Comment from The Zimbabwe Independent, 21 December: Beyond human rights violations

Alex Magaisa

Received wisdom attributes the collapse of Zimbabwe to rampant abuse of human rights. So pervasive is this view that the language of human rights dominates every facet of discourse on Zimbabwe. That the human rights perspective is so dominant is testament to the great efforts of the human rights movement both in and outside Zimbabwe. The result is that challenges to the power and legitimacy of the Mugabe regime are invariably predicated on human rights violations. That may well be true but to the extent that it obfuscates other grounds upon which the authority of the regime can be effectively challenged, the human rights narrative has been limiting. In other words, it is important to appreciate that there are other ways of attributing the collapse of Zimbabwe, beyond the human rights narrative. One of these ways is to understand the collapse as a failure of resource management by an inadequate regime. ...