White minority suffered massive theft, collateral loss at hands of Black supremacist Mugabe regime
By Tsungai Murandu
HARARE – Displaced former Zimbabwean white commercial farmers incurred losses of more than $8.4 billion during their violent ejection from their properties seven years ago, a survey showed.
The survey, jointly undertaken by the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum (ZHRNF) and the Justice for Agriculture Trust (JAG), showed that the immense financial losses were inflicted upon the farm owners and workers in the form of lost incomes, habitation, health services and access to clean water and sanitation that contributed to a high death rate.
“The amount of damages for which the Zimbabwe government should be liable, for giving open support to the land invasions, would have catastrophic consequences for an economy already in precipitate decline,” said the survey.
Zimbabwe is the middle of an eight-year-old economic meltdown that government critics have blamed on President Robert Mugabe’s ill-conceived policies such as chaotic farm seizures that decimated the mainstay agricultural sector. The crisis has been marked by crippling shortages of foreign currency, which have triggered sharp increases in the cost of living and made most basic commodities scarce.
Currently estimated at 4 530 percent in May, the country’s inflation rate is the highest in the world while unemployment has reached an unprecedented 80 percent.
The ZHRNF and JAG researchers also found that only six percent of the former white farmers are still farming and that around 65 percent of those dislodged from their properties were still in the country.
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