Robert Mugabe destroyed Zimbabwe.
Wikipedia has some really excellent further reading on Mugabe and Zimbabwe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mugabe
Putting aside the ideology of Land Reform (that's a whole other minefield of a topic), the execution and economic policies have been woeful.
Another post quoted one issue which was that large tracts of land were broken up, which broke economies of scale. However, it was flawed in a lot of other ways.
The original owners of the land were highly captialised. The people receiving the land often had no experience in cultivation, and even if they did, they had zero capital. They couldn't buy seed, machinery, expertise. The money and expertise required to turn this around pretty much fled the country.
So large farms that produced vast quantities got broken up into small farms that produce almost nothing.
At one stage Zim was in talks with China to have Chinese workers come over and work the land. I don't think that ever came to be, but China is a big player in Zimbabwe still - a lot of tourism, aid, weapons and immigration (several million?) comes from China.
The problem seems to largely have been that the land reform wasn't actually an act for social justice so much as a populist political move. Egypt's attempt at land reform seemed much better planned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_land_reform#Law_Number...
Agreed on your other points. I don't know the politics of the Egyptian reform, but colonialism still turns this in to a very complex set of issue. Especially when you try and distinguish between social justice and populist politics.
Again, if I recall correctly, in the early days of the land reform the UK pledged funds to allow property to be bought back from land owners. I think they even contributed GBP50 million or something (drop in the ocean admittedly), but the rest of the plan was eventually knocked back.
Err... not to dispute the rest of what you say, which is accurate, but the original owners? I realize you can play that game a long way back in history, but still...
If you actually have an argument and you understand the facts of what you want to argue, then please lay out your points. A silly non-relevant statement does not contribute to the discussion in any way.
All this has almost nothing to do with the actual economy of the country - many countries have fallen into much worse economic times than Zimbabwe currently is in, and did not have the problem with hyperinflation.
In actuality, Zimbabwe belongs to the top African countries in terms of infrastructure, education and production. It still does so, but it's currently under a lot of economic pressure from outside countries, and one of the effects is this hyper-inflation.
Zimbabwe does not seem to be listed in the recent TIMSS data. http://nces.ed.gov/timss/table07_3.asp Where are you getting your information from?
This TIMSS page shows 1992 reading-score data for 14-year-olds for Nigeria (401), Zimbabwe (372), and Botawana (330):
Bob Mugabe may have his faults, but he also took Zimbabwe really far.
Because definitions and data collection methods vary across countries, literacy estimates should be used with caution.
Compared to the rest of Africa, the Mugabe government has been pretty good, and it was generally praised a lot till the land redistribution exercise started, after which the media portrayal suddenly swung the other way.
Many people who are aware of Zimbabwe only studied the country post 2001, and those that did have their information sources mostly from sensationalist U.S or U.K based papers. They do not attempt to balance their understanding by reading alternative points of views.
I've got quite a few friends in Zim and spent a few weeks there a bit back. All of the friends that I visited that are under 35 have now left, mostly to South Africa and a few to Botswana. More than a third of Zimbabwe's population has left the country in the last few years. That's far above par for brain-drain.
The coverage in the west is biased, but the fact that people were voting for the MDC, under fear of persecution, which nobody I talked to a year and a half ago when I was there even took seriously, says a lot.
Some of the inflation has been due to external influences, but it's also true that the Zanu-PF leadership let the countries agriculture and industry fall apart. That there's no food now in Zim is nutty.
Government policy does not corellate at unity with outcome. There are other factors.
Would you agree that there is probably a siginificant brain drain occurring right now in Zimbabwe?
http://news.google.com/news?q=zimbabwe+%22brain+drain%22
Would a brain drain likely affect the literacy level of a nation?
The farm seizures affected less than 3000 farm owners, and those people typically did not employ highly skilled labour, so the effect that had was not so significant on emigration of university-level people.
I'm not sure what exactly your point is - are you saying that farm seizures in some way affected the level of education in the country?
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lab_une_wit_sec_edu_mal_of...
The brains have reason to drain.
Yes, if you mean the real attained education levels, rather than simply credential levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwe#Refugee_crisis
The economic meltdown and repressive political measures in Zimbabwe have led to a flood of refugees into neighbouring countries. An estimated 3.4 million Zimbabweans, a quarter of the population, had fled abroad by mid 2007. Some 3 million of these have gone to South Africa.
Apart from the people who fled into the neighbouring countries, an estimated 570,000 people are displaced within the borders of the country, many of whom remain in transit camps and have limited access to assistance. Most of the displaced have been victims of the Operation Murambatsvina in the year 2005 and continuing evictions and violent farm seizures.
You say only as many as 3,000 of those 4 million refugees were made so by land reform. Where did you get your figure?
Maybe. The World Factbook says it was 11,350,111 last July.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
The Factbook also notes a population growth rate of -0.787% (despite a birth rate more than twice that of the United States), and adds:
there is an increasing flow of Zimbabweans into South Africa and Botswana in search of better economic opportunities (2008 est.)
The Factbook also says of 569,685 refugees (IDPs; Internally Displaced Persons) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... in the country, that they result from:
MUGABE-led political violence, human rights violations, land reform, and economic collapse
Below that, in the (Trafficking in persons) section, it notes:
large scale migration of Zimbabweans to surrounding countries - as they flee a progressively more desperate situation at home - has increased
Zimbabwe was never formally isolated from the outside in the same way that, say, apartheid South Africa was. The only sanctions in place were restrictions on the sale of military goods and targeted sanctions against much of the ZANU-PF and ZDF hierarchy. It's a popular belief that Zimbabwe has been under full economic sanctions, but this could not be further from the truth. In fact, such is the eagerness of the international community to help the country recover that official and developmental foreign aid to the country more than doubled between 2000 and 2005, reaching $367 million at its peak. So there was no economic isolation; instead what we have seen is a country that has destroyed its ability to engage in any meaningful level of economic activity whatsoever. It's not isolated, it just can't do anything with the access it has.
Fact is, nearly one third of Zimbabwe's people have left the country, and they have done so in direct response to the actions of the ZANU-PF government, which have included severe political repression, arbitrary state-sanctioned violence and the kind of disastrous economic policies the rest of us all thought were confined to the 1920s.
Amongst the émigrés have been virtually all of Zimbabwe's best and brightest; the skilled and talented individuals who had once been such a major part what appeared to be the country's boundless potential. And even if Zimbabwe were to experience a change in government and some sanity were to be restored, it will take decades to rebuild the country's economy to its previous levels and very few of the skilled individuals will choose to return. Not after they've established successful lives for themselves in their new host countries. The place faces a bleak future.
I don't usually like to throw the word 'evil' around, since it usually oversimplifies complex situations and makes people fall into the trap of considering events along binary lines. But I don't think there's any doubt that history will quite rightfully regard Mugabe and his ZANU-PF confederates as thoroughly evil bastards. We can debate his supposed justifications all year long, from British support for land-reform (or lack thereof) to perceived Western interference, but none of those come even remotely close to justifying what they have done.
Honestly, I think that the absurd claim you made earlier in this thread, effectively stating that Zimbabwe's economic problems are due to externally-imposed factors, is utterly delusional and illogical. I think you should re-examine your assumptions on this subject.