The challenges for Zimbabwe will be significant when Robert Mugabe finally leaves office. Children sat on election posters in Harare.

ALAN COWELL ESSAY

LONDON - Whatever convulsions are yet to come in Zimbabwe, and however short or long the remaining tenure of Robert Mugabe may be, the tortured electoral crisis that has been unfolding raised a question: In a post- Mugabe era, what will Zimbabwe need?
No doubt, the dictator’s exit, whenever it happens, will unleash a torrent of joy among his adversaries. But then will come the hard part - redeeming the promise that Zimbabwe had at its birth.
In fact, Zimbabwe now confronts a longer road to prosperity and stability than it did at its moment of independence; anyone who was there at the time can testify that this was then a land of prosperity and hope after years of warfare.
I was a young reporter for Reuters, holding a crackling phone line open to announce the new nation’s birth, when the British union flag - the colonial emblem - slid down a white flagpole to be replaced by Zimbabwe’s new banner in Harare’s Rufaro soccer stadium in April 1980. Certainly among whites, there was trepidation; Mr. Mugabe had been depicted in their propaganda as likely to drive the once omnipotent minority into the sea. But he amazed many of his critics by appearing on national television to offer an unexpected reconciliation.
The economy, too, offered cause for hope. Perhaps paradoxically, years of international sanctions against the previous white regime had also inspired a degree of economic depth as the country replaced scarce imported goods with its own products. Tourism, from Lake Kariba to the Victoria Falls to the Eastern Highlands, offered alluring vacations. Tobacco farms were bringing in dollars and pounds.
And even though land-ownership patterns were skewed and unjust, the system allowed a few thousand white farmers to produce enough corn, wheat and beef to feed Zimbabwe and the region around it.
Then, over the years, Mr. Mugabe turned the breadbasket into a basket case.
Most disastrously, he seized the farms and doled them out to loyalists who squandered their bounty. Today, four people out of five have no job. Inflation is said to be running at an annual 100,000 percent.
The macroeconomics can probably begin to be fixed with international aid. The World Food Program is already feeding Zimbabweans. And Western countries cannot afford to be seen as ungenerous after Mr. Mugabe leaves the scene.
But there is a much deeper malaise, posing challenges that simply did not exist to the same degree in 1980. The AIDS epidemic has slashed life expectancy for Zimbabwean women to 34 years. And millions of Zimbabweans have gone into exile in South Africa, Britain and elsewhere.
Today, remittances from the exiles sustain what is left of the ruined economy. But the exiles will not return while Mr. Mugabe is in power, and when he goes, luring them back to a land of deep poverty will remain a major challenge. As in the Balkans after the wars of the early 1990s, no reconstruction plan will work without a citizenry to implement it.
Reconciliation in Zimbabwe is no longer a racial issue, given the brutality with which Mr. Mugabe has treated political opponents of whatever race.
More than that, any new government will be heir to a land where an elite has acquired vast riches by siding with a despot who made most of his people poor.
Even if reconciliation is offered, a new social understanding will probably require some form of atonement by those who have benefited from the years of corruption, particularly in the military. Outsiders like to say Zimbabwe is inherently a gentle nation. But its people have been traumatized, possibly beyond the forgiveness and magnanimity they were prepared to show as victors in the struggle for independence. A bloodletting cannot be ruled out.