Online Reporter
FOR the seventh year running, Sadc countries will be marking the Anti-Sanctions Solidarity Day on Saturday, when our neighbours come out in strong support for the ending of all sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe early in the century as a result of the country’s land reform programme.
The pressure from our neighbours, as President Mnangagwa stressed over the weekend in Mutare, has been one of the major reasons why we have been seeing the United States and particularly the European Union retreat from their hard-line positions imposed when Zimbabwean took the necessary drastic action to reclaim its own land and redistribute this to the descendants of those who had watched it being seized in the late 19th century by fraud and war.
Our neighbours, who are a large group of respectable democracies, have been effective in getting countries in the West to see that Zimbabwe, also a functioning democracy, had good reasons for land reform and should, in fact, have been backed more solidly in this process in the years after independence.
The Second Republic itself saw the fixing up of financial and trade relations with those countries imposing sanctions as a major strand of its modern diplomacy, where Zimbabwe wishes to engage or re-engage with all countries and be a friend to all and an enemy of none.
As a result of these national and regional efforts the relations with the European Union and its member states have improved dramatically over the last few years. For all practical purposes the EU sanctions are over in practice, whatever bits of paper might remain, and trade and investment flow unhindered.
There might technically still be an arms embargo, but as Zimbabwe is not buying arms, let alone from EU members, this is not impeding any trade whatsoever. There has actually been no test to see it is still there.
The EU has also been supportive of the measures Zimbabwe is taking to sort out the arrears owed to global financial institutions with representatives of the EU and member states at the important meetings called to discuss measures.
Generally everyone expects that as these measures take effect, the votes of EU members on the boards of the global institutions will support, or at the very least not oppose, Zimbabwe’s readmission to practical finance, especially as the country itself has made it clear that it wishes to be very careful in resumption to avoid future problems.
The country generally now has some of the best, most detailed and cleanest Government accounts in the world, a factor that assumed great importance in the process of regularising debt arrears and working out through rescheduling the necessary payment plans. This sort of attitude to public finances will also make sensible, necessary and rational new loans more possible, since like every other banker, the international agencies like clients who look after their money.
The US has gradually been backtracking on sanctions, largely using different legal methods to create and enforce them that are more limiting in the collateral damage that was being caused. Despite claims that sanctions were targeted, major US sanctions did deny Zimbabwe practical access to global finance agencies and made a lot of trade practically impossible.
US companies and banks had to ascertain that there was no listed entity or person subject to sanctions involved, however, remotely in any deal, and that needed a great deal of checking since it could be some totally trivial connection.
The cost of doing such checks, compared to the sort of levels of trade involved, usually meant that the profits were more than absorbed by checking costs, so the US business simply did not want to bother.
The latest moves in the US now see a Bill proposed by a Republican congress representative to end the legal imposition of sanctions so long as Zimbabwe fulfils the commitments it has made to its own, the former landholders, to pay the agreed compensation for improvements. This is in any case a constitutional requirement in Zimbabwe.
An interesting point is that if Zimbabwe had better access to international agencies the land reform compensation would have been settled a long time ago. Other countries facing similar histories and unneeded social distortions had received backing to sort out the injustice, so adding Zimbabwe to this list seems simple.
Our neighbours have been most effective in pointing out the illogic of many foreign positions, and the suffering and collateral damage this causes to their own economies when sanctions are applied on an important SADC member right in the middle of the bloc.
Most of the main roads and railways across SADC pass through Zimbabwe, and while we have done wonders under the Second Republic on getting these links fixed, everyone agrees that access to global finance will speed rehabilitation up further, especially as servicing loans is simply applying the tolls and other fees already being used to pay the cash costs.
The solid backing from the neighbours has been driven both by their desire for justice, but also by their need to have a totally functioning Zimbabwe and they have made it clear that both factors have been important.
