Crisis? What Crisis?
There is a question knocking around about how best to characterise the nature of the Zimbabwean state, a question that gets more urgent every week. The government’s view is that it is a state in trouble, but trouble induced by external pressures, and generally, in response to criticism about how poorly the country is doing, respond by blaming sanctions and the hostility to the land reform process. Zimbabwe, without doubt, incurs more than its fair share of international attention, just as Rhodesia did before Independence, but, as before Independence, not without reason. However, and just like the pre-Independence government that was fighting “communism” (and hence blameless), the forty-year-old Zimbabwe government does not accept in any way that it must take the blame for the parlous state of the nation: rather it blames all the problems on external forces, opposition political parties, and, since November 2017, on the legacy of Robert Mugabe.
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