Zimbabwe pays compensation to white farmers, which the land was taken 25 years ago

Zimbabwe issued tax bonds worth $ 307 million. And made the first small payments to white farmers who were thrown out of their farms 25 years ago, as part of the agricultural reform carried out by the then President Robert Mugabe.

The Minister of Finance Zimbabwe Mthuli Ncube announced that Harare, in addition to issuing tax bonds, paid $ 3.1 million in cash to 378 farmers, which, as calculated by the state newspaper “The Herald”, constitutes 1 percent. from $ 311 million allocated for the first tranche of payments.

These are the first compensation under the so -called “Global Compensation DEED”, an agreement signed in 2020 between the state and former farmers, in which Zimbabwe undertook to pay $ 3.5 billion for “improvements of left agricultural land”.

After the reform, most of over 4,000 White farmers thrown out of their farms moved to the neighboring countries: Botswana, South Africa and Zambia. They usually preferred South Africa because of the similarity of climate and arable land, but also because of their political system friendly. In Zambia, they transformed many wasteland into prosperous farms for a few years, often building in their areas schools and clinics for their employees.

And Zimbabwe did not rise from the food crisis caused by agricultural reform. The country, which in the 20th century was the main producer of cereals in Africa, buys hundreds of thousands of tons of corn from its northern neighbor each year.

From Lusaki Tadeusz Brzozowski (PAP)

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