“Zimbabwe was proceeding with the compensation of former commercial farmers who were displaced during the country's agrarian reform despite growing criticism against the policy, President Emerson Mnangagwa said last week, highlighting that compensation for land improvements was a constitutional obligation,” reported Bulawayo 24.
Mnangagwa said "the land reform is irreversible", adding: "We fought for the land and we will never regret.”
Rubbish! The Zanu PF inspired land reform, like so many other things in post independent Zimbabwe, was NOT what the nation had fought and many had died for. The chaotic and violent seizure of white owned farms that started in earnest in 2000 were for two reasons:
- Mugabe needed something to give away to his ever demanding but wasteful Zanu PF loyalists and their families and friends; with the country’s economy already in ruinous there was nothing else left for him to give away other than land. Zanu PF has maintained that the land would be given to the landless peasants but in practice it was the ruling elite who benefited and the millions of peasants are still stuck in the overcrowded and unproductive rural areas. Mugabe and his family got no less than 13 commercial farms.
The Zanu PF cronies got the farms but failed to put it into productive use resulting in the country losing its cherish position as the breadbasket of the region. For the last decade, Zimbabwe has failed to produce enough to feed its own people, for Pete’s sake!
Worse still, the total collapse of the country’s agricultural sector was one of the contributory factor to the country’s record breaking economic meltdown of the last 20 years. The collapse of the farming sector, commerce and industry has send unemployment rocketing into 80% plus and has yet to come down. Basic services such as supply of water and health care have all but collapsed. Millions of our people now live in abject poverty.
To crown it all, Zanu PF is using taxpayers’ money to compensate the white farmers. Why should those who suffered from the chaotic land reform pay the compensation when those who inherited the looted farms and benefited from it all are once again allowed to go Scott free!
Of course, the ordinary people deeply regret Zanu PF’s chaotic and violent land reform because it is NOT what the nation fought and many died for! The land issue is one of the many botched issues in Zimbabwe that will have to be revisited once the nation rid itself of the Zanu PF dictatorship. The country needs to put land into productive hands to have any hope of reviving the country’s comatose economic; it will therefore nonsensical to allow the looters to keep the land.
- The chaotic and violence farm seizures were used by Zanu PF as a smoke screen behind which to hide the party’s sinister political scheme of using violence to deny the people of Zimbabwe their right to free, fair and credible elections. The party accused all its political critics and opponents including the ordinary Zimbabweans in the urban and rural areas of being against the party’s land reforms and so the violence that always flared up in the farms during elections would soon sweep the whole nation.
Zimbabwe is in this economic and political mess because the country has been stuck for 39 years with this corrupt, incompetent and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship. It is ironic that the regime has used the botched land reform to justify rigging elections and extending its oppressive and ruinous reign. Fortunately for the nation, this is becoming increasing difficult to sustain.
When Mnangagwa seized power from his former boss and mentor, Robert Mugabe, in the November 2017 military coup; he promised to end corruption and to hold free, fair and credible elections. He knew the old worn-out excuses of blaming white farmers, western sanctions, etc. would never get the nation out of the economic mess the regime had landed us in.
Alas, he failed to end the corruption and blatantly rigged the July 2018 elections. He is hoping that by compensating the white farmers everyone will forget about Zimbabwe still being a pariah state ruled by corrupt and vote rigging thugs and re-engage. Poor Mnangagwa, it is his last throw of the dice and it will achieve nothing!
As long as Zimbabwe remains a pariah state ruled by corrupt and vote rigging thugs there will be no meaningful economic recovery. And the country’s worsening economic situation will, in the end, force Zanu PF to step down and thus allow the nation to finally exorcise the demons of rigged elections and pariah state!
5 comments:
The country's worsening economic situation has Mnangagwa is a real panic, he does not know what to do and which way to turn!
When he got into power in November 2017, he knew then that he had to address two demons; end corruption and hold free and fair elections to end Zimbabwe's pariah state. He has failed to deliver in the two key areas. As long as Zimbabwe remains a pariah state ruled by corrupt and vote rigging thugs there is no hope of any meaningful economic recovery. The penny has finally dropped and with it the panic!
Mnangagwa is hoping that by compensating the white farmers the world will forget his regime is corrupt and illegitimate and will re-engage and it will be business as normal. It is his last throw of the dice and, sadly for him, no one will be so easily fooled! Zimbabwe will not seize to be a pariah state just because the thugs have paid back a tiny fraction of the assets they looted from the whites!
To make matters worse, the thugs are forcing the country's impoverished taxpayers' to pay the compensation on their behalf because they cannot bear giving up even a faction of their looted wealth!
@Mahiya
“It is not the fault of the ruling party or government, but it is the fault of the enemy who has made inroads and advanced in tactics to ensure that the economy doesn’t perform because of sanctions and many other issues that are being unleashed to the Zimbabwean people,” you said.
You keep wittering about sanctions but have never said how sanctions have affected the economy. You have never said a word about corruption even after Mugabe admitted the nation was losing US$15 billion in lost diamond revenue alone. Mnangagwa himself admitted last week that he has failed to end corruption and yet you continue rumbling on and on about sanctions. What a dimwit!
The country's liberation war attracted everyone across the spectrum of Zimbabwe society, heroes, cowards, opportunists, clever ones and empty heads. Mahiya is just one of the village idiots who played a major role in the liberation war only to retain home to be the new oppressor.
The Zimbabwe economy is in serious trouble and Mnangagwa and company have run out of ideas of what to do. VP Chiwenga was at it again a few days ago blaming the business people for the soaring prices of goods and services. He was accusing them of causing the price increases when everyone can see the root cause of the falling value of the RTGS$! He called the business people terrorist and threaten them.
The regime has certainly hit panic button and for good reasons; the economic situation has hit crisis point.
If Mnangagwa thinks the world will be fooled into believing the Zanu PF dictatorship has changed because the regime has given the white farmers US$18 million, small change compared to the billions the party thugs looted, then Mnangagwa and company are even more naive than we ever imagined.
The only way out of this mess is for Zanu PF to step down, a hard nut to swallow but, in the end, the regime will step down or be forced to.
We are stuck with a regime that has failed but will never accept that it has failed and we cannot remove it from office!
What makes the whole situation even more infuriating is that we had many golden opportunities to end the Zanu PF dictatorship but wasted them all. Zanu PF rigged last year's elections, the party is illegitimate but is in power because there are Zimbabweans out there who have accepted the regime as legitimate including the opposition parties. We cannot ever unite and agree on a simple matter like whether the elections were rigged even with all the evidence that they were rigged!
True the whites seized the land from the blacks but it is also true that they put the land to productive use fueling Zimbabwe's rapid social and economic development. The exact opposite has happened after Mugabe seized the farms giving it to the his family and cronies.
I have nothing against paying the white farmers compensation for the improvements. What I object to is that the taxpayers should pay the bill instead of those who benefited from the improvement paying it.
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