Mugabe is turning in his grave as Zimbabwean Government to pay $20million to white farmers
Zimbabwe’s Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube Friday said the nation will this month pay an initial $20 million to foreign white and local Black farmers who lost land during farm invasions that were carried out under former President Robert Mugabe’s administration at the turn of the century.
The funds were allocated in Zimbabwe’s 2024 budget as part of a series of measures to restore the country’s once-thriving farming sector and help launch a long promised economic revival.
Ncube said beneficiaries of the funds include 400 Black Zimbabwean farmers and others from foreign nations, including those from Belgium and Germany.
In 2020, a separate and much larger $3.5 billion scheme for 4,000 white Zimbabwean farmers was announced. However, the money has not been forthcoming owing to the nation’s financial woes.
The government measures are focused on reviving Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector which collapsed after Mugabe’s government seized highly productive farms in 2000. Most were owned by Zimbabwean white commercial farmers after colonialists forcibly took them from Blacks early in the 20th century. But foreign white farmers and some Black Zimbabweans also lost property in the seizures a quarter of a century ago, many of them spontaneous, unorganized and largely benefiting those with links to the ruling Zanu-PF party.
