Zimbabwe is not a hopeless case

Its neighbours are friendly (although often too friendly to Mugabe) and it has made a huge step forward by allowing foreign currencies to replace its hyper-inflated money.

It now needs to curb government spending and restore economic freedoms to liberate every productive worker from the strangling regulations and taxes that have pushed most economic activity underground.

The International Finance Corporation estimates that it takes 96 days to start a business in Zimbabwe, 481 days to comply with licences and another 30 days to register a property.

Even the cost of hiring an employee is 14 times the average salary.

Developing countries that deliberately lowered trade barriers in the 1990s grew three times faster (five percent annually) than those whose trade policies remain unchanged. Zimbabwe curbed trade and currently ranks 7th worst on the World Bank’s Trade Restrictiveness Index.

Seizures of white-owned farms by Zanu-PF cronies dominate headlines but the sad reality is that property rights for everyone, whether for smallholdings or businesses, have been smashed.

Unable to enforce or trade property rights, the poor cannot get credit to improve their land and productivity.

The tried and proven lesson for improving trade, business formation, employment and land registration is simple: simplify, simplify, simplify.

But simplicity is not easy.

A powerful minority benefits from the mess but ZANU-PF’s dominance will eventually weaken then crumble.

Tsvangirai and other reformers must be ready with the proven policies that have worked elsewhere and can work for Zimbabwe: an Africa-wide group of think-tanks describes these lessons in The Zimbabwe Papers, published on 19 May and already seen by Tsvangirai.

Unlike North Korea or Myanmar, Zimbabwe has skilled citizens who remember how a successful country works and can put it back together again. Yes they can.

Nolutshungu is a South African on the Commission of “The Zimbabwe Papers - A Positive Agenda for Zimbabwean Renewal,” recently published by nine of Africa’s leading think-tanks.