What went wrong with Zimbabwe?

[Dave A]

I think there are very few people who look at the current situation in Zimbabwe and think everything's OK. Reading much of the "popular opinion," it seems the blame for this is largely being placed on Robert Mugabe's desire to cling to power at the cost of the nation. I'm less convinced.

Sure, it's Robert Mugabe's policies that have led to the economic meltdown. How can he not be held responsible when he's been the country's leader since the end of UDI and the establishment of broad democracy. It's just too long after taking power to blame this on a colonial past. Besides which, much like here, there was a period of good growth and prosperity that crossed racial lines.

This might sound strange, but the turnaround happened at a time when I wasn't paying any attention to anything outside of my business and my family - part of the recovery process from a very difficult time in my life. So I have got absolutely no idea exactly what the sequence of events were that led to this crisis.

So can anyone help me out here. What was the sequence of events that led Zimbabwe to this point? Somewhere along the line there was a fatal flaw in policy development. But what were the actual policies that led to the meltdown?

[Eugene]

Dave, I have a Zim friend which summed it quite interesting (please delete if you feel it might be offensive).

Z = zero
I = intellegence
M = mainly
B = because
A = all
B = bloody
W = whites
E = emigrated

[Dave A]

Yeah. I remember that one from 1980. Got it repeatedly from a whole pile of "when we's" whilst I was at varsity. And I'm sure some of the other acronyms and anecdotes will come up before we're through.

But seriously - I kinda went to sleep on these sorts of issues from 1997 until about 2004 or 5. We were the rainbow nation. I had a bit of a head job to do on myself and basically there were more pressing problems for me to attend to a lot closer to home.

At the time (1997) there were the odd grumblings - still from expats really - which I tended to discount. You've got to really fire up a bit of ill-feeling about your homeland before you get motivated enough to emigrate and I consider ex-pats something of an unreliable source of the true lay of the land due to this emotional, but rather necessary step.

For example, I don't recall the land invasion issue being around at the time. No talk of food shortages really. Just an occassionally brutish government that blamed everything and anything on Britain and its colonial past.

Now given that I believe that our perception defines our future reality, I suspect that was the source of the problem - This business of looking back instead of forward. That been said, there are clues to our future in having a healthy understanding of our past, so before anyone takes that too literally.... there still needs to be some basis on reality, OK.

I'm kinda hoping that there might be someone out there that can objectively identify if there were any defining moments that signalled the start of the slide.