Slog
News & ArtsWednesday, January 30, 2013
International Mugabe and the White Farmers
Posted by Charles Mudede on Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 7:43 AM
"Last week when we paid civil servants there was $217 (left) in government coffers," Biti told journalists in the capital Harare on Tuesday, claiming some of the workers had healthier bank balances than the state [of Zimbabwe].Yes, this is what happens when you have a large rural population that doesn't know jack. Mugabe's voters were not in the cities but in the rural areas. And those farms he so heroically reclaimed for the blacks were not owned by the whites; they were owned by the banks, and the banks were owned by the blacks. You could not remove the whites without creating a deep banking crisis. The banks depended on the payments white farmers made on their loans. If you took their farms, you also had to take their debts. This did not happen, and so Zimbabwe is where it is."The government finances are in paralysis state at the present moment. We are failing to meet our targets."
Zimbabwe's economy plummeted at the turn of the millennium, after President Robert Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms.
2
Farms make food.
Food feeds people.
People on farms feed themselves.
People in cities are fed by farmers, they do not feed themselves.
As such, cities are not needed.
Food feeds people.
People on farms feed themselves.
People in cities are fed by farmers, they do not feed themselves.
As such, cities are not needed.
3
@2 I suggest you read up on the history of civilization using that computer, literacy, etc that you think is so unnecessary.
7
Almost a guaranteed outcome when you take export oriented large farms and convert them to subsistence and small holder market farming. These may feed your family. They may even pay school fees for your kids. But they're not going to pay back loans made to the displaced farmers. Add in the balance of trade issues that follow a switch from tobacco to maize and your banking crisis deepens as other sectors that require hard currency inputs start to fail.
8
Bailo is almost right, except the circle is completed when you realize that the economy created by the city keeps the farms in business.
Both are needed, they can not exist without each other, and our society could not exist without both.
Well, I guess technically an individual farm can exist without the city, but who the hell wants to go back to isolated, subsistence agriculture?
Both are needed, they can not exist without each other, and our society could not exist without both.
Well, I guess technically an individual farm can exist without the city, but who the hell wants to go back to isolated, subsistence agriculture?
9
Chuckie only posts this junk about his failed birth "country" because he'd like you to believe that after the Mudede's left with their suitcases stuffed full of Mugabe's blood money that an irreversible brain drain took place.
10
@8, I might agree that our, American, society might not be able to survive without rural and urban environments, but I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of rural communities in the third world that would do just fine without cities. You know, those places that are basically isolated, subsistence agriculture.
@7, Those export-based farms were taking the value of the land and lining their own pockets. Why should the subsistence and small holder market farmers be responsible for their debts?
@7, Those export-based farms were taking the value of the land and lining their own pockets. Why should the subsistence and small holder market farmers be responsible for their debts?
11
I was under the impression most of the people Mugabe re-distributed the farmland to were city people who had no effing idea how to make a living as a farmer which is why the farmland is essentially not being farmed or at least not very well. Plus, the white hicks were sort of bitter about losing and tore up the irrigation pipes and hid the tractors.
12
Mugabe didn't give the seized farms to "the blacks" he gave them to his cronies. The whole thing was a cynical exercise in politically-motivated theft, taking from one set of disfavored people in favor of a small set of the favored and well-connected. This was not justifiable redistribution. This was not taking from the rich to give to the poor. Mugabe and his cronies are exactly the kind of villains a Marxist should hate: a small group of parasites enriching themselves by stealing from the productive masses.
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