Quotes of the Day

"The economy is the land," President Robert Mugabe declared repeatedly in the run-up to Zimbabwe's presidential election last March. Mugabe finally made good on his plan to redistribute his country's farms, and as a result Zimbabwe's economy — once among Africa's strongest — is in freefall. A land that was once fertile now lies scorched and fallow. Comrade Mugabe, as he is still known in Zimbabwe's state media, bludgeoned his way to re-election, beating out opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in a poll marred by violence and allegations of official vote rigging. European, American and Commonwealth observers all questioned the election's legitimacy.

But Mugabe rejected these misgivings, cracked down on dissent, and sped up his controversial land redistribution scheme.

The 78-year-old President says forcing Zimbabwe's few thousand white commercial farmers to hand over most of their land to poor blacks is necessary to right historic wrongs. While few question the need for redress — ownership of Zimbabwe's agriculture industry was starkly divided between white and black — Mugabe's methods are plainly unfair. Most of the redistributed land has gone to supporters, such as the thuggish "war veterans" whom the President uses to intimidate political opponents. Senior soldiers back from fighting (and some lucrative diamond mining on the side) in the Democratic Republic of Congo also did extremely well out of the program, as did Mugabe's cronies and family. Legitimate beneficiaries — such as peasant workers — have been allotted tiny patches of land but given no farm training, no money to buy seeds, not even a spade. As a result, some large-scale commercial farms have been broken into hundreds of small subsistence plots; some are used as training camps for Mugabe's thugs; and some, like the one visited by Time earlier this year, have become makeshift bars where angry war vets drink the day away.

Inevitably, the program has gutted Zimbabwe's once-thriving agriculture industry. Tobacco farming, which until two years ago brought in a third of Zimbabwe's foreign currency reserves, is now running at just 30% of capacity. Zimbabwe desperately needs this money to pay for imports like fuel and machinery. More than 100,000 farm workers have lost their jobs, pushing unemployment above 60%. As the economy has shriveled — down 12% this year, according to government figures — price controls on basic foodstuffs have left supermarket shelves empty. Most remarkably, the country now has two interest rates: a lower rate for exporters and "productive" companies and a much higher one for everybody else.

The result of such lunacy has been chaos and hunger. Like much of southern Africa, Zimbabwe is in the grip of a severe drought. But Zimbabweans also have to contend with a dictator intent on starving his opponents into submission. Aid workers, Western diplomats and religious leaders charge Mugabe with using food aid as a political weapon. Mugabe denies the charge. Still, supporters of his ZANU-PF party regularly receive food, opposition supporters do not. Right now some 7 million Zimbabweans — half the country's population — are in desperate need of help.

Mugabe probably sees 2002 as a triumph. He won re-election and finally managed to force the majority of white farmers off their land. The revolution he began fighting four decades ago is over. But his personal victory has resulted in a national tragedy. He did get one thing right, though: in Zimbabwe, the economy is the land. And this year Mugabe managed to destroy both.

• SIMON ROBINSON
• He's driven Zimbabwe's economy into the ground and its people to despair