Zimbabwe – An Old Milking Cow

Opinion — By on October 7, 2009 1:32 pm

By Phil Matibe

Zimbabwe’s farms are like an old dairy cow, ZANU (PF) ties its legs; Mugabe
squeezes the last drops of milk from its shrivelled udder; while his wife
feeds it raw grain; the masses sit patiently waiting for milk by the cow’s
rear end—only for Nestlé and Grace to lift the cow’s tail as it dumps bovine
excrement onto the heads of the hungry populace.

Nestlé Zimbabwe, confirmed media reports that one of its milk suppliers is
Gushungo Dairy Estates, controlled by Grace Mugabe, and that the estate
supplies ten percent—the equivalent of one million litres—of Nestlé’s raw
milk intake.  However, Nestlé Switzerland has issued a statement blessing
the arrangement in a condescending announcement, which confirms Nestlé’s place as an enabler of tyranny and an eager accessory to crime.

Switzerland is taking a position that is consistent with its national
interest of protecting its banking industry—essentially the ATM for
politically exposed persons. This system is the rock underneath which
dishonest leaders who enrich themselves from looted state funds hoard
so-called potentate funds (dictator’s assets).

Switzerland is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against
Corruption (UNCAC) and upholds the obligation to return illicitly acquired
assets.

However, Switzerland has proposed to donate funds stolen by despots to aid
agencies instead of repatriating them back to the countries of origin. In
other words, Zimbabwe gets aid, Mugabe pilfers it, and his wife Grace secretly banks the loot with help of Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono in
numbered Swiss bank accounts.

If the people of Zimbabwe ever trace these funds, the Swiss government would then donate the loot to the next aid agency for onward “lending” to another despot. The vortex of sleaze and corruption starts all over again. In the meantime, Switzerland appears to be a benevolent aid giver to suffering
Africans and yet, in practical terms, is merely sending interest earned from
Africa’s stolen wealth back to the very despots who are encouraged to steal
it all again. Africans become permanently anchored in bottomless pit of debt and poverty with the complicity of the societies that offer us aid.

The Swiss Federal Criminal Tribunal requires sufficient evidence of criminal
wrongdoing in order to effect restitution and these proceedings may take up
to fifteen years.

Zimbabweans expecting Switzerland to censure a dictator is akin to a farmer
chopping down a tree in order to harvest its fruit. Potentate funds are the
mother’s milk of the Swiss banking system, and Mugabe is one of the clients
who buttress the system.

Gushungo Dairy Estates is the 4000-hectare farm, part of a criminal
enterprise, a vast agricultural land holding owned by Robert Mugabe and his
immediate family. He stole state land and allocated it to himself under the
guise of correcting a colonial imbalance. In this melee, 350 000 farm workers, whom Mugabe in his xenophobic tirade on CNN, referred to as aliens, are now classified as internally displaced persons (IDPs), and survive on foreign humanitarian aid handouts.

What happened to the one-man one farm policy? What happened to a maximum farm size (450 hectare) policy? What became of the promise that no farmer shall go without land and the declaration that no absentee landlord may own land in Zimbabwe?

Instead of allocating or distributing “acquired” farms and land to deserving
landless peasants, all prime land is now the private asset of absentee
landlords, the freedom fighters from yesteryear. Zimbabwe’s entrepreneurs
consisting of farmers, hoteliers, and bankers, are facing an unprecedented
onslaught from the pillaging ruling party bourgeoisie who unashamedly
misappropriate private property for personal gain.

Under the pretext of land reform, indigenisation, and decongesting communal areas, ZANU (PF) politicians now control 95% of Zimbabwe’s prime agriculture with its leader becoming one of Zimbabwe’s largest private landowners.

Switzerland has a moral obligation to side with the suffering people of
Zimbabwe and help bring this deplorable chapter to a close. Criminal
gangsters, mobs of illicit cattle rustlers, murderers and rapists who trade
in misappropriated assets, loot state coffers and launder ill-gotten wealth,
must never become the preferred trading partners to Switzerland.

“Chinokanganwa idemo” – What forgets is the axe, but the tree that has been
axed will never forget.

The old dairy cow must be now be replaced in the paddock by a younger
milking heifer that will provide real milk for the ordinary people of
Zimbabwe.

Phil Matibe – www.madhingabucketboy.com

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