Last month, the World Bank (WB) paid for Zimbabwe’s Government of National Unity (GNU) team building exercise at Victoria Falls. The GNU was being berated for its bloated size, for issuing a new Mercedes Benz to each of the ministers, for its failure to implement democratic reforms and continued human rights violations. With such a pathetic and hopeless mob one would thing it wise to have the deadwood removed first before team-building! Today it is the WB’s sister organisation, IMF’s turn to pamper Mugabe.
When it comes to Africa the two Brentwood sisters either believe the continent can still achieve economic prosperity without the prerequisite economic prudence and the need for good governance and democratic accountability. Or else they believe such economic and political goals are too loft and totally unachievable for Africa. They have given up and therefore will work with whatever regime comes up even one as incompetent, corrupt and ruthlessly oppressive as Mugabe.
Zimbabwe was once a model African economy but has now fallen into bad times with a severe economic melt down and a political crisis. IMF and WB have played their part in Zimbabwe’s downfall. For twenty years, these two Brentwood Financial Institutions propped up Mugabe and bankroll his reckless spending at great cost to the Zimbabweans who ultimately will be expected to pay back the mountain of debt Mugabe accrued. The people paid an even bigger price as they were at the coal face of the human rights violations under the repressive regime – something the Brentwood sister institutions have yet to acknowledge ever happened in Zimbabwe.
It was IMF and WB who sponsored the first and second five-year Economic Structural Adjustment Reform Programme (ESARP) in 1990 and 1995 respectively. The programmes did not delivery the economic recovery it promised; all they did was to bankroll Mugabe’s wasteful ways and, more significantly, the confidence that he does not have to accept democratic reforms which are the true prerequisites for economic prosperity and political stability.
So what is this new IMF sponsored programme, Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility-Exogenous Shock Facility (PRGF-ESF)? Is this the beginning of a new ESARP at a time when Mugabe is stubbornly refusing to implement meaningful democratic reforms? Most of major financially players have stood firm in their demands for meaningful democratic reforms in Zimbabwe before they would restart any financial assistance to Zimbabwe. Is PRGF-ESF designed to undermine all these players’ efforts?
The ordinary Zimbabweans have paid a heavy price, many of them with their very lives, over the last three decades of this Mugabe dictatorship. The one thing the people want right now is a fresh start NOT yet another false start.
MDC made a stupid decision to join Mugabe in a power sharing deal in which Mugabe had all the dictatorial powers. The GNU has been in power for three months already and still there is no progress of many of the basic issues. And it is Mugabe who is the stumbling block. It seems IMF board is ignoring all these political realities or is it that these men and women simply do not care!
The IMF and WB have the money and Mugabe has all the political power; so the two define Zimbabwe’s destiny. The great majority of Zimbabweans have neither the money nor the political power, the dictatorship has supped them of both; they have no say. Zimbabwe’s poor and destitute will never hold the Brentwood sisters to account and of course neither can they hold Mugabe to account. So the poor are caught between the rock – a ruthless dictator with all the political power – and a hard place – WB and IMF with the deep pockets to bankroll the dictator sold on the idea that Africans have a tough skin and they actually “enjoy” all the suffering the dictator has brought upon them!
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