Mugabe defends land reform programme

President Robert Mugabe said in an opening address to parliament on Tuesday that his campaign to seize white farms would empower black people across Africa, the Associated Press reported.

Mugabe described the government’s nationalisation of mostly white-owned commercial estates - ruled illegal by the courts - as “our last struggle for the decolonisation of our country and our continent”. Since last year, ruling party militants have occupied 1,700 white-owned farms demanding they be confiscated and given to landless blacks, AP said. At the same time, the government has targeted more than 5,000 properties for confiscation without compensation - representing, according to the Commercial Farmers Union, 90 percent of white-owned estates.

Formally opening the new session of parliament, Mugabe said his land programme was accepted as necessary and just by fellow African leaders and what he called “the majority of members of the international community”. Western countries and multilateral lenders have frozen aid as a result of the land scheme, but Mugabe said “attempts to isolate Zimbabwe have come to grief”. Mugabe described the land program as “the basis for our economic transformation” that would create better agricultural production and improve general economic development. He acknowledged, however, that acute shortages of hard currency and gasoline and a 70 percent increase in fuel prices imposed by the government last month left ordinary Zimbabweans with “enormous hardships”. “It is our intention to review the fuel situation in future to lessen these hardships,” he said without elaborating.

Addressing another economic drain, Mugabe said the reduction in the size of Zimbabwe’s military presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was going ahead “smoothly”, AFP reported.
Zimbabwe committed up to 12,000 troops, or a third of its total defence forces, to back the DRC government. “The exercise to reduce our force level in that country started in March this year and has been proceeding smoothly,” Mugabe told parliament, without giving details.