Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Winter 2007
Damage Assessment
All foundations are in the business of taking calculated risks. All grants,
however promising and carefully researched, involve unknowns, and the
decision to hand over funds requires a willingness to accept some degree
of risk. Arguably, the Corporation’s belief in the potential of
the Constitutional Commission of Zimbabwe was unfounded. Still, the desire
to support democratic progress is laudable and projects aimed at making
a difference may receive support despite serious doubts at the highest
levels. In the case of Zimbabwe, while the grant produced the projected
outputs — a public education and outreach campaign, the hoped-for
outcome—a viable constitution acceptable to a majority of Zimbabwe’s
citizens, was not achieved.
“If a project did not accomplish what a grant applicant declared it would, then there should be an in-depth discussion aimed at understanding the reasons why not,” Vartan Gregorian writes. “Failure in pursuit of discovery should never be rewarded with blame. Even a failed project can generate some knowledge. If we could view projects that don’t come to fruition in this way, it would be easier to extract those necessary lessons learned from them.”
The lesson learned from the ill-fated grant to Zimbabwe is an old one that must be re-learned time and again: that leadership and program staff must weigh their aspirations against a realistic assessment of the limits of what they can accomplish in order to keep both in balance. “One has to find a way to be daring while also being realistic—to figure out how not to over-promise,” Gregorian stresses. In addition, various safeguards have been put into place at the Corporation to bolster monitoring of grantmaking, with payments contingent upon adequate progress toward goals, and placing of additional conditions on grants when there is cause for concern about structure or sustainability.
No new grants have been made to Zimbabwe by Carnegie Corporation since 1999. Looking back after seven years, constitutional reform was clearly a lost cause. “The very openness of the process, and the expectations it raised, was its downfall,” wrote Sarah Rich Dorman, lecturer in African and International Politics at the University of Edinburgh.2 The Mugabe regime’s intention was undoubtedly to co-opt the process without ever acceding to any of the public’s demands, and “the Constitutional Commission’s hearings provided a forum in which ordinary Zimbabwean citizens were able to criticize explicitly the government’s policies,” Dorman noted. Inevitably this process led to rejection of the constitution and, by extension, Mugabe himself.
The ruling party’s humiliating loss led to even more intolerant and authoritarian policies. Analysts point to the failed referendum as a tipping point in Mugabe’s slide into full-scale tyranny. Conditions in Zimbabwe have gone from bad to disastrous. According to the United Nations Development Program, Zimbabwe’s GDP has contracted over 40 percent since 2000, and the inflation rate had reached a high of 1,913 percent as of May 2006, while the exchange rate depreciated from ZW$55/US$1 to ZW$109,000/US$1. Chronic food shortages continue and HIV/AIDS, brain drain, and stark poverty make a dismal situation bleaker still.
As for the future, “we don’t know that lessons from the experience of an open public outreach campaign won’t be replicated when Zimbabwe undertakes its next attempt at constitution-making,” Andrea Johnson contends. Meanwhile, there’s Mugabe. At 82 years old, the oldest leader in Africa, “is the key obstacle to a more hopeful future,” according to John Norris, Africa Program Executive of The International Crisis Group, an independent, nonprofit organization that works to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. Mugabe and his party win every rigged election and his retirement, scheduled for 2008, has been pushed back to 2010. Whether he must be eliminated by activists on the inside as Norris contends, or with the help of outsiders such as South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, isn’t known. We do know even the highest motives may not defeat a regime inexorably bent on thwarting democracy. Sadly, all the grants in the world won’t fix Zimbabwe while Robert Mugabe remains in power.
2 “NGOs and the Constitutional Debate in Zimbabwe: from Inclusion to Exclusion.” Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 29, Number 4, December 2003.