I’m aware that our political overlords in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, as is the case with their counterparts elsewhere, have at their disposal experts providing advice on all manner of issues – from politics to economics and how not to fall foul of the law. Given recent utterances by some of them, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to beef their teams up with people who are au fait with history. Living-memory history is what I have in mind, not ancient stuff like the old University of Timbuktu in what is now Mali.

I’m not going to name and shame the SADC leaders who need a little history lesson, especially the history of Zimbabwe. Anyone who follows the news would know that many of our Presidents have been shouting from public platforms – as well as during bilateral engagements – for Western countries to lift the punitive sanctions they slapped on Zimbabwe about 20 years ago. Because of the sanctions, they aver, Zimbabwe has been in economic decline ever since, as a result of which many of its citizens have moved to neighbouring countries, thus exacerbating these countries’ own challenges, including high unemployment levels and a failure to adequately deliver services.

I’ve said it before – the so-called sanctions are measures designed to induce senior officials in government and in the security services to embrace democratic and human rights norms. But that’s not the only thing that the SADC leaders who have decided to take up the cudgels for the Zimbabwe government don’t get. It’s also not true that Zimbabwe’s economic woes are attributable to ‘sanctions’. Even a cursory reading of the country’s recent history will reveal that.

Let’s look at the timelines. The US first imposed ‘sanctions’ on Zimbabwe in 2001 and has continually extended them ever since, with the European Union taking similar action a year later. The scope of these measures includes visa and financial restrictions on specified individuals and State-owned entities, a ban on transfers of defence items and services, and the suspension of nonhumanitarian government-to-government assistance.

Zimbabwe’s implosion started a few years before the ‘sanctions’ were imposed. Matters came to a head when then President Robert Mugabe deployed a third of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA)to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to repulse an armed insurgency against his ally, the late Laurent Kabila, and his son and successor, Joseph Kabila. The cost to the fiscus was enormous. This is what a correspondent for the UK’s The Guardian newspaper wrote in October 1999: “The World Bank suspended a $140-million loan to Zimbabwe yesterday after Mugabe’s government had lied about how much money it was spending on the war in the DRC.

“In addition, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has ordered an audit of the Zimbabwe government’s books to help it decide whether to suspend a $139-million loan.

“The loans are of immense economic and political importance to Mugabe’s government. Inflation is running at 70%, his people are feeling the pinch.”

Citing a leaked government memo, the newspaper added that the military deployment in the DRC was costing about $28-million a month, ten times more than what the World Bank and the IMF had been told.

The ZNA was in the DRC from 1998 to 2022.

Earlier, in 1997, veterans of the country’s 1970s independence struggle, numbering about 50 000, arm-twisted Mugabe into paying each of them the princely sum of Z$50 000 without budgetary provision. Back then, one needed only Z$6.2 to get one greenback. The currency lost 75% of its value on the day the payouts were announced.

And in the last years of his Presidency, Mugabe did say $15-billion (American, not Zimbabwean) in revenue from diamond mining had disappeared from State coffers.

Clearly, it’s corruption and mismanagement that are at the core of Zimbabwe’s troubles – not sanctions.