Feb 23 2009
Seizure of White-Owned Farms in Zimbabwe
The pressure in Zimbabwe is rising as racial tensions play out across the country. The results of the elections are still being withheld, and Zimbabwe’s High Courts have delayed making a decision on whether or not to force election officials to release the results, until Tuesday. In the meantime, opposition leader and now co-leader with Mugabe, Morgan Tsvangirai, left the country to meet with South African leaders. Coinciding with his departure, this weekend militia groups have started a campaign to seize all white-owned farms. So far about 77 farms have been taken. Police in most cases are guarding the seized lands from the white farmers returning, which is unlikely to happen as most have gone into hiding in fear of violence.
President Mugabe has condoned the seizures, saying, “This is our soil and the soil must never go back to the whites…We don’t want to hear this fight is going backward”, according to an MSNBC report. In fact Mugabe started the whole land seizure trend in 2000 as a redistribution program. Approximately 5,000 farms were seized then. Unfortunately, instead of going to poor black farmers, they went to Mugabe’s friends and high supporters, who never successfully farmed the land, leading to a dramatic fall in agricultural output. He started the redistribution program when he was in political trouble before, and is doing it again now that Tsvangirai is challenging his power. He is playing politics, not passionately supporting the poor of his nation.
If he was a true lover of the people, wouldn’t he have done something about the cholera outbreak, that has claimed nearly 4,000 lives so far, and the rampant inflation, which is at 10 sextillion per cent, or the food crisis, leaving half of the population without food? But the 84-year old waning tyrant is facing a political dilemma, nothing new in his 28-year reign, nothing the old man can’t deal with.
