posted
This is wishful thinking on my part, but i clearly fail to recognize all the issues prohibiting agricultural development in the midst of the long-running Mugabe political stalemate. I would think someone in the Mugabe government would have been paying a lot of attention to agriculture.
With approximately 85 sq. miles per person, it seems agricultural neglect accounts for a lot of the reason where Zimbabwe is today, it's currency ruined and the economy fully dependent on the value of the US dollar. The creation of a well-functioning and self contained agricultural base still offers the best hope of reducing the country’s many economic and social ills, while feeding it's people and laying the foundations for eventual recovery when the politics are finally sorted out.
Why has not happened? Are their Zimbaweans on board who can say why citizens haven't just taken squatter rights to parcels of available farm land and started growing food? Once this begins, Zimbabwe begins breaking or lessening the dependence on European currency. Same as Cuba has done for the last 15 years.
posted
It's the usual recation of Africans who have been forced to do agricultural work for Europeans during the colonial--always under slave-like conditions.
So as the chance presents itself in post-colonial times everybody who gets a modern education wants to become an imitation European--suit, tie, briefcase, etc.--and work in an office. Agricultural farming is hardly vere considered an option--hence very few people study modern agronomy, etc.
The other side of the coin is that the European farmers controlled agriculture until the land was taken back by the Mugabe government.
But the European farmers didn't do any of the hard work. That was done by those Zimbabweans who did not get the chance to get a modern education. The farmers had the big advantage of being allowed big and easy credits with the European banks dominant in Africa: Barclays, Standard Charter, Trust Bank, etc. These banks catered mainly to European and Indian credit needs.
Onece the land was taken back the Europeans ganged up together and closed off the credit spigot to Zimbabwe.
An obvious solution would be for Zimbabwe to scrap its own currency and adopt the South African rand. There must be some extra-Africa political reason why this has not been done.
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1) Blacks don't control the industry in or around Zimbabwe and Southern Africa to be able to put their resources to good use.
2) Most of the industries and economy is based around export earnings, which means American or some other foreign currency.
3) There is no focus on trading and exchange BETWEEN the countries of Southern Africa, using a locally agreed upon exchange system.
4) Most of the industry is run by whites who WANT the system to stay as it is.
The problem in Zimbabwe is not the currency it is white manipulation and control.
For example, the largest meat producer in the country Colcom holdings, does not seem to be suffering any from the current so-called crisis. Why? Because THEY CONTROL the market and the suppliers that they deal with ARE ALSO in bed WITH THEM. These companies aren't 'suffering'. Those suffering are the little black farms who can't get irrigation equipment, feed, seed and fertilizer or are too small for those things anyway. Whites don't HAVE a problem getting the equipment,seed and fertilizer because WHITES own these industries and will MAKE SURE that they support each other. It is the NETWORK of white owned industrial/agricultural interests that are the problem, not the land or the currency. As long as the whites own all the MEANINGFUL industries that you NEED to live, they can STARVE you into submission.
The other big producer is Cold Storage Corporation, a parastatal (government owned), meat producer created by the racist white government. There is more than enough industry and large organized farms to feed Zimbabwe many times over. The issue is control.
Other such companies are Hippo Valley Farms (sugar and agriculture), Triangle Sugar and many many others. These are all top notch industrial European (British) owned and run operations. ALL of them were threatened by Mugabe's actions. So the ONLY thing that they could do to defend themselves was to use the power of the international economic system. So whatever Mugabe's game, it is only a charade, because he isn't really serious about changing the paradigm of white control of these institutions. The facts on the ground are way different than what you see on T.V. in terms of who runs what, who is REALLY suffering and who isn't. The white minority and their companies are NOT suffering for the most part. It is only the black MAJORITY who are suffering. As a matter of fact, they actually are EXPORTING beef from Zimbabwe.
So while Mugabe made a big SHOW of not re licensing the MAJORITY white LARGE farming companies, seed companies, chicken growers, dairy producers and slaughter houses, he eventually GAVE IN and allowed them back into business. ALL supposedly because of the crisis. But he really wasn't serious to begin with. He just wants to stay in power.
quote:
Harare reinstates licences of remaining private abattoirs Wednesday 26 September 2007
By Regerai Marwezu
MASVINGO – President Robert Mugabe’s government has reinstated the licences of all private abattoirs in another embarrassing admission that the state beef monopoly has no capacity to meet demand.
The government withdrew the licences of all private slaughterhouses on 11 July, accusing them of defying orders to reduce meat prices by half in the state's attempts to rein in rampant inflation.
Industry Minister Obert Mpofu said at the time that the state-owned Cold Storage Company (CSC) would be given sole responsibility for slaughtering livestock.
But Mpofu yesterday announced that all abattoirs had now been given the green light to operate.
“We have re-licenced all the abattoirs because we have discovered that the CSC has no capacity to supply beef to the nation,” Mpofu said.
The reinstatement of licences of all slaughterhouses comes about a month after the Harare authorities announced the lifting of the ban on 42 private abattoirs to alleviate severe shortages of beef around the country.
The lifting of the ban had at the time sparked allegations of favouritism with some mainly white abattoirs accusing the government of re-licensing slaughterhouse owned by individuals with close links to the ruling ZANU PF party.
Mpofu was yesterday confident that beef supplies would have improved by the end of the week following the entry of more players and the recent increase in prices.
“We have also increased the price of beef with immediate effect and we hope by the end of the week meat will be available in most butcheries," said Mpofu.
A kilogramme of economy beef is now going for $685 000, up from the previous recommended price of $144 000.
Super beef now sells for $800 000 a kg from $250 000 previously.
Mpofu said the government would continue to push for greater participation by indigenous blacks in the beef industry but said implementation of such a policy was being frustrated by some white abattoir owners who opted to remain closed than to be forced dispose of their shares to blacks.
Most white owned abattoirs in southern Zimbabwe had remained closed since last month after the government refused to re-licence them, demanding that they first dispose of at least 50 percent of their shares to blacks.
There is a lot of B.S. behind what is going on in Zimbabwe. Whites are a MAJOR factor in all of this, because they don't want to GIVE UP all that they have built up over the years, but Mugabe and his gang aren't really helping AT ALL because his efforts ARE NOT sincere.
The funny part is that ALL of this may well turn out to BENEFIT WHITE and foreign controlled economic system. As time goes on, just watch as new CHINESE, EUROPEAN, SOUTH AFRICAN and other foreign controlled AgroIndustrial enterprises magically POP UP to "fix" the agricultural problem in Zimbabwe. It isn't a question of FIXING something, it is a question of FOREIGN CONTROL and the current antics of Mugabe are ONLY MAKING IT EASIER for these foreigners to CONTINUE to rule Africa for its resources and wealth while keeping the majority as peasant landless workers and slaves in the "new economy".
quote:There is a lot of B.S. behind what is going on in Zimbabwe. Whites are a MAJOR factor in all of this, because they don't want to GIVE UP all that they have built up over the years, but Mugabe and his gang aren't really helping AT ALL because his efforts ARE NOT sincere.
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But it all depends on the people themselves. Not just Mugabe. But the question remains: what is the cause of the currency crisis--unique in all of Africa?
In the rest of Africa there are local farmers who own their own farms and grow enough for themselves and the urban markets. So the question is, why is this not happening in Zimbabwe?
There is a lot of Western shouting about the so-called cholera epidemic. But I have my doubts as to its source and extent.
In the final analysis it's the people who must seize all the productive assets which they have slaved on for the settlers. So the question is what is holding them back.
Of cousre we bear in mind that the alternative to Mugabe is Tsvangirai the bought and sold lackey of the West.
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posted
But the people in the rank in file don't control anything and they aren't in a position to do anything about it. What are the people going to do with no money, no power and no control over anything?
This is precisely why the whole world has been using every trick in the book to keep Africans (and everyone else) deaf, dumb and blind to what is going on around them, who they are and where they come from. It is fundamental to the powers that be that they maintain a TIGHT control over the social and economic system and to do this they will go to any extreme. Crisis is a fundamental aspect of this system of control, as it generates a NEED. A need for order and NEED food, shelter and worldly luxuries is what drives consumerism, debt and a willingness to work for "the man" or fall for the lies of the fake flunky politicians who really represent the powers that be. Without crises, people would settle into a life style where they would not need "the man". So they cannot let people get comfortable and most certainly not Africans, because Africans becoming wealthy, settled, stable and IN CONTROL are the biggest threat of all.
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posted
Well, history does have its surprises. So no condition is permanent. Hopefully it would be forward and not backward.
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So it has happened – America’s vote pointed to its future instead of its past. Welcome President Barack Obama. If for nothing else, your election will help educate those who have for a long time believed in black inferiority. As the great British journalist, writer and broadcaster, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne (born 22 December 1923) once confessed in an article for the Daily Mail in April 1998: “Race is still a problem for some of my generation. No longer because we regard blacks as inferior but because, having done so in the past, traces of that prejudice remain in the blood despite being banished from the brain. Looking back, I am amazed about the depth of racist indoctrination which I received at school and in the home, not explicitly but implicitly. At the best, blacks were regarded as delinquent children, and at the worst cannibals and savages. For years, those assumptions lingered, seriously affecting my reporting on the decolonising process in Africa.”
Well, perhaps, I am getting ahead of myself. But why not? If an established journalist and broadcaster like Sir Peregrine, who was once editor of the Sunday Telegraph and contributor to numerous British newspapers and radio programmes, could publicly confess that assumptions about blacks lingered for so long that it “seriously” affected his reporting of the decolonising process in Africa, it is a cause for celebration that today one of these “savages” now sits in the White House, not as a “cannibal” but as the President of America! In fact, three things happened in 2008 that deserve celebration by our people. The first was Obama’s election, followed by Lewis Hamilton becoming the first black person to win the Formula One motor racing title (which my countryman, Cameron Duodu, so eloquently elaborated on in our last issue, NA, Dec pp74-76); and last but by no means the least (and I know I will be damned for saying this, but I will still say it because it is the truth!) is the success of the first African leader in both pre- and post-independence history to be still standing after having been assailed for 10 long years by the combined might of the nations of European stock: President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
When Obama said in his victory speech, “this is our time … and where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can”, I read it as: “Yes, there is a God, and He can’t be mocked. I don’t know what Obama, a Christian himself, will say about this, but we must admit that his election is a huge jump from the days when people of African descent were considered as mere chattels worthy of being flung into the sea to save the slave master’s insurance costs. As Lord Mansfield, the UK’s Lord Chief Justice, put it in 1783: “…Though it shocks one very much, the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.”
Now, we pray that this new “horse” in the White House will open the eyes and the mind of the Mother Country to give more “horses” a chance around the cabinet table in London, in fact in all walks of British life, and, hopefully, someday at No. 10 Downing Street. I bet it must have put the British to shame, their faces red, when Obama’s landslide victory flashed on their TV screens. “We are the Mother Country,” they must have whispered to themselves, “and yet we don’t have one – just one – black person as a full minister sitting at the cabinet table with us.
And blacks have been here for over 400 years, since the early 1600s?” As S. I. Martin reveals in his book Britain’s Slave Trade, published in 1999: “By the last quarter of the 18th century, London had become the largest black metropolis outside the Americas. It was home to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people of African origin among its 800,000 residents.” Today, London has a population of 7.5 million, of which over 2 million are black and minority ethnic people. Yet, over 400 years after the first arrivals, not one person of African origin is anywhere near the top echelons of the British government! Will Obama’s election bring any change? Will we ever see a black British prime minister? And why not? It is a challenge that the Mother Country should relish. Come on, prove us wrong, Great Britain!
Elsewhere, and especially for discerning Africans, the other significant success in 2008 was achieved by the man so despised in the West that some call him Hitler (as though Hitler was African): President Mugabe. Looking back into history, from the first encounter of Europeans with Africans on our shores, we can’t find one single example of any African – leader, community or nation – that was assailed by the combined might of the nations of European stock and survived!
The Asantes held the British at bay over nine debilitating wars but finally succumbed in 1900. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was cut down in five years of assault by the nations of European stock; his economy then overwhelmingly dependent on cocoa exports, collapsed dramatically when an artificial credit crunch was induced in Ghana by the West via the deliberate manipulation of the world cocoa price which fell calamitously from a high of £480 a ton in the early 1960s to an incredible £60 a ton by 1965. In 1999, 33 years after Nkrumah’s overthrow, the British daily, The Times, admitted in a leader comment that “Nkrumah was brought low by the cocoa price”. Patrice Lumumba fared even worse in Congo; he was gone within seven months of independence, his Belgian killers cutting up his body as a butcher does beef, and dousing it in a barrel of acid to obliterate the evidence. Today, the same people come to us as preachers of human rights and democracy. May the Good Lord help them to see beyond their feeding spoons.
Yes, just look around you, in Africa’s pre- and post-independence history, every one of our leaders who was disliked by the nations of European stock was cut down and overthrown. The French were particularly brutal in this venture, dispatching all they disliked in their so-called “sphere of influence” in Africa. And typically, for the past 10 years – since 1998 – when Zimbabwe had a dispute over land reform with Britain, and Britain assembled its allies to its side, President Mugabe has been under a continuous assault by the combined might of the nations of European stock. As they did in Nkrumah’s Ghana, they have deliberately engineered an artificial credit crunch in Zimbabwe, cutting the country off from the international financial system for 8 years now, and thereby inducing an economic implosion and an inflation rate that have never been seen since the bad days of Germany between 1914 and 1923.
And yet, at issue in Zimbabwe is a just cause – the land issue. I have gone back to my scrapbook to find this entry for Charles Powell, Mrs Thatcher’s long-time foreign policy advisor who, while at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1979, was instrumental in the Zimbabwe independence negotiations at Lancaster House. Talking about Zimbabwe’s land issue in an interview with David Dimbleby for a BBC1 documentary broadcast on 24 June 2000, Powell said on camera: “We tackled it really from the point of view of the Rhodesian regime, not the future of Zimbabwe. The real concern at the beginning was to offer guarantees, assurances, protection, to the white farmers.”
In 1979, Zimbabwe was like a baby about to be born, and the parents of this baby, according to Powell, did not tackle the core issue in the life of the baby from the point of view of the future of the baby, but from the view of the dying Rhodesian regime. And yet, because Zimbabwe wants to reverse this horrendous legacy, the man at the helm of the reversal must be cut down via an artificial credit crunch of which the aim is regime change. And so we have seen Iceland, a country of just 301,000 people, being given a $2.1bn emergency loan by the IMF to rescue it from the jaws of the credit crunch now sweeping over the nations of European stock. Another $2.5bn facility from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, and additional funds from Russia, Poland and the Faroe Islands, will take Iceland’s package to $5.2bn. In all, Iceland intends to borrow $10bn or $330,000 for each of its 301,000 population.
In contrast, the IMF has been prevented by the same nations of European stock from giving Zimbabwe, a nation of over 13 million people, any loan at all for the past eight years. And Zimbabwe is still a member of the IMF! Instead, during the same period, the IMF has been religiously calling time on its old loans to Zimbabwe without mercy, forcing a nation in a far worse credit-crunch condition than Iceland, to pay up or face the music. The irony is, the IMF has recently announced a bail-out package of $100bn for Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia and Pakistan, but nothing for Zimbabwe, which is going through worse economic conditions.
Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Solon of Athens wrote that: “The Law is like a spider’s web. The small are caught and the great tear it up.” All this must have greatly displeased the Creator of Mankind, who upon looking down on what is happening, must have said: “Well, these nations of European stock, I will let them taste a teeny bit of their own medicine. I will see how they would like it, confronted with a credit crunch.” And now they are all scampering like headless chickens!
Gordon Brown, whose country, along with the Americans, has been a cheerleader in the campaign to deprive Zimbabwe of international credit, has suddenly realised how important the flow of credit, or government borrowing, is to nations and their economies. Just imagine the effect it will have on British life if Brown's government is prevented from borrowing the £118bn it says it needs to get Britain out of the credit crunch and recession. Zimbabweans are human beings too! All told, with high inflation, an economy on its knees, and an electorate justifiably voting with their stomachs or “stoning the leadership” as the late Robin Cook had warned would happen, Mugabe was a ripe candidate for a big fall. But what do we see – the man is still standing! Though wounded somewhat politically, he has nonetheless become the very first African leader to be undefeated after 10 years of brutal assault by the nations of European stock. Is it the beginning of the turning of the tables?
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quote: n 1979, Zimbabwe was like a baby about to be born, and the parents of this baby, according to Powell, did not tackle the core issue in the life of the baby from the point of view of the future of the baby, but from the view of the dying Rhodesian regime. And yet, because Zimbabwe wants to reverse this horrendous legacy, the man at the helm of the reversal must be cut down via an artificial credit crunch of which the aim is regime change. And so we have seen Iceland, a country of just 301,000 people, being given a $2.1bn emergency loan by the IMF to rescue it from the jaws of the credit crunch now sweeping over the nations of European stock. Another $2.5bn facility from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, and additional funds from Russia, Poland and the Faroe Islands, will take Iceland’s package to $5.2bn. In all, Iceland intends to borrow $10bn or $330,000 for each of its 301,000 population.
In contrast, the IMF has been prevented by the same nations of European stock from giving Zimbabwe, a nation of over 13 million people, any loan at all for the past eight years. And Zimbabwe is still a member of the IMF! Instead, during the same period, the IMF has been religiously calling time on its old loans to Zimbabwe without mercy, forcing a nation in a far worse credit-crunch condition than Iceland, to pay up or face the music. The irony is, the IMF has recently announced a bail-out package of $100bn for Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia and Pakistan, but nothing for Zimbabwe, which is going through worse economic conditions.
Can someone tell me why Zimbabwe is still memeber of IMF????????
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posted
Why hasn't Mugabe done SOMETHING, and why haven't the people do anything for themselves? Surely the elite have access to dollars to begin something positive to move away from the European influence Mugabe detests. South America seems to be a open option for Mugabe to form strategic partnerships to at least enable him to feed the people.
Cuba's Agricultural Revolution an Example to the World by Andrew Buncombe
To the right lay revolutionary tomatoes and to the left lay revolutionary lettuces, while in the glass in my hand, filled to the brim and frothing with vitality, was the juice from revolutionary mangoes. It was thick, unfiltered and fabulously sweet. It was also organic.
"Yes, it is very good. It's all natural," said Miguel Salcines Lopez, his brow dotted with sweat from the midday sun, as he raised a glassful to his lips. "Growing food in this way is much more interesting. It is much more intelligent."
Almost five decades after the now ailing Fidel Castro and his comrades overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista and seized power in Cuba, another revolution, largely unnoticed by most visitors and tourists, is well under way on this Caribbean island. And Salcines and his small urban farm at Alamar, an eastern suburb of the capital, Havana, are at the center of a social transformation that may turn out to be as important as anything else that has been achieved during Castro's 47 years in power.
Spurred into action by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous effect this had on its subsidized economy, the government of Cuba was forced to take radical steps to feed its people. The solution it chose -- essentially unprecedented both within the developed and undeveloped world -- was to establish a self-sustaining system of agriculture that by necessity was essentially organic.
Laura Enriquez, a sociologist at the University of California-Berkeley, who has written extensively on the subject of Latin American agriculture, said: "What happened in Cuba was remarkable. It was remarkable that they decided to prioritize food production. Other countries in the region took the neo-liberal option and exported 'what they were good at' and imported food. The Cubans went for food security and part of that was prioritizing small farmers."
Cuba is filled with more than 7,000 urban allotments, or organoponicos, which fill perhaps as many as 81,000 acres. They have been established on tiny plots of land in the center of tower-block estates or between the crumbling colonial homes that fill Havana. One afternoon I visited a small garden of tomatoes and spinach that had been dug just a few hundred yards from the Plaza de la Revolution, a vast concrete square where Castro and his senior regime members annually oversee Cuba's May Day parade. More than 200 gardens in Havana supply its citizens with more than 90 percent of their fruit and vegetables.
Of all these gardens, the Vivero Organoponico Alamar is considered one of the most successful. Established less than 10 years ago, the 0.7-hectare plot employs about 25 people and provides a range of healthy, low-cost food to the local community.
Salcines led a brief tour of his garden, stopping off to point out things of which he was particularly proud. There was the shed of tomatoes that had produced five tons of fruit in six months, a self-designed metal pyramid structure that he claimed focused natural energy and benefited not just the plants but the gardeners as well, a worm farm wriggling with California Red worms and the bright marigolds planted at the end of each row of vegetables to attract bees and butterflies.
He was also very proud of his crop of splendid, shiny mint. "The Hotel Nacional (Havana's state-run landmark hotel once frequented by the likes of Al Capone) uses our mint for its mojitos (a mint-based cocktail)," he said. "It's because it's organic."
The economics of various organoponicos differ. At the Metropolitana Organoponico in the city center, two of the four workers who tend the plot said the land was owned by the government and that everything grown there was split 50-50. "It's very good. It means that food does not have to be brought into the city," said one of the men.
At Alamar, Salcines said that once the workers had grown their set quota of food and given that to the government, the surplus was theirs to sell with the profits then divided among them. Such a sense of cooperation -- along with the free meals for the workers -- added to the heady sense of idealism at Alamar, the sort of socialist idealism that has earned Cuba many international supporters over the years, despite Castro's dictatorial rule and his repression of political dissent.
Such farms barely existed in the late 1980s. Back then, Cuba's economy was extraordinarily reliant on subsidies from its political older brother, the Soviet Union. Its agriculture was designed with one aim in mind -- namely to produce as much sugar cane as possible, which the Soviets bought at more than five times the market price, in addition to purchasing 95 percent of its citrus crop and 73 percent of its nickel. In exchange, the Soviets provided Cuba with 63 percent of its food imports and 90 percent of its petrol. Such a relationship made Cuba extraordinarily vulnerable.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, such subsidies halted almost overnight. Suddenly, the future looked bleak.
Nowhere was the effect felt more strongly than in the stomachs of the ordinary people. Figures produced by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization suggest that the daily calorie intake of the average Cuban fell from about 2,600 calories a day in the late 1980s to between 1,000 and 1,500 by 1993. Essentially, people had to get by on about half the food they had been eating.
With no subsidies and limited resources, the Cuban regime took the decision to look inward. Ceasing to organize its economy around the export of tropical products and the import of food, it decided to maximize food production. By necessity, this meant a back-to-basics approach; with no Soviet oil for tractors or fertilizer it turned to oxen, with no Soviet oil for its fertilizer and pesticide, it turned to natural compost and the production of natural pesticides and beneficial insects.
It is estimated that more than 200 locally based centers specializing in biopesticides annually produce 200 tons of verticillium to control whitefly, and 800 tons of beaveria sprays to control beetles.
Professor Jules Pretty, of the University of Essex's department of biological sciences, recently wrote: "Cut banana stems baited with honey to attract ants are placed in sweet potato fields and have led to control of sweet potato weevil. There are 170 vermicompost centers, the annual production of which has grown from three to 9,300 tons. Crop rotations, green maturing, intercropping and soil conservation have all been incorporated into polyculture farming."
Remarkably, this organic revolution has worked. Annual calorie intake now stands at about 2,600 a day, while UNFAO estimates that the percentage of the population considered undernourished fell from 8 percent in 1990-92 to about 3 percent in 2000-02. Cuba's infant mortality rate is lower than that of the U.S., while at 77 years, life expectancy is the same.
Everyone appears to agree that this new, organic approach is far more efficient than the previous Soviet model that emphasized production at all costs. Fernando Funes, head of the national Pasture and Forage Research Unit, told Harper's magazine: "In that old system it took 10 or 15 units of energy to produce one unit of food energy. At first we did not care about economics, (but) we were realizing just how inefficient it was."
A second step Cuba took in the mid-1990s to try to save its economy was the establishment of mass tourism. Yet while this has provided the government with a ready source of millions of dollars in hard currency, it also has helped produce a dual-track society with its own tensions and clear divide between those who have access to foreign currency -- or the Cuban Convertible Peso -- and those who make do with the lowly Cuban peso, which cannot be used to buy many goods.
By contrast, Salcines believes the introduction of organoponicos -- a loosening of government control that also saw small restaurants and some private businesses established -- has been a success. He also believes these allotments have stayed true to Cuba's revolutionary ideas.
"Not everything is perfect," Salcines said. "But if you look at what capitalism has done for other countries in the region, I believe that the situation for poor people is better in Cuba. Our society is more equal."
Experts, such as Professor Pretty, believe Cuba may be one of the only countries in the world to have adopted wholesale a self-sustaining system of agriculture. "They had no choice," he said. "Their only choice was to look inwards, to the resources they had and say: 'Can we make more of these resources?' "
Champions of organic, non-intensive agriculture might cite Cuba as an example that other countries could adopt rather than following the large-scale, industrial agriculture system.
But could Cuba's labor-intensive example be repeated without the availability of large numbers of enforced workers?
"I don't know. I think it is true that it has required much labor," Pretty said. "The thing is that it has also produced a lot of food. ... People are also closer to their food production. (In the West) we are worried that we don't know about where our food comes from. In Havana, people are closer to their food production and that may also have psychological benefits."
The same day as visiting the allotment at Alamar, I took a visit to the other side of Cuba's dual-track economy. The Hotel Nacional has hosted the likes of Winston Churchill and Fred Astaire, and more recently Naomi Campbell and Leonardo DiCaprio.
On a lawn overlooking the ocean, I paid the equivalent of an ordinary Cuban's weekly wage for a mojito. It tasted great, but it didn't taste of the revolution.
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quote:But US Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Jendayi Fraser it could no longer fulfil either of those pledges.
"We have lost confidence in the power-sharing deal being a success with Mugabe in power. He has lost touch with reality," she said during a visit to South Africa.
"We were prepared to use the American influence to negotiate with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to clear the $1.2bn Zimbabwe debt, but now we are no longer prepared to do that."
posted
Whoops, I just noticed "pre independence" here means post colonial era. There use of the Ashante (who on and off fought /w the British for 100 years) confused me.
posted
Why Hasn't Mugabe called on Castro and Cuba for help in fighting against the many medical issues, or how to survive in the face of embargoes? I'm for Mugabe, but I don't see where he is effectively utilizing resources and options to the benefit of Zimbabwe. His opposition seems to be just as impotent. Am I wrong?
South Africa honors Fidel Castro
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa: South Africa is honoring former Cuban President Fidel Castro.
The government's National Heritage Council said Thursday that Castro was the third recipient of its Ubuntu Award. The two previous winners were Africans — former South African President Nelson Mandela and former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda.
"Ubuntu" refers to the importance of community. The idea often is expressed as, "People are people because of other people."
Africans revere Castro for his support of anti-colonial rebellions and of the anti-apartheid movement. Castro attended Mandela's 1994 inauguration.
Castro was not expected for the Sept. 24 Ubuntu Award ceremony.
Castro has not been seen in public since July 2006. He ceded power to his brother in February.
Posts: 3595 | From: Moved To Mars. Waiting with shotgun | Registered: Dec 2006
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posted
That ceremony is all face saving like what you do here boy. All to cloud the fact that ANC is one of the most pro-western, backward and reactionary parties in Africa. From "freedom fighters" to negro business men lackeys of western capitalism and neo-liberal ideology. The ANC can better honor Castro by scrapping their neo-liberal policies. But we know that wont happen as they are as cowardly as you boy.
Posts: 4165 | From: jamaica | Registered: May 2008
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posted
What Africans can do to honor Castro is to get off their asses and act like MEN, and less like sheep!!! The ceremony is/was purely fluff and symbolic, but at least it was SOMETHING versus NOTHING. What's happening in Zimbabwe? What's the plan? Clearly, you are as in the dark as I. Perhaps, even more so.
Castro has stamped his mark on Africa’s history
Thu Aug 10, 2006 6:32 AM ET By Pascal Fletcher
DAKAR (Reuters) - As the world wonders about Fidel Castro’s health, Africa remembers him as the foreign leader who most invested his personal effort — and Cuban lives — to help end colonialism and apartheid.
Throughout the veteran Comandante’s 47-year rule, the world’s poorest continent has loomed large in his global outlook and it was the scene of his most ambitious overseas adventures.
From the deserts of Algeria and Ethiopia to the jungles of Guinea Bissau and Congo and the Angolan bush, close to half a million Cubans have fought and worked on African soil in the name of "revolutionary solidarity". More than 2,000 died there.
Most served as soldiers in Cuba’s large-scale military interventions in Angola and Ethiopia.
"I vividly remember the support Cuban troops rendered (to Ethiopia) during our struggle in beating back a Somali invasion of our east … I wish speedy recovery and long life to the great Cuban leader Fidel Castro," retired Ethiopian brigadier-general Wasihun Negat told Reuters.
Castro’s critics say he fought as a Cold War proxy in Africa for the Soviet Union, sacrificing Cuban and African lives as cannon fodder in Moscow’s superpower tug-of-war with Washington.
But Cubans have also served as medics and construction workers in Africa, benefiting the lives of ordinary people.
Nearly 2,000 Cuban doctors are still working in countries like South Africa, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Mali. Tens of thousands of African students have also studied in Cuba.
"The Cubans had a huge influence in southern Africa, they helped to shape history there. … There are Africans who remember this," Piero Gleijeses, professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University, told Reuters.
Fresh from his own 1959 Cuban Revolution which toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista, Castro threw himself with enthusiasm behind the liberation struggles of Africans fighting to end European colonial rule.
"AFRICA’S STALINGRAD"
From the early 1960s he sent Cuban military instructors to Algeria and Guinea Bissau. One of his closest comrades, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, tried and failed to ignite revolution in eastern Congo in 1965, leading a band of black Cuban soldiers.
But it was Angola, the former jewel of Portugal’s African colonial empire, which saw Castro’s biggest foreign gamble.
When Angola’s Soviet-backed independence was threatened in 1975 by South African and Zairean forces and mercenaries, Castro launched "Operation Carlota" — a rush airlift of Cuban combat troops who defended Angola’s new Marxist rulers.
So began Cuba’s 16-year intervention in Angola, which culminated in 1988 with 55,000 Cuban troops armed with Soviet tanks and MiG fighters battling white South African soldiers and U.S.-backed Angolan rebels in the southern bushlands.
Thousands of miles from their Caribbean home in Angola’s "lands at the end of the earth", young Cuban servicemen fought in what Castro dubbed "Africa’s Stalingrad", the battle of Cuito Cuanavale which blocked the South African advance north.
Gleijeses says Castro often angered and alarmed the cautious Soviets with his daring deployments in Angola.
WANING INFLUENCE?
African leaders, and many historians, say Cuba’s military muscle — personally directed by Castro from Havana — kept Angola free, won independence for Namibia and hastened the end of apartheid rule in South Africa.
"When Angola was invaded by the Boers, Comrade Castro sent his troops to assist his brothers here in Africa," Zambia’s former President Kenneth Kaunda said recently.
After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the cash-strapped island pulled its last combat troops out of Africa in May 1991.
The memory of Cuba’s help against colonialism and apartheid kept Castro’s star burning brightly in Africa. South Africa’s former President Nelson Mandela calls him friend, so too does Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and a host of other African leaders.
Castro has extended this goodwill by replacing Cuban soldiers with doctors — albeit in fewer numbers.
But analysts see Cuba’s influence in Africa waning.
"Without Castro, Cuban-African relations will deteriorate. … When a new leadership comes in, there could be new priorities," said Lyal White of the South African Institute for International Affairs.
Posts: 3595 | From: Moved To Mars. Waiting with shotgun | Registered: Dec 2006
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Well, the reason for the current situation in Zimbabwe boils down to Mugabe and his machinations to stay in power. He could seriously care less if the whites keep control of the land or wealth as long as he is in power. Therefore, this is why for most of his presidency he was a supporter of the IMF and allowed the notorious racists like Ian Smith to live out the rest of his days in peace and comfort, along with the rest of his white cronies. Zimbabwe has been in the hands of the Western economic sphere since independence and most of this is directly due to Mugabe, who sold off the land, wealth and resources of his country to whites and didn't care less about any sort of land or economic reform for blacks for most of his presidency. So NOW he becomes concerned about such things and is only really using it as a ploy to stay in power, not as some sort of real change. And behind all of this, including BOTH Mugabe AND his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai is the white economic elite. THIS same scenario is no different from what is happening ALL ACROSS Africa from West Africa, to East Africa and South Africa as white backed black "tyrants" are opposed by white backed "revolutionaries" NONE of whom are doing anything but playing a CLOWN act for the hearts and minds of the African people. ALL the TRUE African nationalists are long gone and now replaced by a bunch of fake flunkies for the white socio economic system which has only ONE GOAL for Africa and black Africans. And the results speak for itself. So you can answer your own question about WHY when you look at who stands to gain from the current state of affairs in Africa and it certainly is not Africans.
quote: HARARE, Zimbabwe – President Robert Mugabe declared Friday that "Zimbabwe is mine," saying only Zimbabweans can remove him from power and that no African nation is brave enough to wrest it from him.
The ever-defiant Mugabe — in power for nearly three decades — hit back after the top U.S. envoy to Africa called for the "person who has ruined the country" to step down.
"I will never, never sell my country. I will never, never, never surrender," Mugabe told members of his ZANU-PF party. "Zimbabwe is mine, I am a Zimbabwean, Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans. Zimbabwe never for the British. Britain for the British."
He was cheered by flag-waving supporters at an annual three-day convention in Bindura, 60 miles (90 kilometers) northeast of Harare, the capital. Some wore shirts printed with pictures of Mugabe's face and sang his praise: "Stay with us. We know you are our president."
Mugabe, 84, has ruled the country since its 1980 independence from Britain and refused to leave office following disputed elections in March.
Keep in mind that Mugabe SIGNED the Lancaster House agreement with the British which GUARANTEED whites the rights to land and wealth that they STOLE from blacks. So right there you can see his claims of supporting Zimbabwe for black Zimbabweans are B.S.
The white power elite aren't threatened though. They now he is a phony and they know that they can finance some other front like Tsvangirai to keep their agenda for economic domination in Africa on course into the future.
Of course you know how the white racists view all of this, which is to say it only reinforces their views on why blacks NEED WHITES to dominate them and keep things in order. AND THAT is what makes the antics of Mugabe, Zuma and other phony revolutionaries such a threat to the interest of African nationalism. This is because their antics produce NOTHING for the black Africans except promises not delivered, which makes the black leadership seem incompetent and backwards, while whites AGAIN promote themselves as saviors that need to ride in on a white horse and return things to "business as usual (blacks on the bottom under massa)". But that is WHY these fakes are needed by the white power elite, because it allows them to manipulate and shape the opinions of the masses to the point where WHITE SUPREMACY seems to be the MOST VIABLE option for black survival. Which is utterly STUPID because it is white supremacy that is behind all the political tricksters and crooks that are ruining Africa now to begin with.
And here is a hint, what the white power elite want is nothing less than what you have in SA today, a primarily black underclass slave wage population, with a buffer of middle class blacks dependent on white Affirmitive Action policies and a hand full of elite black sellouts in a sea of white industrial faces. THAT is what these elites envision across Africa and nothing less. These games and antics put on in Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Congo and so forth are simply schemes to support that agenda.
quote: Time for SA to invade and occupy Zimbabwe 1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars Loading ... Loading ...
I am one of the most decisive people that I know. “Come on Chook, let’s go live in China,” I brightly announced one day to my wife in England after being “let go” from my second job (I was a terrible salesman by England’s cut-throat standards). “Okay,” she said, “hmmm … sounds interesting”.
So, amid the moans and pleas of the extended family we made that wonderful decision four years ago.
I am also one of the most reckless, impulsive people that I know. I open my mouth when I shouldn’t, and while I know the TL editors like my writing and are prepared to publish some inflammatory material, I have been politely asked on several occasions to tone it down. Fair enough, their suggestions were wisdom in hindsight.
But the more I think about the Zimbabwe issue the only way forward is for the SA army to occupy Zimbabwe, to remove mad Bob from office permanently and create an interim government that will restore peace and order and re-boot the economy.
I cannot think of a better and more responsible action for the SA government to take right now. And I mean right now. Living in China, I am sick to death of listening to the journalists and non-ANC politicians — from SA and internationally — bleat and moo about Zimbabwe and nothing, absolutely nothing, ever gets done. Pity there was not a reservoir or two of oil or plutonium in Zimbabwe. The US flag would have been waving above Harare a long time ago.
So for all the TALK that Europe is making about being interested in CHANGE for Zimbabwe, we all know what kind of CHANGE they really care about (ka-ching):
quote: June 25, 2008 Outrage over £200m UK investment in Zimbabwe
Anglo American, the London-based mining giant, is to make what is believed to be the largest foreign investment in Zimbabwe to date, just as the British Government puts pressure on companies to withdraw from the country.
Anglo will invest $400 million (£200 million) to build a platinum mine in Zimbabwe — a move that has raised concern among some of the company’s shareholders and been condemned by politicians.
The Foreign Office was investigating tonight whether the company’s investment breached sanctions against Zimbabwe. Anglo insisted that its involvement in the country did not break the law.
The decision, which was criticised roundly as likely to give succour — and possibly money — to the Mugabe regime, is in stark contrast to the policy of nearly all other main British corporations in Zimbabwe. They are either withdrawing from the country or waiting for Mr Mugabe to be deposed before expanding their businesses.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: [QB] Well, the reason for the current situation in Zimbabwe boils down to Mugabe and his machinations to stay in power. He could seriously care less if the whites keep control of the land or wealth as long as he is in power. Therefore, this is why for most of his presidency he was a supporter of the IMF and allowed the notorious racists like Ian Smith to live out the rest of his days in peace and comfort, along with the rest of his white cronies. Zimbabwe has been in the hands of the Western economic sphere since independence and most of this is directly due to Mugabe, who sold off the land, wealth and resources of his country to whites and didn't care less about any sort of land or economic reform for blacks for most of his presidency. So NOW he becomes concerned about such things and is only really using it as a ploy to stay in power, not as some sort of real change. And behind all of this, including BOTH Mugabe AND his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai. THIS same scenario is no different from what is happening ALL ACROSS Africa from West Africa, to East Africa and South Africa as white backed black "tyrants" are opposed by white backed "revolutionaries" NONE of whom are doing anything but playing a CLOWN act for the hearts and minds of the African people. ALL the TRUE African nationalists are long gone and now replaced by a bunch of fake flunkies for the white socio economic system which has only ONE GOAL for Africa and black Africans. And the results speak for itself. So you can answer your own question about WHY when you look at who stands to gain from the current state of affairs in Africa and it certainly is not Africans.
Keep in mind that Mugabe SIGNED the Lancaster House agreement with the British which GUARANTEED whites the rights to land and wealth that they STOLE from blacks. So right there you can see his claims of supporting Zimbabwe for black Zimbabweans are B.S.
The white power elite aren't threatened though. They now he is a phony and they know that they can finance some other front like Tsvangirai to keep their agenda for economic domination in Africa on course into the future.
From outside looking in, this does seem to be the case. Although, African news here in the west (US) is often quite different then the actual situation. I have to agree with Mugabe in his assessment of other African leaders being too cowardly to militarily opposed him directly. I do believe they would in name and with backing from one of the European African puppet master countries though...and now, to include, China.
Posts: 3595 | From: Moved To Mars. Waiting with shotgun | Registered: Dec 2006
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The British dominate Zimbabwe's economics, including farming, industry, mining, tobacco, sugar and everything else. And this domination has been PAY ROLLING Mugabe for a long time (and still does):
quote:
Anglo American defends Zimbabwe project · Mining firm says regime will take over if it pulls out · Critics say £200m project will be lifeline for Mugabe
The international mining group Anglo American sought to defend itself yesterday against criticism of its investment in a platinum project in Zimbabwe amid mounting international pressure on the country's president, Robert Mugabe, to call off tomorrow's presidential election.
In a strongly worded statement, the firm said it was very concerned at the political situation in Zimbabwe, where the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has pulled out of the election because of violence against his supporters. The mining group said it had been an investor in Zimbabwe for 60 years, adding that the Unki platinum project had been under development since 2003 but would not begin to generate revenues for years.
Responding to a report in yesterday's Times newspaper that it was investing $400m (£200m) in the Unki project at a time when the British government was pressing companies to pull out, Anglo American said it was "deeply concerned about the political situation in Zimbabwe and condemns the violence and human rights abuses that are taking place".
It said it was monitoring the situation closely but added that it had been warned that if it pulled out of the Unki development, the Zimbabwean government would take control.
"Anglo American has a clear responsibility to protect the wellbeing of its more than 650 employees and contractors, as well as their families and all those who depend indirectly on the activity around the project, all of whose livelihoods would be jeopardised should the company withdraw from Zimbabwe."
The company, which is one of the largest mining and natural resources groups in the world, said the responsible development of the Unki project would create a long-term viable business in Zimbabwe.
It added that it was involved in supporting communities around the project, providing food and supplies as well as helping with agricultural development and supporting health and education projects. The company's statement concluded: "Anglo American is in full compliance with all relevant national and international laws relating to its activities in Zimbabwe."
The UK government said yesterday it was preparing tougher sanctions against specific members of the Zimbabwean government and urged world leaders to work together to remove Mugabe from power.
"We are preparing intensified sanctions, financial and travel sanctions, against named members of the Mugabe regime," Gordon Brown told parliament.
He said the way forward for the country was the United Nations and African Union "working together for a change of regime". Brown also said the government was speaking to the England and Wales Cricket Board to ensure that the Zimbabwean cricket team was banned from touring England next year. The tour has since been cancelled by the board.
Asked specifically about the Anglo American project, the prime minister's spokesman said the main purpose of sanctions was to prevent the regime carrying out undemocratic acts and they were designed to avoid, as much as possible, harming the welfare of ordinary Zimbabweans.
"We do keep the issue of sanctions on Zimbabwe under review and of course we are mindful of the impact on the humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe but we would not want to see anything that propped up the regime in any way."
Commenting on Anglo American's statement, Edward Davey, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said: "This shows just how weak the sanctions regime on Zimbabwe is in practice. Creating jobs is one thing but supporting the lifeline of foreign exchange to one of the most corrupt and brutal regimes in history is another.
"This investment will come as a huge boost to Mugabe's regime, and will therefore represent a devastating blow to the population of Zimbabwe as a whole." As well as its investment in the Unki project, Anglo American said it had a 37.2% shareholding in Tongaat Hulett, a sugar and starch business that has operations in Zimbabwe employing 16,000 people.
Keep in mind that Prince Andrew was dating a white girl from Zimbabwe, meaning that the white colonial British power elite network is alive and well in Zimbabwe. Mugabe and his clown antics aren't threatening them one bit.
Keep in mind that the large networks of white slaughter houses, seed producers, cold storage plants, refrigeration businesses, farm support industries, ranches, farms and sugar plantations, are the domain of primarily British expatriates and that tobacco was the major export crop of Zimbabwe, all of which was also mostly under the control of whites. So Mugabe isn't really making a dent in ANY of this through his antics. They just stopped selling and shut off the electricity (the electric company is controlled by Guess who?) and created a fake crisis to ENSURE that they could entrench themselves even more in the domination of Zimbabwe's economics.
And Anglo-American promises to combat Cholera as if this represents some sort of panacea for the fact that they have been RAPING Zimbabwe for its mineral wealth for over 50 years.
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quote:Originally posted by Doug M: [QB] Well, the reason for the current situation in Zimbabwe boils down to Mugabe and his machinations to stay in power. He could seriously care less if the whites keep control of the land or wealth as long as he is in power. Therefore, this is why for most of his presidency he was a supporter of the IMF and allowed the notorious racists like Ian Smith to live out the rest of his days in peace and comfort, along with the rest of his white cronies. Zimbabwe has been in the hands of the Western economic sphere since independence and most of this is directly due to Mugabe, who sold off the land, wealth and resources of his country to whites and didn't care less about any sort of land or economic reform for blacks for most of his presidency. So NOW he becomes concerned about such things and is only really using it as a ploy to stay in power, not as some sort of real change. And behind all of this, including BOTH Mugabe AND his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai. THIS same scenario is no different from what is happening ALL ACROSS Africa from West Africa, to East Africa and South Africa as white backed black "tyrants" are opposed by white backed "revolutionaries" NONE of whom are doing anything but playing a CLOWN act for the hearts and minds of the African people. ALL the TRUE African nationalists are long gone and now replaced by a bunch of fake flunkies for the white socio economic system which has only ONE GOAL for Africa and black Africans. And the results speak for itself. So you can answer your own question about WHY when you look at who stands to gain from the current state of affairs in Africa and it certainly is not Africans.
Keep in mind that Mugabe SIGNED the Lancaster House agreement with the British which GUARANTEED whites the rights to land and wealth that they STOLE from blacks. So right there you can see his claims of supporting Zimbabwe for black Zimbabweans are B.S.
The white power elite aren't threatened though. They now he is a phony and they know that they can finance some other front like Tsvangirai to keep their agenda for economic domination in Africa on course into the future.
From outside looking in, this does seem to be the case. Although, African news here in the west (US) is often quite different then the actual situation. I have to agree with Mugabe in his assessment of other African leaders being too cowardly to militarily opposed him directly. I do believe they would in name and with backing from one of the European African puppet master countries though...and now, to include, China.
Why should African leaders oppose him? For what? That is just trash talk of a tyrant who is using the prestige of the LIBERATION ARMY Zanu-PF as his own personal means for staying in power. Yes, the Zanu PF was the LIBERATION Army that defeated the whites and yes they ARE very good. However, they now are only a liberation army IN NAME ONLY. Mugabe made sure of that when he came to power and DID NOT give the land to the Africans like he was supposed to and then GOT RID OF those who were TRULY progressive within ZANU and Zimbabwe. All of this so that he could be one of the Queens royal LACKEYS and keep himself as a darling of the West.
Again, most of the problem in Zimbabwe today is the result of those in control of the farms and agriculture HOLDING BACK their output in order to provoke a crisis. Whites are not in Africa to FEED Africans, clothe Africans, give medical care to Africans or anything else. They are only in Africa to MAKE WEALTH for THEMSELVES and nobody else. And to MAKE WEALTH they need to take the land, labor and resources of Africa FROM the Africans, using Africans as slave labor and MAKING the Africans believe that this is IN THEIR BEST INTEREST, when it isn't. It is the same old white man's burden nonsense wrapped in modern 21st century form. When Africans begin to realize that THEIR BEST INTEREST is to CONTROL their OWN food production, clothing production and medical production, THEN these sorts of NONSENSE fabricated crises will stop.
quote: Zimbabwe's tobacco farmers are refusing to send their crops to the auction floor in a protest over terms that threatens to derail Harare's economic recovery plan.
President Robert Mugabe recently announced what his government is calling the National Economic Development Priority Program, or NEDPP, the linchpin of which is generating an increase in foreign exchange inflows from export sales.
But when Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Gideon Gono opened the tobacco auction floor on Tuesday, farmers declined to step forward despite a 35% bonus for early deliver of cured leaf. The Zimbabwe Tobacco Association has dismissed Gono’s incentive, urging members to withhold crops until the Zimbabwe dollar is devalued.
Under the existing arrangement, growers receive half the proceeds from the tobacco auction in hard currency, and half in Zimbabwe dollars, for a blended exchange rate of Z$150,000 to the U.S. dollar compared with a parallel market rate of Z$200,000. The growers say they cannot afford to continue operations at that exchange rate.
And the majority white elites are not suffering from this farm "crisis". They live in exclusive suburbs like Borrowdale Brooke with supermarkets stocked with everything you could ever want.
This nonsense in Zimbabwe is a complete sham, with the former British colonial enterprises getting ready to SWOOP in and keep things going they wey they always have been:
quote: FOREIGN investors have begun flocking back to Zimbabwe scouting for investment opportunities following last week’s signing of a historic power sharing agreement, it has emerged.
Leaders of Zimbabwe’s business lobby groups disclosed on Wednesday that they were swamped with enquiries from foreign investors seeking potential areas of investment in the troubled southern African country following the conclusion of a political settlement in the country.
“There is so much excitement and enthusiasm brought about by the signing of the political agreement. We are meeting an interested party who has over US$200 million to invest in Zimbabwe projects. We will be meeting today,” Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) President Callisto Jokonya told journalists in the capital Wednesday.
ZANU PF leader Robert Mugabe and main Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, the leader of a rebel faction of the MDC signed a historic power sharing deal, which ended Mugabe’s 28 year hegemony on power, which critics blame for plunging the once prosperous southern African country. Under the power sharing arrangement Mugabe remains as President while Tsvangirai who thumped Mugabe in the March presidential elections will become Prime Minister and will chair a council of ministers.
Chamber of Mines President David Murangari also reported that his organization had been inundated with enquiries regarding investment opportunities in the country’s delicate mining sector.
“There is an increase in the number of enquiries in mining. They (foreign investors) wish to see finality in the law (indigenization and empowerment bill) so that people can make decisions,” said Murangari.
Zimbabwe Council of Tourism (ZCT) representative Emmanuel Fundira, whose organization groups together private tourism and hospitality operators in the country disclosed that international investors were positioning themselves to exploit opportunities ahead of the 2010 soccer World Cup to be hosted by neighbouring South Africa.
“We have people looking for facilities in Victoria Falls. We currently have 15 000 rooms in the country and yet the demand for 2010 World Cup requires that we have 30 000 rooms in the country,” said Fundira.
Economic analysts say foreign investors who have braved Zimbabwe’s nine year political and economic volatility could win big if a new coalition government brings policy changes in the crisis-hit but resource-rich country.
Despite an economic meltdown, world beating inflation and political uncertainty, some investors cautiously held on and positioned themselves for changes after the March presidential and parliamentary elections.
London-listed South African firm Lonrho Plc, through its investment arm LonZim was amongst the first foreign investors to launch a bid to return to Zimbabwe where the investment firm used to have significant mining and property investments. Russian investment group Renaissance Capital, LonZim's placement agency for the Zimbabwe investment, bought into CBZ Holdings -- Zimbabwe's second-largest bank by assets -- by snapping up a shareholding sold by South Africa's ABSA last year while Citigroup recently approved a US$25 million deal for a 20 percent shareholding in another Zimbabwean bank, African Banking Corporation (ABC). The Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and the African Development Bank have all expressed their willingness to resume and offer financial aid to Zimbabwe once the political deal begins to yield positive results.
Meanwhile, the CZI will assume chairmanship of the BCZ for a period of six months before handing over the button to another chair who will be drawn from the BCZ members including the Bankers Association of Zimbabwe (BAZ), Chamber of Mines, Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union (ZCFU), Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC), Employers Confederation of Zimbabwe (EMCOZ), Zimbabwe Council of Tourism (ZCT) and the Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU).
Here you have Lonrho (London Rhodesia Company) the vast Africa spanning enterprise that is the epitome of the British Crown's banking systems interests in Africa. They are going to buy UP all the commercial banks in Zimbabwe, keep the money in the hands of whites so that it can continue to finance WHITE economic projects, while blacks will have to depend on IMF and World Bank SCAMS which will only make them more and more desperate and willing to work for the commercial enterprises of the whites. The same way most blacks get their food from small scale black peasant farms which are totally separate and unequal from the WHITE OWNED commercial farming and agricultural industries which have the best land and employ the most blacks as virtual slave labor.
quote: The Company was incorporated in the United Kingdom on 13 May 1909 as the London and Rhodesian Mining Company Limited.
Businessman Tiny Rowland was recruited as chief executive in 1962.[1] For many years during the second half of the twentieth century it was frequently in the news, not only due to the politically-sensitive part of the world in which it had mining businesses, but also – as it strove to become a conglomerate not wholly dependent on these businesses – in a number of takeover battles, most notably for the Harrods of Knightsbridge department store.[1]
In 1968, Lonrho acquired Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, a gold mining business in Ghana.[2] The former Conservative minister Duncan Sandys, a director of Ashanti, became Lonrho's chairman in 1972.[3]
During the 80s, Lonrho entered the British newspaper market, buying the Sunday newspaper The Observer in 1981[4] and the newly launched daily Today in 1986.[5] Today was sold to News International the following year,[6] while the Guardian Media Group bought the Observer in 1993.[4]
Sir Angus Ogilvy, married to a member of the British royal family (Princess Alexandra of Kent), was a Lonrho director and this increased media interest in the company's affairs. Ogilvy's career ended when Lonrho was involved in a sanctions-busting scandal concerning trade with Rhodesia. Prime Minister, Edward Heath, criticised the company, describing it in the House of Commons in 1973 as "an unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism."[7]
Tiny Rowland was finally ejected from Lonrho in October 1993 after a boardroom tussle with director Dieter Bock. However, Rowland's parting shot was to get the board to appoint his nominee, Sir John Leahy, to succeed him as chairman.[8]
Two months before Rowland's death (on July 26, 1998) the assets of Lonrho were demerged. Two publicly listed companies, Lonrho plc and Lonrho Africa plc were created – the former retaining all the non-African businesses and mining assets.[9] In 1999 Lonrho plc was renamed as Lonmin plc and a new era as a focused mining company began. Since then it has divested itself of all non-core assets.
So for all this talk from Mugabe and the "opposition" MDC, it looks like the white colonists stand to come out of all of this stronger than ever. Just like the whites elites are making more money than ever in South Africa while the blacks are getting worse and worse off. Bet you don't hear that in the news though.
quote: South Africa poverty 'emergency'
A former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town has described poverty in South Africa as being worse than ever.
Having met communities affected by poverty across the country, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane said South Africa was in "a state of emergency".
"The anger, the frustration and the feeling of hopelessness especially among young people is a recipe for possible disaster," he said.
Official figures suggest around 25% of South Africans are unemployed.
"Never before in the history of South Africa have such large gatherings of people consistently said 'we have no food,'" said the archbishop.
"In a country where huge amounts can be spent on [the 2010] soccer world cup or increasing salaries, it is unthinkable that so many can go without food."
Speaking to journalists in Cape Town on Wednesday, he challenged government ministers to go with him, village by village, to tell people what would be done to help them kick-start and maintain agricultural production to feed their families.
And just like Zimbabwe, you got the political theater of the break up of the ANC into two camps, BOTH of which are fronts for white racist economic interests. And again, just like Zimbabwe, the so called FREEDOM fighters sold out the blacks in a bid to gain political power. And the rest is history. Yet they must put on all these antics and clown acts in order to keep the people's attention and divert it from the fact that the WHITES still own and control everything....
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Good Article on the history of the land issue in Zimbabwe and how Britain and the West have NEVER been fair or impartial brokers:
quote: Zimbabwe Will Never be a Colony Again
the return of Zimbabwe's land to its people
Part 1
Demonisation of Zimbabwe
During the past seven years, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) [ZANU(PF)] regime in Zimbabwe, and especially President Robert Mugabe, have come under relentless imperialist attack. From being regarded as a source of stability in southern Africa, a symbol of civilised conduct and a salutary example of good governance, the Zimbabwe regime is now regularly portrayed by the imperialist propaganda organs and statesmen alike as a lawless and uncivilised administration which threatens to destabilise the whole of southern Africa. President Robert Mugabe, not so long ago considered as the perfect gentleman and an instrument of democracy, peace and reconciliation within Zimbabwe and southern Africa, has suddenly been recast into the role of devil incarnate, a power-hungry dictator and a white-hating racist.
What could be the reasons behind this 180 degrees change of front effected by imperialism, in particular British and US imperialism, on the question of the evaluation and characterisation of the Zimbabwean regime in general and President Robert Mugabe in particular? Why this demonisation of Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe? As we have often stated before, there are three main reasons for it. First, Zimbabwe's rejection, albeit belatedly, in August 1999, of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) demanded by imperialism through the World Bank/IMF combine. Second, Zimbabwe's military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in support of the Kabila regime's struggle against imperialist-inspired aggression against Congo by Rwanda and Uganda. Third, and most important, Zimbabwe's determined, and successful, endeavour to restore to the people of Zimbabwe the land, which was stolen from them at gunpoint by the colonialist marauders of Cecil Rhodes and their successors. Here, in this article, we concentrate on the land question alone.
Historical background
Ever since the beginning, in 1890, of European settler occupation of Zimbabwe, and the resultant progressive dispossession of the indigenous people from their land, the question of land rights and ownership has been, and remains, at the centre of the struggle of the Zimbabwean people to regain their freedom and embark on the road to economic prosperity and political and social development. Without a radical resolution of the land question, it is impossible for the Zimbabwean masses to safeguard their national sovereignty and improve their economic well-being. In view of the flood of anti-ZANU imperialist propaganda, full of calumnies and hysterical assertions, totally lacking in all historical analysis, it is important to briefly outline here a few important facts from Zimbabwe's history in so far as they have a bearing on the land question.
Being firmly convinced that the territory north of the Limpopo river was as rich in minerals as the Rand goldfields in the Boer-ruled Transvaal, Cecil Rhodes, the then Prime Minister of the Cape, through his British South African Company (BSAC), fraudulently secured from King Lobengula the Rudd Concession of 1888 - which became an instrument in the hands of the colonialists for the acquisition of mineral rights in Mashonaland. Armed with this Concession, Rhodes persuaded the British government in the following year (1889) to grant his BSAC a Royal Charter, under which it was given the authority to administer and rule the region constituting present-day Zimbabwe. In vain did Lobengula protest that the Rudd Concession had been obtained from him through deception. He repudiated the Concession on the ground that he would "not recognise the paper, as it contains neither my words nor the words of those who got it". Queen Victoria responded to King Lobengula's protestation by the mere assertion that it "would be unwise to exclude white men".
British imperialism was not the only power engaged in the scramble for Africa. Germany, a rising strong imperialist country, was equally intent on acquiring African territory. Germany countered the Rudd Concession by the Lippert Land Concession, also acquired by deceit from Lobengula in April 1889. However the Lippert Concession was quickly bought by the BSAC. But even before this purchase, Rhodes' company had made vast land grants to white colonists in Mashonaland.
Disappointed at the absence of the 'Second Rand' in Mashonaland, but still believing in the existence of large deposits of gold in Matabeleland, BSAC, on an extremely flimsy pretext, invaded Matabeleland in 1893, smashed Lobengula's kingdom, practised wholesale plunder and seizure of cattle and overwhelmed its inhabitants.
Following upon its victory, the Company established a "Loot Committee", which decided to award a land grant of 6,350 acres anywhere in Matabeleland to every settler participant in the war, but with not the slightest obligation to occupy, let alone cultivate, it. Failing to find gold in Zimbabwe, the colonists turned in earnest their attention to a land grab for agricultural production - both arable and livestock - and for purposes of speculation. Thus began the process of ruthless expulsion of the Africans from their most fertile and productive soil and their being herded into poor and marginal land with the creation in 1894 of the Gwaai and Shangani Reserves in Matabeleland. The systematic infringement of the rights of the African people, the brutality meted out to them, and the humiliation heaped upon them by the colonists, were justified by the Rhodesia Herald of 19 April 1895 in these racist terms:
"For the Rhodesian it was absurd to take the untutored savage, accustomed as he is from time immemorial to superstitious and primitive ideas of law and justice, and suddenly try to govern him by the same code of laws that govern a people with many centuries of experience and enlightenment".
First Chimurenga
It is not to be surprised at, then, that the people of Zimbabwe should have risen in revolt against these overbearing invaders during the First Chimurenga in 1896-97. Even less surprising is it that the chief aim of this war of liberation was to restore the land stolen by the invaders to its rightful owners - and with it to restore their dignity so cruelly violated by the settlers.
However, imperialist aggressors' superiority in weaponry and organisation prevailed, ending in the defeat of the Chimurenga and making way for the systematic expropriation of the land of the Zimbabwean people through trickery, violence, war and legislative enactments of successive colonial administrations.
The result was that by 1914, white settlers numbering only 23,730 accounted for the ownership of 19,032,320 acres of land, while approximately 752,000 Africans owned 21,390,080 acres (see R.Palmer: Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia, Heinemann 1977).
Following the First World War, the BSAC launched a major campaign to attract European immigration into Southern Rhodesia, which in turn necessitated further expropriation of African land to free it for occupation by the new arrivals from Europe. This campaign was fully supported by the British government, eager as it was to accommodate war veterans and relieve the strains arising from the economic depression in the aftermath of the war - not to speak of the land 'gifts' to senior government officials, civil servants, party faithfuls and suchlike cronies, "through long-term leases for little to nothing in terms of fees, and to persons who were hardly farmers themselves nor trained at all in the discipline … most if not all came from the ranks of the unemployed in the urban complexes of Britain; many will have seen cattle for the first time on arrival in the colony; and those who became fully-fledged farmers in due course will have been assisted into the profession by generous grants, concessionary loans and a policy framework that made the Rhodesian farmer one of the most coddled and privileged on earth" (The Scrutator, pseudonym of Ibbo Mandaza, Zimbabwe's Sunday Mirror, 23-31 August 2000).
Those who today complain about Mugabe taking away the white farmers' land in order allegedly to give it to his cronies (a reference to the Commercial Farm Settlement Scheme whereby some of the land has been leased to would-be black commercial farmers, as an integral part of the government's programme aimed at indigenising large-scale commercial farming in Zimbabwe), are merely using it as a ruse to distract attention from the real cronies who benefited from vast land grants during the colonial era.
Land Apportionment Act 1930
Following the granting in 1923 of responsible government, the new Rhodesian administration set up the Morris Carter Land Commission (in 1925), whose terms of reference were informed by the concept of racial segregation. Embodying most of the recommendations of the Commission, the Land Apportionment Act was passed in 1930 and brought into force the following year. It restricted the African rights of land ownership to designated Native Purchase Areas. How the land apportionment stood in 1930 is shown in table 1.
As is clear from the figures above, the African population, numbering 1,081,000 in 1930, received 29.8% of the land, while the settler population, numbering a mere 50,000 then, received 51%. It is no surprise then that, as a result of this skewed, and wickedly unjust land distribution, by the late 1930s African agriculture was condemned to subsistence levels. What had by all accounts been a prosperous agricultural region was reduced to misery and destitution - a veritable hell for the Africans. By contrast, the prosperity and the wealth of the tiny settler population multiplied inversely to the meanness and misery of the existence of the African masses.
The ending of the Second World War was accompanied by another wave of European immigration into Southern Rhodesia, resulting in the trebling of the white population from 80,500 in 1945 to 219,000 by 1960. As many of the new immigrants took to farming, the number of Europeans owning or working farms nearly doubled during this period from 4,673 to 8,632. This in turn led to further evictions, forced removals and expropriation of the blacks to make way for the newcomers - a process very similar to that put into effect by the Zionists in Israel/Palestine during precisely the same period. During the decade 1945-55, conservative estimates suggest that at least 100,000 Africans were forced out of their land into the most inhospitable of Reserves - there to rot and eke out a miserable existence.
To add insult to injury, the white racist minority regime, having first created the conditions of overcrowding and degradation of land in the Reserves through a policy of segregation and brutal expropriation, then blamed the Africans for that state of affairs. That was precisely the meaning of the Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951, which was passed for the purpose of compelling the Africans to practise de-stocking and conservation measures on their land - measures which their conditions of existence would simply not allow.
The shocking state of affairs in the overcrowded Reserves so alarmed even the Catholic church, that Donal Lamont, the Bishop of Umtali, was constrained to ask in 1959: "Can you in conscience blame the African, if eking out a tenuous existence from the poor soil in an overcrowded Reserve, he is swayed by subversive propaganda, while close beside him there lie hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile soil which he may not cultivate, not occupy, not grace, because although it lies unused and unattended, it belongs to some individual or group of individuals who perhaps do not use the land in the hope of profit from speculation?"
Rhodesia Front Government
With the onset of the Rhodesia Front government in 1962, even the pretence of any concern for African welfare was dropped. The policy of segregation, forced removals and brutal evictions was practised to perfection. The year 1969 witnessed the enactment of the Land Tenure Act. While it repealed the Land Apportionment Act, it re-enacted and strengthened further still the latter's provisions apportioning land in half - with each race getting 44.9 million acres. With whites, constituting less than 5% of the Rhodesian population at the time, receiving 50% of the country's best and most fertile land, and the blacks, accounting for more than 95% of the population, securing 50% of the country's poor soil, situated in areas of low rainfall, the conditions of overcrowding, overstocking, reduced agricultural productivity, horrendous poverty and environmental damage reached monumental proportions in the communal areas.
Thus is can be seen, that the loss of their land is not a matter of the distant past for the Zimbabwean masses. For many of them it is but a living memory. Equally many of the white farmers were granted large territories following the Second World War in recognition of their services during the war. Peta Thorneycroft and Doris Lessing, be it said in passing, are the daughters of RAF officers who were the lucky beneficiaries of this land loot.
Second Chimurenga
These miserable and pestiferously pestilential conditions of existence that passed for life could not, and did not, fail to cause outrage among the African masses.
It was against this background of expropriation, of forced existence in overcrowded Reserves with little in the way of health and education facilities, of being made to feel foreign in their own country, of having to put up with hellish conditions while a tiny minority of Europeans lived in a veritable paradise lording it over the African masses of Zimbabwe, that the latter, under the leadership of ZANU, embarked upon the Second Chimurenga. Land figured most prominently during this struggle, the chief aim of the liberation struggle being, in addition to the achievement of political independence, the restoration to the African people of land stolen from them at gunpoint by a tiny group of European settlers. "Mwana Wevhu" (Child of the Soil) was the rallying cry of the nationalists in the years preceding the Second Chimurenga. This is how, Herbert Chitepo, the national chairman of ZANU, with his characteristic ability to hit the nail on the head, put it: "I could go into the whole theories of discrimination, in legislation, in residency, in economic opportunities, in education. I could go into that, but I will restrict myself to the question of land because I think this is very basic. To us the essence of exploitation, the essence of white domination, is domination over land. That is the real issue" (Herbert Chitepo, Speech on a trip to Australia, 1973).
Such was the centrality of the land question that all attempts at resolution of the Zimbabwe question that did not address this issue failed. The failure of the Geneva Conference in 1976 and the Malta talks in 1978 can largely be explained by their inability to tackle the land issue. Without an understanding of the land question, the Lancaster House Conference would have shared the fate of earlier attempts and ended up in failure.
The very first attempt at coming to terms with the reality by the US and British governments emerged in 1977, when Dr David Owen, British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, and Andrew Young, US Ambassador to the UN, presented the 'Anglo-American' proposals, accompanied by pledges to set up a fund for compensation to white farmers for the loss of land at the hands of a future government of independent Zimbabwe. Under these proposals, the UK was to provide £75 million and the US $520 million. Earlier, in 1976, Dr Henry Kissinger's proposals for the resolution of the Zimbabwe question very much depended on the provision of $2 billion by the US for the purposes of buying out the settlers and resettling the Africans on land thus made available.
Lancaster House Conference
It was the promise given by the government of the UK, with the support of the US government, to set up a fund for financing the purchase of land from the white settlers, which made it possible for the Lancaster House Conference to succeed and enable the Patriotic Front (PF) to make the following statement on the final agreement: "We have obtained assurances that … Britain, the United States and other countries will participate in a multinational donor effort to assist in land, agricultural and economic development programmes. These assurances go a long way in allaying the great concern we have over the whole land question arising from the great need our people have for land and our commitment to satisfy that need when in government".
Without such an understanding, without the above commitment given by the British and the US governments, it would have been impossible for the leadership of the PF to have accepted, let alone successfully sold to the Zimbabwean people, the agreement reached at Lancaster House. The people of Zimbabwe, who had lost 40,000 lives and undergone much hardship and suffering during the war of liberation, would have fought in vain if a mere 4,500 farmers were to be left in possession in perpetuity of half the country's best land.
At Independence in April 1980 (just as at the time of the Lancaster House Conference), the land distribution in Zimbabwe is shown in Chart 1:
A mere 6,000 European large-scale commercial farmers could not be left to hold 15.5 million hectares, while 4.3 million black people were condemned to a hard slog on 16.4 million hectares of poor soil in overcrowded conditions.
This fact was not lost on even the British government. Lord Carrington, who chaired the Lancaster House Conference, in a statement released on 11 October 1979, clearly recognised the crucial significance of the land question and the "substantial" resources needed to redress the colonial legacy on the land question: "We recognise that the future government of Zimbabwe, whatever its political complexion, will wish to extend land ownership. The costs would be very substantial indeed, well beyond the capacity, in our judgment of any individual donor country, and the British Government cannot commit itself at this stage to a specific share in them. We should however be ready to support the efforts of the Government of Independent Zimbabwe to obtain international assistance for these purposes" (emphasis added).
Lancaster House deal - a messy compromise
For all the commitment made by the British/US governments, the Lancaster House deal was a messy compromise, which obliged the future government of an independent Zimbabwe to resort to the most expensive course of buying out white farmers piecemeal on the principle of willing seller/willing buyer. In addition, it was only too likely that the settlers would not part with prime land, with the government ending up buying less fertile pieces of land dotted all over the country, rendering any meaningful land reform planning and land use virtually impossible. Compulsory acquisition of land by the government was the obvious solution to the problem.
On 16 October 1979, Julius Nyerere, the then president of Tanzania expressed his view on the land question, saying that it would be impossible for a government in a free Zimbabwe "To tax Zimbabweans in order to compensate people who took it away from them through the gun. Really the British cannot have it both ways. They made this an issue and they are now making vague remarks mixing rural development aid with the question of land compensation. … The two are separate. … The British paid money to Kenya. That the future Government of Zimbabwe must pay compensation is a British demand and the British must promise in London to make the money available" (cited in the Utete Report, p.17).
At the Lancaster House Conference, Britain, far from being an impartial broker, was mainly concerned to achieve three objectives:
Put an end to the armed liberation struggle led by the Patriotic Front;
Safeguard British economic interests, white-owned land ownership included; and
Maintain the continuation of British influence in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe.
With the aim of achieving the above objectives through the Lancaster House Agreement, Britain obtained the disarmament and demobilisation of the ZANLA and ZIPRA forces under a British dominated Commonwealth Monitoring Force; guaranteed 20% representation in parliament to the white minority, accounting for a mere 1% of the population, for a period of 7 years; and blocked radical land reform for 10 years by enshrining the willing seller/willing buyer principle. During the ten-year period, the constitution could not be changed except with a 100% vote for the change, thus giving the white minority a complete veto in violation of all democratic norms.
The UK was eventually to pay £40 million - a paltry and grossly inadequate sum. This money was dispensed under the most difficult of conditions for Zimbabwe, for the latter had first to find funds for the purchase of land and then claim the money at the end of each year from the British government which, after scrutinising the books, would reimburse the Zimbabwean government on a 50-50 basis. Zimbabwe had to find a pound for every pound dispensed by Britain. In the end, the cash-strapped Zimbabwe government could continue no more with this arrangement, given the heavy demands on its resources from the needs of rehabilitation and reconstruction in the aftermath of the decade and a half of the war of liberation. By way of illustrating the paltry nature of the funds given by Britain to Zimbabwe, let it be said in passing that a whole 20 years earlier, the British government had paid £200 million to resolve a similar land problem in Kenya.
Under the Lancaster House constitutional dispensation, which made a sharp radical land reform all but impossible, between 1980 and 1990 the government of Zimbabwe managed to acquire only 3.5 million hectares and resettle 71,000 households. The communal areas continued, as heretofore, to be overcrowded, overstocked and overgrazed. The government was under great pressure to do something about the land problem - and do it fast.
With the aim of accelerating the mechanism of land acquisition and resettlement, the government secured the enactment of the Land Acquisition Act, subsequent to the introduction in 1990 of Constitutional Amendment Number 11, both of which had the effect of releasing the government from the vice-like grip of the willing seller/willing buyer provision.
However, besides being expensive, the new process ground to a halt largely because of the fierce resistance of the commercial farmers. When, in December 1997, the government designated 1,471 farms for compulsory acquisition, 1,393 objections were lodged, of which 510 were upheld.
In sheer frustration at the antics of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), the late Joshua Nkomo pleaded with them in these reasonable terms: "I don't think we are being unreasonable if we say you commercial farmers, who own the best and the bulk of Zimbabwe's land because of history, should share part of it with the indigenous, displaced and landless blacks who are the majority" (Joshua Nkomo, addressing commercial farms in Matabeleland, Zimbabwean Sunday Mail, 9 July 1989).
But to no avail. Confident of the support of imperialism, especially Anglo-American imperialism, the white farmers continued to be defiant and arrogant. Till the last, they insisted on being Rhodesians (Rhodies), refusing to behave as the citizens of the new Zimbabwe.
In 1996, a mission sent to Zimbabwe by the then British Prime Minister, John Major, reported back, recommending further assistance.
Labour government
reneges on Britain's obligations
However, in the May 1997 election, Major's Conservative Party was defeated, making way for Tony Blair's Labour government. On being approached by the Zimbabwean government, to bring to fruition the discussions initiated during the previous Conservative government, the Blair administration reneged entirely on Britain's Lancaster House undertakings to assist with Zimbabwe's land reform programme. Clare Short, the then newly appointed Secretary of State for International Development, in a letter dated 5 November 1997, wrote in these arrogant and patronising terms to Zimbabwe's minister of Agriculture and Land, Kumbirai Kangai: "I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new Government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers".
Clare Short went on to say that her government would find it "impossible" to support "… a programme of rapid land acquisition as you now seem to envisage", for such a programme would do damage "to Zimbabwe's agricultural output" and undermine "investor confidence".
Clare Short's letter was greeted with delirious joy and jubilation by the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) in Zimbabwe, for it effectively signalled an end to compensation money and, therefore, in their eyes, an end to land distribution. However, David Hasluck, who had been the Director of the CFU for 18 long years (1984-2002), was roused to anger by Short's letter to say: "I believe a Conservative government would never have done that … Clare Short knows damn well that there was a land issue at Lancaster House, how can she write a letter like that and expect to go forward?" (Exclusive interview published in New African Magazine, February 2003).
In this instance, it is extremely instructive that even Roelf-Pik Botha, foreign minister of apartheid South Africa from 1977 to 1994, concedes that on the land question it is Britain, not President Mugabe and his government, which must take the lion's share of the blame. In his article which appeared on 8 April 2004 in South Africa's This Day newspaper, subsequently reproduced in 25 April issue of Zimbabwe's Sunday Mirror, he reveals, inter alia, the following truths - dispelling the myths propagated by British imperialism:
"Much of what went wrong in Zimbabwe is attributed to Mugabe's seizure of white commercial farms.
"In my opinion, Her Britannic Majesty's government shares part of the blame. The land issue has a long history. After missing out on the Witwatersrand gold rush, Cecil John Rhodes was irresistibly attracted by reports that King Lobengula's Matabeleland was rich in gold.
"He extorted a concession from Lobengula which enabled him to obtain a Royal Charter for his British South African Company (BSAC) with mischievous objectives. One of Rhodes' buddies, someone called Leander Starr Jameson, led British troops on a plundering invasion of the vast regions north of the Limpopo.
"The force occupied Mashonaland in 1890, establishing Salisbury as their headquarters.
"In 1893 Jameson took Bulawayo, deploying their deadly machine guns against the Ndebele fighters.
"The same Jameson led an invasion into Paul Kruger's Zulu-Afrikaanache Republick after Rhodes realised the republic would have far more rewarding loot than Mashonaland and Matabeleland.
"According to Terence Ranger of Oxford, most of the seizures of land in Zimbabwe by white settlers took place between 1898 and 1923. The pillaging of land in Zimbabwe under British colonial rule left scars which fuel black demands for restitution.
"The skewed distribution of land in Zimbabwe featured as a serious subject at the Lancaster House negotiations in 1979 in which Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe, Ian Smith and Bishop Abel Muzorewa played the key roles under the chairmanship of the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Peter Carrington. As a result of my close involvement in negotiations between the British and Smith governments, I got to know Carrington very well.
"A breakdown in the Lancaster House negotiations was threatening at one stage and I was requested to go to London to persuade Smith and Muzorewa not to pull out of the talks.
"It was a hard day's work. I succeeded after explaining to them at length that the alternatives were 'too ghastly to contemplate'.
"I clearly remember that I pointed out to Carrington the determinative importance of a commitment on the part of Britain to pay for the adjustment of disproportional land ownership. The British government agreed to make funds available for buying white farms".
Botha then goes on to advise Britain not to shoot "straight from the hip" and instead to pursue the path of negotiations. He adds with great candour that "To shout at Mugabe publicly .. will not persuade him to change his ways. He believes he is on top of the world, a respectable and competent leader. He believes that he is being persecuted by other colonial powers for implementing a fair and reasonable land reform policy. And he is not alone in believing this. His popularity has been demonstrated repeatedly at meetings of African organisations".
Clear, we think.
Background to the Fast Track Land and Agrarian Reform Programme
July 2000 - August 2002
Zimbabweans were stunned by Clare Short's letter, repudiating all British obligations under the Lancaster House Agreement. What is more, it could not have come at a worse time, for its arrival coincided with growing restlessness in the ranks of the land-hungry Zimbabwean peasantry. The latter, in an effort to put pressure on the government, resorted to militant protests and land occupations. On 11 August 1997, on the anniversary of Heroes' Day, there was a militant demonstration outside the Heroes' Acre - the final resting place of the prominent heroes of the war of liberation. In the wake of the application of Structural Adjustment Programmes during most of the decade of 1990s, on top of a decline in wages there was a decline in industry, which shrank from 25% of the GDP to just 16% - a decline which worsened the situation on the employment front. Meanwhile, war veterans bestirred themselves, culminating in the formation in 1996/97 of the War Veterans' Association. The question of land was increasingly being taken up spontaneously by the poor and land-hungry Zimbabweans. Since 8 million of the 13 million population of the country live in rural areas on congested reserves and Tribal Trust Lands, the government could ignore this question only at its own peril.
In June 1998, in an unprecedented move, the villagers in Svosve communal areas occupied Igava farm and pledged not to leave until they received a written undertaking from the government to settle them. The Svosve incident was only a prelude to similar widespread occupations of commercial farms at Nayamadhlovu in Matabeleland, Nyamajura in Manicaland and Nemamva in Masvingo. Although, with great reluctance, the peasants obeyed the government's order to vacate the occupied farms, the first salvo by the land-starved peasantry had been fired. The government could not ignore these actions, more of which were to follow.
The response of the British government to the designation by the Zimbabwean government in 1997 of nearly 1,500 farms was predictably hostile. And it could not be otherwise, for any attempt to correct a historical injustice of such proportions was bound to meet with fierce resistance of vested interests of the European land-owning gentry, which boasted among its ranks some members of the British House of Lords and other members of the British political elite, who owned vast areas of land in Zimbabwe as absentee landlords. A mere 4,500 white farmers and absentee landlords possessed as much land, only more fertile and productive, as the 13 million blacks.
Imperialist circles responded to the actions of the Zimbabwe government with a crescendo of abuse, denunciation and dire threats - accusing the Zimbabwe government of violating human and property rights, thus portraying the victims as villains, while working all the time for the maintenance of privilege in the name of human rights, rule of law and good governance. These imperialist outcries are best answered in the following words of Dr.I.S.G. Mudenge, Foreign Minister of Zimbabwe: "Whilst there was never an outcry over the violation of the human and property rights of the indigenous blacks by the white settlers, the British authorities have suddenly become the champions of human rights now that their colonial injustices are being corrected, and their kith and kin are losing their colonial heritage of white privileges. The black majority, who are the victims, are now being portrayed as the villains".
Britain scuppers all attempts at an agreed solution
Meanwhile, the Zimbabwean government persisted in its efforts to solve the land question amicably. To that end, it convened a Land Donors' Conference in Harare between 9 and 11 September 1998.
In his inaugural address to the Conference, President Mugabe was doing no more than painting a realistic picture of the state of affairs in the Zimbabwean countryside when he warned: "If we delay in resolving the land needs of our people they will resettle themselves. It has happened before and it may happen again" (cited in Utete).
No less then 48 countries, including Britain, and a few international organisations were represented at the Conference, which agreed upon a package of basic principles and a framework for international assistance for Zimbabwe's Land Reform Programme. The donors made promises to finance an Inception Phase, which was to be carried out in the first 18 to 24 months. This was to be followed by Phase II of a similarly donor-backed land acquisition and settlement programme.
However, owing largely to British opposition, none of the pledges of financial support given at this Conference were honoured. Adopting deliberately dilatory tactics, Britain refused to join the task force agreed to be set up to work out the modalities for the two-year Inception Phase and scuttled the agreement concluded at the Harare Donors' Conference. Britain was subsequently to use the pretext of "land invasions" for its refusal to back the land reform programme. The truth, however, is that these invasions did not commence in earnest until March 2000.
Zimbabwe made two further attempts at resolution of this question through the involvement of the UN and the Commonwealth. In September 2000, as a result of a meeting in New York between President Mugabe and Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, a Technical Mission under the aegis of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was despatched to Harare in October of the same year. In the end nothing came of this effort largely because of the dilatory tactics adopted by the UNDP, which were aimed chiefly at getting the government of Zimbabwe to abandon its Fast Track programme of land reform.
Likewise, nothing came of the Nigerian initiative, for the agreement hammered out by a committee of 9 Commonwealth Foreign Ministers at its meeting of 6-7 September 2001 in Abuja was frustrated by Britain's refusal to honour the commitments it made at Abuja.
Meanwhile, in February 2000, the government organised a referendum on a Draft Constitution which, if approved, could have furnished the basis for a durable solution of the land question. But the Draft Constitution was rejected to a large extent because of imperialist inspired and sponsored opposition. This constitution provided that there would be no compensation for land, but only for improvements.
Fast Track Land Reform and Resettlement Programme
Thwarted thus at every step by the combined forces of imperialism and its stooges in Zimbabwe, ranging from the powerful European commercial farmers to the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change, a party sprung into existence by imperialism), and the rejection of the Draft Constitution, the government of Zimbabwe had no course open to it other than that of resorting to truly radical measures to solve the land issue if it wanted to honour the aims of the liberation struggle.
Even the Zimbabwe Catholics' Conference stated, as early as 1989, that "A war was fought and blood was spilt over the ownership of land. Lasting peace and prosperity can only be achieved if the land is shared equitably" (quoted in the Zimbabwean Sunday Mirror, 27 October - 2 November 2000).
The Zimbabwean government was further encouraged in this direction by the actions of the war veterans who, realising that imperialism and its stooges were hell-bent on scuppering the land reform programme, and being frustrated at the slow legalistic approach of the government, took matters into their own hands and, together with the peasants who had long attempted to occupy land, moved on to the white-owned farms.
Faced with this reality, the government could either endorse the actions of the war veterans and the peasantry, or use armed force to evict them and thus risk a bloody confrontation with erstwhile combatants. The latter would have been too ghastly for the government to even contemplate as the police and the army are headed by the former national liberation fighters. After all, far from being guilty of treasonable actions, the heroes of the war of liberation and the wider peasant masses were only attempting to correct a gross historical injustice.
The situation required urgent action by the government. To its great credit, the government of President Mugabe responded by the adoption of the Fast-Track Land Reform and Resettlement Programme (hereafter FTP) for the resettlement of the Zimbabwean peasantry, which had been starved of land for an entire century. The FTP began on 15 July 2000.
The fact that the FTP was being carried out under the legal framework of Zimbabwe did not prevent a ginger group of farmers of the CFU from resorting to the courts in a last ditch effort to prevent land reform being carried out.
Commenting on the activities and arrogance of this group of extremely reactionary white farmers, operating under the name of Justice for Agriculture (JAG), David Hasluck, made this pertinent observation: "But there is no point, in reality, no matter how much you believe in the law, to go to court and ask for something you are not going to get. Because the Chave Chimurenga is not about the law and the courts, it is about the revolution and the historic right that Clare Short says she doesn't acknowledge" (cited in Mudenge)
In the light of the foregoing, it must be stressed that the motive force behind the land distribution enterprise was the land-hungry peasant masses, who spearhead this campaign - not the government of Zimbabwe, nor ZANU(PF). All that the government did was, through its FTP, to attempt to manage the process in an orderly way by outlining the criteria for land designation and acquisition. Of course, no revolutionary process can be run to order, without infringement of rules and criteria, no matter how carefully crafted and managed. That is in the very nature of such a historical upheaval. In the words of Dr. Mudenge: "That a number of these control fences (criteria) erected by Government ended up being overrun in the process is now history, and is easily explainable on the basis of the century-long wait that the people of Zimbabwe were subjected to, as well as the attendant emotional, even sentimental attachment that the people of Zimbabwe have towards land, be it on the grounds of national sovereignty and pride, or colonial heritage".
It would have been a matter of eternal shame for a government headed by ZANU(PF), the leader of the successful war of liberation, to have left the land issue unresolved and have let a tiny minority of settlers monopolise the Zimbabwean soil. If we are to reproach the Zimbabwean government, should it in fact not be for not undertaking this land reform many years earlier? President Mugabe understood well the centrality of the land question as the key to the solution of other social, economic and political problems in Zimbabwe. Addressing a gathering of Catholics in Harare, on 30 July 2001, this is what he had to say on the question under consideration: "As in the past, the basis of conflict in contemporary Zimbabwe is the unresolved national question of land. It is also the basis of peace and all other rights that we wish for in a democracy. Its solution would enable us to end the two-nation, two-race model we inherited from colonialism. It would create opportunities for everyone and give a stake to the majority of our people, indeed it is the way to the recovery of our economy. This is why Land Reform is at the heart of the current struggle. We cannot relent on this one and we hope the Church will stand with and by us in resolving it" (cited in Utete).
Under the FTP, the government pursued the policy of speedy identification for compulsory acquisition of not less than 5 million hectares of land for resettlement, the provision of basic infrastructure (boreholes, dip tanks and approach roads) and support services (tillage and agricultural inputs), creation of secondary infrastructure (schools, clinics and rural service centres), and simultaneous resettlement in all parts of the country to ensure the even and comprehensive implementation of the programme.
Initially the FTP was aimed at relieving the communal lands of overcrowding. It was later extended to include the creation of an indigenous commercial farming sector.
Identification
Under the FTP, compulsory acquisition of land took place in accordance with the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act, with the following categories of land being targeted for acquisition.
Derelict and under-utilised land;
Land under multiple ownership;
Foreign owned land;
Land contiguous to communal areas.
Excluded categories
Plantations engaged in large-scale production of tea, coffee, citrus fruit, sugar cane, etc.;
Agro-industrial properties engaged in the integrated production, processing and/or marketing of poultry, beef and dairy products, and seed multiplication;
Properties with Export Processing Zone (EPZ) permits and those with Zimbabwe Investment Centre (ZIC) certificates;
Farms belonging to Church and mission organisations;
Farms subject to Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements.
One-man-one-farm
Under the FTP, the government opted for the policy of one-man-one-farm. In the event of the only farm owned by an individual being acquired owing to its contiguity to a communal area, the farmer thus affected was granted another farm elsewhere. Landowners were also given the option to offer land in substitution for that identified for compulsory acquisition. Equally, if a landowner possessed a single farm, but in excess of the maximum allowed size, he could offer to subdivide it and hand over the relevant portion to the authorities.
Two Models
Under the FTP, two resettlement models were used. Whereas Model A1 was aimed at ridding the communal lands of overcrowding, Model A2 pursued the aim of indigenisation, that of creating a class of black commercial farmers. Model A1, being for the benefit of the generally landless peasantry has a villagised and self-contained variant, whereas Model A2 is divided into small, medium and large-scale commercial settlements.
Although it has been claimed in the imperialist print and electronic media that vast amounts of land had been seized from the European settlers and made over to Mr Mugabe's cronies. This is utterly untrue. The commercial sector aimed at preserving commercial farming and indigenising land ownership was open to any black Zimbabwean who could satisfy the designated strict criteria of eligibility. Just as many government supporters have received land under this scheme, so have the opponents of the government, including the Secretary General of the MDC, Welshman Ncube. Some privileged people defrauded their way into more than one farm, but they were exposed and had to return the excess land. Following the Utete Report two provincial governors lost their jobs. Mr Kaukonde, of the ZANU(PF) and Chairman of the Finance and Budget Committee, firmly stated that in Central Mashonaland there would be no land granted under Model A2 until Model A1 had been satisfactorily completed in his province.
Equally, contrary to claims in the imperialist media that all European farmers have had their farms confiscated, there are today approximately 850 European farmers, with one commercial farm each, who continue to farm and live in Zimbabwe.
The Utete Committee
The government of Zimbabwe set up the Presidential Land Review Committee under the chairmanship of Dr Charles Utete (the Utete Committee), which concluded its work and submitted its findings and recommendations in August 2003. After a careful study of this report, President Mugabe appointed a Land Review Implementation Committee to supervise the timely implementation of the recommendations of the Utete Committee.
The Utete Committee concluded that at the close of the FTP in August 2003, throughout the country a total of 2,652 farms with a combined hectarage of 4,231,080 had been allocated to 127,192 households under Model A1, while under Model A2, a total of 1,672 farms, accounting for 2,198,814 hectares, had been allotted to 7,260 applicant beneficiaries.
According to the figures contained in the presentation of Dr J.M.M. Made to the April (20-23) 2004 Conference in Harare, organised by the External Relations Department of ZANU(PF) under the title 'The Liberation Struggle Continues', between July 2000 and March 2004, the government had acquired 11 million hectares for resettling 500,000 families, of which 300,000 families had already been settled to date - all in the face of the "fiercest resistance from the British and Europeans using the local white owners".
Taking the 24 years since Independence (April 1980 to April 2004), a total of 9,154 settler farms, covering an area of 17,403,232 hectares have been purchased or compulsorily acquired by the government for resettlement purposes. Of these, all but 1,736 farms, covering an area of 3,554,534 hectares, were acquired between 2000 and 2004.
The Land Review Implementation Committee has thus far repossessed land in excess of 45,000 hectares from those who had managed to acquire more than one farm. This land is set to be reallocated to traditional leaders to help the further decongestion of communal areas, as well as to those who qualified under Model A2 but have received no land so far.
All the buildings under Model A1 resettlement are turned into government property and reserved for use as schools, clinics and community centres. As for the Model A2 farms, the infrastructure belongs to the beneficiaries of the farm, with an obligation on their part to permit other farmers on the same farm the use of this infrastructure on a cost recovery basis.
Imperialist response to the Fast Track Land Reform and Resettlement Programme (FTP)
The imperialist response to the land acquisition programme in Zimbabwe was violently hostile. Britain, the US and the EU launched a concerted hate campaign to intimidate and destabilise Zimbabwe, to ruin its economy and to remove ZANU(PF) from the seat of power - especially President Mugabe. They accused the Zimbabwean government of poor government, economic mismanagement, corruption, human rights violations, political violence and intimidation, abolishing press freedom and rigging elections. The list of Zimbabwe's alleged crimes is endless. Turning facts on their head, the defenders of monopolist privileges were conducting a malicious campaign of lies against a regime which was valiantly, and successfully at that, getting rid of the monopolisation of Zimbabwe's land by a tiny group of settlers. They damned the land reform programme as the politics of lunacy and the economics of suicide.
The British government intensified its efforts to isolate Zimbabwe by enlisting the help of the US, the EU, the Commonwealth, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the AU and a host of other organisations where Britain wielded any influence. Mugabe and his 'wild' war veterans were by their actions hurting British interests, influence and prestige. They had at one stroke rendered nugatory all the gains made by Britain at Lancaster House; therefore they could not be allowed to succeed. What is more, their example could prove dangerously infectious in the neighbouring countries (South Africa and Namibia), where land ownership is similarly skewed, consequent upon the ravages of colonialism and the colonial legacy inherited by the newly independent regimes. Zimbabwe's open flouting of one of the most scared principles of capitalism, that of private property and the right to exploit (the only true 'human rights' in the capitalist code of morality) outraged the economic, political and intellectual representatives of capitalism in the imperialist countries without exception.
In violation of the accepted procedures of that organisation, Britain was instrumental in securing the suspension of Zimbabwe, in March 2002, from that hangover of the colonial era - the Commonwealth. In the end, when that suspension was confirmed (7 December 2003) Zimbabwe, angered by the discriminatory treatment it received, quite correctly and wisely decided to quit this organisation.
German imperialism joins the fray
German imperialism, fearful of the Zimbabwe example spreading to Namibia, a former German colony where white farmers of German descent own vast amounts of land, joined the Zimbabwe hate campaign, through the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FEF) which worked out a strategy and a detailed plan for the removal of the ZANU(PF) government and President Mugabe. Written by its Director in Zimbabwe, and entitled Zimbabwe - a Conflict Study of a Country Without Direction, the FEF report was presented to the EU's Africa Working Group (AWG) in December 1998, to serve as a basis for recommending action on Zimbabwe.
With great candour, this report singled out Zimbabwe's land reform programme and its support for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as the reasons for hostility towards the Zimbabwean regime. In addition it blamed all the real and imaginary ills of Zimbabwe on its government, especially on Robert Mugabe, adding arrogantly that to put matters right, the ZANU(PF) government and President Mugabe had to go - either voluntarily or be forced out. To that end, the report outlined a programme of engineering economic decline in Zimbabwe to produce hardship and civil disturbances and thus make the country ungovernable. Tellingly, the report stated: "without economic deterioration, there would hardly be any social protest"; "without social protest, there would be no pressure for political change"; and "without political change, the economic issues cannot be effectively addressed".
Cooperation between government and media
The British media, including especially the BBC, so keen on presenting itself as the guardian of gospel truth and objectivity, naturally collaborated with the British government's Zimbabwe hate campaign. Nor could it be otherwise, for the 'free' media are owned by financial magnates, and exist to protect the interests of the kings of finance and robber barons of monopoly capitalism, and not in the furtherance of truth. In close cooperation, the government and the media coordinated a plan for the removal of the government of Zimbabwe and President Mugabe through a scurrilous campaign of lies, slander and vilification against the Zimbabwean leadership; economic sabotage; inciting civil disturbances and ethnic strife; fomenting a coup d'état; attempting a split within ZANU(PF); and assisting the founding of a new opposition party.
Richard Dowden, Editor of the Economist, in an article in November 1998, outlined a plan for the removal of the government, suggesting "developments along Indonesian lines", with a worsening economy, growing mass dissatisfaction, a possible five-day strike by trade unions to demand early elections. He added that if "… the government banned the unions and arrested their leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, furious crowds would take to the streets. After bloodshed the government might fall". He went on for good measure: "or there could be a palace coup against Mr Mugabe … one faction could conceivably decide to seize power".
This same Dowden played a leading role at a meeting, on 24 January 1999, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House under the provocative title: Zimbabwe - Time for Mugabe to Go. Having identified the land reform programme and the dispatch of troops by Zimbabwe to the DRC as the cause of the organisers' hostility towards Zimbabwe, the meeting rehearsed the already enumerated scenario for the removal of President Mugabe and his regime.
A seminar with the similar counter-revolutionary aim of overthrowing the Zimbabwean government was held two months later, on 23 March 1999, at the US State Department under the title Zimbabwe at the Crossroads. The plan of action elaborated at this gathering was little different from that described above.
Zimbabwe Democracy Trust and Westminster Foundation for Democracy
A year later, in April 2000, Morgan Tsvangirai visited Britain ostensibly for fund-raising purposes. During this visit, a letter in support of the MDC appeared in The Times - the list of signatories to this letter is a veritable Who's Who of leading counter-revolutionary spokesmen of imperialism, including three former British Foreign Secretaries - Lord Howe, Lord Carrington, Lady Chalker of Wallasey, Malcolm Rifkind, Douglas Hurd (all former ministers under Margaret Thatcher), former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker, and Evelyn de Rothschild from the notorious banking family. Several of these signatories are members of the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy Trust (ZDT), a select group of top British and US politicians and fabulously rich businessmen, some of them with direct economic interests in Zimbabwe. ZDT has advised and funded the MDC extensively. The British government, through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), which received 95% of its funds from the British government and whose governing body is graced by the representatives of the three major bourgeois parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat), with Tony Blair as its patron, also provided funds to the MDC.
Double standards
The above imperialist-orchestrated campaign has given rise to the application of double standards in judging events in Zimbabwe. If there are food shortages in Zimbabwe, these are attributed to the land reform programme. The truth, however, is that as a result of the severe drought conditions for two consecutive years, there were crop failures in several countries in southern Africa. As a result, many countries - not just Zimbabwe - suffered from food shortages. If the imperialist stooges of the MDC are defeated in the elections, that must be because of rigging. The truth is that no election in Zimbabwe would be regarded by imperialism as free and fair unless ZANU(PF) and President Mugabe lost it. Everywhere in the world, including Britain, authorities require advance notification of any planned demonstrations, for reasons of public order as well as traffic control. In the case of Zimbabwe, such requirements are condemned as attempts to deny the right to free assembly and demonstrate. The requirement for newspapers and journalists to register, while a common practice in practically every country, in the case of Zimbabwe is regarded as an infringement of freedom of the press. And so it goes on.
Thus Zimbabwe, its government, and its president, are subjected to this vile campaign of lies, of vitriol and vituperation, of economic sabotage and sanctions. Through its economic sanctions, on the one hand, imperialism damages the economy of Zimbabwe and, on the other hand, blames Zimbabwe's economic mismanagement for the intended harmful consequences of its own deliberate acts of economic strangulation. The programmes of the Voice of America's Studio 7 radio, and that of the UK-based SW Radio Africa, daily and hourly beam scandalous broadcasts to Zimbabwe calculated to rouse dissent, disaffection and rebellion among the Zimbabwean masses against their government.
All the same, Zimbabwe has managed to survive and come out of this baptism of fire much steeled and much strengthened. No matter what happens, the land question has been decisively settled in favour of the peasant masses of Zimbabwe. The land will remain with them, never to return to a handful of European settlers.
However, to achieve this victory, ZANU(PF), the government of Zimbabwe and President Mugabe, had to have nerves of steel, display great vigilance inside the country and wage a vigorous offensive abroad to keep on board its foreign friends. In the words of comrade Mudenge: "The media war of 'awe, terror and saturation bombing' was unleashed on little Zimbabwe by the bully boys of the West. It is a mark of the maturity of SADC, AU and NAM [Non-aligned Movement] that they have remained solidly behind Zimbabwe in spite of the above onslaught, as well as blandishments and at times naked political and economic pressure. Britain could not successfully spread its hate message beyond the white-race solidarity grouping. The majority in the international community supported Zimbabwe. To survive Zimbabwe had to win the battle for international opinion".
The Role of Social Democracy and Trotskyism
Social democracy, both 'left' and right, and its variant, Trotskyism, have played, not unexpectedly, a most shameful role on the question of Zimbabwe, in particular its land reform programme. With the collapse of the former USSR, 'left' social democracy and Trotskyism, throwing off their radical 'left', even Marxian mask, have degenerated into being cheer-leaders of imperialist aggression and open advocates of neo-liberalism, in which guise present-day imperialism attacks the working class and the national liberation movements. They have become the new missionaries of democracy and fervent supporters of the selective application of the doctrines of human rights and good governance, which are applied by the imperialist countries to gauge the creditworthiness or otherwise of the poor nations through the WB/IMF combine - behind which stand the giant monopoly corporations which are firmly rooted in the centres of imperialism. In the apt words of comrade Mudenge: "Is it not ironic that the values of democracy for which the people of southern Africa fought and died, are now being abused and subverted into instruments of their conquest and re-conquest?" (Western Socialists' view of ex-liberation movements, hereafter, WS).
We have already cited the November 1997 letter of Clare Short, the darling of the Troto-revisionist gentry. On the question of Zimbabwe's land reform programme, the most vehement opponents of this programme in the European Parliament are led by Glenys Kinnock, wife of the former Labour leader - not by any Conservative or Liberal Democrat. The British Labour government set itself the task of engineering the downfall of the ZANU(PF) government and that of President Mugabe. During her one-day visit to Zimbabwe in early January 1998, Clare Short behaved haughtily, refusing to meet any Zimbabwean official other than the Finance Minister, Dr Herbert Murerwa, who had been his country's High Commissioner in London. Later in the day she attended a reception at the residence of Jim Drummond, head of the British Department for International Development (DFID) in Harare. As she waddled about the lawn, within earshot of DFID officials, she provocatively remarked that "Mugabe should be overthrown!" These are the four words with which British imperialism, through one of its most loyal flunkey Labour ministers, announced to the world its intention to destabilise Zimbabwe as a prelude to the overthrow of its government and its president.
Manipulation of trade unions
Being unable to exert pressure on the governments led by the leaders of the former liberation movements, and taking their cue from the counter-revolutionary role played by Lech Walecha's Solidarity in Poland, and in view of the baleful influence exercised by the British TUC and its counterparts in other imperialist countries over the trade union movements in former colonies, the advocates of regime change in Zimbabwe and elsewhere resorted to subverting trade unions in these countries by identifying trade union leaders who could be used as tools for replacing independent regimes with those compliant to imperialist demands. Thus, Frederick Chiluba in Zambia, Chakufwa Chihana in Malawi, Ben Ulenga in Namibia, Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, and Morgan Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe, were singled out for the role of suitable flunkeys of imperialism, and whose trade union connections and positions could be used in the furtherance of imperialist interests in these countries. The 1991 defeat of the Zambian President Kaunda by Chiluba was a source of great encouragement for social democracy to pursue this path vigorously.
Why should imperialism want to overthrow regimes in southern Africa? The answer lies in the mineral riches of this region, which can justly be called the mineral "Gulf Region" of the African continent. It offers fantastic opportunities for the export of capital and exploitation of cheap local labour. Strong, independent regimes present an obstacle to imperialism's quest for domination of the region and the control and looting of its vast mineral resources. Hence the hankering by imperialism after compliant rulers who could deliver this region, endowed with fabulous wealth, on a platter to the vultures of monopoly capitalism in the latter's never-ceasing quest for the maximum of profit and world domination. The oil rich Angola, Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and, particularly, the mineral-rich DRC, likewise are in the unenviable position of being targeted by imperialism.
Social democracy and Trotskyism have gaily joined the imperialist attack on the Zimbabwean regime. Literally a month before the Labour Party was voted into office in May 1997, a Zimbabwe-accredited diplomat during a visit to the Republic of Ireland was informed by a prominent Irish trade unionist that the European trade unions had already singled out the then Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), Morgan Tsvangirai, as their presidential candidate in Zimbabwe against Robert Mugabe (information in this and the following few paragraphs is taken from Dr. Mudenge's WS).
The Danish Trade Union Council (DTUC), the "cooperating partner" of ZCTU, had already, towards the end of 1996, posted Georg Limke to Harare as it regional representative to ensure the success of this project - it being Limke's mission to transform the Zimbabwe trade union movement into a political party. In 1999, Tsvangirai requested Limke to extend his three-year assignment with the DTUC by six months to help facilitate the final phase of the transformation of the ZCTU into an opposition party that would challenge ZANU(PF). "On the technical-political side, I would like to mention that the secretary-general of the ZCTU has expressed the need for my services during the transitional period of the ZCTU when the leadership is changing. … This will be in the form of technical support of the expected new phase and in the form of strategic consultations and services in the broader spectrum of the activities of the ZCTU", Limke wrote to his headquarters.
However, in later October 1999, after his cover was blown, Limke was withdrawn and replaced by Mrs Gitte Vesterlund.
Rudolph Trauber-Merz, the Director of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FEF) in Harare until the end of 1998, wrote a report at the beginning of 1999 on his evaluation of the political situation in Zimbabwe. It is patently clear from this report that he already knew that the ZCTU, which he preferred to characterise as "the umbrella body", would be transformed into a political party in 1999. He wrote: "ZCTU functionaries would have to relinquish their posts before they switch over to party posts".
Role of SWP
The Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), the largest Trotskyist organisation in Britain, characteristically ignoring the extensive support furnished by imperialism to bring into being the MDC, greeted the latter's formation as a step forward for the working class of Zimbabwe. Instead of seeing through the imperialist manipulation of the trade-union movement in Zimbabwe, as would be obligatory on any socialist organisation worthy of its name, the SWP asserted that as the ZCTU had been involved in setting up the MDC, the latter could represent, and advance, the social and political interests of the working class. The International Socialist Organisation (ISO), SWP's sister party in Zimbabwe, made the boastful, not to say shameful, claim that it had been one of the first civic organisations to "encourage the ZCTU to form a workers' party to remove ZANU(PF)".
In a revealing interview, which appeared in the September 2000 issue of the SWP journal Socialist Review, Munyaradzi Gwisai, a leading member of the ISO elected to the Zimbabwean parliament on the MDC platform, explained that as from 1997 FEF gave substantial financial support to the National Consultative Association (NCA), a precursor of the MDC, with the aim of exerting its influence and advancing the possibilities for getting rid of the ZANU(PF) government.
Fully laying bare the counter-revolutionary politics of the SWP and the ISO, the interview proved beyond reasonable doubt that the MDC was the creation of imperialism and that the ZCTU was being manipulated so as to prevent the development of a truly radical and impendent working-class movement in Zimbabwe. In this interview, calling it "an influential social democratic organisation", Gwisai observed that the FEF "had a strategy for building a viable party by getting people to work together without calling it a political party. … I think it was felt that there was a danger of radicalization of the working class … and this is how Morgan [Tsvangirai] was then brought in as a figurehead leader of the NCA. … He lent credibility to the NCA, which was well funded".
It is clear that in the formation of the MDC, imperialism was creating, through the combined efforts of European social democracy and its trade union offshoots, as well as a host of NGOs, a pro-business outfit for the twin purposes of disarming the working class of Zimbabwe and removing the radical nationalist regime of ZANU(PF) and the latter's most steadfast and representative spokesman, to wit, President Robert Mugabe. Nor could it be otherwise. It is beyond belief that an organisation like the FEF, notorious for subverting working class and national liberation movements the world over, would ever consider giving any support to a genuinely militant working-class organisation.
Friedrich Ebert Foundation
Founded in 1925 by the Social Democratic Party (SDP) of Germany, "to honour the legacy of Friedrich Ebert", who died in the same year, the aptly-named FEF has continued to propagate and promote the counter-revolutionary work of the notorious betrayer of the working class after whom it is named. During the First World War, Ebert, along with the overwhelming majority of the leadership of the SDP, deserted the working class and went over to German imperialism under the slogan of the "Defence of the Fatherland" - a slogan used by opportunist renegades of several imperialism countries to betray the working class in the service of imperialism. At the end of the war, Ebert became the first President of the Weimar Republic. Along with Phillip Scheidemann and Gustav Noske, in January 1919 he successfully led the social-democratic government's effort to prevent the revolutionary overthrow of German imperialism, freely using guns and bayonets to drown working class demonstrations in Berlin in blood. Several hundred revolutionaries, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were massacred on the orders of Ebert who notoriously said: "I hate revolution!"
Resuscitated in 1947, the FEF has ever since been an important tool with which German imperialism defends its interests on a global scale. Armed with a budget of $90 million a year, a workforce of 700 at its headquarters and an additional 2,000 elsewhere in the world, maintaining offices in 74 countries, it boasts the possession of the largest archive on the working-class movement in Europe, a vast research centre and a publishing house. It trains and tames diplomats, academics and trade unionists favourably inclined towards imperialist interests, German imperialist interests in particular.
During the 1970s, the FEF played a significant role in subverting the revolutionary movements in Spain and Portugal - guiding them along reformist channels through the setting up of reformist social democratic parties. It continues to do its dirty work in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America in furtherance of the interests of imperialism under the pretext of promoting "democracy", "good governance", "rule of law", "political freedom", "human rights" and suchlike subterfuges.
This is no way to deny the part played by the mistakes of the Zimbabwean government in the rise of the MDC. The acceptance by the government in the early 1990s of the WB/IMF prescribed SAPs, and the consequent freeze on wages accompanied by price liberalisation, led to the further impoverishment of the poor and restlessness among the people, especially the working class, which imperialism and its agents were able to exploit with great adroitness. Here is just one example of the skilful manipulation by the rich privileged minority of the discontent in the ranks of the working class. In December 1997, trade unions in Zimbabwe staged a five-day strike. The following perceptive observation made by the South African Daily Mail and Guardian of 17 December 1997 is truly revealing in this regard: "The strike drew on a deeper discontent which has given trade unions common cause with other interests, including employers who encouraged their workers to join the protest and white Zimbabwean farmers whose farms are threatened with seizures" ('Zimbabwe's Unholy Alliance').
Belatedly, in 1999, the government abandoned the SAPs, further antagonising imperialism. Better late than never. It was the correct thing to do.
Precisely because the MDC was to be a vehicle for furthering the interests of imperialism, organisations such as the FEF were showering it with financial assistance, advice and all other kinds of support facility. This simple truth has somehow managed to elude Gwisai who naively complained that the alleged working-class character of the MDC was "not captured in the Manifesto", that while being characterised as a movement of "working people", the MDC was permitted "…to include the bosses". Contradicting himself at every step, he asserted that the MDC had been "hijacked" by the capitalists, expressing the forlorn hope that through the mobilisation of the mass of workers it could be won over to a socialist programme. He added, as if to annihilate his earlier assertion, that there was "… real disillusionment, and there was a danger of us socialists being swamped".
While maintaining that he had agreed to contest the Highfield constituency on the MDC platform because the ISO hoped to be able to use the election campaign "as a platform for building a revolutionary alternative", with not a little unintended irony, he admitted that, although originally chosen to fight the election for the Harare area, he was moved to Highfield "because of the hostility from the party leadership and its bourgeois party sympathisers about a socialist standing in the central business district".
From the above it is clear as daylight that the SWP and its sister organisation in Zimbabwe, the ISO, hitched themselves in Zimbabwe to the chariot of imperialism. In this context, it would not be amiss to quote the following words of Dr. Mudenge, with which this revolutionary nationalist delivers truly stunning blows to what is at least nominally a working-class organisation - the SWP: "Despite its socialist rhetoric, the British Socialist Workers' Party has rallied behind pro-imperialist policies and helped trade-union bureaucracy and the MDC to foment opposition against the government of Zimbabwe. While the working class is a viable social force that can advance a programme on which to take forward a struggle for democratic rights and social equality, to do so it must begin by acting independently of the political representatives of capital. Instead, Zimbabwe's urban working class have been dragooned into a common organization with their oppressors, a tragedy which the majority of the people of Zimbabwe have beheld with utter disbelief, and which the workers themselves are beginning to exhume themselves from " (WS).
Dr Mudenge goes on to observe correctly that the abuse of trade unions by SWP-type fake socialists "… in our region threatens to polarize our communities and plunge us into unprecedented dangers posed by a political divide between urban workers on the one hand, and rural workers and the peasantry on the other. This polarization … breeds violence, undermines … nation-building efforts, and threatens to roll back our advances in democracy" (WS).
More than that. It is counter-revolutionary to the core. For further advances in Zimbabwe, as indeed throughout southern Africa, the working class needs the closest alliance with the peasantry, without which it cannot lead the latter. Those who would cause distrust among these two classes, those who work for a rupture between them, in the name of some pure and imaginary socialism, can only play a sorry and reactionary role.
MDC continues on its reactionary course
Meanwhile, the MDC, created by imperialism and supported by 'left' social democracy and Trotskyism alike, continues to do the imperialists' bidding. In January this year (2004), Gibson Sibanda, Vice-President of the MDC, travelled across Europe. While there, he distributed an MDC policy document with the title MDC International Briefs and Consultation - First Quarter, January to March 2004. The preamble to this document makes the following shameful admission: "At the Zimbabwe Consultative Meeting held on November 17, 2003 in the House of Lords in London, a blueprint for the MDC's internal political strategies and external diplomatic outreach activity for the year 2004 was unveiled and discussed" (emphasis added).
One could not wish for a clearer admission as to where the blueprint for the MDC's internal strategy and external activity is made. It is manufactured in that centre of reaction - the British House of Lords, one of the oldest centres of aristocratic privilege and big money. Not surprising then that, after unveiling this blueprint, Mr Sibanda denounced SADC as an old boys' club, living in mortal fear of being replaced by trade union based political movements. The reason for his outburst against the leaders of SADC was the latter's support for Zimbabwe. He called upon the 'international community', that is, a tiny group of blood-sucking imperialist Draculas, to put pressure on, and punish, the SADC governments in order to force them into line as per the diktat of international monopoly capital.
ZANU(PF) emerges victorious
Thanks to the steady nerve and steadfastness of the ZANU(PF) government, especially those of President Mugabe, the MDC has failed to make a success of the goal set for it by its imperialist masters. The closest it came to success was in the parliamentary elections of June 2000, when it won 57 seats as opposed to the 62 won by ZANU(PF). With 30 further seats occupied by presidential nominees under the Constitution, the government was easily able to conduct its business in the 150-seat parliament.
The opposition's success during this election, far from cowing the government, only made the latter more determined than ever to settle the land question through the FTP as from 15 July 2000. The rejection of the draft Constitution a few months earlier had had the same effect.
Now that the land question has been irreversibly settled in favour of the Zimbabwean masses, the government's stock has risen higher among the people and it can look forward to a decisive victory in the parliamentary elections next year. In contrast, the MDC's star has dimmed. Its stance on the land question has, to the disappointment of imperialism and the former owners of large commercial farms, become ambivalent - to say the least. Initially it promised to bring clarity and transparency into the land resettlement programme. That has become irrelevant, since the government itself executed the programme with clarity and transparency. Now that the land has been given to the black masses, as well as black commercial farmers, it would be suicidal for the MDC to promise to return land to the European settlers. So, in an interview with a South African newspaper, MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, stated recently that he would not give land back to Joe Bloggs who left Zimbabwe for Australia. On being asked whether he would return land to Joe Bloggs in Borough Dale (a rich residential area in Harare), he was at his wits' end for an answer. This has made him unreliable for imperialism.
Conclusion
In any case, whatever the results in future elections, whatever the fate of the ZANU(PF) government and President Mugabe, the land resettlement in Zimbabwe is irreversible. Imperialism and its stooges are going to have to live with this reality. It is to the undying credit of ZANU(PF), in particular to its undisputed leader, President Mugabe, that they have solved this, the most difficult problem of the Zimbabwean people. Theirs is the first non-communist government, since the Great French Revolution of the late 18th Century, to have solved the land question in such a revolutionary way. Let imperialism and its stooges fulminate and heap abuse on ZANU(PF) and Robert Mugabe. The whole of progressive humanity has every reason to join the joyous masses of Zimbabwe on this historical occasion of their tumultuous return to their land - nay, to their country.
We cannot but associate ourselves with the following sentiments, expressed by President Mugabe during an interview with Cuban journalists in Harare on 15 March 2004; "We feel that our land has now been liberated. It is now the land of our people. It [the land] gives the people a sense of belonging and ownership".
He added ominously: "The people love their soil. No amount of pressure - political, economic or military - would sway them and the government to relent on the land reforms which were now spreading to other countries in the region with similar land ownership disparities between white farmers and the indigenous blacks".
Words like these, which frighten the daylights out of imperialism and its stooges, are a source of inspiration and encouragement for the expropriated black masses throughout southern Africa and beyond. This is what explains the popularity that President Mugabe enjoys throughout southern Africa, notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, his demonisation by imperialism. His government's stance is a constant reminder to the black masses of South Africa, where 12 % of the population holds 80%of the land, that they too can solve the land question in their country through radical measures in the fashion of Zimbabwe.
Robert Mugabe and ZANU(PF) are thorns in the side of imperialism, for they never cease to remind their former colonisers that the original expropriation of the land of the people of Zimbabwe took place, not on the basis of the willing seller/willing buyer principle, so dear to them today, but through greed, fraud, deceit, extortion, trickery, violence and conquest, which in some instances ended in the near total extermination of the local people. Anglo-American imperialism works itself into a frenzied rage over Zimbabwe, for the simple reason that President Mugabe and his regime, questioning the very legitimacy of the colonial conquest, never cease to assert that what was conquered and stolen by the sword must return to the people of Zimbabwe - by the sword if necessary.
In his 18 April 2004 speech at the National Sports Stadium, marking the 24th anniversary of Zimbabwe's Independence, President Mugabe outlined his government's programmes and achievements during the preceding four years. These range from continued efforts at electrification of the countryside, irrigation projects, rural infrastructure (clinics, schools and water supply facilities), to the development of the mining sector and tourism, and a national housing delivery programme. He laid special emphasis on fighting HIV/Aids pandemic, which he described as, "by far the biggest challenge facing the country". He referred to the intensified public education and awareness programmes, the distribution of funds from a National Aid Levy, the allocation by the government of 10 billion Zimbabwean dollars for fighting AIDS, and the availability of affordable anti-retroviral drugs - with Harare and Mpilo Central Hospitals leading the way. The reality obviously is very different from the myths propagated by the imperialist rumour mill, especially the BBC, which unashamedly churns out half-truths and straightforward lies in regard to Zimbabwe.
Referring to the corruption prevalent in some sectors of the economy, and the need to fight this cancer vigorously, he went on: "Our economy has been badly bruised by some in our midst given to greed and corrupt practices. The situation that has been obtaining in the financial sector is simply disgusting and has required a very robust response. Equally, the mining sector has shown serious lapses in integrity. For more than five years, our gold was being smuggled out of the country through a well-organised racket of international criminals. We have had incidents involving theft of our platinum and nickel export consignments in South Africa, which clearly smack of organised pillage.
"Millions in foreign currency have been externalised through a variety of fraudulent activities practised by highly placed people we had trusted to manage our economy. Now we are very clear that far from deserving our trust, these fraudulent and thoroughly dishonest people are the real enemies of our country and people, whose place and permanent home is the prison.
"We shall continue to bring them to book and no person who robs this country should be allowed to get away with it. In the drive to end corruption, no one will be too big or too small. The law is rough with criminals, and we shall shed no tears for them."
The greatest achievement of the Zimbabwean government over the last four years has, doubtless, been the completion of the land resettlement programme. "The last four years", said Mr Mugabe, "presented a number of challenges and real trials for our country. Yet they have been years also of break-throughs arising from our firm and indomitable stand on matters of national sovereignty and economic freedom, the high point being the fulfilment of our liberation war goal of recovering and regaining the ownership and control of our land, and distributing it to our people.
"Expectedly, this far-reaching policy has not endeared us to those countries of the West, led by Britain and America, forcibly linked to us by the cruel history of colonial occupation and other forms of imperial plunder".
To the great annoyance of imperialism, but to a thunderous applause from the 70,000 people listening to him at the Stadium, and to the applause of progressive humanity the world over, he added:
"We will not compromise our principles of freedom and national sovereignty, no matter who gets upset. Zimbabwe is not for the convenience and pleasure of any country, less still of adventurous bloodthirsty and domineering neo-colonialists. Zimbabwe will never be a colony again! Never, never ever!"
The Zimbabwe government of President Mugabe has set a brilliant example, which other countries in southern Africa are bound to follow sooner or later. History will record the not inconsiderable contribution made by the government of President Mugabe, and the people of Zimbabwe, to the struggle of the peoples of the world against the legacy of colonialism and against imperialist attempts at intimidation and subjugation of small nations.
That's a whole lot of sh.et to wade through. It appears Zimbabwe needs to simplify the equation.
Posts: 3595 | From: Moved To Mars. Waiting with shotgun | Registered: Dec 2006
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