If a miracle were to sweep Robert Mugabe out of office, how would Zimbabweans start to repair their broken country? Try to rebuild it piece by piece? But if the old autocrat were to depart and similar successors take his place, how long would it take for a national rebirth to begin? What would the guidelines be?
Zimbabwe would emerge from its dark age to discover that while it was slipping back, much of the rest in Africa had moved forward. The immediate future, analysts say, is brighter than at any time for a generation: Between 2000 and 2010, six of the fastest-growing economies world-wide were African (Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Chad and Rwanda).
For guidelines to the future, Zimbabweans could turn to few better books than Penguin's "Africa's Third Liberation: The New Search for Prosperity and Jobs," by Greg Mills (Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, former director of the SA Institute of International Affairs, and proliific author with links to various International institutions) and Jeffrey Herbst (president of Colgate University, U.S. who has taught at various U.S. and African universities).
The authors write: "If Africa's first liberation was from colonial rule and racist government, and its second stage involved freeing itself from the tyranny and misrule of many of the liberators, the third state must involve a change in focus in politics itself. This will require concentrating on economic development to the exclusion of racial, tribal and religious issues that have plagued much of the continent in the past.
"Africa's third liberation will, for the first time, offer its citizens across the continent the opportunity to set their own agendas. They will render aid from Western countries less important."
"Africa's political evolution points to a third liberation that most of the continent has yet to experience, one that will likely prove as important as the political freedoms earned over the past half-century, or perhaps even more important: the liberation from political economies characterised by graft, crony capitalism, rent-seeking, elitism, and inevitably, widening (and destabilising) society equality. Such an emancipation is necessary to open up economic space in which business can compete, a necessary condition to expand employment."