I disagree. It is a fair comparison, and crying “apartheid denialism” whenever people try to point this out is a gross oversimplification of the facts. Bringing up the racial policies of the Smith regime is also a common dog whistle by those sympathetic to Mugabe and ZANU-PF to deflect blame from the fact that they alone are responsible for the current impoverishment of the country. It’s one of Zimbabwean state media’s favorite tactics, and why almost 40 years later there is disproportionate coverage of the UDI years as opposed to current events in state publications like the Herald and the Patriot, and the ZBC.

Despite sanctions and the war, the Zimbabwean economy in the early 1980s was still much, much better off than Botswana’s, and in terms of rail, road, and power infrastructure it was light years ahead. As late as 1984 economists were still writing glowingly of what they considered one of Africa’s most successful economies. In addition to being a net exporter of food, Zimbabwe also had (and still does have) one of the world’s largest supplies of strategic minerals, namely chrome and lithium. All this in addition to the diamonds and the formerly productive commercial farmland.

The fact that Zimbabwe had a larger population to support becomes irrelevant when we remember that this population was typically much more prosperous, educated, and literate than the population of Botswana as well. A great deal of attention is given by people to the exodus of ex-Rhodesian whites, but having researched the topic for a college paper myself, population wise was really helped kill the economy was Zimbabwe’s sheer inability to retain university graduates year after year, and most were black. They would all leave and take jobs elsewhere, mostly in South Africa but also increasingly in the UK and US. US immigration statistics show that during the first 20 years of Mugabe’s rule a disproportionate number of Zimbabwean immigrants from that country were employed in prestigious professions and had degrees, or had at least completed skilled apprenticeships.

And of course UDI and the Rhodesian racial policies also all do nothing to excuse or explain the fact that Mugabe actively pursued a genocide that killed more innocent civilians in the span of six years (Gukurahundi) than died in the entire war against the Smith regime. Or the fact that he blatantly rigged every election from 1980 onwards. Or a million other things that he deliberately chose to do - like borrowing heavily against the economy for his ill-advised military adventures in the DRC, and simply ordering more money printed every time his advisers warned him financial woes were coming. He made a habit of doing this in the late ‘90s and was lucky it took him as long as the mid ‘00s to actually crash the economy this way. The man was utterly financially illiterate as a head of state in a centralized top-down authoritarian power structure - worst combo.

When you look at all the advantages Zimbabwe had in the 1980s, in spite of the previous decade’s war and sanctions and history of inequality, there simply is no excuse for what Mugabe and ZANU-PF did to piss it all away.