Austin Bay Blog

Zimbabwe has another election this coming Thursday. Here’s a very safe prediction: Zimbabwe’s dictator, Robert Mugabe, will cheat. Why not? He’s done it before and gotten away with it.

Here’s a quote from a column that ran in the San Antonio Express-News in April 2000 (before my column went national with Creators Syndicate). I wrote this when some sectors of the US Left still considered Mugabe to be someone worth lauding. Pshaw– they knew little about sub-Saharan Africa.

He’s an ethnic cleanser, a “former Marxist,” and a savvy, cynical thief whose grip on power is slipping.

His greed and mismanagement have wrecked his nation’s economy.

His scheme to retain power involves the dictator’s usual routines: stoking ethnic strife, inciting economic envy, and physically intimidating his domestic opposition.

Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic? No, this time the scoundrel is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The regional context is a central (Democratic Republic of Congo) and southwestern (Angola) Africa already aflame, with Zimbabwe –thanks to Mugabe’s malfeasance –teetering.

Over the past month, international press coverage has focused on Mugabe’s brutal Afarm occupation@ policies and his domestic failures.

In February, after the defeat of a “land reform” referendum that would have given Mugabe power to take white-owned farms without compensation, gangs under his control occupied the farms. The defeat of the referendum clued Mugabe that his regime, in power since 1980, was at risk. The opposition, black-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) had strength throughout Zimbabwe, through all economic classes and in all tribes.

Mugabe’s “farm occupation policy” utilized two themes that have been political ace cards for numerous African leaders: “combating colonialism” and “fighting racism.”

There’s a good argument that the land rights of some white farmers are at best tenuous. Many 19th century British settlers in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) acquired land via steel — the steel of British bayonets.

However, in the early 21st century, these farms, on one quarter of the farmland, produce two-thirds of Zimbabwe’s food. They also employ thousands of black Africans.

However, early on the MDC realized it was Mugabe’ real target…

That column from 2000 goes on to describe what Mugabe is up to– ie, stealing an election.

If you’re proud of Ukraine’s democrats, then pray for Zimbabwe’s MDC– Movement for Democratic Change.

Over at TechCentralStation, AEI’s Roger Bate has a look at Robert Mugabe’s thug dictatorship and its policy of robbery.

…the real reason that Zimbabwe has collapsed is that there is no protection of private property. The executive rides roughshod over the judiciary in all matters of property. The result is “dead capital” — a term invented by Hernando de Soto — and total economic annihilation. The economy is now worth barely more than one percent (in US$ terms) of its value in 2000, when the Mugabe regime’s “land reform” program, in which they appropriated farms and land-holdings from private owners, really started.

In short, Zimbabwe provides the reverse of the good news offered by De Soto. In The Mystery of Capital, De Soto exhaustively demonstrated that where private property rights are delineated and enforced, economies can grow rapidly. When someone can borrow against his one large asset (for nearly everyone this is his home) he can establish a business, buy supplies, establish marketing programs, sell products and make a profit and thrive.

For some countries the vast majority of capital is dead — one cannot prove one owns it outright, and hence no capital market will lend against it. For example in the mid-1990s when De Soto was asked by President Hosni Mubarak to assess the situation in Egypt, De Soto found that 90% of the capital was dead. Today the situation is slowly improving as more and more people can prove they own their property.

Not long ago, Zimbabwe had all the rights and rule of law one could have wanted. It had a decent titling system, a judiciary that upheld rights of landowners in the face of an executive branch that was largely Marxist in orientation (like so many African economies). And this same judiciary continued to try to do this in the face of mass expropriation of land rights in 2000. Even as late as 2003, as the final major swathe of white farmers were thrown off their property and their land left idle, some judges tried to uphold the constitutional rights of these farmers…

Read the whole thing. Also, Tuesday morning StrategyPage should have a Zimbabwe update with some more details.

UPDATE: From Instapundit, a recommended Zimbabwean web log.