The government initiated an often-violent land resettlement program in 1999/2000, listing large-scale, commercial farms for mandatory and uncompensated acquisition and resettlement. The program aimed to take land from rich white commercial farmers for redistribution to poor and middle-income landless black Zimbabweans. However, under the program, militias of the ruling party have carried out violent acts against farm owners and farm workers, critics say much of the land is still not accessible to those most in need, and crop production has dropped to a level that sustains neither export nor domestic consumption. [Zimbabwe’s Political and Economic Problems Hinder Effective Response to AIDS by Thomas Goliber(2004)]
And he’s drawn criticism from far and wide as he drags his country down the road of poverty, destruction, hopelessness and famine. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa said that Mr. Mugabe is becoming a cartoon figure of the archetypal African dictator. During the last presidential campaign, he took to wearing brightly-colored shirts, emblazoned with his face - a style copied from many of Africa's notorious rulers.
In response to mounting criticism by many African leaders and the international community Mr. Mugabe has characteristically attacked the approximately 75,000 white Zimbabweans and accused them of engineering along with their foreign backers the country’s economic collapse. And like all dictators who never blame themselves for their nation’s failures Mr. Mugabe’s mental time-line fixation is the 1970s when he was a heroic guerilla leader.
He’s also a practicing hypocrite who makes much of his Roman Catholic background and his professed Christianity by rarely missing church on Sundays. All that did not stop him from fathering two children while his first wife was still married to him and dying of cancer. Trying to legislate personal and individual behavior Mr. Mugabe has launched a moral campaign against homosexuality that he publicly declared “an unnatural sex act” and passed legislation that makes such behavior a criminal act punishable with a 10 year prison sentence.
Finally, as opposition to his rule and excesses continue to grow there is much speculation as to how would Mr. Mugabe’s successor arrest this quick slide to failed statelessness that has happened so quickly these past 27 years. To be sure the very institutional fabric of the Zimbabwean state and its support mechanisms have been badly damaged – some irreparable – under Mr. Mugabe’s enigmatic rule. Today, he still presides over what is effectively a one-party state with his ZANU-PF holding 147 of the country’s 150 parliamentary seats.
For millions of Zimbabweans the demise of Mr. Mugabe is the easy part. Rebuilding their ravaged and brutally battered country is the not so easy part.
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