Comments on: A disaster stamped “Made in England”

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:27:12 +0000

Sorry, been away. Still can’t see a single piece of evidence adduced for the thesis that the FCO’s failure to stump up cash exactly as desired by ZANU is the sole or indeed even a major cause of the current crisis, and plenty of evidence adduced to the contrary. By the way, since it’s been mentioned, when did ‘The German people elect a National Socialist Government’? And in which alternate universe? Answers without swearwords if at all possible. On the receiving end of D-squared’s piping insults, I’m rather put in mind of the response I got when I asked Mark Steyn about the precise length of his military service: another fat boy trying to conceal desperate fears about his lack of tough-guy credentials behind a lot of rude words.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 21:51:25 +0000

On this one, really, trust me. Zimbabwean urban marketplaces, both upscale and downscale, were replete with affordable maize (mildly price-subsidized) from 1980-1993 (and actually before that) with a few smallish dips in supply from bad crops which mostly didn’t affect consumers. I’m less certain of the state of maize availability in all rural areas during the same era, especially parts the south, but at least in the northeast, the Mazoe Valley, and the Midlands, local maize supplies were good and cheap throughout that period as well. From 1993 onward, as land was taken more precipitiously and the threat of land acquisitions led to underproduction, and local structural adjustment began to hike prices upward, supplies of maize quickly dried up or became quite expensive. But even as late as 1998, when I was last there, maize could be found in many places in decent quantities at prices which were not yet utterly out of reach. Today, a mere six years later, most rural Zimbabweans and even many urban ones, are highly dependent on food handouts from development agencies. [btw: something very odd here—your content editor didn’t let me to use the word “h o m e g r o w n” in this post as a modifier for “structural adjustment”.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 16:59:01 +0000

Meaning the commercial sector was producing both plentiful maize for the Zimbabwean market and enough for regional consumption as well. This might or might not be true, but it doesn’t follow from the simple fact that Zimbabwe was exporting maize. As I suggested upthread, Ireland exported staple foodstuffs throughout the famine.

By: john s

john s — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 14:56:36 +0000

Daniel, I cannot agree that the Mau Mau revolution packed a publicity punch way above that of the Rhodesian civil war. Sure, the Mau Mau campaign is well-known outside Kenya, but it’s the impact on each country’s white farmers that’s important, and Zimbabwe’s white farmers knew well what was going on. Travelling from Harare to the border with South Africa required travelling non-stop in convoy, white farmers were subject to lethal ambushes, there was an infamous shooting down of a commercial passenger plane en route from Kariba dam to Harare… Peter Godwin captures the flavour in his book “Mukiwa: a white boy in Africa”. White farmers in Zimbabwe had just as much notice that they weren’t popular as they did in Kenya. That partly explains why they sat down in Lancaster House with nationalist leaders they hated.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 14:31:42 +0000

Monbiot notwithstanding, one of the major food exports out of Zimbabwe in the 1980s into 1992 or so was maize, exported not to the radicchio-supping tables of Europe but to other nations in the region. Meaning the commercial sector was producing both plentiful maize for the Zimbabwean market and enough for regional consumption as well. On the major issue, we simply disagree. Land reform is not the dependent variable of the Zimbabwean collapse. Moreover, British money is not the dependent variable of the accomplishment land reform: had England lavished millions of pounds on ZANU-PF, it would have gone to waste, given that ZANU-PF never had anything approaching a coherent strategy for land reform. The proposition that Thatcher’s government could have unilaterally imposed a land reform plan on Mugabe circa 1985 strikes me as highly implausible, not to mention a strange bit of pining for neocolonialism. There are elements of ZANU-PF who deserve credit for sustaining growth in their first decade in power, most notably Bernard Midzero, whose early death removed an important brake on internal corruption (not to mention a source of fiscal competence). But I think you really need to see 1997 as a classic example of a “tipping phenomenon”: it is a mistake to assume that a collapse has to be the result of a discontinuity or change. It can take time to ruin an economy. Zaire under Mobutu was actually in decent shape even despite civil war in the 1960s right up to Zaireanisation, but some of the structural roots of the post-Zaireanisation collapse (and Zaireanisation itself) were laid down from the outset of Mobutu’s control of the country.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 12:22:26 +0000

Timothy: Thanks, and looking back over the thread I see where you’ve set out this case. I think I retain my own opinion though. I don’t think that you give ZANU enough credit in its developmental phase; the Zimbabwean economy just didn’t miraculously survive ten years of sustained ZANU attack and then collapse in the 1990s. I agree with this assessment: As the economic and political rot from within began to spread around 1995-96 and political opposition mounted (opposition parties before the mid-1990s were hopelessly divided and amateurish and no threat to ZANU-PF), Mugabe turned to land as a distraction. This is why it took until 1997. They didn’t need to before then. but continue to believe that if land reform had been financed on a more equitable basis, the particular problems of Zimbabwe post ‘97 wouldn’t have arrived. Things would still have been pretty bad – totalitaian states never end up well – but the specific horrors would have been no worse than late-Moi Kenya (ie still pretty bad). I also remain more optimistic about how the prospects for land reform might have been in the 1980s; I don’t think you can generalise from a small, poorly funded program with no UK involvement, and also suspect that almost any redistribution of land would have been better than the racialised one which Zimbabwe ended up with. (I also place less emphasis than you do on “the economy” of Zimbabwe, mainly due to having spent a bit of time looking at another UK colony (Ireland in the 1840s) which was a significant food exporter from “highly productive” farms growing non-staple commodities, but I suspect this point is tangential.) John: I just don’t regard it as credible to say that the effect of the civil war on white Zimbabweans is remotely comparable to the effect of the Mau Mau on white Kenyans. The Mau Mau revolution packed a publicity punch out of all proportion to the actual casualties.

By: john s

john s — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 08:56:23 +0000

Daniel, you contend the Kenyan farmers realised that, due to their Mau Mau experience of the 1950s / early 60s, the writing was on the wall so they sold their farms from the early 1980s, oiled with British money. Further, that the Rhodesian farmers had no comparable experience, so could bury their heads in the sand about the need for land reform. However, Rhodesia was wracked by civil war in the 1970s, which hurt the farmers the most. They did have a similar experience to the Mau Mau. And drapeto, what did Zimbabwe’s white farmers do that was so much worse than, say, white farmers in the US or Argentina, etc?

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 02:44:59 +0000

Forgive me the “seems pretty clear”s—I agree those are irritating—but I do think I gave rather a large amount of supporting material to go along with them. For example, just on this last point, I’ve already observed twice in this thread that ZANU-PF did grab land before 1997. Once within the constraints of Lancaster House (and therefore not really a landgrab) in the early 1980s, whereupon his ministers made a reasonably honest go at land reform on a small scale and made a pretty bad mess of it. This mess could credibly be said to have something to do with underfunding, but more to do by far with the incoherency of the design behind the reform. ZANU-PF planners were unable to enunciate a clear criteria for entitlement to land nor a clear vision of what they wanted recipients to do on their land once they got it. More to the point, as I noted twice, ZANU-PF grabbed more land in the early 1990s and immediately funnelled it to party elites. As for why 1997-level grabbing didn’t begin in earnest at an early date, I’d suggest that it wasn’t until then that ZANU-PF had managed to thoroughly wreck an economy which was in surprisingly good shape at the time they inherited it and which remained healthy on the surface into the early 1990s. As the economic and political rot from within began to spread around 1995-96 and political opposition mounted (opposition parties before the mid-1990s were hopelessly divided and amateurish and no threat to ZANU-PF), Mugabe turned to land as a distraction. This is why it took until 1997. They didn’t need to before then. In a way, Daniel, I think you’re actually the one who needs to explain why it took until 1997, given that England was unwilling to fund land reform pretty much from the outset. From your perspective, it seems you would expect a crisis on this scale at a much earlier date. I do think I’ve laid this out a couple of times above. I don’t know how to lay it out further without writing a mini-monograph in this space.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 23:13:38 +0000

Timothy: so far, your argument appears to rely pretty heavily on the epistemological device of “it seems pretty clear”. I haven’t done any doctoral work in the area, so humour me; why? FWIW, it seems pretty clear to me that if all Mugabe wanted to do was grab land and give it to cronies, he had seventeen years in which to do it, for seven of which he wasn’t even bound by the LH agreements. Why not before 1997? That more than anything suggests to me that the grab-and-give-to-cronies strategy was a last resort. John: the Kenyan program was agreed with Kenyatta and Moi and carried out mainly under Moi pos 1982, unless I’m completely wrong. Doug: AFAICS, your role in this discussion appears to be to say “yeah me too” to Dan Hardie, who is saying “yeah me too” to Timothy. Your value added is pretty low, to be honest. Dan H: yeh, Rick the student. Got you pegged mate.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 13:55:31 +0000

Monbiot writes, “Mugabe, unable to oversee a full and fair redistribution, acquired an excuse to turn land into a gift, to be deployed as political imperatives demanded”, also arguing that had it not been for the “meanness” of British policy, there would be no land reform problem in Zimbabwe today. I stand by my interpretation of that argument—I think that’s exactly what Monbiot wrote. Mugabe “UNABLE”, e.g., he wanted to institute free and fair land reform, “acquired an excuse”, e.g., would not have turned to corruption but for the lack of an ability to institute land reform. It’s as naive as the rest of that article—including lumping growing radicchio in with growing tobacco, given that the foreign exchange from tobacco was economically important to the vigor of the rest of the economy.

By: drapeto

drapeto — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 07:22:30 +0000

he proposition that Mugabe was chomping at the bit to carry out fair and just land reform only to be stopped by a lack of money, forcing him to distribute land as a corrupt gift, is almost bizarre. It’s also not the proposition Monbiot put forth.

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 16:15:40 +0000

Look, I’m willing to keep an open mind on this. Why don’t we try the counterfactual? Say Britain gives… ohhh… fifty million pounds a year to Zimbabwe for land reform, continuously from the early ‘80s until 1997. Play it out. What happens? Anyone? Doug M.

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 16:12:59 +0000

I think British policy (and money) in Kenya was much easier; there were many fewer farmers, so the policy was inevitably cheaper. Yes. It’s a really weak analogy. Much of Zimbabwe’s most fertile land is used to grow not necessities for the hungry, but luxuries for the sated: mange tout, radicchio, french beans and tobacco. I can’t speak to the radicchio, but a few moments googling show that, yes, Zimbabwe has always been a major tobacco producer. It was the country’s single biggest export earner for many years. Tobacco production has crashed in recent years—no surprise there. Redistribution would enable the poor both to support themselves and to produce staple crops for the landless: all over the Third World it is smallholders who keep their own countries fed…. The technical term for this is “subsistence agriculture”; and to a first approximation, it’s a fairly good explanation of why the rural Third World is still Third World. Does he seriously think that small farms are more productive than big ones? Or that a country has to be self sufficient in food production in order to feed itself? Sheesh. Doug M.

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 16:02:39 +0000

gratuitous mention of the Nazis displaying elementary ignorance of German history Yeah, I noticed that too. Corollary to the Lex Godwinicus—it’s usually an excellent sign that someone has been pushed onto the back foot and is beginning to flail. Doug M.

By: John S

John S — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 23:43:24 +0000

Timothy, excellent… Tangentially, dsquared your timeline comparing British policy (and moneys) in Kenya v Zimbabwe vis à vis white farms is extremely wobbly. At one point you suggest it was occurring in the 1980s / 1990s: “Btw, the idea that the FCO refused to fund land reform in Zimbabwe out of some principled concern for the Ndebele is rather undercut by the fact that at the same time they were continuing to provide funds for a similar program in Moi’s Kenya.” However, then you say: “This wasn’t the way things were done in Kenya; the FCO sat down with Moi and Kenyatta and thrashed out a workable proposal.” Kenyatta died in 1978, so now we’re looking at FCO activity pre-Zimbabwe. Finally, you say: “As far as I can tell, all we did in Zimbabwe was to stall and refuse to talk about land reform, effectively underwriting the head-in-sand attitude of the white farmers (something that wasn’t an option in Kenya because of the Mau Mau).” Mau Mau? Now you’re suggesting British money to buy white farms dates back to the 1950s / early 60s. And why did Zimbabwe’s white farmers have a head-in-the-sand attitude yet Kenya’s didn’t? You hint that the Mau Mau meant Kenya’s white farmers couldn’t take that attitude, but Zimbabwe’s white farmers had a bloody civil war in the 1970s. I think British policy (and money) in Kenya was much easier; there were many fewer farmers, so the policy was inevitably cheaper. The same policy in Zimbabwe would have cost 100s of millions of pounds, perhaps some billions. Do you want to hand over that kind of money, as Timothy says, to a dreadful government?