State Institutions as Harvesting Rods: A Zimbabwean Experience

On attaining political independence in 1980, Zimbabwe became one of the strongest Southern African states but at the turn of the new millennium it began to experience an unprecedented political and economic crises that stretched it to the very edge of the abyss of state failure. This paper advances the argument that apart from the imposing unprecedented economic and political instability, systemic predation greatly fuelled the degree and intensity of the crisis. Borrowing from Levi’s (1981) conceptualization of predatory rule, the paper argues that pervasive discourses of power, injustice and exclusionary rentseeking mechanisms across most sectors of the economy were not accidental but a manifestation of the state’s "willingful blindness" or complicity to their perpetuation. State institutions such as the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), law enforcement units and land resettlement offices were effectively reduced to "harvesting" rods or patronage dispensing instruments by the governing elites and their factional allies. The paper concludes that there was lack of political will to reverse the situation because governing groups were deriving spoils from the perpetuation of the crisis.