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Rather than summary expropriation, a sane policy on the part of President Robert Mugabe would have been to use tax revenues from a prosperous economy to fund education for the underprivileged, and bring in affirmative action to ensure a rising percentage of government jobs for the black majority. Over time, the creation of a significant middle and professional class would have facilitated the increased presence of indigenous Zimbabweans in the country's economy.
Instead, Mugabe resorted to shortcuts that often involved outright expropriation -- as morally indefensible as the original seizure of the land, mainly by settlers from Britain. Only a steady increase in skills within the black population could have created an even more prosperous country, not the forced ejection of the whites from the sectors they had dominated ever since they were established.
Today, the lot of both segments of the Zimbabwean population is worse than it could have been. When it comes to political freedoms, it matters little whether the oppressor is Ian Smith or his successor -- dictatorship is precisely that. Sadly, there is little evidence of a change in Mugabe's tactics, which seem destined to drag his country down to the level of Rwanda.
This "Mugabism" seems to have caught the fancy of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has begun adopting Mugabe-style policies to correct the admitted distortions in Venezuelan society. That a tiny elite has held a monopoly over patronage and riches is obvious in that country. That this pampered lot attempted to subvert the will of the people by launching a street-level coup against Chavez is also true. These well-heeled agitators -- with strong moral support from the United States and less vocal support from the European Union -- sought to paralyze the country in order to smoke the elected president of Venezuela out of office. They narrowly failed to achieve that target, fortunately for democracy in South America.
However, this attempted forcible overthrow so incensed Chavez that he began functioning as a Che Guevara, intent on turning Venezuela into a cauldron of class war. While Saudi Arabia and other Middle East oil producers have adopted the wise policy of ensuring a more equitable sharing of the cake with oil companies, Chavez has gone the disastrous way India did in the 1960s -- seeking to reserve the petroleum sector for the state. India's oil monopolies have resulted in the country becoming one of the biggest net importers of oil in the world, with the share of domestic production falling from 70 percent before the creation of state monopolies to less than 26 percent today.
Zimbabwean agriculture languished after the ejection of the white settlers because the black population had not been given the skills needed to run the farms efficiently. Similarly, in India, state agencies lacked the savvy to tap the country's reserves efficiently or go in for partnerships. The result is that the state oil sector has become a failed enterprise, with bloated costs and ever-falling production, kept afloat only by a pricing policy that has made petroleum products more expensive in India than in most developed countries of the world. Belatedly, in the 1990s Indian authorities began reaching out once again to private operators, both within the country and abroad, to help out. As yet their exertions have yielded scant returns, and the country is now much worse off than its neighbor, China, in control of oil assets worldwide.
Venezuela appears to be on course to experience a disaster even greater than that of India, for under state control, the oil sector is in danger of lowering output even while costs multiply. Hugo Chavez is playing with the golden goose, and the effect could be to reduce supplies from his country and thus contribute to the upward pressure on oil prices evident since the disastrous occupation of Iraq in 2003.
Today, oil companies worldwide are enjoying a windfall caused largely by misfortune: the lack of attention given to boosting production in Iraq; the refusal of Nigerian authorities to go in for an equitable deal with local tribal groups and thus end the agitation against oil facilities there; and the continuing quarantine of Iran by the United States, which has led only to the strengthening of the position of the mullahs and the steady degradation of the local oil industry, resulting in lower output and therefore higher oil prices worldwide. While in the case of Iran the woes of the oil sector have been caused by U.S. sanctions, in the case of Venezuela they are largely self-inflicted.
Unfortunately, even EU leaders are following the very policies which Mugabe and Chavez have introduced within their countries. Even Britain has abandoned its common-sense approach and introduced immigration policies based on ethnicity rather than skills, as Mugabe did in Zimbabwe. Under the leadership of Germany, the European Union has sought to bar people from other continents, especially Asia -- a pattern that is being considered by Australia and even the United States. Such a "Europeans only" policy gives traction to the Mugabes and the Chavezes, who seek to replicate in other regions what the EU is implementing within its own zone.
Globalization should be colorblind, not diverted by the use of ethnic criteria in issues of migration. While it is understandable that EU countries seek to ensure that prospective settlers will not challenge the secular nature of their societies, what is indefensible is the open adoption of ethnic profiling in order to set policy. If this is wrong in Zimbabwe and in Venezuela, it is equally so in Europe, where the recent French elections seem to have confirmed the "Mugabist" trend of placing one's own ethnic group ahead of all others. The European Union's adoption of restrictive criteria will over time affect its competitiveness and its standard of living. It is no accident that these are rising faster in the United States, which is still a much more open society than the closed shop that the EU is becoming.
The expansion of the international economy mandates a sourcing of skills from across the globe, and efforts to train local people in the techniques needed for efficient growth. Chopping away inconvenient elements in an economic and social Bed of Procrustes would be the same prescription that was followed by Robert Mugabe, and has now been adopted by Hugo Chavez. Venezuela seems headed down the Zimbabwean road.
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(Professor M.D. Nalapat is vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and professor of geopolitics at Manipal University.)
