UPDATE NOTE: the comments section has turned into a pretty detailed and interesting (to me, at least) geopolitical discussion, considering that it's on my little blog of nudies and snark. Damn, it basically shows that I am easily sidetracked by bright and shiny things, and even some things with a low albedo. (Does Viagra help for a low albedo?)
ADDITIONAL UPDATE: The worm turns? Mugabe refuses to quit.
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Mugabe has been running the country for 30 years, and was a power figure for many years before that. I did a study there for Mobil in 1995, and it was not a bad place to visit, but the advice to Mobil was to tread cautiously.
The economy had some serious problems - wages were not sufficient to maintain a decent standard of living and were not keeping pace with inflation, and only 10% of the population was employed. (Because of children, retirees and stay-home parents, developed countries usually max out around 65% - maybe 40% if you measure only permanent, full-time workers.) So you can do the math and figure that most of the people willing and able to work were unable to find jobs and essentially had nothing to do. My clearest memory of Zimbabwe was that there were so many people walking the streets day and night. Every day the pedestrian traffic was comparable to Christmas season on 5th Avenue. With no jobs and no money for transportation or entertainment, the entire urban population was peripatetic. They were not menacing, or anything like that, but just socializing and passing the time. In a way it was nice to see an outdoor scene where people were laughing and greeting one another and children were playing happily. I wish America was like that. But it's hard to take any joy in that interaction when you realize the underlying sadness beneath it.
Why so few jobs? The economy desperately needed to diversify because it was almost entirely based on agriculture, despite the fact that only 7% of the land was arable. To make matters worse, the agricultural sector was heavily reliant on tobacco, which is not exactly a burgeoning growth industry. Unfortunately, diversification was difficult because of the lack of skilled labor, which prevented foreign investment. The government was inimical to foreign investment as well. Multiple layers of red tape stood in the way of new businesses, the currency was not convertible, and transparency was lacking. Moreover Mugabe doled out favors, businesses and franchises to his relatives, cohorts and sycophants as if he were commanding a personal fiefdom, which he essentially was.
In short, the country was not developing as rapidly as a poor nation should be and was not doing the right things to speed up development.
And then there were those human rights violations.
Unfortunately, things have steadily gotten worse, not better. The Mobil brand is gone now, having gotten out when the getting was good. (Well, as good as could be expected.) The country has experienced frequent bouts of hyper-inflation.
It's high time they gave somebody not named Mugabe a chance.
It's amazing the stuff I learn by reading this blog.
ReplyDeleteThe best Zimbabwe could do for itself is be annexed by Botswana, but I don't think Botswana would want the trouble.
ReplyDeleteI don't know jack about Botswana, but the saddest story to me is the relationship of Zimbabwe and Mozambique. When I studied the area, Zimbabwe was much more prosperous, perhaps a vestige of having been colonized by much more efficient imperialists. The guys from Zimbabwe laughed when I told them that the Mobil top brass suggested to me that I should also study the fuel/shop potential in Mozambique while I was in the area. "It shouldn't take you long to do that study, Greg. They only have four gas stations in the entire country." I don't know to what degree they were joking. I never made it there. The point is that the Zimbabweans laughed at the poor, disorganized, pathetic people of Mozambique.
Delete... until a few more years of Mugabe's rule, which finally resulted in the ultimate humiliation a few years ago - Zimbabwe having to beg Mozambique for enough electrical power to maintain the thin veneer of remaining civilization.
Overall, they are still more prosperous than Mozambique - but just barely.
(By the way, I really liked the people I met there in Zimbabwe in 1995. They deserve a much better fate than they have received. Well, I guess that's obvious, isn't it?)
Botswana is widely considered a success story in terms of democratic government and economic development, despite significant fundamental disadvantages in terms of agricultural land. (Although it has some diamond mines.)
Deletehttp://theconversation.com/botswana-at-50-the-end-of-an-african-success-story-65349
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=290791
Kind of a textbook case on the power of individual leaders to do good or evil for their people when compared with its northern neighbor.
See Trump
DeleteIn fairness though, about the only thing I know about Mozambique besides it had to deal with Portugal's misrule a lot longer than most of Africa is that Bob Dylan did its tourism board a favor with a song called "Mozambique" on his 1976 album "Desire".
Deletehttp://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4cijgs
Looking at wiki, the song was written after a ten year war of independence and before a fifteen year civil war.
Since it's on the same album as the relentlessly inaccurate biographical songs of the extremely nasty criminals Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and Joey Gallo, one is tempted to look at it as a product of Dylan's generally piss poor research skill, but apparently "Mozambique" was intentionally ironic. (Seriously, there's not a single accurate line in Dylan's "Hurricane", and Carter makes O.J. Simpson and Mumia Abu-Jamal look like choirboys by comparison, both in the viciousness of his crimes and the manipulative sociopathy of his denial of them. It takes a special kind of asshole to beat the crap out of the female activist who helped get you a second trial while being out on bail awaiting that trial. (Let the record indicate that I'm pretty generally on the side of Black Lives Matter, BTW.))
Being in Canada, what made me sick (in addition to what Mugabe was doing to his own people) was those on the far left who complain about the corporate control of democracy (can't disagree with that) or push for greater democracy through some form of proportional representation in Parliament (can't disagree with that either personally though I can appreciate the arguments of those who do) who, as soon as Mugabe started referring to the attempts to have him step down as being promoted by 'western imperialists' that these useless idiots suddenly became his biggest defender.
ReplyDeleteThat was an important ingredient in his formula to maintain his base. He was a champion against the foreign imperialists, which gained him a lot of sympathy from the usual array of "useful idiots." He used that as a rallying point in his domestic speeches as well, and it always seemed to quiet his critics in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa. That currency bought him a lot of forgiveness.
DeleteWell, at least he had some kind of currency to buy things with...
DeleteHe could have used one of these:
Deletehttp://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03338/Zimbabwe__100_tril_3338961b.jpg
If I had 60 Trillion Zimbabwe Dollars for every time I heard a joke about Zimbabwe hyperinflation I'd ever heard... I'd have something like $3.50 USD.
Delete