A legacy of economic ruin, upheaval

Africa’s breadbasket was turned into land of barren fields and hungry people

From widely acclaimed liberator of his nation to despotic dictator, Robert Mugabe’s 37-year rule of Zimbabwe has been one of Africa’s most controversial and influential.

Wily and ruthless, the 93-year-old Mugabe outmanoeuvred his opponents for decades. Mugabe’s often violent seizure of Zimbabwe’s whiteowned farms was his signature action — and devastated the country’s agricultural production, transforming what had been known as Africa’s breadbasket into a land of barren fields and hungry people. The farms, which had been pledged to poor blacks, instead went to his generals, Cabinet ministers, cronies and his wife — or that many of the fields lay fallow years later.

His mismanagement of Zimbabwe’s economy was staggering. The country has been transformed from one that could offer good employment opportunities to its well-educated population to a place of so little hope that people left in droves. An estimated 3 million Zimbabweans are in neighbouring South Africa, and it is routine to find a former schoolteacher working as a waitress at a Johannesburg restaurant. Tens of thousands of Zimbabweans are in Britain. And the 13 million who stayed behind in Zimbabwe have coped with an unemployment rate estimated at higher than 80 per cent.

By 2008 Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation reached 500 billion per cent, according to the International Monetary Fund. Fistfuls of 100-trillion Zimbabwe dollar banknotes were not enough to buy basic groceries. The inflation was brought under control only when Zimbabwe dropped its currency and started operating on the US dollar in 2009.

Once the land of liberation from white minority rule, Zimbabwe became one of fear as a result of Mugabe’s far-reaching domestic spy network, the Central Intelligence Organisation. Hundreds of opposition supporters were killed or disappeared during election campaigns. Between 1983 and 1985 an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people of Zimbabwe’s Ndebele minority were killed by the army in southern Zimbabwe, in what is known as the Matabeleland Massacres.