A penny a day for farmworkers in Paradise Zimbabwe

The ZANU-PF land redistribution program was necessary to give the land back to the people and put Zimbabwe back on the path to self-sufficiency! Only privileged white farmers and meddlesome Tony Blair are upset about this. That's why Blair manipulated the weather to punish Zimbabwe. Ordinary Zimbabweans now live in near paradise thanks to Comrade Mugabe's vision!


One of the most obnoxious arguments made by apologists for the country's dictator Robert Mugabe is the way they've made the land seizures into a racial issue. Too many Africans and Africanists has bought into this line of propaganda. Much western media coverage has also bought into this line.

The indisputable fact of the matter is that the worst victims of the man-made calamity called Zimbabwe are black.

I wish Africa's self-styled intelligentsia would talk more about this. I wish people who should know better would stop acting like Mugabe's willful destruction of his country is some kind of noble martyresque stand against western imperialism. Tony Blair hasn't suffered one $(*&$@#! iota from Mugabe's policies. Neither has George W. Bush. White farmers have fled the country but they're probably not starving. Ordinary black Zimbabweans, the ones Mugabe and his apologists claim to care about, are the real victims of Mugabe's megalomania.

The UN's IRIN news service reports that things are so bad in the country's second city Bulawayo that even the trash scavengers are noticing. "Good garbage is hard to come by these days, unlike in the past, when we could get quality throwaways," one noted.

You know things are desperate when people complain about the low quality of refuse and bemoan the fact that garbage collection is erractic from the weathier suburbs.

According to a report issued by human rights' lawyers in Zimbabwe, Slave wages and the deaths of about 10,000 Zimbabwean farmworkers [are] a consequence of the government's land-redistribution policy.

While US$1 per day is the generally accepted marker for absolute poverty, Zimbabwean farm laborers are supposed to be paid a little over $1 per MONTH... this after a nearly three-fold pay rise.

Many laborers are still being paid under the old wage structure because of employer defiance and are thus receiving $0.36 a month... or barely more than $0.01 per day.

The report opined that 'a plausible case can be made for crimes against humanity having being committed during these displacements.'