Land issue result of colonisation: Mbeki

By M.S. Prabhakara

CAPE TOWN, MAY 5. It is not often that a Head of State begins an address to the nation broadcast over radio and TV with a swipe at the media.

This is precisely what the South African President, Mr. Thabo Mbeki, did yesterday evening when be began his speech criticising the media for failing to report his views on the situation in Zimbabwe though he spoke on the subject thrice in the space of 10 days, between the Good Friday summit in Victoria Falls and May Day, in the presence of the South African media. Frustrated, Mr. Mbeki said, he had chosen to speak directly to South Africans.

The remarks are to be seen in the context of the criticism in the same media, as also by the Democratic Party and the New National Party, that Mr. Mbeki has not been more harsh and forthcoming in criticising the Zimbabwean President, Mr. Robert Mugabe, over the `land invasions' and the `collapse of the rule of law' in Zimbabwe.

The racial dimensions of such criticism articulated overwhelmingly by the white people, some of whom openly hanker for the `good old days of Rhodesia before the terrorists and communists took over', come through in the reporting and editorial comments and edit page articles, in interventions on radio talk shows, in correspondence columns, and even in casual conversations. Indeed, while the distant European Union has expressed its `extreme concern' about the situation in Zimbabwe, no African country individually or collectively in a structure has expressed any such concern.

To the great anger of his critics, Mr. Mbeki reiterated first things first in his address. He said the land question, the direct product of colonisation of Zimbabwe still remained to be addressed. Everything else, he said, flowed therefrom. Mr. Mbeki recalled South Africa's initiative to persuade the British government (`and others') to contribute funds ``to enable the government of Zimbabwe to address the colonial legacy of land dispossession of the indigenous black majority''.

Thus, the international donor conference in Harare in September 1998, held against a background of events (and newspaper headlines) dominated by an ongoing `land invasion' and dire prophecies of an immediate collapse of the state of Zimbabwe which could well have been transplanted in today's newspapers.

In the event, what Mr. Mbeki referred to as `agreement on various measures to solve the Zimbabwe land question' never got implemented because of fundamental differences on how Zimbabwe and the donor countries perceived the land question.

Zimbabwe's plans for massive land redistribution programme, envisaging a progressive take over of 1,480 of the over 4,000 mostly white-owned commercial farms, already `listed' for such take over, never got off the ground.

Even the relatively modest financial input of $ 1.6 billions that Zimbabwe expected from the donor conference did not come through, with the E.U. and the World Bank representatives at the conference cautioning against `unwise attempts to do too much all at once'.

In Mr. Mbeki's words: ``Things did not proceed as had been agreed. The results of the failure to deal with this matter in the manner agreed in 1998 is what has led to the events that have dominated our media in the recent period.''

This is a reading and a perception profoundly disturbing to Mr. Mbeki's critics broadly identified above whose reading of the situation in Zimbabwe is dominated by a demonised image of Mr. Mugabe.

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Section  : International
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