Johannesburg - As President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party celebrate 33 years of independence from Britain today, most of their countrymen still struggle to make ends meet.
Veteran Zimbabwe economist John Robertson says that if it were not for the estimated 3 million or more Zimbabweans – perhaps 2 million of them in South Africa – who fled into exile over the past 13 years, the country would be in even more dire straits.
Robertson believes about half of Zimbabwe’s population of 12.9 million rely on remittances from relatives abroad.
That’s keeping the retail sector of the economy going – keeping the shops much better stocked than they were before the economy dollarised in 2008.
Supermarkets say about 90 percent of all goods on sale are from South Africa.
But the flipside is that the productive side of the economy – farming, manufacturing, and so on – now accounts for only a third of gross domestic product (GDP), a sharp dip from 1980, the year of independence, when the productive and services sectors each contributed about the same.
Zimbabwe manufacturing is still only operating at about 40 percent of capacity. National Railways of Zimbabwe operates about 10 trains a day, down from 50 a day in the 1990s, one of the indicators of declining productivity. .
Robertson adds that Zimbabwe’s GDP (roughly estimated) is US$10 billion, compared to about US$7bn in 1989.
“But of course the dollar was a lot more valuable then. Back then Zimbabwe was the second-biggest economy in southern Africa after South Africa. Now only Malawi has a smaller GDP.”
Formal employment is back to the level of 1970, about 850 000, after peaking at about 1.2 million in 1998, just before the land-grab.
Some economists and analysts believe that Zimbabwe agriculture has recovered better than expected from the land-grab, but not Robertson.
Agriculture remains a disaster, he insists.
The problem now is “not the skin colour of the farmers, but the system of ownership.” Mugabe did not just hand white farms to black farmers, he nationalised the land.
This has destroyed the market value of land, preventing farmers from using their land as collateral to raise the money they need to farm it, says Robertson.
Zimbabwe imported maize only once between independence and Mugabe’s land-grab in 2000. That was in 1991/92, because of drought. But it has imported, or been given, maize every year since 2000. This year it will have a 800 000 ton shortfall to fill.
The land problem is now spreading across the economy as Zanu-PF seizes at least 51 percent of all foreign companies in its indigenisation drive.
The nationalisation of land and corporations is driving away investors, aggravating the lack of capital to grow the economy.
“So the country is caught in a very severe credit squeeze; the banking sector is crippled.” Foreign debt is about the size of the economy, $10 billion.
Robertson is ambivalent about whether the elections can save the country. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) promises change, but Robertson fears that the MDC has been spoilt by its four years in office as part of the unity government with Zanu-PF.
He believes it might not have the courage to implement the radical reforms needed to rescue the economy.
The Star
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