THE WEST HAS KILLED ZIMBABWE’S ECONOMY, WHAT CHOICE DOES THE LEADERSHIP HAVE?
Thoughts of Chishala Mwamba…
Al Jazeera has released a documentary exposing some money laundering schemes in Zimbabwe’s mining sector involving high ranking government officials and some business men.
Though they are yet to do another episode, the following are my thoughts based on this one.
The whole world was very quiet and silent about Zimbabwe before its watershed land reforms, the alarming levels of uneven wealth distribution at the time were not condemned by anyone, more especially the west.
For example, with a white population of about 120, 000 and a black population of about 7 million people in 1980, whites owned about half of the arable land in Zimbabwe, living the 7 million with barely any arable land thereby forcing them to work at meagre wages for the white folks.
However, as soon as the government embarked on a journey of restoring some of the land to the local people who in fact were the original owners of the land, it elicited destructive seeds of hatred and demonization by the West, in the form of sanctions.
These sanctions have done Zimbabwe more harm than good, they have had to lie that it was done in the interest of protecting human rights. But what are human rights if all the country’s wealth belongs to a few foreigners while the millions of locals languish in extreme poverty with no access to land.
Here are a few effects of the sanctions especially on the mining sector.
1. Zimbabwe has found it extremely difficult to effect payments through the international payment platforms as these transactions are intercepted and blocked in the sanctions imposing countries, especially the US. This has resulted in the blocking of many funds belonging to both the government and private individuals making it hard to trade.
2. Due to sanctions the mining sector has faced limited funding to recapitalize as most financiers stopped providing lines of credit to the industry.
3. The country often fails to receive proceeds from mineral sales and has very limited ability to access new markets.
4. The country cannot market its minerals freely and FDI has been stifled.
5. The past two decades have seen Zimbabwe fail to access over 40 billion U.S Dollars that could have helped prevent the plunging of millions of its people into poverty.
On the back log of all these economic impediments, do we expect a sane Country’s leadership to continue enduring harsh economic sanctions without finding alternative means of sustaining its economy? I personally don’t.
This is the only way Zimbabwe’s economy gets a bit of muscle.
Otherwise it would be unimaginable how much poverty our brothers and sisters would have to endure if they are not innovative enough.
The West does not and will not care for a moment if more Zimbabweans sink into poverty due to their illegal sanctions, but will claim to care for the poor as soon as they smell any sort of “corruption”.
I do not support corruption, but neither do I support hypocrisy.
That is why Robert Mugabe once said “Our small and peaceful country is threatened daily by covetous and bigoted big powers whose hunger for domination and control of other nations and their resources knows no bounds.”
“Shame, shame, shame to the United States of America. Shame, shame, shame to Britain and its allies”.
In conclusion,
Let the west uplift all the sanctions illegally imposed on Zimbabwe then we can fairly judge as to whether the Leadership is just corrupt and greedy.
Thank you.