This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 14, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown. A new deeper poverty is gripped Zimbabwe and the formal economy has utterly been destroyed

under the reign of Robert Mugabe.

Rejoyed Naganya, head of the Zimbabwean Coalition for Market and Liberal Solutions,

discuss the realities of life in Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

There is always this, you know, perspective of poverty that it's created by some kind of external force or

a natural calamity or some form of human calamity which society is not in control of.

But in Zimbabwe, we seem to have discovered a new type of poverty where a government that is driven by a compulsive desire

to control its people has been able to create some kind of sarcastic dependency,

you know, syndrome. That in itself is paralyzed the community to such an extent that the community is

in able, is not able to create a good life for itself.

And that's a sort of, that's a new type of poverty, a poverty where, a kind of

poverty where a whole nation has gone out of its way to create a deficit of goods and services and it's incredible.

It's a new innovation.

Now you say it's gone out of its way, how much of the poverty that exists in in Zimbabwe is by design meant

to centralize authority within Mugabe's circle of power.

Well, you know, when Mugabe took power, took over power in 1979, Rhodesia was one of the most sophisticated economies in Africa, a very strong engineering industry.

Tourism was one of the best and so forth.

But he got so carried away by Marxist-Leninist, you know, a dogma, which was rather

utopian and exciting for a new nation and the middle income probably

just bought the dummy as well. So Mugabe then was able to convince us that there was no form of government better than a government that is in charge of everybody's life, very socialist, very patronizing,

and very giving a very benevolent government, which we know is a welfare state.

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