You’d be hard-pressed to find a Black commentator who criticized late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s land reforms of the early 2000s more than I did. However, the backlash from other Black commentators was such that, if I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought I was betraying my race.
Meanwhile, it was plain for all to see that his land reforms amounted to little more than seizing white farms to parcel out to Black cronies. Nobody had to be a clairvoyant (or a real farmer) to see what Zimbabweans would eventually reap from what Mugabe was sowing.
They were already furrowing in withering depths when I launched this blog in February 2005. I felt compelled to bemoan and decry their fate – as titles to just a few commentaries attest:
- “Zimbabweans Pray for Liberation from Their Liberator – Robert Mugabe,” March 29, 2005
- “President Mugabe Finally Admits Starving His Own People Was a Mistake … No Sh!t,” November 7, 2005
- “After Seizing the Land (i.e., Biting the Hand) of White Farmers Who Fed Zimbabwe, Mugabe Seeks Their Helping Hand,” April 25, 2006
- “Yes, Save Darfur! But What About [Starving] Zimbabwe,” February 8, 2007
- “Zimbabwe: From Africa’s Bread Basket to Basket Case…,” December 5, 2008,
- “Zimbabwe’s Black Farmers Cry: Bring Back White Farmers,” September 16, 2015
As things turned out, what I wrote in the very first commentary cited above proved most prescient. Here in part is how I criticized Mugabe’s willful intent to ruin his country’s farmland and, by extension, its agrarian economy – all in the name of Black liberation.
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The Mugabe government of Zimbabwe is the most corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent in Africa. And, on a continent that has the most corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent governments in the entire world, Mugabe’s achievement in this regard is a truly dubious distinction. …
Two decades after independence, a herd of white farmers still managed the most profitable sector of Zimbabwe’s economy: agriculture. And, for a proud Black freedom fighter who promised not only political but also economic liberation from the White man, this fact hovered as a glaring humiliation and contradiction over Mugabe’s leadership. In 2000, he decided to do something about it. …
To the relief and exultation of restive Blacks, Mugabe announced sweeping land reforms in which his government would seize the ‘farms of white colonialists to give to landless peasants and the veterans of the war of liberation.’
Unfortunately, like his plan for Black economic empowerment, Mugabe’s plan for land reforms has been an abject failure:
Five years ago, there were 4000 white-owned farms in Zimbabwe; today, there are only 400 (mostly unproductive) farms left. Five years ago, Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa; today, it is a basket case of starving people.
Indeed, according to a March 12 report in The Times:
The vast majority of the seized farms went to President Mugabe’s loyal cronies in government who used them for weekend retreats. Virtually every Cabinet minister and senior security official now has at least two farms. Even then, they are not given the title deed, just a long lease, which the president can revoke at the first sign of disloyalty.
It has been a catastrophe. These people had no idea how to farm commercially; and farms that would normally be overflowing with maize and other crops lie fallow, now covered in waist-high wild grass. Farm machinery stands unused in abandoned fields.
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Given that background, especially the citation to my 2015 commentary on Black farmers crying for Zimbabwe to bring back white farmers, it probably comes as no surprise that the government has been obliged to do this:
Zimbabwe’s government on Wednesday signed a deal with former white farmers to pay them billions of dollars in compensation roughly two decades after they lost their land in often violent invasions.
(The Associated Press, July 28, 2020)
And that (reverse) reparation comes after years of digging themselves deeper in this humiliation:
Fifteen years ago, the government began seizing property from thousands of white farmers and giving it to blacks as recompense for the abuses of colonial rule. But now, as agricultural output stalls, black landowners are quietly reaching out to white farmers who were thrown off their land.
‘The problem now is that we have the land, but they have the experience,’ said Mutinhiri, a Black landowner.
(The Washington Post, September 14, 2015)
Of course, one can hardly blame Black Zimbabweans for prevailing upon their government to do whatever is necessary to make farming productive again. They were starving, after all.
In fact, it’s arguable that the suffering Robert Mugabe caused in Zimbabwe with his land reforms is surpassed only by the suffering Mao Zedong caused in China with his infamous Great Leap Forward.
Mind you, Zimbabwe did not need land reforms. It only needed to redistribute the wealth white farmers hoarded for centuries more proportionately and equitably with Blacks genuinely interested in farming.
Even so, all Mugabe had to do to execute his harebrained idea was recruit sympathetic farmers from other countries to help new Zimbabwean farmers gain the experience needed to emulate evicted white farmers. Alas, he was too blinded by racism, nationalism, and foolish pride to see this.
On the other hand, one cannot help but blame Black South Africans for allowing their government to traipse down this same primrose path of putative land reforms.
I have already vented consternation in “Aping Zimbabwe, South Africa Expropriating White Farms to Give to Blacks,” August 12, 2018. A familiar Jamaican idiom comes to mind:
Monkey see, monkey do.
However, for South Africa to do what it has seen Zimbabwe do in this case would be genocidal.
In any event, my mummy taught me never to speak ill of the dead. But it would amount to malpractice if I did not at least mention this: Mugabe is making a mockery of real claims for reparations by forcing his successor to pay whites to compensate for the legacy of unintended and unfair consequences his land reforms caused.
Unfortunately, this irony was as predictable as it is perverse.
Related commentaries:
Zimbabweans pray… Mugabe admits… After Seizing land… Save Darfur…
From bread basket to basket case… Black farmers cry… South Africa aping… reparations…