Africa

Given the ever-shifting nature of the economy, variations on prices rising and occasionally falling, and the fact that in the case of Zimbabwe the numbers become meaningless, or at least mind-boggling, it is nearly impossible to know precisely what the rate of inflation is in that beleaguered country. But we do know this: Zimbabwe has the worst inflation in the world and it continues to get (seemingly) geometrically worse. The latest indicators are that the inflation rate has reached 160,000%, give or take a few thousand.

There is little reason to believe that figure will shrink, or even will grow more slowly in the days, weeks, and months to come. The Zimbabwe government is acknowledging the crisis, whereby people who have the country’s virtually worthless notes have to carry it around in bricks and bales, by creating a new Z$250 million note last week and a Z$500 million note this week. The latter trades for $2 American. But if you have American dollars, or British pounds, or South African rands, you must be stingy about trading them for a currency losing its value faster than you can find anything to spend it on.

[Z$25 million is approximately what a dime would buy you if the exchage rates listed above  prevails when you read this.]  

At The American: A Magazine of Ideas Marian L. Tupy has a perceptive piece on the stark differences between Botswana and Zimbabwe. Tupy’s conclusion is a bit prosaic: “It turns out that much of the difference stems from the degree of freedom that each populace enjoys.” (Really? It turns out that way, does it? Well I’ll be.) 

(And that is not the only dubious conclusion – The American is a product of the American Enterprise Institute which elevates liberal economics to the status of a religion. I generally support liberal economics, but Tupy seems gratuitously close to asserting the free market as a monocausal factor that explains the countries’ divergent paths. For her “freedom” seems to be characterized by a fairly narrow conception of market economics. She also seems happy to take on a Marxist straw man that reduces the complexities of post-independence Africa.)

But banalities of interpretation asideTupy does a nice job of telling  a tale of two countries and the article is very much worth reading. 

With the caveat that news from Zimbabwe these days is increasingly sketchy, it is clear that things there continue to fester. Agustino Zacarias, the United Nations senior representative in Zimbabwe, declared on Tuesday that the escalating violence is expanding countrywide, in rural and urban areas, and could reach crisis levels. Supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have been the victims of most of the violence, with the perpetrators supporters of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.

In the meantime MDC presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai is saying all of the right things, including placing his faith in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), despite the fact that South African President Thabo Mbeki’s reputation continues to tumble and that according to Zimbabwe’s former home affairs minister Dumiso Dabengwa, Zim is effectively operating under military rule.

Suffice it to say, it seems less likely with each passing day that viable plans for a runoff that will actually be actionable will be put into place any time soon.

Now that the Movement for Democratic Change has declared that it will contest the runoff election Zimbabweans have reached the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end of this seemingly interminable election issue. It appears that the MDC announcement has fueled increasing political violence that is likely to continue until the polling takes place. but it is precisely because of violence such as this, violence intended to intimidate and crush the opposition, that the MDC must continue forward with their challenge to Robert Mugabe’s reign of violence and fear.

My work is a bit complicated. The best way to describe it is that I explore race, politics, and social movements in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. I wrote the following recently, which mostly involves the issue of race in the United States. I hope you will find it to be of some interest:

We are beyond race.
That is the comfortable little myth that many of us white folks like to spew to make ourselves feel better about a history that clearly indicates that we are not at all beyond race. These people (We?) like to believe in an accelerated curve, a Whiggish and inexorable belief in improvement on the one demonstrable blotch on our national escutcheon, that has somehow innoculated us from centuries of reality. The candidacy of Barack Obama allows even those who do not, will not, support him to claim perfectibility on the one issue about which Americans have been sadly, tragically, imperfect.
Unfortunately there are times when reality kicks us in the teeth, or at least ought to. What to make, after all, in this supposedly color-blind society, about the fact that our misguided drug wars disproportionately effect African Americans? What does this tell us about our racial myths, and more importantly, how we deal with them?
Many of us are wary of decisions, supposedly race-neutral, on, say, voting rights in light of America’s still demonstrably not race-neutral policies. Many of us are wary of claims that we live in a time when race is no longer a factor, because of the relative successes of Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama. Indeed, we are wary precisely because of the facile ways in which we allow the prominence of a miniscule number of black Americans to substitute for a real discussion of the country’s racial past.
Conservatives call such concerns “race hustling,” a phrase notable only for its cynicism, vacuousness, and, yes, racism. And yet how many other issues in American history actually manage to sustain as relevant without actually being relevant? Issues that do not matter fade into obsolescence. This one continues to vex precisely because it matters. Would that we had an honest discussion about it, as Obama has done more honestly, and more frontally, than any American in the country’s history has undertaken.

We can pretend that it does not matter. In fact nothing has ever mattered more.

If this is self indulgent, or if it strays from my mandate of discussing and commenting on African politics, I am truly sorry. I hope this will help establish my bona fides on this issue.

[Crossposted from the Foreign Policy Association South Africa Blog and dcat.]

On the good news front, the Movement for Democratic Change has had a change of heart and now insists that it will contest the runoff election and is planning its strategy, whenever that election may happen. While I understand Morgan Tsvangirai’s frustration with a system so clearly stacked against him, I was happy to see him say: “A run-off election could finally knock out the dictator [Mugabe] for good. The run-off election could be the final round in a very long fight to liberate ourselves from our former liberator.” Of course the MDC also believes that the runoff will happen between now and May 23, which, while consistent with the law, also seems highly unlikely.

One also wonders if Thabo Mbkei’s talks with Robert Mugabe were geared toward pushing the old despot toward conciliation or merely served to validate principles of liberation that, while undeniable in their importance are also irrelevant in the context of the current campaign. Morgan Tsvangirai is more committed to Zimbabwe today than is Robert Mugabe. That Mugabe the liberation hero has been overwhelmed by Mugabe the despot is a tragic reality, but it is a reality nonetheless.

Because everyone needs a bit of a comedown before heading into the weekend, here is a bit of a roundup of Zimbabwe-related stories.

South African President Thabo Mbeki has traveled to Zimbabwe for talks on the country’s disputed election. Acting both as South African head of state and as the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) mediator Mbeki will meet with President Robert Mugabe, but it is unclear whether he will also meet with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), making one wonder just what sort of mediation he could possibly envision emerging from his trip, especially since the MDC continues to insist that it will not participate in a runoff that it perceives to be a sham.
As violence escalates across the country death tolls are beginning to rise. Farmers and farm workers in rural areas are especially vulnerable to the violence, as are lawyers, journalists, and trade unionists.

As if the actual and impending violence is not ominous enough, the Chinese vessel carrying arms intended for Zimbabwe that was turned away from South African waters weeks ago is still afloat on African waters. The South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (SATAWU) reports that the ship, An Yue Jiang, is still in search of a hospitable port and is headed toward Congo-Brazzaville in hopes of being able to offload its deadly cargo there. Somehow that ship, in both its tenacity and its desperation, but also because of the violence that it portends, stands as a pretty grim metaphor for the cynical machinations of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF.

According to a the head of a South African contingent of regional election observers, the presidential election run-off in Zimbabwe cannot take place given the current and threatened levels of violence. How convenient for President Robert Mugabe, for whom violence and the threat of its usage has always been a useful political tool. Such a pronouncement serves his interests perfectly. And of course it does little to motivate him to try to diminish the use of violence in the near or distant future if cessation of violence means the runoff can go on as planned. Instability borne of Mugabe’s irresponsibility thus works to Mugabe’s advantage if that instability means the elections do not take place and Mugabe maintains and consolidates his control.

Perhaps the observers, who surely do not mean to fuel Mugabe’s despotism, should have insisted that a runoff go in in spite of, and perhaps to spite, the cynical use of violence to manipulate the system. There are, after all, worse things than temporal, politically-inspired violence, and that is a permanent state of politically-inspired violence.

This week nine nominees for ambassadorial posts to Africa stood before the United States Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. AllAfrica has the details on the nominees and their backgrounds. The posts to be filled include posts to Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Ghana, Liberia, Togo, Malawi, Zambia, Cape Verde, and Botswana.

There is lots of news and not much time for analysis, so enjoy these links on a range of issues:

At Pambazuka News Chido Makunike looks at the Complexities of Zimbabwe with special emphasis on the various political participants and their needs and desires. A little less elegantly — which is not to say any less accuratel — Binyavanga Wainaina at the Mail & Guardian compares Robert Mugabe to a haemorrhoid, arguing, “He is not Aids, cancer, leukemia or malaria — those things that can kill you.” While Wainaina’s larger argument stands, the fact remains that Mugabe can, of course, “kill you,” especially if you are the opposition. One assumes that the coming weeks, and possibly months, will not be without their Mugabe-backed killings.

IRIN reveals how Botswana has shut down cross-border fuel sales to Zimbabwe and also has a story on how Amnesty International’s report on human rights abuses in Somalia barely “scratch the surface.”  the latter story might provide another example of how Zimbabwe’s neighbors are, however belatedly, increasingly fed up with Mugabe’s regime. Meanwhile the Somali government, or what amounts to the Somali government, predictably denies the report even as most civil society groups argue that the report is insufficient in revealing the true extent of the Somali crisis. My money is on the civil society groups being correct.

In Kenya many refugees are afraid to return home, fearing that violence may resume. Cautious optimism aside, for those who were caught up in the post-election maelstrom the healing process will almost inevitably be slow and may never be complete.

Finally, in this grab-bag of not-so-cheery news, it appears that more than a third of anti-malarial drugs tested in six cities across sub-Saharan Africa failed quality tests. Malaria does not draw the attention that AIDS (rightly) gets in Africa, and yet it is every bit as pervasive and deadly.