Mugabe forces white-owned businesses to give blacks control

Zimbabwe‘s President Robert Mugabe signed into law new regulations forcing foreign- and white-owned businesses to hand over 51% control of their operations to blacks, the official media reported today.

Cranking up his election campaign theme of “economic empowerment” in the impoverished former regional breadbasket, Mr Mugabe also unveiled tractors, buses, animal-drawn farm implements, power generators, motorcycles, petrol and some 3,000 cattle that are to be distributed to black farmers resettled on white-owned land seized by the government since 2000.

“This equipment and implements now form a critical mass that should be deployed effectively so as to meaningfully uplift productivity levels,” the state Sunday Mail reported Mr Mugabe as saying at a commissioning ceremony in Harare on Saturday.

Similar free equipment in two previous handover ceremonies went mainly to followers of the ruling party.

The newspaper said the Economic Empowerment Act on local ownership of businesses and mines became law in an official government notice issued on Friday.

Passed by the ruling party last year, it requires “indigenous Zimbabweans” to hold a minimum 51% stake in every business and public company and to have a controlling stake in every investment or company merger.

Zimbabweans vote in crucial presidential, parliamentary and local council elections on March 29.

The Sunday Mail said the new phase of the government’s “agricultural mechanisation programme” included state-of-the art generators and 300 buses as the nation faces daily power outages and chronic transport shortages that have crippled agriculture and industry.

The programme put Zimbabwe “back at work”, the paper said. No details were given on the cost of the equipment and materials funded by the state central bank, much of it in scarce hard currency.

Zimbabwe has by far the world’s highest official inflation of 100,500% in an economic meltdown traced to disruptions in the agriculture-based economy after the often-violent seizures of thousands of white-owned commercial farms began in 2000.

Production of food and agricultural exports has slumped drastically. Central Bank Governor Gideon Gono, alongside Mr Mugabe at Saturday’s ceremony in Harare, said the bank has paid at least US$43m (€29m) since December for imports of corn, the staple food, from neighbouring countries to avert starvation.

United Nations food agencies say one-third of the nation’s 12 million people received emergency food aid in January from donors. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated massive shortfalls in local harvests in coming weeks and said just 10% of fertiliser needed in the last planting season was available to farmers.

In the presidential vote, Mr Mugabe, 84, is running against former finance minister and ruling-party loyalist Simba Makoni, 57, and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, 55.

Though Mr Mugabe is likely to win, Mr Makoni has drawn support from key ruling-party rebels and disillusioned members of the fractured opposition. Mr Mugabe could be forced to fight a run-off vote if he does not garner 51% of ballots cast in the presidential race.

Mr Makoni’s campaign ran an advertisement in the independent Standard newspaper Sunday showing lines of cars outside petrol stations waiting for fuel under the legend: “Let’s get Zimbabwe working again”. Another depicted a truck upended in a pothole in a crumbling street.

With the world’s fastest shrinking economy outside a war zone, the nation is suffering acute shortages of most basic goods and collapsing public services.

Mr Mugabe blames the crisis on economic sanctions against the country by Britain, the former colonial power, and its allies, to protest his land reforms.

Western loans, development aid and investment have dried up in eight years of political and economic turmoil.

Mr Mugabe on Saturday accused the West of what he called “the spiteful closure of loans and grants,” the Sunday Mail reported.

“This hate programme by Britain and her fellow racists imposed unjustified sanctions on Zimbabwe in futile attempts to frighten us off our land. They should remember we are not that easily scared away,” he said.