I was surprised to see Andrew Hartnack's article criticizing (he would doubtless say "critiquing") my Zimbabwe piece. This was not just because of my warm relationship with his father, Michael - always my first port of call on every Zimbabwe visit - but because it was, well, so jejune and post-graduate.
The central point, on which surely he and I can both agree, is that we exist in something of a vacuum as far as reliable statistical data on Zimbabwe is concerned. The whole country has been turned upside down, there has been no reliable census for ages and I found even professional survey firms guessing whether the total population of Zimbabwe was anywhere between 8 million and 11 million. Similarly, we know that millions of Zimbabweans have emigrated and that many have died in emigration - but we have absolutely no precise data as to numbers.
This is just the nature of the situation, which is what makes it absurd for him to accuse me of "hearsay, guesswork and speculation" for, unfortunately, that is all either he or I or anyone else can currently offer - as well as, in my case, quite a long history of carrying out survey work in Zimbabwe and a large number of journalistic visits and enquiries. I am not aware that Andrew has any similar record of quantitative empirical or survey research.
It is absurd to pretend that there is any way of remedying this via the academic literature, for academics have no magic wand in this regard. Indeed, the best that Andrew can come up with was a guesstimate by "all informed sources". I did at least give references for all I wrote; his sources are anonymous.
As I pointed out in my piece, we are all waiting for the new Zimbabwean census to shed a modicum of light on the situation. Meanwhile, if you live in the real world and want to have some idea as to what is going on, you simply have to rely on what there is, unsatisfactory though that may be. I make no apology for that.
Contrary to what Andrew suggests, I did not wish to imply that the land reform proposals of the CFU were a full answer to the problem - but they were a way of starting a conversation, had Mugabe been interested. But he wasn't: farmer after farmer who offered land to the Zimbabwean state was given an official certificate of "no interest", which sums it up rather well.