By Wilbert Mukori- Zimbabwe has signed an agreement with the Commercial Farmers Union of Zimbabwe and the Southern African Commercial Farmers Alliance which mandates Zimbabwe to pay white commercial farmers US$3.5 billion.
The money will be raised from Zimbabwe taxpayers.
The compensation agreement is “for improvements and assets on the more than 4,000 farms that were seized and doesn’t pertain to the land itself,” Ben Gilpin, a director of the CFU, explained.
No one objects to the white farmers being compensated. What anyone with half a brain would object to is that the Zimbabwean taxpayer should be the one paying the compensation. The ordinary taxpayer is not the one who benefited from the looted assets; it is the ruling elite and their families and cronies who benefited.
Indeed, the beneficiaries of the seized white-owned farms have also benefited from freebees from the 2007 Farm Mechanisation Programme and many other similar looting schemes all at taxpayer’s expense.
Those who benefited from the looted assets from the white-owned farms must pay the US$3.5 billion just as those who benefit from the multitude of looting schemes must repay the money.
40 years of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption by this Zanu PF dictatorship have left the Zimbabwe economy in total ruins and 34% of our people already live in extreme poverty – i.e. they cannot afford one decent meal a day much less other basic essentials such as education for the children, health care, etc.
Digging these millions of ordinary Zimbabweans out of the abject poverty is not going to be a walk in the park without piling on them the burden of debts from which they benefited nothing.
“Today we signed a historic compensation agreement with the Commercial Farmers Union, bringing closure and a new beginning to land discourse in Zimbabwe. The agreement re-affirms the irreversibility of land and is as a symbol of our commitment to the rule of law and property rights,” said Mnangagwa.
“It is a testimony to the fact that as fellow Zimbabweans, we can peacefully resolve our differences. We cannot change the past, we can only learn from it. Let us build on the trust demonstrated today, let us choose dialogue over confrontation and let us move forward together.”
How can this agreement bring closure to this messy land seizure problem when:
1) The burden of compensating the white farms is being imposed of the impoverished ordinary Zimbabweans whilst those who benefited from all the looting, keep their loot.
2) Zimbabwe’s economic recovery is totally dependent of the nation reviving the country’s once productive agricultural sector a.s.a.p. Whilst the new farm owners have failed to put the land to productive use, they have nonetheless profited from the many corrupt scheme designed to help farmers. The new farm owners are now holding the nation to ransom!
It is not only the white farmers who have been the victim of Zanu PF’s corrupt and tyrannical rule; the ordinary Zimbabweans too have suffered untold injustices under the regime. The white farmers have voiced their suffering and povo have no such voice.
You, Mnangagwa, and your fellow ruling elite benefited from looting white-owned farms; you must pay the US$3.5 billion compensation and not the taxpayer.
“Let us move forward together!” How can we move forward when all you have done is taken your foot off the white farmer’s neck but only to plant both feet on the long-suffering povo’s neck!