Modest Change in Zim

You would be forgiven for wondering if things are improving in Zimbabwe or not. My inclination is to believe that with Jacob Zuma’s tougher stand on Robert Mugabe and with continued pressure from NGO’s and other outsiders things have improved and will continue to do so. But that improvement is tenuous and incremental. More importantly, it is subject to backsliding at the whim of the “war veterans,” the military and police, and of Mugabe himself.

The Zimbabwean people (if such a generalized entity exists in any meaningful way — I am using it as a sort of shorthand descriptor and not as an analytical tool) continue to show a remarkable resilience. Special interest groups are stepping forward to demand that they be protected within the new constitution.  There is double optimism at work with such advocacy — the optimism of inclusion, that the new Zimbabwean constitution will resemble that of South Africa, perhaps, but also the very optimism that constitutional talks will go forward — and the very presence of such optimism might tell us something about what Zimbabweans think about their country’s future prospects. And then there is the entrepreneurial spirit that continues to thrive despite the myriad impediments (and the transition from the worthless Zim dollar to the American dollar has hardly been an unalloyed good, especially in the countryside, even if the change was almost certainly necessary).

But in the end Zimbabwe’s future hinges on a few figures and entities and bodies. The aforementioned troika of Mugabe, the police and military, and the “war veterans” will have a huge say not because they have shown much interest in civil society (especially Mugabe and the bulk of his was veterans) but because their power is the power to destroy, the power to disrupt, the twin powers inherent in anarchy and nihilism. But at the same time, one can imagine that success might fuel success. That those on the fringes of the war veteran movement might find that their interests are better served elsewhere, that the police and military might find that a future without Mugabe in charge is better than one with him in power, though we might in the end find out that in recent months the men with guns were the tail wagging the dog of power and not Mugabe. Hopefully Prime Minister and longtime Mugabe antagonist Morgan Tsvangirai will continue to seize the opportunities before him, working from within to destroy a system that not so long ago seemed impenetrable to him.

Zimbabwe in September 2009 seems marginally better than Zimbabwe in September of 2008. If that seems a modest claim, we have to get to grips with the fact that Zimbabwe’s foreseeable future will be measured modestly.