Mugabe poll ploy strips white firms

This paragraph is particularly striking:The Economic Empowerment Act requires “indigenous Zimbabweans” to hold a minimum 51per cent stake in every business and public company, and to have a controlling stake in every investment or company merger…How long before Australian, North American and New Zealand indigenous
peoples think of using the same dodge?

Correspondents in Harare | March 11, 2008

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe has signed a new law requiring foreign and
white-owned businesses to hand over 51 per cent control of their
operations to blacks.

The move has allowed the Zimbabwean despot to shore up his election
campaign with handouts of imported vehicles, machinery and cattle
paid for with millions seized from private companies and local and
international aid agencies.

At the weekend, Mugabe, 84, presided over the distribution of 500
tractors, 20 combine harvesters and an array of modern farm equipment
as well as 50,000 ox-drawn ploughs, 60,000 ox carts, tools, cattle,
buses, motorcycles, generators and diesel fuel.

The goods were to be distributed around the farming districts, he
said, under the agricultural mechanisation program, which would
produce “the sound of machinery tilling the land in places far and
wide and announcing with an irreversible finality that our land has
returned to us”.

In two similar handouts last year - of $27 million of equipment - the
main recipients of the modern machinery were members of the country’s
ruling elite.

Human rights organisations said peasant farmers were forced to chant
party slogans to qualify for the manual implements.

No indication was given of the value of the handout. John Robertson,
an economist, said: “They must have paid cash (in hard currency)
because no one anywhere will give the Government credit. It’s a
desperate attempt at vote-buying. ”

Mugabe, cranking up his campaign theme of “economic empowerment” in
the impoverished African nation, directed his handouts at black
farmers who have resettled on white-owned land seized by the
Government.

The new program comes three weeks before Zimbabweans vote in crucial
presidential, parliamentary and local council elections in which
Mugabe is running against former finance minister and ruling party
loyalist Simba Makoni, 57, and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai,
55.

With the agricultural and mining industries in ruins, the coffers
drained by excess and its international credit ratings exhausted,
there is one source of finance left - the foreign currency bank
accounts of private companies.

The money is routed into commercial banks via the central bank, which
is under the control of Mugabe.

“Every company that has tried in the last two months to draw on its
export earnings has been told by their bank that the Reserve Bank of
Zimbabwe (the central bank) says it can’t be done at the moment
because they don’t have the money,” Mr Robertson said.

Bankers said central bank agents had been buying foreign currency on
the black market inthe past month to pay for Mugabe’s re-election
costs.

At the time of the latest acquisition the Government had been
struggling to pay for imports of grain and electricity and to supply
drugs for hospitals.

A cabinet minister complained last month that the equipment handed
out last year was being used as transport and was parked outside beer
halls “instead of tilling the land”.

Since the Government began ordering the seizure of white-owned farms
in 2000, production of food and agricultural exports has slumped.

Zimbabwe has the world’s highest official rate of inflation: 100,000
per cent.

One-third of the nation’s 12 million people received emergency food
aid in January, UN food agencies said. The UN Food and Agriculture
Organisation predicted shortfalls in local harvests in coming weeks
and said just 10 per cent of the fertiliser needed in the last
planting season was available to farmers.

The central bank had spent at least $US43million ($46million) since
December to import corn - Zimbabwe’s staple food - from neighbouring
countries, its governor, Gideon Gono, said at the weekend.

The state-owned Sunday Mail said the new program would put
Zimbabwe “back at work”.

The Economic Empowerment Act requires “indigenous Zimbabweans” to
hold a minimum 51per cent stake in every business and public company,
and to have a controlling stake in every investment or company merger.

The Times, AP

http://www.theaustr alian.news. com.au/story/ 0,25197,23351335 -
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