Sunday 27 September 2009

Grace Mugabe dairy farm selling milk to Nestle: Mugabe destroyed so many productive farms to create a tiny few!

Grace Mugabe is the owner of a Dairy Farm supplying a million litres of milk to Nestle, the Swiss Food Giant.

Mugabe destroyed one of the most productive farming sectors in the world to create one that has been a total failure. Zimbabwe has gone from a net exporter of food and earning billions of dollars in foreign currency from the sell of products like tobacco before Mugabe's land redistribution programme to a point where 80% of our people are dependent on food aid and agricultural production has dropped to a tiny fraction of its original level.

The nation has heard of these few "success stories" of Grace Mugabe dairy farm and Gideon Gono’s chicken farm but before we swallow this story we must ask two things:
1) How much of their new wealth is going to the national coffers? I would not be surprised that these new owners are not only paying their workers poor wages but they are paying only a fraction of the tax due compared to the original owners of these farms.
2) How much has these new farm owners received in direct and indirect aid? People like Grace and Gideon no doubt had unlimited support; everything their touched had to turn into gold. They received all the funding they asked for even to the point of taking the funds away from critical national institutions like schools and hospitals!

Nestle continued to do business with people like Grace Mugabe knowing fully well what these individuals stand for. If this was happening in Europe or North America, Nestle would have rather closed down than be guilty of propping up such a repressive regime. Nestle is not alone in this, a few months the same thing was being about Barclays Banks.

As a nation we have to investigate the business dealing of Mugabe and all his cronies. People like Gono will use no doubt use their ill got wealth to maintain the status quo; that can not be allowed.

We have also to investigate the role of the many individuals and companies who propped the regime up. As long as they made fat profit, they did not care. These ill got profits must be shared by the many Zimbabweans whose lives have been totally destroyed by this unholy cooperation.

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