By Jonathan Maphenduka
MUCH as my recent open letter to the British ambassador will have cleared some misconceptions, which led to injustice and betrayal in the issue to compensate white former farmers who lost multiple farms in the stunning land reform of 2000, the letter did not provide an answer to enable government to extricate itself from the trap it walked into through its decision to compensate.
That letter, much as its impact will be felt for a time in the life of the country, lacked one essential element: context. There is a danger, therefore, that it can be maligned as unconstructive. My answer to that is history has no context. History is a set of facts as are known by the one who presents them.
That letter presented the facts in an honest, though uncompromising, manner as I have uncovered them from records of historians of another generation, much to the chagrin (I believe) of many in the present generation of farmers. It was intended to bring to light (without any intended malice) a screaming, if you like, injustice to the victims of colonialism.
Injustice cannot be absolved by resorting to compromise and expediency.
There is a general belief (even among those who should know better) that compensation will result in the lifting of economic and other sanctions gripping the country right now. The international lobby, which includes those who stand to benefit from compensation, has simply used compensation as a stick with which to flog, if you like, an economy which was already dead before November 2017, to the betrayal of the ruled of this country. The decision to compensate, therefore, has the potential to become a scandal and a national embarrassment.
But that is not the whole problem.
Farmers themselves believe that compensation is their just right to demand. They do not believe that there was ever any wrongdoing during the time when colonialism unleashed terror and plunder at the expense of its African victims. Their judgment of colonialism is warped and affected by racial influences.
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Moreover — rather tragically — the country’s leaders do not accept that colonialism is an evil that should be condemned. This is why it is generally believed that compensation is the route through which to ward off sanctions.
This is why government has placed compensation before other imperatives and — in so doing — compounded an issue, which is pretty straightforward because there is no justification for compensation. You can only compensate if you are dealing in expediency at the expense of right and justice.
Government (for its part), instead of biting the wrongdoing has conveniently decided to kiss it.
Government has played into the hand of this country’s enemies whose agenda is to reduce the people to the level of unacceptable misery.
Let me come to the point of this narrative: how can government extricate itself from the trap into which it walked by deciding, against its better judgment, to compensate? The only democratic way, after government succumbed to coercion to compensate, is by referring the matter to a referendum to let the people decide. This is the only fair and equitable thing to do.
This by no means detracts from government’s right to make decisions on matters of national import but no elected government should decide a matter which clearly is a betrayal of the welfare and the best interest of those who elected it into power as does the decision to compensate.
Many readers who believe (erroneously) that compensation is blocking resolution of the sanctions saga will accuse me of rocking the boat. Let me be quite blunt and state that those who should be paying reparations/compensation and restitution are the farmers and their sponsors, the United Kingdom government.
The idea that the people of Zimbabwe should pay compensation cannot be justified and is, therefore, a travesty of justice and should be condemned by every fair-minded person as a repugnant expediency.
Moreover, the British government has not escaped paying reparation and restitution and being condemned for its brutal suppression of the Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya (for one example) for which brutality the United Kingdom paid reparations and restitution and was roundly condemned for its act. Germany in Namibia paid damages and reparations to the people of Namibia for atrocities Germany committed against them.
These are the guidelines that should be used to settle this matter.
Are there any secret British colonial strings attached to Zimbabwe, which obligate the people of this country to pay compensation to those who deprived them of their land in a brutal and unprecedented manner, and these are the same people who have forced government to compromise on a matter of such profound national interest?
On the other hand, the country has committed itself to democratise its governance. The decision to compensate, unfortunately, is a flagrant violation of democratic norms and should not be allowed to pass unchallenged.
The opposition is equally guilty of betraying the people of this country by its failure to raise issue with the government on compensation, in an open parliamentary debate. Tragically (again) the opposition also believes that sanctions will fly away by compromising principle and allowing betrayal and injustice to reduce the people of this country to the level of colonially-spawned orphans who have been left out in the cold with no-one to speak for them.
The belief that compensation is the shortest way to lifting of sanctions is, I must repeat, a tragic blunder. The myth that compensation is the way to go must be exploded once and for all.
Compensation is an instrument of blackmail. It leads government to the gallery of hostile and ridiculing directors and audience to betray the people.
When the new dispensation policy was at its apex the first country to warm up to the idea of normalisation of Zimbabwe’s relations with the West was the United Kingdom whose motive, however, was to set up a trap using compensation as a bait and government unwittingly walked into the trap, thereby betraying the people who voted it into power.
The United Kingdom government has never forgotten that British investments in this country in the sectors of coal mining, iron and steel, printing and publishing, heavy steel fabricating industry, foundry industry, large scale ranching and many other sectors, had been adversely affected by independence.
Does the British government harbour any goodwill for this country? There was a Bulawayo-based tinsmith (for just one example) who made money making radiators and jerrycans. He took a low loader truck to Kwekwe where he bought the only machine south of the Sahara to produce irrigation pipes from a disinvesting British company and trucked it to Bulawayo where he put it to the cutting torch and sold the pieces to a scrap metal merchant. This is the kind of equipment which this country shall never afford to acquire in a thousand years, and some racist lunatic put it to the cutting torch to fix this poor country.
Days later his workers reported for work to find that the place was locked and the employer had flown out to the United Kingdom to spend his money on an exclusive British island. It was his money, fair enough but it had been externalised illegally to contribute to the destruction of the country where he had earned it.
This was his contribution to the scorched earth policy in which British companies had long before independence been actively involved, illegally externalising their earnings to investment havens in South Africa or the United Kingdom, helped by the Rhodesian Front government whose diehard members can still be found in this country. Many white former farmers settled in Zambia long enough to get free land and bank loans (guaranteed by the United Kingdom), but left the country to settle in Australia, leaving the British government to repay the loans.
l Jonathan Maphenduka is a retired journalist. Contact 0772 332 404
