1. 1980-2000: From reconciliation politics and international re-engagement to growing authoritarian nationalism The raising of the flag of independence in Zimbabwe in 1980 marked the end of a long anti-colonial struggle that took the form of a war of liberation in the 1970s. In 1979, the Lancaster House Agreement between the Smith Regime and the forces of liberation – which was mediated by the former colonial power Britain with the strategic assistance of the Front-Line States, apartheid South Africa and the United States – set in place a particular balance of forces. According to one of the early analysts of this period, Ibbo Mandaza, the ‘postwhite settler colonial state was characterised by the combination of the economic and state legacies of settler colonialism, and the renewed influence of international financial forces’.13 Given the constraints of the Lancaster House Agreement, which centrally sought to protect the status of the economically privileged white elite, the major challenge for the new ZanuPF government was to create a new policy of reconstruction and development within the existing economic and social structures, ‘funded by private sector expansion and donor support’.14 The radical socialist promises of the liberation movement, which were largely a strategic discursive tool of the nationalist parties during the period of the Cold War, were
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very quickly set aside. The government did implement large social policy initiatives in the fields of education, health, social protection and food security in line with its first economic policy document, Growth with Equity. However, the terms of the Lancaster House Agreement, combined with the legacies of the racially skewed economic structures, entrenched neoliberal economic management methods15 in the first decade of independence. In 1980, the government of Zimbabwe was largely ‘under-borrowed’16 and as previously noted, government expenditure was funded mainly through local resources, from mining and agriculture, and debt.17 Donor funding never reached the sum of US$2.2 billion promised at the 1981 donors conference in Harare. ‘Because of the Cold War and other geo-political calculi’, only piecemeal payments were made.18 In the case of the US, criticism of ‘Mugabe’s one party Marxist system’ from key US policymakers resulted in the US approving only US$40 million in 1984 of the US$225 million pledged in 1981.19 It is reported that by the end of 1984, only one-fifth of the pledged amount had been disbursed.20 ESAP provided access to external support such
Mandaza, 1986, p. 15 Saunders, 2019, p. 3; Dashwood, 2000, p. 24 Nyamunda & Sibanda, 2020 External debt-to-GDP increased from 10.4% in 1980 (10% in 1981) to 14.2% in 1982, 18.4% in 1983, 23.8% in 1984, 31.8% in 1985, 33.2% in 1986, 36.2% in 1987, falling to 29.3% in 1988, 28.2% in 1989, before rising marginally to 28.9% in 1990 (Dansereau, 2000). Heavy commercial borrowing in the 1981-83 period resulted in Zimbabwe’s debt being badly structured, with excessive reliance on debt on relatively hard terms (World Bank, 1985). Mate, 2018, p. 8 Scarnecchia, 2011 World Bank, 1985
CASE STUDY: NAVIGATING TURBULENCE IN ZIMBABWE
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