Introduction

Abstract

In mid-1990, Zimbabwe joined the swelling ranks of countries undertaking to liberalise their trading policies and adopt a programme of macroeconomic adjustment supported by the World Bank and, eventually, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). President Robert Mugabe and the dominant political party, known as the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) — ZANU (PF) — thus formally abandoned several economic policies identified with their past professions of socialism, including extensive price, wage and investment controls, social service additions, and government intervention generally. Later that year, ZANU (PF) dropped its proposal for legal status as the country’s sole party. These events occurred only months after the party had won — on a platform calling for Marxist-Leninist socialism and a one-party state — an overwhelming majority of seats in the third parliamentary elections to have been held after the negotiated dismantling in 1980 of the racially-based Rhodesian regime and the consequent gaining of formal independence from Great Britain.