It's tough not to be cynical about Zimbabwe these days. Robert Mugabe's megalomaniacal tyranny has fueled political chaos and violence, the economy is in shambles and looks primed to get worse, people are going hungry in the cities and in the country, and the prospects for improvement would seem to be scant. And yet according to this report at IRIN, the International Crisis Group (ICG), a nongovernmental conflict resolution organisation, sees reason for optimism on the horizon. Of course their forecast is predicated on two conditions. The first is that things are really bad (and will get likely get worse, especially economically). The second is that Mugabe must go.
Color me unimpressed. The argument that wretched conditions might set the stage for things getting better is one of those predictions that has an air of inevitability. The ICG is setting itself up for a post hoc ergo propter hoc validation. Any pundit in recent years could have made themselves look smart by foreshadowing things getting worse in Zimbabwe. That holds true today as well. But beyond that, how much wisdom does it take to assert that all it will take is for Mugabe to yield, lose, or die for things in Zim to get better? (Forget for a moment that Mugabe's departure is probably a necessary but not sufficient condition for Zim's improvement — African succession struggles have been known to get more than a little bit messy.) Beyond the gilded walls of ZANU-PF there are not a lot of serious Zimbabwe observers who do not recognize that Mugabe's departure is key to the country's long-term success. The serious questions are how the country gets to that point, just how much worse things get in the meantime, how contentious the succession struggle becomes, and what control Mugabe has over who follows him.
