Дарон Аджемоглу - Why Nations Fail

After independence, Mugabe quickly established his personal control. He either violently eliminated his opponents or co-opted them. The most egregious acts of violence happened in Matabeleland, the heartland of support for ZAPU, where as many as twenty thousand people were killed in the early 1980s. By 1987 ZAPU had merged with ZANU to create ZANU-PF, and Joshua Nkomo was sidelined politically. Mugabe was able to rewrite the constitution he had inherited as a part of the independence negotiation, making himself president (he had started as prime minister), abolishing white voter rolls that were part of the independence agreement, and eventually, in 1990, getting rid of the Senate altogether and introducing positions in the legislature that he could nominate. A de facto one-party state headed by Mugabe was the result.

Upon independence, Mugabe took over a set of extractive economic institutions created by the white regime. These included a host of regulations on prices and international trade, state-run industries, and the obligatory agricultural marketing boards. State employment expanded rapidly, with jobs given to supporters of ZANU-PF. The tight government regulation of the economy suited the ZANU-PF elites because it made it difficult for an independent class of African businessmen, who might then have challenged the former’s political monopoly, to emerge. This was very similar to the situation we saw in Ghana in the 1960s in chapter 2 (this page–this page). Ironically, of course, this left whites as the main business class. During this period the main strengths of the white economy, particularly the highly productive agricultural export sector, was left untouched. But this would last only until Mugabe became unpopular.

The model of regulation and market intervention gradually became unsustainable, and a process of institutional change, with the support of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, began in 1991 after a severe fiscal crisis. The deteriorating economic performance finally led to the emergence of a serious political opposition to ZANU-PF’s one-party rule: the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The 1995 parliamentary elections were far from competitive. ZANU-PF won 81 percent of the vote and 118 out of the 120 seats. Fifty-five of these members of Parliament were elected unopposed. The presidential election the following year showed even more signs of irregularities and fraud. Mugabe won 93 percent of the vote, but his two opponents, Abel Muzorewa and Ndabaningi Sithole, had already withdrawn their candidacy prior to the election, accusing the government of coercion and fraud.

After 2000, despite all the corruption, ZANU-PF’s grip was weakening. It took only 49 percent of the popular vote, and only 63 seats. All were contested by the MDC, who took every seat in the capital, Harare. In the presidential election of 2002, Mugabe scraped home with only 56 percent of the vote. Both sets of elections went ZANU-PF’s way only because of violence and intimidation, coupled with electoral fraud.

The response of Mugabe to the breakdown of his political control was to intensify both the repression and the use of government policies to buy support. He unleashed a full-scale assault on white landowners. Starting in 2000, he encouraged and supported an extensive series of land occupations and expropriations. They were often led by war veterans’ associations, groups supposedly comprised of former combatants in the war of independence. Some of the expropriated land was given to these groups, but much of it also went to the ZANU-PF elites. The insecurity of property rights wrought by Mugabe and ZANU-PF led to a collapse of agricultural output and productivity. As the economy crumbled, the only thing left was to print money to buy support, which led to enormous hyperinflation. In January 2009, it became legal to use other currencies, such as the South African rand, and the Zimbabwean dollar vanished from circulation, a worthless piece of paper.

What happened in Zimbabwe after 1980 was commonplace in sub-Saharan Africa since independence. Zimbabwe inherited a set of highly extractive political and economic institutions in 1980. For the first decade and a half, these were maintained relatively untouched. While elections took place, political institutions were anything but inclusive. Economic institutions changed somewhat; for example, there was no longer explicit discrimination against blacks. But on the whole the institutions remained extractive, with the only difference being that instead of Ian Smith and the whites doing the extracting, it was Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF elites filling their pockets. Over time the institutions became even more extractive, and incomes in Zimbabwe collapsed. The economic and political failure in Zimbabwe is yet another manifestation of the iron law of oligarchy—in this instance, with the extractive and repressive regime of Ian Smith being replaced by the extractive, corrupt, and repressive regime of Robert Mugabe. Mugabe’s fake lottery win in 2000 was then simply the tip of a very corrupt and historically shaped iceberg.

NATIONS FAIL TODAY because their extractive economic institutions do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and innovate. Extractive political institutions support these economic institutions by cementing the power of those who benefit from the extraction. Extractive economic and political institutions, though their details vary under different circumstances, are always at the root of this failure. In many cases, for example, as we will see in Argentina, Colombia, and Egypt, this failure takes the form of lack of sufficient economic activity, because the politicians are just too happy to extract resources or quash any type of independent economic activity that threatens themselves and the economic elites. In some extreme cases, as in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone, which we discuss next, extractive institutions pave the way for complete state failure, destroying not only law and order but also even the most basic economic incentives. The result is economic stagnation and—as the recent history of Angola, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Zimbabwe illustrates—civil wars, mass displacements, famines, and epidemics, making many of these countries poorer today than they were in the 1960s.

A CHILDREN’S CRUSADE?

On March 23, 1991, a group of armed men under the leadership of Foday Sankoh crossed the border from Liberia into Sierra Leone and attacked the southern frontier town of Kailahun. Sankoh, formerly a corporal in the Sierra Leonean army, had been imprisoned after taking part in an abortive coup against Siaka Stevens’s government in 1971. After being released, he eventually ended up in Libya, where he entered a training camp that the Libyan dictator Colonel Qaddafi ran for African revolutionaries. There he met Charles Taylor, who was plotting to overthrow the government in Liberia. When Taylor invaded Liberia on Christmas Eve 1989, Sankoh was with him, and it was with a group of Taylor’s men, mostly Liberians and Burkinabes (citizens of Burkina Faso), that Sankoh invaded Sierra Leone. They called themselves the RUF, the Revolutionary United Front, and they announced that they were there to overthrow the corrupt and tyrannical government of the APC.

As we saw in the previous chapter, Siaka Stevens and his All People’s Congress, the APC, took over and intensified the extractive institutions of colonial rule in Sierra Leone, just as Mugabe and ZANU-PF did in Zimbabwe. By 1985, when Stevens, ill with cancer, brought in Joseph Momoh to replace him, the economy was collapsing. Stevens, apparently without irony, used to enjoy quoting the aphorism “The cow eats where it is tethered.” And where Stevens had once eaten, Momoh now gorged. The roads fell to pieces, and schools disintegrated. National television broadcasts stopped in 1987, when the transmitter was sold by the minister of information, and in 1989 a radio tower that relayed radio signals outside Freetown fell down, ending transmissions outside the capital. An analysis published in a newspaper in the capital city of Freetown in 1995 rings very true: