Zimbabwe has found one loyal friend: China.

Two loyal friends.

The ANC government just next door in the New South Africa has issued not the smallest peep of protest about Robert Mugabe’s misconduct.

That’s a genuinely dangerous marker for future developments in South Africa itself, and for all of its neighbors. The only way that the continent is going to be able to even arrest its accelerating overall decline, much less begin to build a semblance of prosperity, is to finally and definitively drive out the corruption and ineptitude and arrogance of its old cadre of Big Man leaders.

There are examples which show that this can be done. In immediate proximity to the sinkhole of zimBOBwe, look at Botswana, which is, while not perfect, a relative marvel of transparency and honesty and competence. Namibia isn’t doing badly on that score either.

But for South Africa, the regional superpower, to stand by and treat Comrade Bob with respect and deference while he has destroyed the civil society and the economy of his own nation is a poisonous thing. It indicates that racial solidarity continues to outrank good sense. It tells other African tyrants that their seats are safe and that they need not contemplate reforms.

rebuilding from the Mugabe-created ruin won’t be easy

Nor fast.

There is an insidious decompounding effect which occurs in these sorts of situations (and which has had awful effects in similar situations in other Third World countries afflicted by Marxism).

A huge percentage of the physical capital of Zimbabwe has gone to wrack in the last two decades. Specifically agricultural machinery.

But if someone (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) were to put up the money to purchase and import new ag kit, that deficit could be redeemed. What would continue to be lacking would be the tradecraft required to actually competently operate those systems.

The white farmers dispossessed by Mugabe certainly did know how; they were among the most productive agriculturalists per acre anywhere on the planet.

The persons to whom the Zim government awarded the farms did not know what to do, even though the farms in question were fully equipped and ready to run.

Farming is a deceptive business. Simple on the surface, very complex and nonlinear and artful in its particulars. It really requires long-term immersion in the job via supervision by an already experienced supervisor. Flash rote training does not have a great history of success (cf. Soviet collective farms).

It’s highly doubtful that even if black Zimbabweans were given training and all-new equipment, that they could revive the farming economy there with any dispatch. And as it stands, they’re learning nothing: many of the black Zimbabweans who had previously worked on farms run by white Zimbabweans have drifted away from the trade, since the farms no longer generate income and hence pay.

As for the expropriated white Zimbabweans, many of them were on the older side to begin with. The younger ones who are able to are leaving (including for elsewhere in Africa, where their skills are welcomed in many cases).

By the time that any putative successor to Mugabe comes in, the ones who are left may well be too enfeebled by age to return to the soil. And may also be frankly too embittered to want to exert the effort. Which ought to be understandable.

Cogent observations by Marquer. One gets a sense of what Roman legionnaires must have felt as they watched what had been the glory of Rome slip away. Perhaps akin to what the Algerian “pieds-noir” felt as they removed to France.