwards and forwards between price controls, subsidies (where they are possible) and government intervention on the one hand and neo-liberal devaluation, privatisation and adjustment. The ‘price controls’ heralded by the regime as proof of the governments popular credentials were hastily scrapped.

The way out?

What are the solutions? Is it the craven desire that the ‘international community’, under Bush’s leadership, will liberate Zimbabwe? The London branch of the MDC wanted to call a recent demonstration ‘After Saddam, Mugabe. Regime change in Zimbabwe.’ These sentiments resound on the street. There is the hope that ‘Bush will deal with the ‘old man’ since we are unable to’. They reflect the despair that grips Zimbabwe’s opposition movement.
 Civil society – the frenetic and self-important world of NGOs and their endless public meetings, community groups and congresses – advertise in the Daily News about ‘preparations for a transitional government’. The radical trade unionist Raymond Majongwe is scathing, “that’s nonsense. This are exactly the same people I meet in the same circles, people are already jostling for power. What transition are they talking about? Do they know who Robert Mugabe is? I doubt it. Mugabe has gone out on TV, gone public to say the issue about transition is nonsense. People don’t know Mugabe. Mugabe is a person who is ready to die for what he believes in. Mugabe has to be kicked out. You don’t negotiate with Mugabe cause he know no negotiations, his history proves the man does not respect any other idea as long as  its not in line with his.”
 Jonathan Moyo – the reviled Minster for Information and Publicity – writing under his nom de plume Nathaniel Manheru – is equally dismissive, “the so-called transitional government … would be an imposition on the people of Zimbabwe of some ‘agreed’’ acceptable jolly good fellow who would have to be an uncle Tom … to ensure … [the] reversal of the gains of the Third Chimurenga” (shona for uprising). It is a horrible sensation when you are forced to half agree with these bullies and party bosses, but Moyo has a point.
  What does the opposition propose? Consider the following. A western diplomat interviewed in the monthly magazine Parade explained why he saw ‘no end in sight to Zim’s woes’. His prescription was predictable enough: privatisation, adjustment and austerity. Have a listen. “A future government of Zimbabwe may have to summon Herculean might to resurrect the … economy. It will have to downsize its bureaucracy, ‘reform’ land reform, secure international financing and devalue the Zimdollar.” It gets nastier, “Then it will have to wean its population from negative borrowing rates, dirt cheap fuel and donated food. Worse still, the later a new government of Zimbabwe gets started, the more arduous – and eventually futile – it tasks.” So it clear, Zimbabwean have been having it easy – lazing around on food handouts and taking trips to seaside on that infuriatingly cheap fuel.
   On land the diplomat surpasses himself, “Admittedly, evicting some settlers from farm houses and the surrounding land would be an unpleasant, divisive and risky move … In another two years new farmers will be more physically and emotionally attached to the land while many white farmers will no longer reside in Zimbabwe. At that point the government will have to live with costly compensation claims hanging over its head.” Our diplomat concludes that even if a new ‘transitional’ government comes to power it is far from clear that they will have the political will and “skill to guide the population through the bruising and tumultuous transition period we describe above”. So even if the government is replaced, ‘transitioned’ or reformed Zimbabweans must prepare to give up the good life, and get ready for a ‘bruising and tumultuous transition period’. Where do these people live?
 The secession debate was launched a few weeks ago by Mugabe, ‘to discuss in the open who will replace me.’ Subsequently contenders for the presidency have been paraded on the front cover of the Herald. The main runners seem to be the speaker of parliament Emmerson Mnangagwa and Simba Makoni, the streetwise professional outspoken in his advocacy of ‘adjustment and privatisation’, who fell out with the government last year. The reforms would be the same – who ever wins – and closer to our western diplomat than state socialism. The rumours in Harare are that Mugabe will hold presidential elections during the parliamentary ones scheduled for 2005, handing power over to a trusted successor.
  So what are the alternatives? The collapse of the ‘mass action’ and the ‘final push’ has given the government a temporary advantage. The MDC are weak and seem unable to pursue the full consequences of ‘jambamja’ by ditching their commitment to neo-liberalism, and their sycophantic and nonsensical attachment to the ‘international community’. But this does not make the opposition redundant, or open the gates to a ‘third force’ (‘neither MDC nor Zanu but …’) though it does alter the picture. As the crisis deteriorates there is the real possibility of a ‘final push’ emerging under the directions of the streets: through strikes, riots and demonstrations, when people will finally protest ‘in their thousands’. But the subjective factor still demands an answer: how will Zimbabwe’s opposition respond, can they break from the neo-liberalism that has failed them so disastrously?

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