[Marxism] [DEBATE] : Mamdani on Zimbabwe

[Patrick Bond]

Mahmood Mamdani is an inspiring intellectual and political writer, one 
of Africa's greatest ever. But I think there are a few points worth 
debating.

> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n23/mamd01_.html
> Lessons of Zimbabwe Mahmood Mamdani
> ... His
> policies have helped lay waste the country's economy, though sanctions have
> played no small part

A deeper capitalist malaise engulfed Zimbabwe since around 1974, the 
year that per capita wealth began to decline, based on overaccumulation 
of capital and, by the time of structural adjustment in the early 1990s, 
a turn to the speculative/parasitical mode of not only capital 
accumulation but also state management. These are not Mugabe's 
'policies', but problems all state managers have faced, nearly 
everywhere in the world. Mugabe had much more leverage - because 
politically he is a dictator - to adopt a unique zig-zag technique 
between market liberalisation, crony-capitalist corruption and state 
interventions, leaving Zimbabwe with the highest inflation ever recorded 
in human history, at a time neighbouring states' inflation was declining 
substantially due to more pure versions of neoliberalism. In comparison 
to such processes, 'sanctions' have played a very small part in the 
present manifestation of this long crisis. (I try to spell out the long 
crisis argument here: 
http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/Bond%20Zimbabwe%27s%20Long%20Economic%20Crisis.pdf 
)

> ... it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to
> survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land
> reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not
> just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. 

This sort of phraseology is confusing. Mugabe's 'popularity' within the 
electorate at election time is less than half, and has been since 2000 
(assuming that his voters are genuinely free to cast their ballots, 
which they are not). Elections Mugabe supposedly 'won' - such as June 28 
2008 - have not been free and fair, and coercion has been characteristic 
of his rule, especially in rural areas where pro-opposition forces (e.g. 
pro-MDC teachers) have been bullied and in many cases disappeared or 
killed. His land reform measures were 'harsh' - to a few thousand white 
farmers yes, but mainly to millions of black peasants and urban workers 
now starving or unable to buy food, and hundreds of thousands of rural 
farmworkers - not to those outside Zimbabwe who support him (who remain 
well-fed). Hence the middle-ground phrasing Mamdani employs here sets 
the tone for a false balance.

> ... My abiding recollection of
> my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin's expulsion of
> 'Asians'. Most merely said: 'It was bad the way he did it.' The same is
> likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe.
>   

Is this an appropriate comparison? The 4000 whites who controlled the 
bulk of good Zimbabwe land included beneficiaries of the historic 
colonial theft, while others bought into the system by purchasing farms 
after independence. Most had vast swathes of underutilised land, but 
many were extremely productive, using racially-exclusive networks for 
inputs and marketing, especially to growing international markets during 
the 1990s liberalisation era. Helter skelter, they were all removed; a 
few hundred remained on their farms through the late 2000s because they 
cut deals with local elites or in some rare cases, had the support of 
neighbouring Communal Area constituencies for whom they provided services.

Rather than confuse matters with the Uganda comparison (which related 
mainly to urban Asians and those in commercial circuits), the following 
is more 'likely to be said' of the situation prevailing in February 2000:

* land transfers to the majority were necessary and long overdue, since 
the free market model agreed at Lancaster and in subsequent World Bank 
loans wasn't working (nor was it meant to), and since structural 
adjustment had generated vast profits for tobacco, horticultural and 
other (mainly white) agro-exporters while peasants lost economic ground 
during the 1990s (a point important for understanding what fueled so 
much resentment against wealthy white farmers);

* Mugabe used his defeat in the national constitutional referendum of 
February 2000 as a pretense for War Vet invasions of white farms 
(especially after white farmers were shown on tv writing cheques to the 
opposition);

* Mugabe allowed far too many of his cronies to get good farms (even a 
state investigating commission conceded), and didn't set up proper ag 
support systems for those millions of landless who should have benefited 
from redistribution, leading to a huge decline in agricultural output, 
food aid dependency on Western donors and NGO distributors, and the 
prospect now of mass starvation (points Mamdani skirts).

> What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not
> their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions
> of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been
> denied by the colonial system. 

There are a wide variety of such rulers who used a fake anti-imperialism 
and anti-neocolonialism to rally support, from Marcos in the Philippines 
to the Argentine generals back to the characters Frantz Fanon described 
in Wretched of the Earth in 1961. It's an old trick.

> ...The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any
> assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact.
>   

Sounds good, but is it really a 'fact'? Just as much a 'fact' are 
perceptions that:

* 2000-03 was the moment when - reminiscent of the early/mid-1980s in 
Matabeleland - Mugabe used brutal violence against his opponents, 
terrorising the society and vindicating those who claimed Mugabe's rule 
would necessarily end in dictatorship, hence leaving the early 2000s the 
definitively 'exhausted' state of Mugabe's ultra-nationalism (insofar as 
it stopped delivering goods and instead switched to coercion);

* 'settler colonialism' easily transformed into post-settler 
neocolonialism nearly everywhere, and Zimbabwe is no exception, for 
while the society may now have only a quarter (or even less) of its 
former peak of white inhabitants, the economy is still oriented to 
activities that, if not controlled by white Zimbabweans or white South 
Africans or white Brits, mimics that control through compliant local 
black ownership - in finance, commerce, mining and residual 
manufacturing especially (while a preponderance of white senior managers 
remains).

(There follow some contentious points on land reform, which I'll leave 
to others to rebut. I'm most concerned that Mamdani amplifies what can 
be considered Mugabe's greatest myth: economic destruction and inflation 
unprecedented in recorded human history is due to 'sanctions'.)

> ... When international donors pressured the regime in the run-up to the parliamentary
> elections of 2000 by suspending aid and loans – a boycott favoured by the MDC and the unions 

Not true; the only sanctions the MDC has publicly advocated are 'smart 
sanctions' - personal bank account freezes and travel bans on about 150 
ZanuPF and state officials. The MDC and most in civil society have 
formally opposed western-style sanctions. On rare occasions - such as 
the prevention of weapons transfers from a Chinese ship in April by 
labour and church leaders here in Durban - the oppositional forces in 
Zimbabwe have expressed support for specific sanctions.

> ... The best publicised casualties of the land reform movement were the urban
> poor who hoped to benefit from extending land invasions to urban areas. 

There was a huge disconnect between what was happening in the 
countryside, and the city, so that this sentence is misleading:

> The veterans spearheaded occupations of urban residential land in 2000-1.
> Housing co-operatives and other associations followed their lead and set up
> 'illegal' residential or business sites. 

The housing coop movement was firmly established by the mid-1990s and 
did not follow the War Vet lead - but instead joined hundreds of 
thousands of atomistic urban residents in setting up illegal or informal 
economic activities and residential situations in the overcrowded, 
underhoused cities. They did so in an incremental way beginning in the 
1980s, hence there were an estimated 700 000 people whose shelter and 
livelihoods were destroyed by Operation Murambatsvina, including Mugabe 
supporters.

> But the state feared that it would
> lose control over towns to the MDC if the land reform movement was allowed
> to spread 

This is an unusual formulation, one I've never heard in discussions 
about Murambatsvina. Mugabe had a simple rationale for invoking 
Murambatsvina: demonisation/intimidation of opposition supporters (and 
even, by accident, some of his own urban supporters). There was no 'land 
reform' rhetoric here.

> and met these occupations with stiff repression, including
> Operation Restore Order/ Murambatsvina, a surprise military-style
> intervention in 2005 in which tens of thousands of families were evicted.

> Not surprisingly, those who opposed land reform in rural areas were the
> strongest critics of government efforts to stifle occupations in urban
> areas.
>   

Another unusual formulation. If this barb is aimed at white farmers, 
US/British diplomats and the world's conservative media, it is 
technically true. If it is aimed at those in civil society who 
consistently supported poor people *both* through radical land reform 
(minus the problems caused by Mugabe's rural ploys starting in 2000) and 
through 'rights to the city' projects such as informalisation of 
survival activity, then it's misplaced.

> ... Zimbabwe has been the target of Western
> sanctions twice in the last 50 years: once after UDI in 1965 (very 'soft'
> sanctions, which did not stop the country becoming the second most
> industrialised in sub-Saharan Africa by the mid-1970s) 

A few words on the sanctions against Ian Smith's Rhodesia, which not 
only 'did not stop' the fastest growth in the world from 1966-74 
(9.5%/annum), but caused such growth, since sanctions were the basis for 
import substitution (the following is from my book Uneven Zimbabwe):

    Overcapacity had been the rule across industry prior to UDI, with
    capacity utilisation down to below 60% in 1962 (Ramsey, 1974;
    Davies, 1982). What was particularly important about how that
    capacity was taken up during UDI was the extraordinary flexibility
    shown both by capitalists (who organised an extension of product
    lines largely on the basis of existing plant and equipment prior to
    1970) and by black workers who adapted to the initial skills
    shortage caused by early 1960s white emigration, and to the new
    production demands. Rhodesia suddenly produced its own breakfast
    cereals, cube sugar, high quality furniture, lollipop sticks, canned
    asparagus, bird seed, fifteen varieties of hair shampoo, ten
    different hand cleaners, five lipsticks, seven varieties of swimming
    pool paints, and ten varieties of pet foods. These corresponded to a
    vast expansion in local industrial production units (ie, with ten or
    more workers) from 665 at UDI to 1,036 five years later, as the
    number of different products increased from 1,059 in 1967 to 3,837
    in 1970.


> and again after
> Zimbabwe's entry into the Congo war in August 1998. Zimbabwe's involvement
> in the war was not well received in the West. 

The difficult task here is to sort out what factors were in play at what 
points. In 1998 Mugabe was supporting Laurent Kabila (who came to power 
in part through mining interests), and his own allies' and generals' 
personal interests in that process are well documented. No doubt some 
geopolitical factors related to control over the eastern DRC were also 
in play, with the US lining up with Uganda and Rwanda for medium-term 
control of the region's resources. But Mamdani forgets that the IMF 
explicitly *allowed* huge financial transfers from within the Zimbabwe 
fiscus to the war (so long as cuts in other programmes paid for it), and 
expressed much more concern about a new set of economic policies, 
'Zimprest' (the following from my coauthored book Zimbabwe's Plunge):

    introduction of selective price controls, increased tariffs, import
    licensing on some goods, procrastination in meeting regional
    liberalisation targets, pegging of the exchange rate, suspension of
    foreign currency accounts, introduction of new export incentives and
    application of new levies on tobacco and consumer goods. Although
    five major parastatals were privatised, a more rapid sell-off of
    state assets was postponed. The Value Added Tax, on the cards since
    the World Bank began pressing hard in 1996, was also delayed. The
    IMF sent a high-level team to negotiate the disbursement of a US$53
    million loan (which in turn would release another US$800 million
    from other lenders). There was a confused flurry in early 1999, when
    Mugabe sought funding elsewhere than the IMF. The IMF’s Zimbabwe
    objectives were straightforward: reversal of both the luxury import
    tax and price controls on staple foods. According to Michael Nowak,
    the IMF official controlling a US$53 million loan tranche, "There
    are two issues outstanding and these have stopped the IMF from
    making the standby credit available to the country. These issues
    are, one, we want the government to reduce the tariffs slapped on
    luxury goods last September, and secondly, we also want the
    government to give us a clear timetable as to when and how they will
    remove the price controls they have imposed on some goods." Later in
    1999, the IMF agreed to increase the loan amount to US$200 million.
    But according to an IMF official, yet more conditions emerged,
    namely, access to classified Democratic Republic of Congo war
    information and a commitment to pay new war expenditure from the
    existing budget: ‘The Zimbabweans felt offended, shocked, but they
    all the same agreed to give us the information, we got all the
    clarification we wanted. They had no choice... We have had
    assurances [that] if there is budgetary overspending, there will be
    cuts in other budget sectors.’ A final deal arranged in August 1999
    also compelled the Zimbabwe Reserve Bank to restore foreign currency
    accounts to local corporations. The deal soon fell apart, however,
    when Mugabe’s government violated several provisions. 


> Participants in the donor
> conference for Zimbabwe that year were decidedly lukewarm about committing
> funds. 

As they had been since 1980.

> Britain announced a review of arms sales to Zimbabwe and, after the
> conference, again disclaimed any responsibility for funding land reform. 

Again, nothing new. The US also ended their military flirtation with the 
Zimbabwe army in the late 1990s.

> The
> following year the IMF suspended lending to Zimbabwe, 

By then, Mugabe had stopped paying IMF loans back, and was violating 
several of the neoliberal conditions placed on earlier loans.

> while the US and the
> UK decided to fund the labour movement, led by the ZCTU, first to oppose
> constitutional change and then to launch the MDC as a full-fledged
> opposition party. 

International donor support for the ZCTU's more conservative initiatives 
was nothing new (I was a victim of one such process when the US labour 
movement's Solidarity Center told the ZCTU - then run by Tsvangirai - to 
stop working with me on various projects).

> Its enemies have claimed that, by the late 1990s, the ZCTU
> was dependent on foreign sources for two-thirds of its income. 

But that would probably also be true of many labour movements in Africa, 
especially when the manufacturing base and industrial workforce had been 
so dramatically reduced by structural adjustment.

> Once 'fast-track' land reform began in 2000, the Western donor community shut the door on Zimbabwe.
>   

There were other factors in play here, too: the uptick in state 
repression, Mugabe's zigzagging away from neoliberal economic policies, 
and a sense that Mugabe would soon lose to Tsvangirai in an election. 
But a great deal more donor aid continued to flow during the 2000s; the 
door was not shut, by any means. US AID in particular was prolific in 
sending out its food support, replete with branding logos all over the 
maize bags and cooking oil tins.

> The sanctions regime, led by the US and Britain, was elaborate, tested
> during the first Iraq war and then against Iran. 

The only real US sanctions were the smart sanctions against the elites. 
Instead of imposing genuine economic sanctions, George W. Bush left 
Zimbabwe to his 'point man' (sic), Thabo Mbeki.

> In 2001 Jesse Helms,
> previously a supporter of UDI, sponsored the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic
> Recovery bill (another sponsor was Hillary Clinton) and it became law in
> December that year. Part of the act was a formal injunction on US officials
> in international financial institutions to 'oppose and vote against any
> extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to
> the government of Zimbabwe'. In autumn 2001 the IMF had declared Zimbabwe
> 'ineligible to use the general resources of the IMF' and removed it from the
> list of countries that could borrow from its Poverty and Growth Facility. In
> 2002, it issued a formal declaration of non-co-operation with Zimbabwe and
> suspended all technical assistance. 

Surprisingly, Mamdani does not mention the most profound reason for the 
IMF's above decisions: Mugabe's failure to repay overdue loans. 
Moreover, when in 2005-06, Mugabe (egged on by Mbeki) tried to clear 
$210 million in extreme arrears (with more than $1 billion in other 
arrears to the IMF and World Bank still outstanding), he had not put in 
place neoliberal economic policies required by the IMF for ongoing 
support. My own understanding is that at no time did the US have to 
exercise the veto over IMF loans it has been notorious for in other 
cases. The 'sanctions' Mamdani describes were simply not a factor - 
Mugabe had himself imposed sanctions on himself by not repaying the 
Bretton Woods Institutions starting in 1999, and by adopting 
non-neoliberal economic policies. In any case, 'sanctions' by the 
Bretton Woods Institutions should be no barrier to a country's growth, 
if it is managed properly, as Argentina showed after its 2002 default on 
$130 billion in foreign loans including IMF loans - following which it 
led Latin America in recovery from the 'lost' 1980s-90s neoliberal era.

> ... sanctions mainly affect the lives of ordinary people. 

Where is the evidence for this?

> Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, wrote recently that the
> country's foreign exchange reserves had declined from $830 million,
> representing three months' import cover in 1996, to less than one month's
> cover by 2006. 

These statistics have nothing to do with 'sanctions', but instead 
reflect the abuse of the forex control system by Gono. Zimbabwe has had 
the third worst outflow of capital flight, of any country in Africa 
(only Nigeria and Angola have suffered a higher proportion of their GDP 
moving abroad, illegally, since the mid-1970s, according to the most 
rigorous study - by Ndikumana and Boyce of U.Mass-Amherst), not to 
mention ubiquitous luxury good imports for Mugabe's cronies.

> Total foreign payments arrears increased from $109 million at
> the end of 1999 to $2.5 billion at the end of 2006. 

As the Jubilee movement (locally represented by the Zimbabwe Coalition 
on Debt and Development) repeatedly requested, Mugabe stopped repaying 
foreign loans, starting in 1999. But instead of Mugabe following a 
principled strategy linked to other Third World leaders in a debtors' 
cartel, as Jubilee South (and Nyerere and Castro) advocated, there was a 
simple reason: Mugabe ran out of forex. In 1998, Zimbabwe paid more in 
debt servicing than any country in the world (as a percentage of GDP) 
aside from Brazil and Burundi. Having stopped repaying - except for the 
silly strategy of partial IMF repayments in 2005-06 - naturally arrears 
increased dramatically. The Jubilee movement was disgusted by the 
2005-06 repayment, and advocates that Zimbabwe's entire foreign debt - 
$5 billion + - be repudiated, and indeed declared 'Odious Debt' in 
international law, since the vast majority of people who suffered 
because of those loans (which mainly funded the 1990s structural 
adjustment destruction of the economy and social wage) were not properly 
consulted by the Mugabe regime.

> Foreign direct investment had shrunk from $444.3 million in 1998 to $50 million in 2006.
>   

The Zimbabwe economy has been the fastest-shrinking in the world, so 
this is only to be expected - it's not a sign of sanctions.

> Donor support, even to sectors vital to popular welfare, such as health and
> education, was at an all-time low. Danish support for the health sector,
> $29.7 million in 2000, was suspended. Swedish support for education was also
> suspended. 

What Mamdani fails to note here, is the systematic abuse of aid - both 
in day-to-day activities (as the World Development Movement and 
ActionAid have documented) and also in Zimbabwe where forex used for aid 
has been systematically abused by the central bank and government 
departments.

> The US issued travel warnings, blocked food aid during the heyday
> of land reform and opposed Zimbabwe's application to the Global Fund to
> Fight Aids – the country has the fourth highest infection rate in the world.
> Though it was renewed in 2005, the Zimbabwe grant is meagre. 

Widescale abuse of donor funds (including in the health sector) is one 
reason for this low Global Fund grant level - not sanctions. The 
opposition has systematically opposed Western sanctions against Zimbabwe 
(aside from smart sanctions), and even last week called for increased 
humanitarian aid to deal with the worsening food and health crises. 
There are a great many providers of humanitarian aid, as well as NGOs, 
ready to supply the Zim countryside with food and other services - but 
Mugabe has systematically prevented them from operating.

> ...
> Nonetheless, it was clear that support for Zanu-PF was higher [in 2005] than in the
> pre-fast-track elections of 2000. 

Given how widespread electoral fraud was in 2005, nothing is 'clear' 
about support for the ruling party. Most important was the March 2008 
election in which Mugabe conclusively lost the presidency, by his own 
admission because it was such an obvious fact, one that even weeks of 
delay in issuing the results could not disguise.

> ... Namibia, Nigeria and the South African observer team, which had
> monitored the elections, concluded that the result was legitimate.

These were extremely contentious findings (in 2005), which left these 
observers utterly discredited. Quite simply, the 2005 election showed 
once again that African elites (from Windhoek, Abuja, Pretoria) could 
readily support other African elites (in Harare) - against the mass of 
Zimbabweans.

> ...
> The experience of land reform in Zimbabwe has set alarm bells ringing in South Africa 

Unfortunately, this is an exaggeration. The alarm bells tinkled once or 
twice in 2001 at the World Conference Against Racism and in 2002 at the 
World Summit on Sustainable Development, which were the debut and high 
point of the Landless People's Movement. The LPM was subsequently 
destabilised, and tragically, there is presently no rural South African 
social movement with the weight necessary to raise an alarm bell that 
the Zimbabwe experience will be repeated.

> ... In South Africa especially, the upheaval and bitterness felt
> in Zimbabwe seems to suggest that the 'Malaysian path' to peaceful
> redistribution and development is not inevitable. 

Everyone in South Africa awaits discovery of an 'Malaysian path', 
because the present neoliberal government has a different roadmap of 
redistribution from poor to rich, and followed this path very 
successfully, moving SA up the rankings of the world's most unequal 
countries, and pushing SA's population far down the Human Development 
Index rankings.

> An anxious South Africa
> and less powerful members of the Southern Africa Development Community tend
> to feel that sanctions, along with other destabilising policies pursued by
> the West against Zimbabwe, have only made matters worse. 

What proof is there of 'anxious' South African and other SADC leaders' 
'feeling' on this matter? SADC's leaders showed their respect for 
democracy in Zimbabwe in mid-November in Sandton, when they willfully 
misread the political situation so as to favour Mugabe, advocating a 
shared ministry of home affairs (with no other comments on 10 other 
contested ministries), an unworkable and inequitous arrangement which 
the MDC rejected.

> ... South Africa's non-confrontational policy vis-à-vis Mugabe –
> which Mbeki pursued despite mounting criticism from the ANC and the unions
> in South Africa – along with its provision of fuel and electricity to its
> northern neighbour, set it at odds with Western governments. 

Which Western government has publicly suggested SA cut off fuel and 
electricity to Zimbabwe? None have cut off any trade of their own to 
Zimbabwe (aside from arms - which Pretoria and China supply Mugabe 
liberally), so how would they argue for fuel/electricity sanctions?

> ... many activists and intellectuals, for the most part
> progressives, have aligned themselves with distant or long-standing enemies
> in an effort to dislodge an authoritarian government clinging to power on
> the basis of historic grievances about the colonial theft of land. Symbolic
> of this was the refusal by Cosatu-affiliated unions to unload a cargo of
> Chinese arms destined for Zimbabwe when the *An Yue Jiang* sailed into
> Durban in April.
>   

Symbolic of alignment with long-standing enemies? What happened in April 
was that a local progressive church leader, Bishop Rubin Phillip (whose 
political roots are in the black consciousness movement) and the 
anti-Mugabe SA trade union movement together raised the alarm about 
three million bullets and crates of guns moving from Durban to Harare, 
and prevented the unloading there and across the region (and they were 
assisted by a lawyer based at Open Society's regional arm). The most 
important alliance is only just beginning now, people-people solidarity 
across the Limpopo River. After the xenophobia attacks on tens of 
thousands of Zimbabweans here in May-June, this is ever more crucial to 
note. I don't know of any 'alliance' between progressive activists (like 
Phillip or Cosatu) and 'long-standing enemies'. Just because both may 
want to see the end of Mugabe's reign, doesn't mean there is an alliance 
or alignment.

> The arguments, which are not new, turn on questions of nationalism and
> democracy, pitting champions of national sovereignty and state nationalism
> against advocates of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses
> the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance;

The left critique of Mugabe is the same you find in Fanon's chapter on 
Pitfalls of National Consciousness, and highlights crony capitalism and 
compradorism. Mugabe would happily again be the Bretton Woods 
Institutions' fair-haired boy if he could squeeze sufficient surpluses 
from his society to do so (in 1995 he was considered the best African 
implementer of structural adjustment, winning a 'highly satisfactory' 
label from the World Bank for helping to destroy large swathes of the 
productive economy and shrinking the social wage).

>  it replies
> that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. 

That is a problem, to be sure.

> ... Nationalists have been able to withstand civil society-based
> opposition, reinforced by Western sanctions, because they are supported by
> large numbers of peasants. 

The military/police are a rather more important source of support than 
the peasants, Mamdani would surely concede.

> ... In the wake of Mbeki's resignation as president of South Africa it is vital that this
> agreement remains in place.

Perhaps this is the most bizarre sentence. Land reform will again be 
needed in Zimbabwe, to dislodge Mugabe's cronies who have merely taken 
over existing plantations. But land aside, the September 15 agreement is 
a disaster in many other respects, as it combines the worst of both 
worlds: looming neoliberalism if the business faction of the MDC 
influences economic policy (the MDC gets the finance ministry), and 
ongoing crony capitalism through Mugabe's extensive patronage system 
within the Zim state; plus a relegitimised repressive arm of the state 
for those in civil society who would protest the new elite transition.

Fortunately, it's so very bad that civil society have persuaded 
progressives within the MDC not to accept the deal. The main problem is 
that with all the elite negotiating going on, there's really no Plan B 
for popular insurrection.

And Mahmood Mamdani's otherwise politically inspiring work does not help 
the Zimbabwean people there, at all.