Johannesburg — Now that President Thabo Mbeki and his colleagues, Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo and Malawi's Bakili Muluzi, are at last engaged in a serious effort to resolve the Zimbabwe crisis, it is time to look ahead to a post-Mugabe era and try to assess the country's recovery prospects.
How much of the economic damage inflicted by Mugabe's madness is permanent, how much is recoverable, and how long might a recovery process take?
Even a rough assessment reveals one stark fact which Mbeki and his colleagues should note. Time is of the essence. There is a tight window of opportunity, between June and September of this year, when a fairly swift recovery will still be possible. After that it will become rapidly more difficult and full recovery will be less likely.
Already some of the damage is permanent. Zimbabwe has suffered a serious loss of skills, especially in the industrial sector and in the professions. Some 60% of the country's trained professional people - engineers, accountants, lawyers and doctors - have left the country. Few will return.
The industrial sector has been the worst hit. Scores of enterprises have been forced to close down and others have moved to neighboring states in a disinvestment process that eclipses anything South Africa experienced during the apartheid years.
One estimate is that half a billion U.S. dollars of industrial investment has left the country annually for the past three years. Again, it will be hard to persuade any of these enterprises to return.
The mining sector has suffered the least harm. Although mining is being badly disrupted by power cuts at the moment as foreign electricity suppliers, Eskom included, demand up-front payments which the crippled Zimbabwean fiscus cannot meet, the mines have suffered no structural damage and could quickly be brought back to full production.
And ironically, although the agricultural sector was the target of President Mugabe's wildly disruptive "land reform program", which has been the root cause of Zimbabwe's economic collapse, it, too, could be substantially revived in a relatively short time.
This is because what Mugabe unleashed was not in reality a land reform program at all but a mindless spasm of legalized theft and vandalism which brought agricultural production, and thus the economy as a whole, to a standstill.
But the wonderfully fertile land is still there, and given bold policies to reverse what has been done it could be brought back to levels of production within a few years where Zimbabwe could at least feed itself and pay its way once again.
Some permanent damage has been inflicted in agriculture too. A quarter of the evicted commercial farmers, including some of the most valuable producers of specialist crops like seed maize, have emigrated to prosper in Australia and New Zealand, and they will not return. But three-quarters of the farmers are still in the country, having moved into the cities and towns and clung to their title deeds in the hope that things will change.
At the same time, between 60% and 70% of the farms from which these commercial farmers were evicted are now vacant, abandoned by the black "settlers" who were unable to operate them because of a lack of expertise, financial resources, labour and government back-up.
Travelling across the country, as I did recently from Harare to Bulawayo, reveals a remarkable sight of lush grazing - the livestock population has been decimated to a quarter of what it was only three years ago - and unworked farmland. Large fields which used to yield crops of maize, soya bean, sorghum and tobacco, now lie unploughed and overgrown with weeds.
A leading Zimbabwean rancher and agricultural specialist, Michael Clark, describes what he saw during a recent trip through the once thriving Masvingo and Chatsworth farming areas. "Although there were a few isolated settler huts," Clark writes in an e-mailed memorandum, "there was nothing else. No crops, no cattle, no people, no wildlife, no farmers, no production."
Through most of the rest of the country it is the same, he says, "just an empty void." Clark describes one farm he visited which used to run 22,000 head of export quality cattle, and which is now deserted.
What this means is that with a bold and determined reversal of policy, the farmers who are still in the country could be returned to their unoccupied farms. A substantial part of the agricultural economy could be revived.
This should then be followed by a legitimate and sensible land reform program, with land properly acquired with fair compensation for occupation by authentic black farmers, who should be provided with the financial support to acquire the seeds, fertilizers and other equipment they need to make productive use of it.
But speed is critical.
Zimbabwe is bankrupt and to get it up and running again it needs to have a tobacco crop in the ground by September. Do that, says John Robertson, the country's leading independent economist, and Zimbabwe could possibly match its 1999 export earnings of US$600-million next year, compared with the miserable US$150-million it earned from tobacco sales this year. This would be a lifesaving injection of foreign exchange, the essential starting point on the road to recovery.
But, Robertson warns, to achieve that requires getting the bulk of the available commercial farmers back on the abandoned farms by June or July.
In other words, there is no time for further timidity and egg-dancing by Mbeki, Obasanjo and Muluzi in their dealings with Mugabe.
More critical still, if a settlement is delayed until next year it will be too late to plant food crops for the 2004 harvest. Starvation, already ravaging the rural population, will then become worse with no chance of recovery until the 2005 season.
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The timeline is achievable. What is needed is a swift agreement that Mugabe should retire immediately, with a guarantee of immunity from prosecution for all his crimes to ease him on his way, and for a new leader with some local and international credibility to take over the leadership of the ruling Zanu-PF party.
The former Finance Minister, Simba Makoni, whom Mugabe fired last year for suggesting the Zimbabwe dollar should be devalued, would clearly be the most competent successor, but he lacks a solid support base within the party and other old party hacks are hungry for the job. Again Mbeki and company should use their influence to get the right man appointed, for international credibility is vital to the recovery process.
That done, negotiations should then take place between the new Zanu-PF leadership and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) for a joint transitional administration to take over and prepare the ground for internationally supervised elections to take place, preferably before the end of the year.
That would be enough to win international endorsement of the deal. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund would then come on board, and with the support of the police and military the reconstruction program could begin even before the election.
But if there is any further diplomatic soft-shoe shuffling, another agricultural season will be lost and the misery will turn into catastrophe, for Zimbabwe and the region.
