Zimbabwe: When will the suffer end?
13 Jun 2009 Leave a Comment
It is a very, very sad fact of life when you can see girls as young as 12 years old are now selling their bodies for food such as a pack of biscuits. It is even more terrible when you know that the problem today, could have been prevented from becoming a reality since many years ago. Zimbabwe are now suffering from a post-imperialism problem, years of political blunders, dangerous adventures of its politicians, particularly its president, and also from economy sanctions applied by the Eu & US in the name of democracy.
Zimbabwe used to be called Southern Rhodesia when it was still occupied by Great Britain. The “European” (or the British) came to “Southern Rhodesia” in 1890s and in 1918, all land in Southern Rhodesia were practically owned by The Crown, not the British South Africa Company. This is pretty much similar to saying that all land of Indonesia are owned by the Queen of Holland, not the VOC (aka Dutch East Indian Company, although VOC itself actually were armed). It was clearly a more direct way of colonialism.
The immediate consequences of the colonialism were clear to see, there were imbalance ownership of land by the natives and the colonialists. The white farmers, who made up less than 1% of the population, were able to control about 70% of the better land. Meanwhile, the natives were pretty much left with less fertile land.
In 1979, a land reform in Zimbabwe began after the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement. This agreement was to end a biracial rule in Zimbabwe at the time and to return European-owned land to the natives slowly and fairly by using a “willing buyer, willing seller” clause. It also paved way for the first democratic election, which was won by president Robert Mugabe in 1980.
The “willing seller, willing buyer” clause prevented the smooth operation of land purchases from the European owner during the 1980s, therefore in 1992, a Land Acquisition Act was issued. This act was aimed to speed-up land reform process by removing the “willing seller, willing buyer” clause and empower government to purchase the land fairly for re-distribution. Unfortunately, instead of redistributing the purchased land to the poor Zimbabwean, a majority of the land are owned by government officials and rich indigenous businessmen.
In 1998, the government of Zimbwabwe published its Land Reform and Resettlement Programme Phase II, which outlined a compulsory purchase of 50.000 sqkm of land from commercial farmers (both black & white) and called up many donors to ask for supports. But in 2000, having failed to pass a bill that would have given power to the government to seize land from its owners without compensation, the supporters of Robert Mugabe marched on to white-owned farmlands and began to seize their land. The process turned violence and about 110.000 sqkm of land were seized from its white oweners.
The “fast-track land reform” of course was not supported by the British Government. This controversial nationalisation of land ownership actually created an economic downfall to the people of Zimbabwe themselves. The majority of indigenous Zimbabwean lack skill and capital to run large farms. Bank could not lend them capital because the ownership of the land was not clear. Furthermore, it angered the other “whites” abroad, the European Union and US then applied economic sanctions in 2002 to remove Robert Mugabe from his presidency.
The sanction was practially a war without sending troops, to make people who suffer from the effect of the sanction to fight their own government. It doesn’t have any kind of effectiveness at all. Cuba has proved it, so has North Korea. What the economic sanction causes is only more suffering for the ordinary people, the poor who have no power to fight at all.
We’re now seeing a generation in Zimbabwe that will be lost forever as a result of political and economical mismanagement from its own government and on top of that, very cruel actions from developed countries in imposing economial sanctions to them. The end of this dark tunnel is not yet obvious at all and nobody know if there will ever be an end before the country itself collapses.
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