In April 1980 Zimbabwe was born amid equal measures of celebration for the triumph over Rhodesian colonialism and expectation of the challenges that lay ahead. After seven years of armed struggle and decades of economic and political repression, inequality and conflict under white colonialism, the prospect of a new progressive order under two avowedly leftist liberation movement parties pointed to opportunities for substantial redistribution and development, and the establishment of an inclusive, participatory government in place of white minority rule. Under majority rule, the new Zimbabwean state was envisaged as the primary vehicle for this project, with the liberation movements led by Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) providing political guidance and legitimacy, and popular sections of civil society – the labour movement, collective cooperatives, progressive media, churches and rights organisations, and others – providing support in consultation and engagement from below.
Thirty years later, the last vestiges of that once inspiring project lie in ruins. Through successive cycles of economic and political restructuring inflected by unsettled and shifting class alliances in the political leadership, ZANU-PF unravelled the developmental power of the nationalist state, along with the prospects for its constructive and popular confrontation of renewed imperial power. In 2010, at the end of a turbulent decade characterised by the militarisation of politics and the dismal withering of Zimbabwe's once-envied professional state, a new ‘nationalist consensus’ has emerged in the guise of the securocrat business-politicians who dominate it.
ZANU-PF v.2000 – militarised, opaque, elitist, immersed in secretive and corrupt business deals, a model of elite entitlement but not popular delivery – is this the model of ‘liberation nationalism’ that we should expect to see elsewhere in the region, as the disciplining principles of ‘people's struggle’ gives way to the hunger for elite class formation? Does ZANU-PF reflect the dying days of late nationalism – or its reinvention in a new form that depends importantly on interlinked elite networks of politics and markets extending beyond the country's borders?
An ambiguous heritage
For many observers, the broad brushstrokes of Zimbabwe's successive dramatic political transitions under ZANU-PF – from the social welfarist, nominally socialist, redistributive state of the 1980s; to the elite-driven accommodation of international capital, international financial institutions and white-dominated local capital codified in the 1990s' Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) policies; to the restructuring of the state and party in the 2000s via their mutual militarisation under threat of political challenge – illustrate the skewed trajectory of a nationalist movement as it was transformed by post-independence encounters with capital and power. In this context, much of the mainstream commentary on the current political meltdown locates its origins in the adoption of ESAP in 1991, and the swirl of economic shocks, deindustrialisation, declining real income levels and rising social crisis which followed; or in the emergence of the ‘war veterans’ as a prominent force in ruling party politics in 1997, at a time when the leadership was under increasing attack from both traditional allies in the popular sector and newfound friends in the market.
However, important questions about the ambiguous class composition of the ZANU-PF state, and particularly the emerging power of an elitist faction-ridden petite bourgeoisie bridging the state, party and private sector were already being raised by critics from the Left in the mid-1980s.1 By then, contradictory ambitions were pulling the state and ruling party in several directions simultaneously. While competing policy paths were initially accommodated through redistributive policies, the state also went to considerable lengths to engage local and international capital as economic performance grew unsteady in the wake of drought and an effective boycott by domestic and international investors. For Brian Raftopoulos, writing in ROAPE in 1992, the multi-class nationalist alliance contained within ZANU-PF had been faced with the unavoidable ‘central dilemma of a welfare strategy: how to reconcile growth with more equitable distribution, and initiate change without serious destabilisation’.2
By 1982 an International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme involving budget restraint, subsidy cuts and liberalisation of the capital account was in place; in the mid 1980s state officials were discussing new strategies for export-oriented growth with the World Bank; and by 1987 the first in a series of sweeping trade liberalisation and foreign investment reforms were introduced, with the strong support of established and emerging black capital.3 This narrower alliance of class forces, consolidated in and protected by a state-based leadership, and ideologically reproduced through ZANU-PF's invocation of nationalism, provided the key momentum for the formal shift to neoliberalism with the introduction of ESAP in 1991.
But while ESAP represented an intra-elite pacting of capital and leading political interests it also helped heighten emerging points of tension. On the one hand, the unmet ambitions of a black petite bourgeoisie frustrated by the persistent dominance of local white and international capital seemed likely to be exacerbated by ESAP. Discord grew among black capital and state-linked businesses, as important parts of the petite bourgeoisie were negatively affected by rising interest rates, import deregulation and declining state protection for home market producers. They mobilised through increasingly vocal groups like the Indigenous Business Development Centre and the more militant Affirmative Action Group, demanding protection from and more direct incorporation within ZANU-PF's shifting accumulation project. Other critical components of ZANU-PF's traditional base, including public service workers, ‘war veterans’ and land-hungry subsistence farmers – their hopes blunted by ESAP's market-driven approach to land reform – also found their interests and influence marginalised.
On the other hand, the severely negative economic and social consequences of adjustment – including the peeling back of many of the key health and education gains of the 1980s, and a catastrophic decline in formal-sector employment, real wages, and manufacturing output due to import- and interest-rate-induced deindustrialisation – fuelled a resurgence in civil society activism, led by the national labour movement under the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.4 Important debates over the fate of ZANU-PF's one-party state project, which helped generate the brief appearance of Edgar Tekere's conservative Zimbabwe Unity Movement at the time of the 1990 elections, also mobilised engagement of the political inside and outside the ruling party.
But while spaces for public debate had opened significantly following ZANU-PF's 1987 absorption of Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU),5 and in the broader context of post-Cold War debates about the options for democratic renewal and economic development, such debates would also have sharp limits placed on them. Labour movement structures and university students calling for government to pursue a popular agenda and clamp down on corruption and elitist tendencies met with aggressive attack; leftist currents were regularly targeted for marginalisation in the party, state structures and public institutions; and ‘indigenisation’ debates and activism were increasingly contained within the narrow confines of ZANU-PF policy precepts. Crucial spaces in the public media that had briefly opened were soon locked down, while a combination of harsh market conditions and seeping state harassment and threats undermined the position of several critical independent privately owned publications (despite ‘political liberalisation’, ZANU-PF never permitted non-state broadcasting, a situation which persists to time of writing).6
In the late 1990s, the powerful convergence of political, economic and social tensions generated by ESAP provoked the collapse of the ‘liberation consensus’ consolidated under ZANU-PF in the 1980s.7 This unleashed a new phase of political realignment underpinned by the militarised reorganising of the ruling party, its structures and core active constituencies; the terrain of national politics (now featuring a diverse civil society alliance focused on constitutional reform and mounting a direct political challenge to ZANU-PF); and the state itself, including its representative, judicial, security and bureaucratic structures (Saul and Saunders 2005). Here, the party leadership's accommodation and political re-incorporation of disaffected ‘war veterans’ in 1997 marked a decisive step in the direction of a new ruling consensus dominated by the senior ranks of the party and state security institutions, and strategically incorporating and embracing elements of not only the veterans, but also poor urban youth, traditional leaders, rural landless and urban professionals, among other social fragments. This new formation was ideologically cemented from above by a repackaged nationalist mantra focused on the delivery of social justice via a ‘Third Chimurenga’, and by extension, the eclipse of the redistributive welfare state project of the 1980s, as well as the mass-democratic structures in which it was politically rooted. In the recalibrated nationalism of ZANU-PF and its state in the 2000s, those popular mass constituencies demanding greater transparency, equity, redistribution and the entrenchment of participatory democratic norms of political management – the resurgent political majority, it would later become clear – were increasingly identified by ZANU-PF as the prime target of attack, along with the remnants of its social welfarist state.
The audacity of ‘No’
The historic defeat of ZANU-PF in the February 2000 constitutional referendum by an alliance of leading civil society organisations and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)8 marked a pivotal point in Zimbabwean politics.9 It was the first time the party had lost a national poll since independence. With no coherent policy compass in hand, plummeting economic indicators and fresh parliamentary elections featuring a new party looming in early 2000, ZANU-PF responded by unleashing a series of violent interventions that formally announced its abandonment of mass-democratic politics ‘business as usual’.
In April 2000 the first of an extended series of commercial farm invasions was launched under the protection of, and often with the direct assistance and orchestration of, the state and party structures. ‘Fast track’ land reform, as it became known, would take on wider significance for ZANU-PF's economic programme and ideological repositioning in the years ahead, and lead some such as Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros to portray ZANU-PF as a paragon of militant African nationalism in the face of globalisation in post-Cold War epoch.10 For others, ‘jambanja’ importantly marked the reintroduction of systematic political violence under the patronage of the state, and more broadly, the subordination of the state to the party's emerging new agenda.
Soon after the land invasions began, violence spilled from the rural areas onto the broader political terrain. It would be regularised, institutionalised and ‘legalised’ – if not fully legitimated – in coming years by a wall of repressive legislation that targeted rights to public association, media and freedom of expression, citizenship and electoral participation, among others.11 The primary victims of these measures were the opposition MDC leadership, rank-and-file members and supporters. But targets of repression also included a range of civil society organisations – particularly those which represented key constituencies in the popular sector and had a sustained organisational grounding in communities, like the national labour movement, residents' associations, human rights defenders and professional cadres including teachers, doctors and nurses.
An enormous and incalculable cost in lives, health, security and organisational resources was paid as ZANU-PF defaulted to violent coercion as a means of confronting the spectre of electoral defeat in 2000, 2002 and subsequent polls. One 2006 report documented more than 15,000 politically motivated gross human rights abuses since 2000, with more than 90% of these perpetrated by ruling party and state officials against perceived ZANU-PF opponents.12 Murder, torture, rape, beatings, illegal detentions and property destruction, in oscillating waves related to electoral cycles and campaigns, made state-enabled political violence an established feature of the political landscape by mid decade.
‘Operation Murambatsvina’ (meaning ‘clear out the rubbish’), a 2005 post-election security forces-led campaign directed primarily at MDC-supporting poorer urban areas, signalled the commitment and ruthlessness with which systematic violence was pursued. More than 200,000 homes were bulldozed, large swathes of informal-sector infrastructure was pulled down, more than 20,000 were summarily arrested and perhaps more than one million people in all were displaced and dumped.13 At the same time, ZANU-PF officials suggested that informal sector permits, licences and rights to work would, in the future, be subject to effective political approval. The economic misery visited on the urban poor, particularly those displaced to the informal sector by the crash of agriculture, industry and mining, helped fuel new waves of underground migrancy to neighbouring South Africa.
Another important casualty was the state itself. ZANU-PF's coercive strategy was underpinned by – indeed required – a corresponding attack on the autonomy, accountability and professionalism of the judiciary and security forces, state bureaucracy, parliamentary institutions, media and information structures.14 Sections of the ruling party, too, were targeted. In a selective house-cleaning led by the war vets, local party officials were summarily thrown out of office under force of violence and with the backing of the national party leadership.
The clearing-out of state development and party structures helped exacerbate an economic crisis that had taken root in the 1990s, and spiralled out of control in the 2000s. With the decline of commercial agriculture, deepening shortages of foreign exchange and slumping domestic demand in the early 2000s, Zimbabwe became the world's fastest-collapsing peace-time economy, contracting by as much as 60% in 2000–2006.15 Inflation exploded past 700% in 2005 and then went supersonic, as government printed more money and repeatedly revalued and reissued currency in a failing bid to keep up with crashing market confidence. Before it finally went out of effective circulation in 2009, annual inflation had reached over 225 million per cent. Inflation and crashing production saw sharp falls in formal employment and rising poverty. By 2004, formal sector wages had fallen from 95% of the 2001 Poverty Datum Line to less than 50%. By 2006 wages fell further, to pre-1980 levels. By then perhaps 80% of Zimbabweans lived in profound poverty. Hundreds of thousands more escaped poverty and violence by leaving the country, to South Africa but also further afield. Some reports estimated that as many as three million Zimbabweans were living in South Africa by 2010 – certainly at least half that number would be a conservative estimate.
This sort of disastrous performance might have spelled political death for many political parties. But ZANU-PF survived by playing to its strengths: on the one hand, its access to the instruments of organised violence and the state electoral bureaucracy; on the other, its peerless liberation credentials. Thus ZANU-PF's unique linked claims to institutionalised violence and the mantle of restorative nationalist justice became the hallmarks of its election campaigns throughout the decade. If state and ruling party violence increasingly characterised the election process, it was in defence of ‘national interests’ and the gains of the liberation struggle; if the opposition was short-changed, it was in the name of defeating the agenda of ‘recolonisation’; if electoral processes were flawed by imposed international standards, they nonetheless produced results that were favourable to ‘Africanist aspirations’; and so forth. This recasting of electoral standards and legitimacy was peddled with considerable success in southern Africa and more widely on the continent, even as it repeatedly failed to find traction inside the country.
Most independent observers now concur that the MDC likely won the vote in every national election since 2000. The MDC's main problem, however, was in winning recognition of this reality and a corresponding transfer of power. Here, the enabling role of ZANU-PF's southern African neighbours and erstwhile allies in tolerating the party's overt manipulation of electoral processes emerged as a defining and perplexing element in Zimbabwe's continuing political crisis. Despite the refrain frequently repeated by Southern African Development Community (SADC) governments, that Zimbabweans must ‘solve their problems by themselves’, every attempt to do this through the ballot box since 2000 has been frustrated by the interventions of regional and continental powers – interventions skewed, almost without exception, in favour of one political player.
Was this sign of consolidation of an old boys' club among ageing liberation movement ruling parties? Of a cynical supportive stance for local nationalist-clad regimes, no matter how soiled the cloth, against the insistent and often condescending critiques of northern donors and rights activists? Or worse: of a strategy of collective mutually assured political survival in the longer term?
Yes, partly. But while regional responses to the Zimbabwe crisis often reflected such concerns, there were other factors that spoke to the continuing fragility of the wider terrain of mass-democratic politics in much of the region. Distrust of or lack of familiarity with the MDC among many regional ruling parties worked in ZANU-PF's favour – it seems clear that the model of a labour-movement-led alliance of civic and popular forces is not one which nationalist regimes in the region wish to nurture, lest it lead by example. ZANU-PF worked hard, with the resources of the state behind it, at maintaining a diplomatic foot in the door in key regional spaces, while seeking to jam the MDC's fingers in it whenever possible.
At the same time, relatively weak and ineffectual links among regional civil society organisations helped to undermine their own capacity to lobby home governments in the region. In key countries, notably South Africa, civic interventions with government around the Zimbabwe issue were complicated by the dynamics of relations among civil society organisations and national ruling parties – which ZANU-PF was quick to exploit.
In important ways, then, ZANU-PF enjoyed a relatively open space to play out its revamped nationalist hand in the region – an advantage that dovetailed powerfully with its efforts to marginalise international initiatives against ZANU-PF's electoral and human rights abuses, while appealing to SADC to oversee ‘normalisation’ of the political order inside the country. The outcome was a fragile political equilibrium that saw ZANU-PF come through a series of flawed elections still in power, and dominating a thwarted, increasingly divided opposition MDC – the party split into two entirely separate entities in 2005 following deepening leadership and strategic wrangles – and a similarly factionalised, weakened and wearied civil society.
Class formation, revisited
This uneasy political status quo, placed against the backdrop of a weakened state, low transparency and pervasive influence of securocrats, facilitated a significant restructuring of class interests in the ruling party leadership in the 2000s. This development saw the institutionalisation of elite-organised violence at the centre of Zimbabwe's political economy. At critical junctures of political challenge (like elections) and accumulation opportunity (whether on the land, in diamond fields or in urban vending markets), organised violent interventions would prove decisive in sustaining the ZANU-PF ruling coalition. By 2010, this fact – not the choices of Zimbabweans as expressed through their votes – would come to weigh heavily on the terrain of national electoral politics and economic policy making.
The massive shift of agrarian commercial assets in the first part of the decade – a process which is still not fully understood and about which reliable evidence remains thin – initiated a period of unprecedented reallocation of public and private productive assets. Much of this was hidden from view, the exact identities of the players and competing political factions unannounced. But it is clear from glimpsed cases of shifting ownership in commercial agriculture, parastatals, public infrastructure, mining and services, among other sectors, that substantial factors of accumulation agglomerated in political-security business networks; that this happened through irregular means, beyond the direct and transparent control of the state bureaucracy and legal system; and that this unfolding of events had profoundly negative implications for the resuscitation of a democratic development state.
Restructuring of the political-business elite in the 2000s was not simply a matter of including new ‘briefcase businessmen’ in the circles of state-dependent accumulation – a phenomenon seen earlier in the 1980s when politically connected entrepreneurs used access to import licences, foreign currency and other rationed production inputs, and in the 1990s under ESAP, when soft loans, government contracts and pressures for ‘indigenisation’ fleetingly provided new points of business entry for the black petite bourgeoisie. Those earlier forms of accumulation were relatively openly structured, and animated and sustained to a large extent by the ZANU-PF government's policy.
In the 2000s, elite accumulation increasingly went off-grid: out of reach of transparent regulation by government; primarily benefiting a small predatory cadre without systematic ‘empowerment’ redistributive concerns; and frequently, overlapping with regional ‘parallel markets’ and criminal networks. If accumulation and new class formation were driven in the first two decades of independence by state-based policy making, in the third it was often hidden behind a veil of secrecy, operating on the edges of the state and enabled by business-security networks patronised by competing ZANU-PF factional blocs with links to the military and political wings of the party. Indeed the prospect of a rehabilitated, professional Zimbabwean state stood in the way of the new accumulation project – whereas in the past it had been employed to nurture it.
The convergence of political, security and business interests in opaque and powerful networks was chillingly illustrated in the emergence of Zimbabwe's own ‘blood diamonds’ in 2006.16 The discovery of alluvial diamonds in the eastern district of Marange was soon followed by the arrival of state security agencies, led by the police and army, to ‘secure’ the diamond fields against illegal miners and smuggling networks. In short time, reports of extensive human rights abuses started flowing from the area, along with indications that security-forces personnel were involved in illegal mining and smuggling. In successive military-style and violent ‘operations’, hundreds of informal miners, traders and innocent locals died violently at the hands of security forces; untold numbers suffered rape, assault, illegal detention, forced labour, harassment and, for locals living near the diamond fields, forced removals.
Opposition parties and civil society, including the media, struggled to prevent the violence and mounting corruption and criminality. So did the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KP), the international organisation with a mandate to certify rough diamonds as ‘conflict-free’ in advance of export. The KP and its consensus-driven processes were repeatedly manipulated by ZANU-PF to blunt its investigative and censuring powers. Meanwhile, local civil society organisations and other investigators working on Marange diamonds were prevented from freely accessing the region to assist victims of rights abuses and compile evidence of who was responsible for, and benefiting from, the chaos.
Marange starkly illustrated a contradiction at the centre of ZANU-PF's revised nationalist project: the entrenchment of narrowed elitist securitised power in the state and economy, amid deepening exclusion of constituencies that previously had formed its bedrock support. The political outcome was widespread desertion of the party by voters; a problem exacerbated by the withering of ZANU-PF traditional grassroots structures by the violence of the 2000s, which was nonetheless manageable by means of highly organised election manipulation – and the abiding tolerance of ZANU-PF's SADC friends.
But there were limits to this strategy. The economic repercussions of continuing donor and investor boycotts, hyperinflationary spending under Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) Governor Gideon Gono, and the crash of the formal-sector economy, undermined the sustainability of any ZANU-PF accumulation project resting on coercion. ‘Legitimacy’ became a key sought-after economic commodity, and ZANU-PF identified new elections as the key means to achieve it while retaining overall control of the transition to ‘normality’.
In this context, the 2008 parliamentary and presidential elections were a hallmark of the contradictory political and economic imperatives within the restructured ZANU-PF status quo. The elections were held under slightly improved rules of procedure negotiated by South African mediators that temporarily closed loopholes which in the past had been used to control the poll count if not the vote itself. ZANU-PF had agreed to these changes, sufficiently confident of gaining a plurality in the context of a divided opposition – part of which had already expressed interest in a government of ‘national unity’. But the party had woefully misjudged the situation – the depth of anger towards ZANU-PF, even in rural areas where it had once ruled unchallenged; the opposition and civil society's careful attention to vote-counting procedures, which made it difficult to cook the count; and the enduring popularity of the main bloc of the MDC led by Morgan Tsvangirai, which made large gains in all parts of the country, among all class and ethnic constituencies.
The surprise results of the first round of voting on 29 March 2008 – the combined opposition MDC won 109 seats to ZANU-PF's 97 – suddenly threatened to set in motion a transfer of power. There were days of ominous silence from ZANU-PF and its sounding-board state media – reruns on television of FIFA World Cup Finals of years past, endless American action movies, Swahili children's programming – anything except the officially indeterminate state of Zimbabwean current affairs – as the old guard debated how to extricate itself from the mess of democracy. Its answer became clear as state security forces, war vets and youth militias were deployed to viciously attack MDC officials and supporters, but also significantly, traditional ZANU-PF areas that had turned against the party in March. With this – an unprecedented and sustained attack on ZANU-PF's heartland structures and constituents, unambiguously labelled ‘Operation Makavhoterapapi?’ (‘where did you put your vote?’) – the ruling coalition of elitist securitised interests in ZANU-PF buried the old mass-based movement that had prosecuted the liberation war. The central challenge facing any transition in the near term was also drawn into focus: the security apparatus, namely the ZANU-PF-aligned military, now openly claimed the role of arbiter of power in any transfer of authority to a new political order.17
Since 2008, the threat of institutionalised violence by state security agencies has been a key vector shaping the trajectory of political restructuring, dragging the country away from the edge of democratic transition and all of the uncertainties that holds for the ZANU-PF leadership. For Tsvangirai's MDC, the perception of this military threat by others – including most SADC governments, foreign donors and diplomats – was a key obstacle to securing recognition of its win in March 2008 (Kwinjeh 2008). The power-sharing Global Political Agreement (GPA) signed in September 2008 was effectively imposed on the MDC through diplomatic and coercive pressure, and had little to do with the fair and accurate representation of Zimbabweans' political voice as expressed through their votes.
Compromised equilibrium?
With such problematic origins it is unsurprising that the GPA has been ineffective in meeting its key objectives: among them, demilitarising the political space, tackling rights abuses, preparing a new constitution, readying the country for a new round of free and fair elections within two years, and importantly, reintroducing a sense of order grounded in economic recovery.
In contrast, the GPA increasingly appears to have been most efficient in serving the instrumental needs of the ZANU-PF elite (Ndlovu 2008). It has provided a flimsy but sufficient veneer of legitimacy while facilitating ZANU-PF's continued access to strategic levers of state power – including the defence, security, police, foreign affairs and information portfolios, as well as control over state prosecutions through the Attorney-General's office, and responsibility for strategic resource extraction sectors like mining and agriculture. These instruments have been turned overwhelmingly to meet partisan ends.18 The GPA may be a ‘stalemate’, but it is one tilted unmistakenly in the ZANU-PF elite's favour. And while incremental gains have been made – for example, disastrous hyperinflation ended with the dollarisation of the economy, although continuing dollarisation is rife with hazards in the longer term – these are primarily gains only in comparison to manifestly unacceptable and unsustainable conditions in the recent past.
In the meantime, continuing secretive and partisan exploitation of national resources, including assets in the agrarian and mining sectors, stand the risk of fuelling renewed capacity for ZANU-PF violence in the future as political-cum-security business networks move to defend themselves on the terrain of the state. Here, Marange is a sobering example of not only the depth and extent of political-security-criminal linkages; but also the efficiency with which they have made use of state power and illegal violence; the relative weaknesses of regulatory bodies and oversight institutions; and the comparatively high tolerance of governments in the region – for whatever reason – for such overtly shady behaviour.
Some of the worst human rights abuses at Marange occurred after the GPA was signed in September 2008. In ways that would be symptomatic for the unity government more broadly, the state appeared to nurture the consolidation of criminality at Marange under the direction of security and political interests. Using its strategic ministerial powers, ZANU-PF severely restricted access to Marange or information about developments there, amid documented allegations of continuing rights abuses, revenue diversion and illegal exports of diamonds by the state mining parastatal. The MDC seemed helpless to alter the situation – as was the KP – as ZANU-PF skilfully lobbied regional and other allies within the KP to hold off censure, while attacking and threatening local civil society diamond researchers working in Marange.19 For some, the new government's handling of Marange represented a ‘litmus test’: if the grip of overtly criminal and politically partisan diamond networks could not be dislodged by the new government, what hope was there for the wider ‘normalisation’ of the national political economy?
In late 2010, the outcome of that ‘litmus test’ remains unclear, and stands as an example of the new and complex kinds of challenges faced more broadly across southern and east Africa by democratic movements calling for political and economic participation and equity. Is it possible to establish viable transitional government structures incorporating powerful constituencies with a vested interest in preventing real transition and transformation of political–economic systems? Can regional democracies and economies be counted on for meaningful support for change, particularly when similar voices of change become stronger across borders and threaten old orders and tired, threadbare political rhetoric? Can entrenched security and business interests, increasingly extended across regional borders, be effectively disinterred by weakened states and vulnerable civil-society constituencies? Thirty years on from independence, the last vestiges of Zimbabwe's popular development state project lies in ruins, and civil society voices demanding a return to authentic participatory politics remain under attack and divided.
Zimbabwe's lessons for the region are not hopeful, and point to the residual creative survival capacities of late nationalist ruling elites and the corrupt and sometimes criminalised networks of accumulation they helped establish. A crucial remaining question is whether anyone or any institution, in Southern Africa or beyond, has the willpower and the means to challenge this situation. The regional proliferation of late-nationalist regimes, each with their own networks of politically brokered accumulation, assembled behind veils of corruption and concealment; the fallout of market excesses and ineffective supervisory regulation; and the weakness and halting, mostly ineffective interventions of international governments and organisations; suggest that the struggle to recoup popular control over markets, states and democratic transitions will be a long and difficult one.