The pothole question

Xan Smiley

Harare, Zimbabwe

Two years after independence there are few potholes in the roads of Zimbabwe. This astonishing news flies in the face of the conventional colonial wisdom that no African country is truly black unless its main roads are cratered and the wheel itself, `brought in' a couple of generations ago by the white man, is recognised to be well on the way to redundancy. Indeed, the liberal- paternalist Kenyan settler leader who skilfully helped cajole newly independent Kenya into a more or less amiable neo- colonial state, is said half in jest to have warned fellow British liberals of the more starry-eyed school that 'Africans actually wanted potholes'.

To black Africa, this is absurd and in- sulting. But to put it more mildly, African upkeep of public facilities — schools, hospitals, roads — inherited from the outgoing colonials has not usually been par- ticularly pernickety, even though there may be a simultaneous inflow of aid in the shape of new facilities similar to those that are merrily collapsing. In colonial parlance, it is called 'going downhill' or 'reverting to bush'. It is a process that is occurring, I should guess, in over half of Africa.

The Zimbabweans, however, still appear to manicure the wide grassy verges of their highways with tweezers. It is conceivable that the verges themselves may be marginal- ly narrower. Most of the road-tending municipalities have changed their names: in Africa, the name-game often seems to ac- auire greater importance than changes of substance: if you talk enough about new freedoms, maybe people will believe that they've got them. And the new names are more euphonious. The defiant one-horse Afrikaner 'republic' of Enkeldoorn, full of guttural throat-clearance and Boer grunts, has become Chivhu, with a charming up- ward intonation on the second vowel. But — to revert to the pothole issue — the road beauticians themselves, the road gangs in their blue overalls, are still in evidence and the potholes are tantalisingly absent. Does this mean that Zimbabwe, then, is the great exception? What, indeed, has changed?

The answer is, plenty. Let us get one thing straight. The average Zimbabwean is much better off than he was four years ago. For a start he (and she, too — though Zim- babwean women have decades to go before they will be remotely equal in the eyes of the men who rule them) earns probably three times more than under Smith. Inflation, probably running at around 20 per cent, will eat back into these benefits but not nearly to the extent of cancelling them out. (And incidentally, re the old charge that South African workers are the best off in Africa, I recently discovered that workers in a Bata shoe factory down south, where the cost of living is roughly comparable, earn a minimum wage two-and-a-half times less than the Zimbabwean equivalent.) Zimbabwean workers are also far more assertive of their rights — which annoys many employers but makes little difference to the more efficient ones. Overtime, for in- stance, has to be more rigorously paid to servants and labourers who would previous- ly have taken extra work as part of a job they were lucky to have at all. Black ad- vancement in the middle and upper reaches has been accelerated, giving whole villages, via the African trickle-down theory, extra pride and wealth. In education and health there have been notable improvements: ser- vices for the poor have become almost totally free (in education, up to the end of primary level), whereas previously schools and hospitals made a small charge. In addi- tion, there is an upsurge of communal spirit in the rural areas, with villagers and students often helping to build more clinics and classrooms, while a new system of voluntary village health workers is improv- ing low-level health care. The benefits of all of this cannot be gainsaid, and a number of Mugabe's ministers and new black perma- nent secretaries (now outnumbering the old white ones) deserve credit, although many of the advances are simply due to the war's end. Many schemes concocted by white doctors but impossible to implement during the guerrilla war are being carried out. Many other improvements were advocated during the now discredited Muzorewa era but were — again — stymied by the war.

More striking is the lack of real Marxism, despite the ruling party's continuing (but so far rhetorical) adherence to it. Mugabe, to be sure, is a puritanical socialist, and may still dream of an egalitarian Utopia in the hazy future. But most of his ministers and new top black civil servants clearly do not. It is still too early to be dogmatic. Mugabe's crucial strategy for the past two years was to prevent a mass exodus of skilled whites, whose overnight exit still makes neighbour- ing Mozambique perpetually chaotic. Last October, when Mugabe made a rural tour of Zimbabwe and sniffed an air of landless frustration among peasants who had suf- fered many years in the guerrilla cause, he seemed to be moving into a higher socialist gear. The rhetoric became more abrasive; investors, naturally, became edgier. But lit- tle dramatically egalitarian has happened.

The land question is the most symbolic and the most ticklish. Large-scale commer- cial farmers, all but forty of them white, re- main more numerous than they were at the end of the war (down a little from 4,950 last year to 4,800 today). Land resettlement has proceeded with the utmost caution — far too much so for the party purists. Of the eight million hectares the government wants to redistribute to the peasants, only 1'h million have so far been taken over, all on a willing-buyer-willing-seller basis. And of that amount, due to conservative peasant resistance barely 10 per cent has been handed over to communal farming, the method preferred by Mugabe himself.

The sandals-and-pebble-glasses-and- goatee-beard brigade has trooped in from Europe and America, wearing strangely puzzled expressions, creepy I-love-you- black-man smiles, and muttering about 'kulaks' and 'comprador classes', 'in- frastructure and inputs', even 'prioritisa- tion'. North Koreans are met in ministry lifts and flash gold teeth at nonplussed blacks who tend to chuckle whenever the name of Kim Il Sung is mentiohed, which is a frequent occurrence on TV and radio. The Swedes are around, sad, serious and bent on establishing the credentials of universal 'caring' with a bit of sex across the colour line. For a few weeks some of the newcomers even try to do without servants, once known as 'houseboys', however decrepit, but now, as the pendulum of Afro-etiquette swings, called 'domestic workers'. The university has been embellished with quite a few new 'people- oriented' lecturers. The new economics pro- fessor, Ms Seidperson, has the distinction of having 'conscientised' the intelligentsia in the now bankrupt states of Ghana, Tan- zania and Zambia. She does a fair bit of smiling, and advocates 'self-reliance' for Zimbabwe rather than investment by evil multinationals. But the message of instant equality does not seem to be spreading. The farmers and the sanctions-busting gun-runn- ing wheeler-dealers, whom the guerillas failed to dislodge, are still in charge of the economy and showing little sign of giving up or reducing their profits.

If a new ideology has not been imposed, what is more remarkable is the burgeon- ing power of the ruling party. Not that there will necessarily be a de jun, one-party state, though Mugabe and most black Zimbab- weans would like one. That is prevented un- til 1990 by Lancaster House, whose provi- sions have so far been upheld. There may soon be an executive presidency — Africa's traditional preference — and power is rapidly accruing to the office of a prime minister who will soon, I expect, evolve into a president. De facto, however, Zimbabwe is moving fast towards a single-party system. This is manifest both in overtly political terms (the attempt to destroy Nkomo, to detain his military and in- telligence leadership, to absorb the rest of the Ndebele and related Kalanga into the embrace of the ruling party, and the more successful process of co-opting many in- fluential former supporters of Muzorewa and Sithole) and — perhaps more notably — in economic and social terms. That is to say, all top people — businessmen, lawyers, university lecturers and headmasters, civil

servants — are recognising the need to 'get onside' with government if they are to re- tain their prominence. A sharp example of this need was the public recommendation by the minister of legal and parliamentary affairs, Eddison Zvobgo, that shopkeepers who belong to opposition parties should be denied trading licences. He was rebuked by more moderate supporters of Mugabe, but the process whereby the interests of party and state are beginning to converge is clear- ly visible throughout Zimbabwe. In the rural areas, where most people live, the new black District Administrators, technically civil servants who have replaced the old white colonial District Commissioners, are bolstered by 'local government promotion officers', all of them ex-guerrillas and most of them, even in pro-Nkomo country, drawn from Mugabe's army. Civil servants are expected to assist the party in rural ac- tivities, even in raising money for the pro- posed new party headquarters, to which many sensible businessmen make well- publicised donations. No publication or TV programme is foolish enough to release news that could be viewed as adverse to government.

The Nkomo problem festers, but while Matebeleland may remain alienated for many a year, the odds are that Mugabe can ride along, whatever the unrest in the west. The 'mixed' army has held together well, with only a couple of battalions out of 46 cracking up. There may be as many as 2,000 disenchanted ex-Nkomo guerrillas, known officially as 'dissidents', drifting around mainly in the west of the country, robbing buses and stores, occasionally shooting people (and failing, recently, to shoot Mugabe himself). But they will not get help from neighbouring states, unless South Africa is dottier than usual, and they won't stop Mugabe from governing. The western minority is disgruntled, but most of Zim- babwe accepts `Zanu-isation' as perfectly natural: winner takes all.

The Ndebele could, indeed, have been more cleverly and politely handled. The hidden arms issue need never have been raised. All sophisticated Shona-speakers in Harare assumed the caches were there and

that some of Mugabe's own vakomana

(`boys') have their private supplies too. A steady merger of the two parties, with Nkomo's men given greater patronage than hitherto, could have been gently embarked upon. Maybe the old fatman asked for too Much, thus antagonising Mugabe's more bellicose advisers. As a result, the political unifying process will take longer. It is a pity no more than that. What is far more worrying than the ele- ment of coercion and bullying implicit in the drive towards a one-party state is the rapidly swelling bureaucracy that is its in- evitable accompaniment. Already far too many ministers and deputy ministers have been appointed, presumably to make everyone happy: 54 of them, out of a total

of only 80 black MPs. Coordination is Poor; there are not even enough secretaries to go round. The whiff of bloated Patronage is wafting fast down the cor-

ridors, and parliament itself seems extreme- ly reluctant to conduct vigorous debates: all the real talking goes on behind closed doors in the monthly sessions of the party's 29-person central committee. So bureaucracy and administrative constipa- tion will increase, while public criticism dwindles. That, of course, means corrup- tion and incompetence, and they are on the way.

Those observations, however, are not in- tended to presage an all-bleak picture of Zimbabwe. Certainly the whites will keep on leaving. Services such as posts and telephones are already declining. White civil servants are going because they see their promotion prospects blighted by younger blacks leapfrogging in at (or near) the top. Liberal whites, unable or reluctant to recognise that modern African government perforce will be highly authoritarian, do not like many of the new facts of life: many of Ian Smith's laws have been used to detain `dissidents', with whom all legal opposi- tionists are quite simply identified; proper- ties (even a technical college originally set up with the assistance of the Common- wealth Secretariat, and farms into which Nkomo guerrillas have placed all their sav- ings) have been confiscated without trial; at least one Nkomo guerrilla has died in deten- tion. The trade unions will be strictly con- trolled, unofficial strikers cool down behind bars. Newspaper editorials and radio and TV commentaries can hardly be termed liberal. In the papers, mandatory death sentences for dissidents have been demanded (`though we would not recom- mend hanging in public,' added a charitable columnist); urban squatters, it is advised, should be 'swatted like flies' (shades of Crossroads, Cape Town?).

On top of this, the reverence with which leaders have to be publicly treated, the en- suing sycophancy, above all the hypocrisy of the egalitarian protestations of the new elite coupled with so brazen a zest for per- sonal material advancement: all these quite normal trappings of a modern African state affront the Western liberal desire that in- dividual rights be upheld against the en- croachment of the state. In Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, the traditional African demand

is the precise reverse: society, whether view- ed through the eyes of Left or Right, is more important .than the individual. Dissidence must be crushed.

In stark economic terms, it is ques- tionable whether the gap between rhetoric and reality can stay as wide as it is without risk of ruction. The poorer people could get angry. But my guess is that the party machine, gearing itself for a congress next year, will tie matters up without too many squeaks of rural disenchantment..It is the uncertainty caused by the current strange mixture of cautious conservative policy and splendid socialist promises that is unsettling business and scaring investment. Next month Mugabe is to unfold a major development plan. Can he go on fudging the issue? Probably yes.

So will the economy, then, 'go downhill'? My own fudged answer is that it will continue to advance but in a more ram- shackle fashion. There will be general growth and fairer distribution of wealth and wages — plus inefficiency and corrup- tion. Most people will continue to benefit, but standards of public honesty and energy will slump. Zimbabwe, now probably the most efficient and self-sufficient economy in Africa, could become a superior version of Kenya, with Mugabe's own example of puritanical sincerity and idealism perhaps staving off the excesses of venality that are now making Kenya economically rickety and in some ways uglier than neighbouring, bankrupt, socialist Tanzania.

Zimbabwe is not, of course, a white man's country; certainly not one for a white liberal. Even for whites 'of goodwill' (that useful euphemism meaning 'those who hope the blacks don't mess it all up') there will be much that grates. A feeling of social isolation, the demise of the local club, a loss of colonial 'fun', as much as economic adversity, is what will surely drive away the gritty white farmer, thus breaking the backbone of the white stayers-on. Nor, at present, is Zimbabwe truly a country for the Ndebele. But it is what most of the country wants. So far, it is democracy, albeit rough-style. Most people are happy, there are still no potholes, and Zimbabwe will accept them when they come.

`We demand flexible roostering.'