[some historical context of] Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe

자료 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe

※ 발췌 (excerpts as of 2015. 1. 25.)

On 18 April 1980, the Republic of Zimbabwe was born from the former British colony of Souther Rhodesia. ( ... ) When Zimbabwe gained independence, the Zimbabwen dollar was more valuable than the US dollar. In its early years, Zimbabwer experienced strong growth and development. ( ... )

From 1991-1996, the Zimbabwen Zanu-PF government of president Robert Mugabe embarked on an Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), designed by the IMF and the World Bank, that has serious negative effects on Zimbabwen economy. In the late 1990s, the government instituted land reforms intended to redistribute land from white land owners to black farmers to correct the 'injustice of colonialism'. However, many of these farmers had no experience or training in farming.[citation needed] From 1999 to 2009, the country experienced a sharp drop in food production and in all other sectors. The banking sector also collapsed, with farmers unable to obtain loans for capital development. Food output capacity fell 45%, manufacturing output 29% in 2005, 26% in 2006 and 28% in 2007, and unemployment rose to 80%. Life expectancy dropped.

( ... ... )

자료 2: The Truth About Mugabe’s Land Reform (Douglas Rogers | AEI, Jul 2013)

자료 3: Lessons of Zimbabwe (Mahmood Mamdani | London Review of Books, Dec 2008)

※ 발췌 (excerpts):

It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe's descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country's declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the explicit aim of unseating him.

There is no denying Mugabe's authoritarianism, or his willingness of tolerate and even encouraging the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country's economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country's growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe's crisis can be found everywhere, from the ^Economist^ and the ^Financial Times^ to the ^Guardian^ and the ^New Statesman^, but 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. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison ins't entirely off the mark. I was one of the 700,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. 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.

( ... ... ) In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin's brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972─and not the formal handover in 1962─as the dawn of true independence. 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.

( ... ... ) Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, but the social realities of the newly independent state remained embedded in an earlier historical period: some 6000 white farmers owned 15.5 million hectares of prime land, 39% of the land in the country, while about 4.5 million farmers (a million households) in 'communal areas' were left to subsist on 16.4 million hectares of the most arid land, to which they'd been removed or confined by a century of colonial rule. In the middle were 8500 small-scale black farmers on about 1.4 million hectares of land.

This was not a sustaining arrangement in a country whose independence had been secured at the end of a long armed struggle supported by a land-hungry population. But the agreement that Britain drafted at Lancaster House in 1979─and that the settlers eagerly backed─didn't seem to take into account the kind of transition that would be necessary to secure a stable social order. Two of its provisions, one economic and the other political, reflected this short-termism: one called for land transfer on a 'willing buyer, willing seller' basis, with the British funding the scheme; the other reserved 20% of seats in the House of Assembly for whites─3% of the population─giving the settler community an effective veto over any amendment to the Lancaster House terms. ( ... )

( ... ... )

... ...