By Sophia Hoffmann
While debt relief for Africa tops the development agenda, Zimbabwe faces an increasingly severe crisis. Its standoff with the IMF is symptomatic of its plight
With no end in sight to Zimbabwe’s humanitarian crisis, the IMF’s governing committee showed some leniency towards the country on September 9. The executive board decided to postpone Zimbabwe’s imminent expulsion from the Fund – but only after the cash-strapped Mugabe administration coughed up $120 million to bring down its arrears.
Analysts wonder where the money came from. Meanwhile relief organizations are still denied access to many of the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans on the brink of starvation.
After receiving Zimbabwe’s payment at the last minute before the crucial meeting, the IMF granted the country a six-month lifeline for the second time this year. “The decision provides Zimbabwe with a further opportunity to strengthen its cooperation with the IMF,” says the Fund. The executive board also urgently called for an economic adjustment programme and for help for the victims of the government’s recent programme of mass evictions.
Zimbabwe’s central bank governor Gideon Gono was keen to express his government’s will to cooperate: “This is a modest payment to demonstrate our sincerity with respect to our international obligations,” he told Zimbabwean newspaper The Herald.
But only a day after the IMF’s favourable decision, Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe adopted a defiant stance. “We have never been friends of the IMF and we shall never be,” he said on a visit to Cuba. The president added that the “IMF is never of real assistance to developing countries.”
Amid international puzzlement over where the $120 million materialized from, Gono said it was raised through exports as well as remittances from the Zimbabwean diaspora. But analysts expressed scepticism, as figures for foreign reserve inflows have been low recently. Instead, they say, the source for the money could lie abroad, and both South Africa and China have been mentioned as possible creditors.
The dire situation of thousands of Zimbabweans deteriorated further this summer, when the government forcefully evicted some 300,000 people from their homes in informal settlements across the country.