Zimbabwe next month will start paying partial compensation to white commercial farmers whose properties were seized nearly 20 years ago under Robert Mugabe’s land reforms, the government said Monday.
In a statement, the finance and agriculture ministries said they had budgeted 53-million Zimbabwean dollars ($18-million) in payments to “former farm owners affected by the land reform programme and who are in financial distress.”
More than 4 000 of the country’s 4 500 white farmers were stripped of their land under former president Mugabe’s highly controversial land seizures.
Mugabe justified the land grabs as a way to correct colonial-era land ownership disparities that had favoured whites and to stimulate economic growth for black Zimbabweans.
Critics blame the evictions for a collapse in agricultural production that forced Africa’s one-time bread basket to become dependent on imported food to feed its population.
Econom
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