Abstract
The authors show how, in the face of worsening employment conditions, an growing humanitarian emergency and increasing political repression, large numbers of Zimbabweans fled the country, while others were able to enrich themselves amidst increasing destitution. They analyse the consequences for state fragility as capacity drained out of the public sector and the quality of planning and service delivery deteriorated. Simpson and Hawkins examine how the private sector was also not able to shield itself from the increasingly unpredictable monetary and fiscal policies pursued by Government, and was likewise crippled by the mass migration of skilled and semi-skilled workers. The chapter also looks at the increasingly important role played by diaspora remittances in sustaining the livelihoods of those who remained.
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Notes
- 1.
Amongst the numerous policy frameworks launched during the crisis years were the Millennium Economic Recovery Programme of 2001, the Ten Point Plan of 2002, the National Economic Revival Programme of 2003, the Macro-Economic Policy Framework of 2004, the National Economic Development Priority Programme of 2006, and the Zimbabwe Economic Development Strategy of 2008.
- 2.
In some cases, quite literally so. As conditions deteriorated so the number of reports of poaching on nature conservancies multiplied, as did the reliance of rural populations on other forms of wild food.
- 3.
The TCPL was a composite metric derived from the monthly cost of a basket of essential food and non-food items. Households unable to secure the basket were judged to be below the national poverty line.
- 4.
The report itself was only released three years later in 2006 by the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, and possibly only because the Government had received significant UN funding to carry out the survey which made any attempt to withhold the results problematic, while Harare also had international obligations to report on progress in the area of poverty reduction in the context of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals framework.
- 5.
The extent to which the RBZ felt it had carte blanche to move away from its core business and engage in ‘quasi-fiscal’ activities, running the economy on behalf of the ruling party elite and ensuring their needs were met, is attested to by the directive it issued in 2007 compelling all commercial banks to lodge their foreign currency holdings with the RBZ. One notable casualty of this move was the donor-funded Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), which had US$7.3 million of its US$12.3 million Zimbabwe programme funds, which it had deposited with Zimbabwean commercial banks, seized, compromising its ability to operate. At the time not only did this cause serious tensions between Western donors and the RBZ (though the funds were eventually returned), but it also threw light on the amounts of foreign exchange required to fuel the patronage system, the extent to which the slush funds had been depleted, the short-termism that dominated the regime’s actions given that it risked jeopardising the country’s next funding application to the GFATM, and RBZ’s willingness to sacrifice the welfare of the country’s population in the pursuit of the means to maintain the patronage machinery functioning (Zim Online 2008).
- 6.
One report, produced by a coalition of Zimbabwean human rights NGOs in the aftermath of the 2005 parliamentary election, highlights this politicisation of food aid. It noted, for example, that villagers were regularly vetted by headmen, with those known to support the Opposition or unable to produce a ZANU-PF party membership card being denied access to food aid by having their names struck off the food register. (On this see Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum 2005, 12–13).
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Simpson, M., Hawkins, T. (2018). Regime Survival: Poverty Creation, Mass Migration and Elite Enrichment. In: The Primacy of Regime Survival. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72520-8_7
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