Anation’s politics is a palimpsest: the medieval scribe scraped a parchment and wrote anew, yet the earlier text never wholly vanished, and the faint older script gives the new its meaning. Ralph Mathekga’s essay, “Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe turns more autocratic”, wants the older script erased and the new one condemned. He frames Zimbabwe as a duel between two men, one the villain and the other somehow worse. This is a reply, and its argument is that the duel is a fiction. Across several thousand words he offers no macroeconomic statistic, no figure from the IMF or the World Bank, and no scholarship. What follows tests his thesis against the record.
Begin with the inheritance. Independence in 1980 was followed by one of the most ambitious expansions of schooling the continent had seen. Primary enrolment rose from 800,000 to 2.4 million within four years, and the number of primary schools from 2,411 to 4,161. By 2000 primary enrolment stood at 93 per cent, among the highest in Africa. That was the liberation creed in its constructive form: dignity delivered as classrooms. The party’s history also holds episodes of violence, which I have argued against on the record, and a movement that wishes to be believed must say so plainly.
Then came the great storm. The IMF’s assessment of 2008 found that real GDP fell by about 14 per cent that year, on top of a cumulative decline of some 40 per cent between 2000 and 2007. It attributed much of the monetary disorder to quasi-fiscal activity at the central bank, estimated at 36 per cent of GDP. I record these numbers without relish, because the causes were plural: a contested land settlement, arrears and sanctions that closed the doors of international finance, drought, and monetary indiscipline. World Bank data on real GDP per head show a fall from roughly US$1,789 in 1998 to US$803 in 2008, in constant 2010 dollars. A tempest is not a verdict on a voyage, but it is a lesson in how a ship may be broken, and the present course must be judged partly by how thoroughly that lesson has been absorbed.
This is where the vocabulary changed. In November 2017 the Defence Forces launched what they named Operation Restore Legacy, which they said was aimed at removing “criminals” around the president. The name matters, for it was an argument as much as an operation: that the liberation inheritance had been captured by a faction and must be recovered. Critics call it a coup, and Mr Mathekga is among them. But the facts are more tangled than the label. The ruling party itself turned to impeachment proceedings, Mugabe resigned, the High Court declared the military’s action constitutionally permissible and lawful, the Constitutional Court endorsed the transition, and much of the international community avoided the word coup altogether. Whatever one’s verdict on the manner, the matter of the translation is plain. Within days the new president was calling on states that had imposed sanctions to reconsider and asserting that Zimbabwe was open for business. The ideology carried inside the old phrases, sovereignty, the land as birthright and liberation as an unfinished project, was re-expressed in the language of capital: arrears clearance, re-engagement, bankable title, a lower risk premium.
Consider land, the most delicate entry in the ledger. The government’s position remains that land is the birthright of all indigenous Zimbabweans, and it will not return it. Yet in July 2020 it signed the Global Compensation Deed, acknowledging a US$3.5 billion obligation to former farm owners, and it has been finalising a 99-year lease that is tradable and bankable, so that farmland can again serve as collateral. Payments have been modest, with 740 farms approved and 1 per cent paid in cash, the rest in dollar-denominated bonds, and sceptics are right to say so. But the direction of travel is the point: sovereignty retained, solvency pursued. This is what a translation looks like: the meaning is kept while the words that carry it are changed.
The numbers show the translation taking hold. The World Bank reports that annual ZiG inflation fell from 85 per cent in April 2025 to 4.1 per cent in January 2026, the first single-digit reading in local currency since 1997. Growth in 2025 was estimated at 7.5 per cent by the Bank and 8.3 per cent by IMF staff. Real GDP per head has risen to about US$1,503, which is 87 per cent above its 2008 trough and above its 2018 high. In July the Fund approved the first review of the Staff-Monitored Programme, noting that every quantitative target had been met, and Citigroup’s chief Africa economist described Zimbabwe as on a path to rapid recovery. Tobacco marketing exceeded 357 million kilogrammes this season, a record, mineral exports reached a record US$2.53 billion in the first half of 2026, and the investment agency approved US$1.59 billion of projects in the second quarter, most of it in mining and manufacturing. Mr Mathekga says only a government-sanctioned narrative leaves Zimbabwe. The IMF, the World Bank and a Wall Street bank are not branches of ZANU-PF.
History offers precedents for this kind of pivot, and none was tidy. Meiji Japan wrote “restoration” on a programme that was in substance a revolution in industry and statecraft, its slogan being to enrich the country and strengthen the army. China’s 1981 Resolution on party history, shepherded by Deng Xiaoping, both praised and criticised Mao and so honoured the founder while turning the party towards reform, a feat of loyalty and correction in the same breath. West Germany’s 1948 currency reform preceded its economic revival, because a trusted money is the grammar in which all other contracts are written. The most apt scholarship comes from India. Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian, in IMF Staff Papers, argued that the country’s growth surge around 1980 was triggered by an attitudinal shift by government towards business, and that a relatively small shift could elicit a large productivity response because the economy was so far from its frontier. Zimbabwe, with output per head near US$1,500, is a long way from its frontier. The cautionary note belongs there too: that same literature distinguishes pro-business from pro-market reform, and Zimbabwe’s task is to graduate from the first to the second.
Mr Mathekga also claims that Zimbabwe has grown more corrupt since Mugabe left. Transparency International’s index is more ambiguous. Zimbabwe scored 22 in 2017, reached 24 in 2019, 2020 and 2023, and stands at 22 today, up from 20 in 2012, according to Transparency International Zimbabwe’s own analysis. The slide to 21 in 2024, the lowest in the SADC region, is a warning to heed. And I concede, with the World Bank, that the international poverty rate is near 48 per cent, projected to ease towards 42 per cent by 2028, that the informal economy is vast, and that the ZiG itself was born in April 2024 after earlier currencies failed. Credibility is built over years and lost in an afternoon.
His constitutional case is the strongest part of his essay, and still it misreads the genre. The 2026 amendment lengthens presidential and parliamentary terms to seven years and has parliament elect the president. Britain, whose commentators are quickest to lecture, is poorly placed to condemn. In 1716 a sitting House of Commons voted to extend its own life from three years to seven, a feat Blackstone called an instance of the vast authority of parliament, and the Parliament elected in 1935 was prolonged until 1945. No British prime minister has been elected directly by the nation. South Africa’s National Assembly elects its president, as, under its constitution, does Botswana’s, so the leaders Mr Mathekga rebukes for their silence hold office by the very mechanism he condemns. Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach, in World Politics, found a much stronger correlation between democratic consolidation and parliamentary frameworks than with pure presidentialism, and Alberto Alesina and colleagues showed that growth is significantly lower where governments are prone to collapse. Critics may fairly contest whether the new term should apply to a sitting president and whether section 328 required a referendum, and Human Rights Watch has raised concerns about the process. Those are matters for the courts. Nor does scholarship end the debate in either direction: Daron Acemoglu and colleagues found that democratisation raises GDP per capita by about 20 per cent in the long run, through investment, schooling and health, which is exactly the gain Zimbabwe must now earn by other routes.
The regional silence he deplores has a simpler explanation than complicity. Mr Mathekga concedes that Western sanctions hampered recovery for two decades, and the research agrees. Matthias Neuenkirch and Florian Neumeier found that sanctions measurably reduce the growth of target economies, and Jerg Gutmann and colleagues showed that the damage runs through trade, investment and finance. A country shut out of capital markets by about US$23 billion of unresolved debt has paid dearly for isolation. When regional leaders praise Zimbabwe’s progress, they are reading the same IMF tables, and the Structured Dialogue under Dr Akinwumi Adesina and President Joaquim Chissano has done more to restore Harare’s standing than any lecture.
So return to the palimpsest. The older script, liberation, land, sovereignty, schools in every village, still shows through the new. What the New Dispensation has attempted, with uneven success and under honest scrutiny, is to translate that inheritance into a language investors, creditors and citizens can all read. George Orwell warned in “Politics and the English Language” against phrases grand enough to dispense with proof, and “constitutional coup” is one of them. Amílcar Cabral asked African intellectuals to tell no lies and claim no easy victories. Zimbabwe has none to claim, but it has a ledger, and the ledger is open.
Farai Ian Muvuti, Chief Executive of The Southern African Times and Founder of Sankofa Capital Ltd.
