Mad Bobby Mugabe

Bobby Mugabe's crackpot blend of racism and socialism has run aground on the reefs of reality.

David Blair reports in the Telegraph:

President Robert Mugabe confessed yesterday that millions of acres of prime land seized from Zimbabwe's white farmers are now lying empty and idle.

After years spent trumpeting the "success" of the land grab, Mr Mugabe, 81, admitted that most of the farms transferred to black owners have never been used.

All but a handful of Zimbabwe's 4,000 white farmers lost their homes and livelihoods when armed gangs of Mugabe supporters began invading their property in 2000.

In the first 18 months of the campaign, eight white landowners and 39 of their black workers were murdered, court orders defied and Zimbabwe's economy plunged into crisis.

Mr Mugabe said this was the price that Zimbabwe would have to pay to redress the wrongs of the British colonial era, which left much of the best land in white hands. He claimed that the seizures would boost production and benefit millions of blacks.

Yet in his home province yesterday, Mr Mugabe chided the new landowners for growing crops on less than half of their land.

Mugabe's Zimbabwe has long stood as an example of the worst aspects of anti-colonialism, and Bobby's sanity has long been in question. It appears that in recent years he has completely lost contact with reality and now resides permanently in cloudcoocooland.

Item:

Last year, Mr Mugabe boasted of a bumper harvest and said that Zimbabwe no longer needed help "foisted" on it from the United Nations World Food Programme. [emphasis mine]

His land grab had made Zimbabwe "self sufficient", Mr Mugabe repeatedly claimed, and the national maize crop was a record 2.4 million tonnes.

But:

The Commercial Farmers' Union said that Zimbabwe grew only 850,000 tonnes of maize last year, not enough to meet domestic demand. In 1999, the last year before the land grab began, Zimbabwe grew 1.5 million tonnes. Then, Zimbabwe also earned about £263 million from tobacco exports. Last year, production had fallen by more than 70 per cent [emphasis mine] and earnings were down to £77 million.

Item:

Zimbabwe will hold parliamentary elections on March 31 and, for the first time in 10 years, Mr Mugabe is no longer holding out the offer of white-owned land as a vote-winner. Instead, his speeches are dominated by attacks on Tony Blair, who he claims is plotting to recolonise Zimbabwe. [Emphasis mine.]

Clearly Mugabe's anti-colonialist obsession has reached paranoid proportions and his commitment to socialism is just as rigid.

Blair reports that the reason for the decline in production is:

The new farmers are unable to raise bank loans because their properties are formally owned by the government and they have no individual title deeds. Without loans, they cannot buy seed, fertiliser or farming equipment and the regime has broken a pledge to supply them with tools.

If that analysis is correct, and it may well be, it sounds like a job for Hernando De Soto, [no, not the explorer, the development economist], but Bobby's answer is this:

"He warned the farmers that the government will not hesitate to redistribute land that is not being utilised."

This is pathetic. Mugabe's policies have not only destroyed Zimbabwe's commercial farming class, they have denied new farmers the opportunity to create wealth. They have also led to persistent food shortages that are only partially met by UN aid, and since Zimbabwe has historically been an exporter of food to its neighbors, they have undermined the economic health of the entire region.

Fortunately the old anti-colonialist is not likely to live much longer -- he's into his eighties now.

Read the article here.