With the dust slowly settling from the disputed July 2013 Zimbabwe election, attention shifts to what might happen if - indeed, when - Robert Mugabe departs. This is likely the next major political event on the beleaguered southern African country's calendar.
It is wishful thinking to believe anything other than economic stagnation if not outright decline face Zimbabweans under continued rule by Mugabe and ZANU. Central to Mugabe's rule has been rent-seeking, patronage and poor governance allowing him to maintain allies despite the economy's collapse. The stabilisation measures introduced by Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) ministers with the advent of the coalition government in 2009 were at best tolerated by ZANU and never enthusiastically endorsed. Now even those reforms may be reversed as ZANU has unfettered control over the government.
More than 33 years after he took over running Zimbabwe, President Mugabe is not going to change his ways. In his recent September speech to the 68th UN General Assembly, he railed against his Western adversaries who had dared to place and now retain personal travel and financial sanctions on him and his key associates
‘Shame, shame, shame to the United States of America. Shame, shame, shame to Britain and its allies, said the 89-year old, 'Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans, so are its resources. Please remove your illegal and filthy sanctions from my peaceful country'.
Equally it is wishful thinking to anticipate that Mugabe, his election victory behind him, will be more accommodating to Western firms, not press ahead with plans to ‘indigenise' existing foreign investors, and to be nice to his domestic critics. While it is comforting to believe ZANU will keep the US$ and the SA Rand as Zimbabwe's currency, it will be tempting for ZANU to attempt to reassert sovereignty and offer the possibility for rewarding the party faithful by reintroducing the Zim dollar. And if the economy does not soon improve, as it probably will not, whatever ZANU's charm offensive and promise of a softer policy line, as things get tougher, politics will harden, probably with violent consequences.
In the circumstances, the type of Investment that might come to Zimbabwe is likely not to be worried about governance niceties, and in fact interested in investing specifically because of the absence of good governance, in so doing reinforcing a vicious cycle of governance and development failure.