An excellent report here detailing the countless political machinations, delusions, shenanigans, and paranoia at work in Zimbabwe which have contributed to the current abysmal situation.

Mbeki’s fundamental position was that, as a fellow national liberation movement (NLM), Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF had to be maintained in power at all costs. According to this theory, the NLMs of southern Africa are those movements which used armed struggle to overthrow white rule – that is, the ruling parties of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Mbeki’s and Mugabe’s minds Western imperialism is engaged in a struggle to overthrow the NLMs and restore, if it can, the preceding regimes – apartheid, colonialism or white settler rule. In so doing it will use various local parties as lackeys: Inkatha and the Democratic Alliance in South Africa, Renamo in Mozambique, Unita in Angola – and the MDC in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is the weakest link here, which means that the other NLMs must defend Zanu-PF to the death, for if Zimbabwe ‘falls’ South Africa will be the next target.

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Perhaps the most important thing about the election was that, because Mbeki and Mugabe had miscalculated so spectacularly, Zanu-PF was caught off-guard and for several days there was complete uncertainty. That period provided an aperture through which Zimbabweans could glimpse an alternative future – and many did. It was clear that, with a new democratic government, there would be immediate British and American help, quickly followed by the EU, the World Bank and IMF, with the emphasis on food aid and the restabilisation of the currency. One consequence would be that Zimbabwe would cease to be a client state of South Africa and instead become more generally dependent on developed country donors and investors. Doubtless, Mbeki and Mugabe would see this as a victory for neocolonialism, though one is bound to say that even if the prospect was described in those terms, ordinary Zimbabweans would happily vote for it. And, in no time at all, as the Zimbabwean economy revived, South African companies of every kind would move in.

This merely highlights the absurdity of the Mbeki-Mugabe theory. To be sure, for many years their parties took an orthodox Marxist-Leninist line and aimed to set up people’s republics in their liberated states, replete with Soviet and Chinese advisers. Had this occurred and the Cold War continued, then doubtless it would have been correct to see the major Western powers as intrinsically hostile to these new Cubas-in-Africa. But nothing of the sort happened. Not just Zimbabwe and South Africa but all the other states ruled by NLMs have retained mainly capitalist economies, and everywhere a new black middle class is attempting to establish itself. Indeed, the intransigence of the Zanu-PF leadership derives essentially from the fact that it has used state power to enrich itself and is determined to hang onto its enormous gains.

When such an elite feels its power threatened, it tends to fall back on its original self-definition as a national liberation movement. If one posits the problem in those terms then it follows that the defeat of an NLM can only mean the triumph of the forces of colonialism and apartheid which it came into existence to fight. In that view national liberation, once achieved, is the end of history. There can never be a point when it would be desirable for the gains of liberation to be lost, so the theory provides a watertight rationale – and a legitimating self-righteousness – for the ANC, Zanu-PF and the region’s other ruling NLMs to cling to power indefinitely. Seen this way the drama of Zimbabwe may indeed prefigure a more general crisis as these movements age and decay. We have seen enough of movements that believe they will remain to see the state wither away or to usher in a thousand-year Reich to know that bringing them to accept a less intransigent view of themselves is seldom a gentle business.