14. The Transitions That Weren’t

A single Independent candidate picked up the remaining House of Assembly seat.

The Constitutional Court upheld the results, and confirmed Mugabe as the winner of the Presidential race.

ZESN, with over 7,000 observers deployed, produced a report, but this was only released on 13th September 2013 (ZESN 2013).

As was so often the case with the issue of Zimbabwe, the sole voice of dissent within SADC circles was Botswana, which argued to no avail that evidence of electoral irregularities was sufficiently compelling to merit an independent audit of the results.

One of the last actions taken by Tendai Biti as Minister of Finance had been to negotiate an SMP with the BWIs in June 2013. This allowed the IMF to provide Zimbabwe with technical assistance for the first time since the ‘declaration of non-cooperation’ by the IMF’s Executive Board in 2002 (see Chap. 8). Partly because of that year’s elections, little progress was made in implementing the policies set out in the SMP. The new ZANU-PF government was to express a commitment to seeing through the policies and reforms in the SMP initiated by the previous IG. The IMF agreed to extend the SMP, which was renewed until mid-2014. Despite this, key targets were missed including measures to ensure diamond revenue transparency, new mining legislation, recapitalisation of the central bank and a reduction in the public sector wage bill as a proportion of government spending.

The report reiterated the fundamental importance of this area, noting that “Where governments make registration easier, more entrepreneurs start businesses in the formal sector, creating more good jobs and generating more revenue for the government” (World Bank 2016, 17). For Zimbabwe, given its fiscal constraints, as well as the key funding assumptions of Zim Asset namely that the plan would be partly funded from tax and non-tax revenues, this variable took on even greater importance.

Zimbabwe’s ‘Look East’ policy, and the supportive role Beijing had played internationally as a ‘friend’ of Zimbabwe in international fora such as the UN Security Council, was also strained. In the course of meetings between Chinese and Zimbabwean officials on the side-lines of the World Economic Forum meeting in Switzerland that year, the latter informed the Zimbabweans of their concerns that Harare was in arrears in terms of repayment of Chinese loans, though the objectives, amounts and conditions were not publicised given the secrecy surrounding the loans (AFRIK NEWS 2010). Beijing was to issue an even sterner warning to Zimbabwe in January 2016 when Harare moved to seize all diamond mining claims in the context of its indigenisation policy, negatively affecting two Chinese companies. Beijing called upon the Zimbabwean government to respect the China-Zimbabwe Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement signed in 1996, thus finding itself in illustrious company, even if in a crowded field, of numerous other countries who had tried to enforce their respective BIPPAs with Harare (Daily News 2016).

In a further sign that ‘something for nothing’ remained the order of the day as far as economic policy was concerned, and a reminder of the role state companies played in the system of largesse distribution, Zim Asset contained a commitment to cancel US$80 million of debt owed by farmers to the state power company, and which would only further weaken its financial position and capacity to operate (GOZ 2013, 38). In October 2013 the power utility was instructed to cancel the debts it was owed by consumers, both households and farmers, amounting to an estimated US$170 million. ‘Something for everyone’, one of the slogans used in the ruling party’s 2013 election manifesto, was clearly being zealously implemented, with little thought given to the longer-term consequences for the company’s operations.

It was noteworthy that the report also referenced the failure of Tsvangirai’s Office of the Prime Minister to account for expenditures to the tune of US$15 million (Financial Gazette 2014).

Little progress was made in terms of reducing the public sector wage bill notwithstanding the flushing out of large numbers of ‘ghost workers’ during the IG (see Chap. 10). Fulfilling its electoral commitment to improve the wages of public sector workers, the new government had granted wage increases such that the IMF estimated that total employment costs would represent 79 percent of projected revenue for 2014 (IMF 2014, 12).

In the case of the Zimbabwe National Road Administration (ZINARA), payments unsupported by authorised payment vouchers amounted to US$4.15 million (Office of the Auditor-General 2015, 45).

In the case of the Civil Aviation Authority of Zimbabwe (CAAZ), these debts amounted to US$242 million (Ibid., 3).

A particularly strong ‘Adverse Opinion’ was reserved for the ZMDC, in which the opacity of its operations was highlighted, with the Auditor-General concluding that “the Group financial statements do not give a true and fair view of the financial position of the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation and its subsidiaries as at 31 December 2014” (Office of the Auditor General 2015, 137). The report would have been of particular interest to those who during the IG had raised concerns, including the then MDC-T Finance Minister, regarding the amounts Treasury was receiving from diamond operations and specifically the operations of Anjin, the private Chinese mining company operating in Chiadzwa/Marange diamond areas (see Chap. 12). Under a joint venture with ZMDC, Anjin was supposed to pay a resource depletion fee of 3 percent of its gross revenue to the ZMDC. This had amounted to only US$3.24 million for 2013. The Auditor–General noted in the report that she had been “unable to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence on the completeness and accuracy of the 3% share of revenue as no financial information was availed from Anjin Investments (Private) Limited” (Ibid., 135). Further evidence that the ZMDC had become a body operating outside the country’s regulatory framework, included the fact that while its organisational structure had 108 approved positions, the actual staff number on the payroll was 133 (Ibid., 153), it had failed to pay taxes and income taxes amounting to US$5.25 million, and had not remitted employer and employee contributions to pension funds (Ibid., 146).

In the course of his 2014 budget presentation, the new Finance Minister disclosed that maize output for the 2013 season had fallen to just under 800,000 tonnes, down from 968,000 tonnes in 2012. This against a national requirement of around 2 million tonnes, with needs having to be met through imports and donor-funded emergency food assistance.

There were reports that the US$30 million actually raised from the country’s corporate sector prior to the 2013 elections, and earmarked for a range of community trusts, was used to oil ZANU-PF’s elections machinery (Zimbabwe Independent 2014c).

The WJP is an initiative of the American Bar Association, launched in 2006 and based in Washington, D.C. The project’s focus is on assessing “a nation’s adherence to the rule of law from the bottom up, that is, from the perspective of ordinary people who are directly affected by the degree of rule of law in their societies” (WJP 2012–13, 7).

The eight factors covered in the WJP surveys are: 1. Limited Government Powers (which included sub-factors such as extent to which government powers were limited by the legislature and the judiciary, and government officials were sanctioned for misconduct); 2. Absence of corruption (in the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government as well as in the police and military); 3. Order and Security (with sub-factors such as the extent to which civil conflict is effectively limited); 4. Fundamental Rights (sub-factors including due process of the law, and freedom of opinion, expression, assembly and association); 5. Open Government (including the degree to which official information is available); 6. Regulatory Enforcement (covering sub-factors such as extent to which Government Regulations were applied without improper influence and properly enforced, and the Government does not expropriate without adequate compensation); 7. Civil Justice (with sub-factors such as the access of people to affordable civil justice, the extent to which it is effectively enforced, and free of corruption and undue government interference). 8. Criminal Justice (including the effectiveness of the criminal investigation system, and the extent to which the criminal justice system is free of corruption and improper government influence).

Known amongst Zimbabwe’s wits as ‘DisGrace’, ‘Grasping Grace’ or the ‘First Shopper’, following her 1996 marriage to the President, First Lady Grace Mugabe rapidly acquired a reputation for ostentatious living and acquisitiveness, the former through her foreign shopping trips and mansions she was reported to have built around the country, and the latter through her seizure of a number of white-owned commercial farms during the FTLRP. In an effort to build credibility within ZANU-PF, in 2014 she secured a PhD in Sociology from the University of Zimbabwe (of which her husband was Chancellor). The academic qualification was achieved in record time a few months after registering for the programme, (though the subsequent efforts of investigative journalists to track down a copy of the doctoral thesis in the university libraries proved fruitless). Streets around the country were soon being renamed in honour of Dr. Grace Mugabe.

Further evidence of the country being turned into a family business was provided by the appointment of Mugabe’s nephew to the post of Minister of Youth, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment in the new Cabinet.

The costs of these celebrations were regularly estimated at over US$1 million a time, with wildlife, including elephants, being shot to feed the tens of thousands of invited guests, and private companies being ‘encouraged’ to make financial contributions to support the festivities.