Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown is so severe, with its treasury unable to pay soldiers, police, and civil servants their monthly entitlements, that President Robert Mugabe, 90, has now resumed his decade-long scapegoating of his country’s remaining white farmers.
But it is a largely de-horned scapegoat. In 2000, when Mugabe began to target whites who farmed the land, there were about 4,000 whites owning tobacco, maize, sugar, wheat, and other profitable agricultural holdings. Now there are fewer than 150 white farmers.
In 2000, they employed about 400,000 Africans, and supplied a significant percentage of Zimbabwe’s export earnings. Zimbabwe’s Virginia tobacco crop was world famous and, before Mugabe sent young thugs and supposed war veterans to usurp white-owned holdings, the nation was comparatively wealthy. It could feed all of its citizens.
Six years later the World Food Program began feeding 10 or more percent of all Zimbabweans, which it still does. The 400,000 African farm laborers lost their jobs, a major contributor to Zimbabwe’s 80 percent unemployment rate. And nearly all of the 4,000 white farmers were forced off their farms in successive pogroms. They are now settled in Australia, New Zealand, Zambia, Mozambique, Kenya, and other more hospitable nations.
Zimbabwe is now impoverished, with a shrunken agricultural sector, low tax receipts, no African or international credibility, six failed banks, 70 newly failed local businesses, energy and water shortages – and few good prospects…
South Africa Today Africa – Southern Africa Zimbabwe News
