Captain Obvious says to President Mugabe!!
Posted on 08/14/2006 6:55:02 PM PDT by blam
Mugabe admits land-grab failure
By Peta Thornycroft in Harare
(Filed: 15/08/2006)
President Robert Mugabe admitted yesterday that Zimbabweans were "begging" for food because of his mass seizure of white-owned farms.
After years of official claims that his land policies would improve production and guarantee self-sufficiency, he confessed that many of those awarded white-owned farms were doing nothing with their gains.
"If farming is not in your blood, switch to what you are good at," Mr Mugabe told supporters in the capital, Harare. "We want those with land to use it. We don't want to keep begging for food."
Zimbabwe has depended since 2001 on emergency supplies from the World Food Programme. Almost four million people - one third of the population - needed help from the WFP last year. Food once ranked among Zimbabwe's main exports. The main reason for the switch from self-sufficiency to dependency on outside help is the transfer of commercial farms to new owners with no training, capital, expertise or equipment for farming.
Mr Mugabe's speech at the annual ceremony remembering the war against white Rhodesia of the 1970s amounted to an admission of failure. "Those who can't produce, be warned, we will take the land back," he said. "We now need to distinguish capable and committed farmers from holders of land who are mere chancers and who should be made to seek opportunities elsewhere." Mr Mugabe's regime has evicted all but a few hundred of the 4,000 white farmers who, until the start of the land seizures six years ago, were the backbone of the economy.
The economy has shrunk by nearly 40 per cent since 2000. Inflation, at nearly 1,000 per cent, is the highest in the world.
Move the UN to Zimbzbwe.
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it!
"transfer of commercial farms to new owners with no training, capital, expertise or equipment for farming. "
Pathetic.
Sell the land for Euros or dollars to someone who knows how to farm it.
ML/NJ
Ping.
Profitably? You took the land away from them and drove them out.
Zimbabwe. Ought to be the new UN host if our president only had the cojones to throw the crooks out.
It was quite a decent economy, for black Africa, back in 2000. Second to South Africa.
dumbasses deserve what they got.
Sad.
Too late now, Bobbyboy !
You can't put the honey back into the jar!
You're kidding. This thing failed? The terrorizing, murdering drunkards didn't know a thing about farming. Who knew?
Mugabe gets an F on his FFA project. We should immediately send 10 billion cajillion dollars to help rebuild the farms and put displaced people back where they were.
Let's see. It's August in the northern hemisphere. That mean a bunch of buffoons are in control of the near planting season in the southern hemisphere. Timing is everything. Timing of words is even more.
I like that idea.
give plantations to our global UN brothers.
Without the return of the Rule of Law, and property rights, there is no way to help this failed government. I feel sorry for the ordinary people, but Mugabe and his thugs should somehow be held accountable. I am glad that there is a God who will bring the appropriate eternal justice to this miserable excuse for a human being.
"Sell the land for Euros or dollars to someone who knows how to farm it."
Amish?
Unfortunately, BobbyMugabe, that's most of your own party's adherents, the city-dwellers who would be absentee landlords. And they aren't going to be dispossesed of anything - they're the dispossessors, remember? They have the guns. And they don't like dirt under their fingernails.
The whole thing was a massive case of theft under the ancient, creaky excuse of "social justice." Well, social justice turns out to be starvation. That is an inhumanly cruel irony, but it's also a fact.
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