Abstract
Against the backdrop of negative news on Zimbabwe that has been the norm since 2000, Simpson and Hawkins remind readers how Zimbabwe was widely seen as a potential African success story at Independence in 1980. They highlight its then relatively diversified economy, strong human capital base and sound infrastructure, as well as the international goodwill it enjoyed. In the area of political governance, the Lancaster House constitution had entrenched the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary and multi-party elections. The authors note that such baselines are important as they serve to highlight the extent of Zimbabwe’s regression that began in the late 1990s, and which they argue is a function of the desire of the ruling party to remain in power at all costs through the construction of extractive economic and political institutions.
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Notes
- 1.
Notwithstanding Mugabe’s efforts to allay the concerns of the white population of Zimbabwe, by the early 1980s this was estimated at 140,000 – approximately half the peak of around 275,000 in the mid-1970s.
- 2.
The HDI is a composite index developed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). It brings together life expectancy at birth, education (expected and mean years of schooling) and gross national income per capita indicators, with countries grouped into four human development categories based on their index, namely Very High, High, Medium and Low.
- 3.
The MDC was to split into two factions in 2005, putatively on the issue of whether the party should participate in senate elections that year. The split would eventually result in a much larger MDC-T led by its original founder Morgan Tsvangirai who had favoured a boycott of the elections and overruled the decision of the party’s National Council to participate in the polls, and what would eventually become the significantly smaller MDC-M led by Arthur Mutambara . At the time there were complaints from dissidents within the MDC that Tsvangirai was demonstrating disturbing signs of authoritarianism, and that his grassroots supporters had employed violence against them.
References
Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2013. Why Nations Fail—The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. London: Profile Books.
Ministry of Information, Immigration and Tourism. 1980. Address to the Nation by the Prime Minister Elect—4th March 1980. Harare.
Zimbabwe Today. 2017. Samora Machel 1980 Warning to Mugabe: Chasing White Rhodesians Will Ruin Zimbabwe, February 6. https://zimbabwe-today.com/samora-machel-warning-mugabe-chasing-white-rhodesians-will-ruin-zimbabwe/.
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Simpson, M., Hawkins, T. (2018). Introduction. In: The Primacy of Regime Survival. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72520-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72520-8_1
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