What is Populist

Since 2000, Zimbabwe has embarked on an unplanned “land reform” referred to as the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). The tumult experienced in its wake has infamously become known as the crisis in Zimbabwe. This chapter dissects and interrogates issues relating to competing variables such as land restorative and redistributive moral considerations, “hypocritical” political expedience, and, related to the latter, indigenous economic empowerment considerations that government used to justify FTLRP. The central hypothesis is that the economic and political crisis that FTLRP spawned was not, strictly speaking, “land reform,” but, by a figure of speech, only some aspirin that was meant to ease people's pain caused by economic and political challenges for which government did not have a solution. Adopting a stance of victim, underdog triumphalism, FTLRP was essentially a mischievous pretext for the ZANU(PF) government to coercively retain political power while sacrificing the economy, which inexorably imploded.