When I read this article last evening, I was saddened at the blinkered logic that pervades the ZANU PF party.

“In 2000, Robert Mugabe’s regime removed roughly 4,000 colonial-era white farmers from their land and resettled the land with Africans. The land reform was meant to address injustices and poverty suffered by Africans at the hands of the colonialism. According to a new report given at a conference attended by government, the World Bank, donors and farm groups, Mugabe’s regime paid compensation for “only” three percent of the land seized during land reform. The tone of the report condemned the moves by the regime, “Only 203 farms out of the gazetted 6,571 farms have to date been compensated.” The report went on to discuss declining production that has occurred in Zimbabwe allegedly due to the redistribution of land to Africans. The summaries of the report in the media failed to mention the stranglehold imposed on Zimbabwe’s economy by the imperialists.

It’s the same old story. The media leaves out the fact that when the settlers originally stole the land, the only compensation that the Africans received was terror imposed on their communities by a white supremacist apartheid state. Similarly, when the Whites stole North America from the Indigenous peoples, the compensation was the genocide of an entire continent of civilizations. The same is true of the Zionist theft of Palestine. Whole countries, whole continents are stolen by the imperialists without compensation, yet when Africans, Arabs, or other oppressed peoples take back their land it is considered theft.”

What the writer forgets is that many of the farms that were seized since 2000 had been purchased since independence and that Mugabe’s government had declared “no interest” in the land - and as soon as the farmer had made it worth something, then the land became a target.

Another disingenuous idea is that the land has been returned to the ‘landless blacks’, whilst in reality the land has been parcelled out to Mugabe’s loyalists and apologists.

It is this sort of logic that in endemic in ZANU PF - and they believe that if they repeat it often enough, then it will become the “truth”...

Possession of land in Zimbabwe has nothing to do with race, creed, culture or religion - and for many years the white commercial farmers provided for the population, giving them more than enough food to eat, and the surplus was exported.

Today, Zimbabwe cannot feed itself - yet the farms have been forcibly taken from capable hands and given to senior ZANU PF members who have no intention of working the land.

I even read, over the weekend, about a new landowner who was seeking a court order to evict 50 families living on his newly appropriated land!

Mugabe, on the other hand, has sold the land grab to the world as a ‘returning of the land to the landless blacks’ - and yet the very people that he has given the land to are not ‘landless blacks’ and they themselves are seeking to remove the black people from the land - a place they have lived for many years, in harmony with the commercial farmers!

Surely this move would create more ‘landless blacks’?

Oh, and one more thing - the predecessor to Zimbabwe was not an “apartheid” regime. Yes, there was some segregation, but it cannot be compared to the regime in South Africa pre-1994.

A little research would not been out of place here.

Robb WJ Ellis
The Bearded Man