The United States has reportedly warned Zimbabwe about its growing economic dealings with Russia after Harare recently sealed an agreement with Moscow for a US$3billion platinum mine.
According to Herald columnist Nathaniel Manheru, who is thought to be President Robert Mugabe’s spokesman George Charamba, the Obama administration threatened further sanctions against Zimbabwe over its ties with Russia.
Zimbabwe’s Pen East Investments has teamed up with Afronet, a consortium of three Russian partners, to form Great Dyke Investments, which is developing the US$3 billion Darwendale platinum project.
At full development in 2024, the mine will produce 800,000 platinum ounces, pushing Zimbabwe’s output over one million ounces, and create 8,000 jobs.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov visited Zimbabwe last month to conclude the deal with President Robert Mugabe.
However, according to Manheru, the deal could see Washington hit Harare with further sanctions.
Manheru wrote in the Saturday Herald:
“A week or two ago, the US government, through its local embassy, sent an official communication to the Zimbabwean Government, listing the full measure of sanctions the West, led by America, have slapped on Russia.
“The communication went further. It spelt out American expectations on Zimbabwe, namely that Zimbabwe was expected (read required) to support those sanctions by avoiding any association with companies sanctioned by the Americans and their Western allies. Or their subsidiaries or affiliates.
“And . . . yes you guess right, that targets the new US$3bn-plus platinum investment by the Russians at Darwendale! It (Zimbabwe) should not proceed or else we are under sanctions.”
Manheru said it was ridiculous for the US to refuse to lift sanctions against Harare and then demand support for its measures against Moscow.
“America then invites sanctioned Zimbabwe to support sanctions against Russia, itself a bird of the same feather!
“This is where I am tempted to tell the American government to go and hang, hang on a banana tree, bums up.”
When the National Empowerment Fund ended a tender to a Pretoria company, the black owner became “suicidal”.
Had the Fund destroyed a white-owned company, it would have been just fine. The agency’s task is to fund black-empowered businesses.
Public Protector Thuli Madonsela found that the agency contributed to the demise of Best Care Medical Supplies, which is owned by Naomi Ngwenya.
The company imports and distributes medical supplies to three provincial departments of health and the Department of Defence.
Ngwenya complained to Madonsela after the agency withdrew her R5-million grant in 2012.
A Zimbabwean by birth, she received a letter from the agency on August 10 2012 approving her funding. But barely a month later she received a letter informing her that her funding had been withdrawn as the agency had received information that she was naturalised as a South African citizen after 1994.
Releasing the report titled “Stringed Along” in Pretoria yesterday, Madonsela said by this time Ngwenya had incurred expenses. Ngwenya had been applying for funding since 2010 and the issue of her identity had never been raised, Madonsela said.
Madonsela recommended that the agency apologise to Ngwenya and compensate her for the “trauma”.
She also recommended that the agency revise its procedures.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has signed economic and cooperation deals in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is in “desperate need of investment,” Thea Fourie, an analyst at IHS Global Insight in Johannesburg, told Bloomberg in an e-mailed statement. Mugabe “has reached out to partners such as China and Russia to fill the gap,” according to Fourie.
Trade bans and economic embargoes were placed on Mugabe and senior members of his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party in 2002 by the US, the EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Lavrov signed a $3 billion investment deal with Mugabe that will allow Russian firms to help develop Zimbabwe’s platinum resources.
The Russian foreign minister said it’s important to recognize pluralism in the international community, as well as “the emergence of new, big players, including the African continent, whose interests and voices must be taken into account in world politics.”
The project is the largest single foreign investment in Zimbabwe since it gained independence in 1980.
Mugabe, 90, met Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at his rural home in Kutama Village, 130 kilometers north of the capital Harare.
Mugabe said international sanctions have to be approved by the UN.
A recent statement by the FW de Klerk Foundation in Cape Town after the Constitutional Court’s finding in the Renate Barnard affirmative-action case, said that “[the judgement] is, in effect, a prescription for, and validation of, harmful discrimination against millions of South African citizens for an indefinite period, on no basis other than their race – and with no reference to their individual merits, circumstances or concerns”.
Legalised “positive discrimination” against South African whites is now a fact of life, as is the growing racial nationalism of the country’s blacks. “Africa for the Africans” is the underlying slogan in South Africa, by which we must understand “African” in a racial sense. Many of South Africa’s radicalised black intellectuals and celebrities affirm that every African has the right to cross the border and settle in South Africa, but that whites “belong to Europe”.
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In essence, what black racial nationalists assert is that Afrikaners have not naturalised after 360 years in the country. This might have been dismissed as simple talk by blacks, if it were not supported by the courts and the political system in South Africa which effectively exclude the Afrikaner minority of all political power and influence. Outside the Western Cape, there is not even a single municipality where Afrikaners have any say in how their taxes are spent, let alone a province or the central government.
Objectively speaking, Afrikaners have been disarmed, disenfranchised, culturally marginalised and now find themselves in the position summed up by the Canadian political scientist, Heribert Adam, as an “internal diaspora” in South Africa. Being an internal diaspora is but a few nuances removed from having the status of internal refugees.
Since 1994, criminal, political and social violence has been constantly rising in South Africa and Afrikaners have been victims of so-called “farm murders” and attacks during which they are tortured and executed in dehumanising ways reminiscent of ethnic war and ethnic cleansing. In the cities too, house robberies and interracial attacks are rising. Together with legislation all but prohibiting them from holding state and corporate jobs, it is clear that the only rational choice for Afrikaners is to leave as many have already done, emigrating to Australia, New Zealand and other countries in the British Commonwealth.
With the benefit of hindsight, both South Africa and the ex-Rhodesia were deliberately brought under the control of radical black-nationalist movements that saw no long-term future for whites in Southern Africa, notwithstanding the posturing of Nelson Mandela before the world media, which was simply meant to ensure a smooth transfer of military and police power to the ANC and the South African Communist Party.
Over the past decade or two we have seen many countries destabilised by the Western drive for “democracy”, which is usually an ill-concealed strategy to strip the target countries of their mineral wealth and other assets. In that respect, South Africa is no different to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen where the USA is currently fighting wars. America also has military personnel deployed in other states, including Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates.
While Europe normally pays obeisance to the USA in its global strategy and foreign adventures, lately also seen in Ukraine where Russian commentators have accused the EU of being a “lapdog” of the USA, the Old Continent carries a heavy responsibility for the destabilisation of Southern Africa. Instead of finding a compromise between the various peoples and interest groups in this part of the world, European states have consistently supported the most radical, anti-white, quasi-Marxist revolutionary groups. The rise of Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa portend exactly the same future for South Africa as the present Zimbabwe, with the confiscation of white-owned farms, urban property and other assets.
As in Gabriel García Márquez’s famous novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, we know exactly what the outcome is going to be: the ethnic cleansing of Afrikaners from South Africa, with or without even more violence than we are experiencing at present from the marauding, anomic killers that prosper under the ANC government’s policy of laissez-faire and a gradual descent into general lawlessness.
At least five European states may be held accountable for Afrikaners’ becoming a stateless people: Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, (East) Germany and our former colonial power, the United Kingdom. They financed and supported, also through propaganda and diplomatic means, the African National Congress and South African Communist Party, knowing full well that these were radical, revolutionary movements that would ultimately “chase the whites into the sea” as had occurred in several other African states, notably the Belgian Congo (currently the DRC), Algeria, and the Portuguese colonies such as Mozambique and Angola.
It is telling that, after finally seeing the writing on the wall, albeit 20 years too late, the FW de Klerk Foundation has just launched an appeal to the “international community” in trying to stem the devastating effects of permanent affirmative action upon a politically powerless minority. According to the FW de Klerk Foundation, “We must make it clear that we are not prepared to accept a status as second-‐class citizens.”
Clearly, De Klerk merely followed European and particularly British dictates twenty years ago, in the optimistic belief that there would be some kind of Western or European “veto” in the future if things had to go wrong. However, with so many countries being destabilised by American wars, the international community would simply regard South Africa as yet another casualty of internal divisions without acknowleding the key role played by Europe in setting what used to be an organised Western-style industrial state on the road to radicalism, revolution and ethnic cleansing.
There is an expression in Afrikaans, gedane sake het geen keer, which is more or less equivalent to the English “no use in crying over spilt milk”. Afrikaners will never rule South Africa again and the country is living through a miniature “decline of the West”, with long-forgotten African beliefs and superstitions displacing Christianity and even the secular, scientific thought of the European Enlightenment. Mbeki’s so-called AIDS denialism was but one, highly publicised challenge to science which is also taking place in many other fields.
South Africa, like Zimbabwe, has been broken and it will never be fixed, unless there takes place such a vast conceptual revolution in the world which makes possible another basis for political power besides sheer numbers and demography, but there are very few signs of such a development. In truth, no-one cares about the fact that Zimbabwe has gone from bread basket to basket case, and neither does anyone care that South Africa is slouching towards the same fate.
The only question that remains is: What is to become of the Afrikaner people? We started life out here in this colony almost four centuries ago as either refugees from Catholic France or as indentured employees of the Dutch East India Company. Today and once more, we have become at best a stateless people or “minority at risk”, holding South African passports but without any say in government, in our schools, universities, municipalities or other institutions from which we are being increasingly displaced. Everywyhere, we are subjected to a rapidly intensifying racial quota system and our children hardly have the right to study, let alone to find work within the state or corporate sector. At worst, we are already internal refugees and unlike the Portuguese of Angola or Mozambique, or even the white Rhodesians, we do not have the luxury of holding European passports. In a certain sense, having destroyed or at least destabilised our heimat, Europe does not want us back.
The behaviour of Europe could perhaps be compared to that of a man burning down his brother’s house and then refusing him shelter afterwards. Being the victims of European and American geopolitical scheming and social engineering, we do not have any form of recourse as to the consequences of their destructive designs. It was also cleverly done by means of indigenous proxies or “exiled” ones, so it is going to be difficult to prove European mischief in destabilising South Africa.
Even though we speak a variant of seventeenth-century Dutch and Low German, that former lingua franca of Northern Europe from 1300 to 1600 when the Hanseatic League held sway, we have long since ceased to think of ourselves as Europeans. We named the standardised form of our language “Afrikaans” in honour of our adopted continent, that same continent which is now rejecting us in the name of the slogan, “Africa for the Africans”, understood in a racial and cultural sense. The paradox is that the anglicised or americanised African speaking English, but racially African, is able to stigmatise the white Afrikaner as a foreigner, an interloper, despite the fact that our cultural roots in this place are deeper and more ancient than his.
However, Europe too, although it does not seem to accept the principle of “Europe for the Europans”, also enthusiastically supports the notion of “Africa for the Africans”. Most European companies apply discrimination against indigenous whites with alacrity, as it is the law of the land.
Given the continuing African population explosion, with the continent’s population set to rise to 2,5 billion in the next 30 years, the demographic pressure on us is going to be relentless, added to all the other pressures such as the violence and institutionalised discrimination. What kind of racial quota do you get by the time that you constitute only one or two percent of the population? A percent or nothing?
During the call for sanctions against South Africa during the 1980s, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher opposed it on the basis that up to a million whites from here had British passports and could therefore swell the ranks of British unemployed. Presumably the same million whites of British descent could still return to the United Kingdom, like the Portuguese from Africa did or the French pieds noirs from Algeria. But what about us, descendants of the French Huguenots, the Dutch, the Flemish and the Northern Germans whose forgotten trading language from centuries gone by we still speak, write and school our children in?
If all else goes wrong, as increasingly seems likely, do we not have the same right of return as the British, the Portuguese, the pieds noirs or the Belgians, even though we are technically “non-Europeans”?
Will Europe, as it welcomes the Syrian, Iraqui, Afghan and other refugees from destabilised countries where the Anglo-Saxon oil wars have played themselves out, reject us, despite being its own flesh and blood? Not only that, but we are truly the victims of the European political junkyard dumped on South Africa, with its Swedish theory of the melting pot, of multiculturalism, of communism, of white guilt and the rest.
In more senses than one, Afrikaners are a problem of Europe’s making.
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe says South Africa is failing to lead the economic development of countries in the African Union (AU) because its economy is in the hands of the white minority.
Speaking at a function attended by African diplomats stationed in Beijing, China, on Monday where Sierra Leone ambassador Victor Bockarie Foh and Liberia’s McKinley Thomas heaped praise on him, Mugabe said South Africa was in a compromised situation.
“We would love to see South Africa taking the lead. But the country’s economy is still controlled by the white community, making it difficult [for blacks] to take charge.”
His address took place on his recent two-week tour of China to seek funds for Zimbabwe’s ailing economy.
In response, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe told Voice of America’s Studio 7 on Wednesday that South Africa would not “drive whites into the sea” in a manner that would look like Zimbabwe’s chaotic black empowerment programme.
He said South Africa would not draw inspiration from Zimbabwe in redistributing national resources.
Last year, in a televised interview with Dali Tambo, Mugabe took a dig at Nelson Mandela for being too “friendly” with whites. “Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of blacks,” said Mugabe.
Since taking over as chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) earlier this month, Mugabe has pushed for South Africa to help other African countries, especially those in the region, instead of using them as a “dumping ground” for surplus products.
He told journalists at the end of the SADC summit: “We also appeal to South Africa, which is highly industrialised, to lead us in this, and to work with us and cooperate with us and not just to regard the rest of our countries as open markets for products from South Africa.”
Before this address, Mugabe had been let down by South Africa which, with Namibia, had refused to sign the Protocol on Trade in Services. It provides for a mandate to progressively negotiate the removal of barriers to the free movement of services.
Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe unleashed a storm of brutal, genocidal violence after losing the 2008 elections — and now we know that it was funded by western hedge-funds and banks, led by Och-Ziff Capital Management, the largest publicly traded fund, with assistance from Blackrock, GLG Partners, and Credit Suisse, who raised $100M for Mugabe’s weapons and torture-chambers in exchange for a sweetheart deal on the country’s platinum mines.
Daniel Och’s Och-Ziff manages $45.7B, including funds from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Och’s protege, Michael Cohen, led the charge to fund Mugabe’s pogrom; while an Israeli diamond trader called Dan Gertler helped broker a joint deal with OCH to invest in mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, another nation whose state is complicit in horrific terror-campaigns that include child soldiery and rape camps.
Och-Ziff is under investigation for its deals in Zimbabwe and DRC, including allegations that it deliberately and illegally disguised its involvmeent. Cohen left Och-Ziff in 2013, shortly after buying a $22M country estate outside London: “Ewhurst Park, the more than 900-acre spread includes a sprawling main house, cottages, a church, a large lake with ducks, a boathouse, bridges, wooded areas, fountains, and formal gardens.” Cohen wouldn’t provide a comment to Businessweek on the deals.
Four days later, Camec announced it was using the money it raised to purchase a joint venture with the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corp., or ZMDC, Mugabe’s state-owned mining company. The joint venture owned the platinum stakes on the Great Dyke that had been taken back just a few weeks earlier from Anglo American. The price included $5 million in cash; Camec issued shares to partners whose identities were shielded by a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands; and $100 million to Mugabe’s government. Camec said the $100 million was a cash loan “to comply with its contractual obligations to the government of Zimbabwe” for the platinum claims. It said the money would be repaid out of ZMDC’s share of future platinum earnings. Camec’s balance sheets for the period make clear that funding for the platinum rights came from the private transactions involving Och-Ziff.
On the day Camec announced the deal with Mugabe’s government, two of McGee’s embassy employees were in the countryside gathering intelligence on Mugabe’s efforts to ensure his win. A lieutenant colonel in the president’s army told embassy staffers that soldiers, militia members, and ruling party backers loyal to Mugabe were training to conduct what he called a “reorientation campaign,” according to McGee and embassy cables. The lieutenant colonel also said 400 vehicles were being deployed to facilitate the operation.
Violence intensified throughout May. Soldiers drove opposition supporters out of their rural villages or urban neighborhoods. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 33,000 people were driven from their homes by month’s end. Hundreds turned up at the gates of the American Embassy. “These people were literally running for their lives,” McGee says.
In a shock move Paul Siwela’s Matabeleland Liberation Organisation (MLO) has signed an agreement with an investment firm which deals in natural resources to set up and operate an oil, gas mining company in Matabeleland.
MLO signed the agreement on Tuesday with Kilimanjaro Capital Ltd which is based in the offshore-financial centre Belize City, following a year of talks.
Belize stands out as one of a dwindling number of “safe” tax havens where privacy and assets are respected for Anglo-American citizens.
Siwela is currently on the run after skipping bail just before he was due in court to hear whether treason charges against him and his colleagues stood.
He was charged with treason for allegedly planning a violent overthrow of the government.
In a Press release, Kilimanjaro Capital Ltd said the company would be jointly administered by Kilimanjaro Capital and the MLO.
Siwela said this marks MLO’s total take-over of all economic resources in Matabeleland.
“We are talking of taking over all economic resources in Matabeleland territory. Talks have been going on for more than a year and stand to change the economic face of Matabeleland and give economic resources back to the people of Matabeleland,” Siwela said in an e-mailed response.
Kilimanjaro Capital Ltd focuses on the acquisition, development and management of natural resource assets in Africa.
The company is listed on the Danish GXG Exchange and has obtained a secondary listing on the United States Over The Counter markets exchange as a foreign issuer.
Siwela added the agreement with Kilimanjaro would change the face of Matabeleland.
“The memorandum of agreement shall change the politics of Matabeleland forever and MLO is now taking over the affairs of Matabeleland and will not interfere with Zimbabwe. This means all businesses operating in Matabeleland must know the authority that must give them valid licences to operate in Matabeleland.
“We respect the Zimbabwean border and would not take anything over our borders. Zimbabweans would remain with their land and their government and we would not interfere with that as it is for Zimbabweans to sort their own problems,” he added.
Siwela’s MLO has been leading calls for a separate Matabeleland state saying the province was being sidelined from national development programmes.
MLO says a separate Matabeleland state is necessary to put an end to the marginalisation of the region which lags behind in development.
The 50-year-old Siwela, is thought to be domiciled in Sweden after skipping the country.
“Zimbabwe is a failed State and heading towards the abyss,” Siwela told the Daily News from self-imposed exile.
“It is for this and other reasons like gross abuse of human rights, corruption, Matabele genocide and lack of accountability and abuse of office by the government and failure to address Matabeleland political grievances that the current situation shall deliver the birth of the Republic of Matabeleland.”
Siwela together with Charles Thomas and John Gazi, former leaders of the Matabeleland Liberation Front, were arrested in 2011 on allegations of treason and attempting to subvert a constitutionally-elected government.
The trio distributed fliers calling on members of the public and the army to rise up against the government. The High Court has since acquitted Gazi but ruled that Thomas and Siwela have a case to answer.
Speaking to the Daily News, from his base yesterday, Siwela said: “The people of Matabeleland have been suffering discrimination since November 3, 1893 when the British colonial masters annexed the region.
“As if that was not enough, they further lost their independence and sovereignty and suffered genocide under President Robert Mugabe who has dismally failed and falsely projected himself as a pan-Africanist yet he is an anti-thesis of pan-Africanism.”
While not giving a time frame when the plan will likely be put into motion, Siwela said MLO intends to raise the national flag of the “Republic of Matabeleland” by 2018, claiming they have already penned a national anthem that is set to be sung during the inaugural hoisting of the flag.
He claimed Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces were ready for the so-called separation.
“At the moment, the agenda is to commit to the independence of our country,” he said.
“We have finished our constitution for the Republic of Matabeleland and we have our coat of arms as well.
“The people of Matabeleland have resolved to combine their efforts and work towards establishing their independence from Zimbabwe which is a colonial master being a successor to Rhodesia. Remember, there was no country called Zimbabwe before April 1980.”
Spelling out his ambitions for the new State, Siwela said they would recruit 30 000 civilians to form the Matabeleland Defence Force “to defend and protect our political integrity.”
He added: “We will have a 10 000-member police force, 3 000 correctional services, 1 000 civil servants that would include district, provincial and central government; some would be absorbed in the agriculture, mining, tourism services, a few parastatals and State-owned entities, industry and wildlife.”
Zimbabwe’s economy is ‘regressing with deindustrialisation or informalisation; 84% of the economy is now informal’.
While liberal media in the West, such as the New York Times, have been lauding Zimbabwe’s antiwhite “land reform” and confiscation of white assets as a “success”, its government is currently unable to pay salaries.
According to reports, the Zimbabwean government “may be heading for a shutdown after it announced that it cannot guarantee pay dates for the civil service as the cash crunch bites deeper and with no solution in sight”.
Like many African countries, Zimbabwe has a vast army of government bureacrats constituting the “growing middle class” of the country who produce very little but receive 90% of the government budget. Since the ANC takeover of South Africa, government’s salary bill has also skyrocketed, with investment in infrastructure or maintenance of state assets slumping.
Zimbabwe’s Deputy Minister of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare Tongai Muzenda told Senate last week that government “won’t guarantee any fixed pay dates”.
“We do not want to make false promises as the (Civil Service) Commission does not put the dates on the pay slips and that is going to be the case for some time until our economy has stabilised,” he said.
Analysts yesterday said that the admission by government poses a serious threat to the economy considering that salaries take a huge chunk of the recurrent expenditure.
“We are in shutdown,” an analyst said. “The budget is 90% recurrent and the bulk of that is in salaries”.
The last country to experience a government shutdown was the United States after Congress failed to enact legislation appropriating funds for fiscal year 2014. It lasted for 16 days.
During the US shutdown at least 800 000 federal employees were indefinitely furloughed (leave of absence) and 1,3 million reported for work without known payment dates.
Analysts say the civil service was the most secure borrower through Salaries Services Bureau and a payslip was a blank cheque to micro credit, which is driving the informal economy.
“That has been decimated. Once that is not there, banks won’t be able to lend. It means the lending platform has come to a halt,” an analyst said.
The civil service enjoys salary-based loans on the basis that government pays salaries on time.
Banks have stopped lending to companies due to rising defaults with statistics from the central bank showing that the ratio of non-performing loans to total loans had increased to 16,96% as at March 31 2014, up from 15,92%.
An NPL is when payments of interest and principal are past due by 90 days or more, or at least 90 days of interest payments have been capitalised, refinanced or delayed by agreement.
An executive with a commercial bank said measurement of economic policies was not on the basis of its nobility or objective but on the consequences.
“The consequence of announcing that there is no fixed date [for civil servants’ salaries] is that the economy has shut down,” he said.
Analysts say the only symbolism which was giving the economy a semblance of life was the fact that civil servants were being paid.
Government is the largest single employer and had until now provided fixed pay dates for its workers while other companies were defaulting.
“That symbolism has now come to an end by the removal of fixed dates and signifies government’s acceptance of default,” he said.
American actor and comedian Larry Fine once remarked that “the pain goes away on payday”, a feat that was only enjoyed by the civil service because the money was coming on time.
For the majority of Zimbabwean workforce that pain has become a permanent feature as payday becomes a moving target. For the unlucky ones, it has appeared only in dreams as companies took a battering from the harsh prevailing economic environment.
Statistics from the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) shows that 15 companies retrenched 2 491 in the first half of the year.
The Employers’ Confederation of Zimbabwe (EMCOZ) attributed the challenges in paying salaries on time to “a shortage of cash in the economy for various reasons which include minimum injection of new cash into the economy to grow the formal sector and inefficiencies inherent in an economic environment that is growing very slowly with some companies closing”.
“What is then happening is that producers of goods are having difficulties collecting cash from their sales and their suppliers are always sitting at their gates wanting to be paid for services rendered,” EMCOZ president Jack Murehwa said.
“When the company eventually gets a bit of cash from the overdue debtors, it then has to prioritise and decide how much goes to service providers, inputs, maintenance, salaries and many other costs.”
He said as a result of the limited cash, the company has to decide where to apply the cash — net salaries, pension, PAYE and other levies to be paid.
“As would be expected, in most cases, one or more of the commitments will suffer and obviously in instances where the extent of the unfunded commitments continues to grow, the formal business winds up,” he said.
Murehwa said under the current circumstances, employees who are still getting their salaries, although delayed, are in fact “in a better shape compared to those who have stopped thinking of ever getting a salary because the operation wound up or is as good as non-existent”.
Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe director Godfrey Kanyenze said the private sector was a victim of the environment and government has to address the doing business aspect to help companies.
“How do you compete when you don’t have electricity? Government should address the cost of capital through re-engagement with multilaterals because no one will bring the money cheap, they demand a premium,” Kanyenze said.
Kanyenze said the economy was regressing with deindustrialisation or informalisation. He said 84% of the economy was now informal.
In his 2014 national budget presentation, Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa said the old economy was dead and a new one, based on the informal sector, had been born, urging financial institutions to cater for the small to medium sized enterprises.
But Kanyenze said informality was problematic as it did not contribute to taxes.
“You can’t celebrate informality. Everything informal is hidden. Much of the work is organised around sustenance,” Kanyenze said.
“There is nothing to celebrate unless there is a transition to formality.”
Kanyenze said the situation was dire and government alone could not resolve the crisis. He said it was now necessary to have a convergence of minds among all stakeholders so that everybody could put their hands on the plough.
Figures from the national statistical agency, Zimstat, show that imports in the first half of the year have been reduced to US$2,99 billion from US$3,92 billion in the comparable period last year. Exports went down to US$1,22 billion from US$1,54 billion.
A large portion of Zimbabwe’s foreign currency receipts come from migrant workers who have crossed the border to South Africa, mostly illegally. In Johannesburg the majority of restaurant and café waiters, maids and gardeners now come from Zimbabwe.
Western, mostly British, aid agencies are also active in Zimbabwe, propping up Mugabe’s regime which was installed by Britain in 1980 when Fleet Street gushed about “that brilliant Marxist-intellectual leader, Robert Mugabe”.
In the wake of collapsing companies, analysts say the low imports signify that the liquidity crunch is biting.
While the ANC regime is pursuing a policy of “land restitution”, black farmers seem to have little interest in the ideological project
Another farm, owned by the state, has been found outside Hartbeesfontein in the North West in a state of serious neglect.
While the ANC regime is pursuing a policy of “land restitution”, black farmers seem to have little interest in the ideological project.
A white councillor in the Matlosana municipality, has had to provide food and water for three pigs through holes in a wall, after the pigs had been without food and water for some time.
“Another two pigs in the pen were already dead and were being eaten by the surviving pigs,” the statement said.
“The agricultural unit of the National SPCA was informed of the situation and removed the pigs after obtaining a court order.”
The farm is under the management of the Matlosana municipality and used for “local economic development projects”. Millions of rands have been spent on the farm but every project has failed.
The farm, Moria, was across from another farm, used as a provincial agriculture project, where the SPCA had to previously euthanize 28 stud cattle, and where recently a further two were found to be in a “shocking” state of malnutrition.
On July 6, The Sunday Independent reported that pigs were found starving and eating one another on the farm Modderfontein, near Potchefstroom, owned by Thandi Modise, who is National Council of Provinces chairwoman and a former North West premier.
Police and SPCA officials found dead and dying animals, including pigs, sheep, geese, goats and ducks. Many had to be put down.
It appeared the animals had been without water and food for around two weeks. There were no farmworkers on the property, no electricity, and the water pumps were broken.
Abdul Mogale, is Thandi Modise’s former boyfriend and an ANC councillor for the Ekurhuleni metropolitan municipality, neighbouring farmers told amaBhungane.
The black former ANC premier Modise has been charged with the death of up to 80 animals and euthanasing of a further 117 by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) after they had been denied food and water for two weeks.
Modise purchased the 488 hectare farm with a R4.9-million Land Bank loan in 2011 for her black boyfriend say insiders.
Farmworkers aslo claim they had been underfed and underpaid, and that they had begged for food on the black-owned farm.
The former romantic relationship between Modise and Mogale was confirmed this week by Modise’s spokesperson Neo Moepi.
Long-term neglect and plundering of the farm was evident when amaBhungane visited the farm.
The ANC is currently pushing for laws to disown white farmers, much like in Zimbabwe where the black landgrab has resulted in famine.
According to the SPCA and a well-informed veterinary source, the pigs had been underfed for longer than two weeks.
Neighbours also said that the cattle on the farm had gathered at the electric fence around the farm, well before the SPCA’S intervention, desperate for food and water.
The desperate starving pigs could be heard squeeling for water from kilometres away.
Andries Venter from the SPCA said various things pointed to long-term neglect that would be probed for a possible criminal case against Modise. “There is definite evidence of overall neglect that has gone on for months,” he said.
The water pumps were out of order and amaBhungane saw fences in disrepair. According to Daan van den Berg, the farm’s previous owner whom amaBhungane interviewed this week, the pump failure was because of an electrical short circuit that the SPCA asked him to rectify.
Modise suggested that the water and electricity supply to the farm had been cut off, saying that she wanted an investigation to determine who had done this.
Previous owner Van den Berg said that on two occasions shortly after Modise bought the farm, Mogale had asked him to source feed for the pigs. Mogale did not explain why he could not source the feed himself.
Van den Berg said the tractor and implements he sold with the farm did not seem to have been used for years.
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe on Wednesday ratcheted up pressure against few hundred white remaining farmers saying they too must go adding whites would no longer be allowed to own land in Zimbabwe.
In an address filled with anti-western rhetoric at the launch of the A1 Model Settlement Tenure Permit in the Zanu PF heartland of Mashonaland West, Mugabe said Zimbabwe was no country for whites as far as the land was concerned.
“There are white farmers who are still on the land and have the protection of some cabinet ministers and politicians as well as traditional leaders,” he said.
“That should never happen and we will deal with ministers but as for our chiefs we do not want to harass you.
“Chief Charumbira (Fortune and president of chief’s council), you need to help us on this one because we respect you and your members. We do not want trouble.”
He added: “I have been given a list of 35 white farmers in Mashonaland West alone and in just a few districts that have been audited. We say no to whites owning our land and they should go.
“They can own companies and apartments in our towns and cities but not the soil. It is ours and that message should ring loud and clear in Britain and the United States.”
The new tenure system will confirm land ownership and, according to Mugabe, the government will create modalities within the financial services sector to allow farmers to access funding.
In typical anti-western rhetoric Mugabe took a dig at former British Premier Tony Blair.
“We had an agreement with the Margaret Thatcher government and when Tony Blair came he reneged on that agreement. I pleaded with him to review his decision but he was a boy from the street with no experience so he stuck to his guns,” said the veteran leader.
“I was not amused and told him to keep his England and we would keep our Zimbabwe. We will not pay for our land and we will not ask our people to pay for it because they never paid for it in the first place.
“They were selling to each other amongst themselves and we will not recognise any of that nonsense. They were living like kings and queens on our land and we chucked them out. Now we want all of it.”
Mugabe’s latest pronouncements are likely to send jitters across the agricultural sector and the remaining white commercial farmers some who have argued that they never benefitted from colonialism. – New Zimbabwe
Since 1994 white farmers have been murdered in alarming numbers.
Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti wants white commercial farmers to hand over half their farms to black farmworkers.
Nkwinti said in an interview this week that stakeholders in commercial agriculture, including farmers, trade unions, farmworkers and the agricultural business sector, have until April next year to react to his proposals.
The commercial farmers retain 50% of the farm;
The labourers on the land assume ownership of the remaining 50%, proportional to their contribution to the development of the land based on the number of years they had worked on the land;
The government pays for the 50% to be shared by the labourers, but the money will not go to the farmer. It will go to an investment and development fund to be jointly owned by the parties constituting the new ownership regime. The investment and development fund will be used for reinvestment in the farm, skills improvement and to pay out those who want to opt out of the arrangement;
Current tenancy protection remains and it will be balanced by a regime of duties and responsibilities that worker-dwellers must comply with if they want to stay on the farm;
Of the 50% to be shared by labourers, all labourers with a history of between 10 and 25 consecutive years of disciplined service will share 10%, those with 25 to 50 years’ consecutive service will share 25%, those with more than 50 years’ consecutive service will share 50% and 15% will be available for household subsistence farming; and
Land rights management committees, consisting of local people, will be established to solve local disputes.
Nkwinti said he had come up with the proposal because the previous system had “many deficiencies”.
Land reform has been brought into sharp focus by the decline of agriculture in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where many white commercial farmers have been violently evicted and their property rights trampled by the state.
Some 90% of farms redistributed to South Africa’s black population from white farmers are not productive.
Since 1994 white farmers have been murdered in alarming numbers.
About 50 people on average are murdered in South-Africa per day, of which at least 20 are white(95+ % black on white murder rate), although whites make up only 9% (4 500 000) of the demographics in South-Africa.
Registrar-General Mr Tobaiwa Mudede has urged Zimbabweans to stop using contraceptives religiously, saying the contraceptives are a ploy by powerful nations to retard population growth in Africa and thereby weaken the nation.
Mr Mudede said contraceptives were also conduits for pandemic diseases such as cancer, especially in women. He said this in a Sunday address to Family of God Church congregants commemorating Africa Day in Kambuzuma, Harare.
Present were senior Government and Zanu-PF officials who included ruling party national political commissar Cde Webster Shamu, who was guest of honour. Church founder Reverend Andrew Wutawunashe invited Mr Mudede and the other VIPs.
Mr Mudede said he had co-authored a book on population control with television producer Mr Richard Hondo.
He said the book explained why people should desist from using contraceptives and urged Africans to sire as many children as possible. Mr Mudede conceded that his ideas would face stiff resistance.
“When I looked at other countries that are smaller in size than us they actually have bigger populations,” said Mr Mudede. “I am pained when I am told that my little daughter must go on contraceptives.
“Why do you want these foreign products? It pains me a lot.
“Where are you going to get soldiers should there be an aggression? We want police officers, workers, nurses. If you are to ask young people today how many children they have you would hear them responding proudly, ‘just two’.”
Mr Mudede said the book came after extensive research, including among the Doma people of Kanyemba, the San of Plumtree and various apostolic sects.
The Doma, San and some apostolic sects, particularly Johanne Marange, do not use contraceptives. Mr Mudede questioned how society could thrive when it was limiting its growth.
“You want to be a superpower, but you do not want to multiply,” he said.
Mr Mudede said some cancers were a side-effect of contraceptives.
He said Nigeria had a population of more than 130 million and its economy was booming while countries like Zimbabwe, which are preoccupied with contraceptives, have subdued economies.
Mr Mudede said most birth control methods were as bad as genetically modified organisms. “Pasi nedepo provera. Pasi nenorplant (Down with depo provera, Down with norplant),” he said.
Mr Mudede said he recently lost a niece to cancer associated with the use of contraceptives. He added that contraceptives interfered with God’s biological plan for women in which their bodies cleanse themselves every month.
“So you want an injection or a tablet to interfere with that natural process created by God?” Contraceptives were popularised in the country from the 1980s, with donors and Government discouraging people from having large families.
Bearing a child each year was viewed as a bad practice, with a sustained campaign being run to ridicule those in the practice.
According to the 2012 Zimbabwe Population Census, the population growth rate was at 1,1 percent for the last 10 years, while the average size of a household was at 4,2.
The population growth rate was also 1,1 percent in the 2002 census.
Blade telling Nkwinti to take white farms, not mines
Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande and member of the SACP has described what is being written about President Jacob Zuma and his Nkandla residence as “white people’s lies”.
He has been the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party since 1998.
Nzimande was speaking at an event to honour President Zuma held at the University of Zululand, at KwaDlangezwa.
Nzimande has heaped praise on President Zuma, saying it is appropriate to honour him for his contribution to peace in KwaZulu-Natal and education in the country.
He’s dismissed as “lies perpetuated by white people” reports about Nkandla and Zuma.
In 2007 Malawian businessman Charles Modise claimed he made a R500,000 donation to the South African Communist Party in 2002.
He claimed he gave the money, packed in black plastic bags, to Willy Madisha, who in turn swore he transported the money in the boot of his car to SACP general secretary Nzimande. However, Nzimande denied ever receiving the money, also calling the allegations “lies perpetuated by white people”.
Despite being a Communist, Mzimande is against the nationalisation of mines, strangely stating that it is not “inherently progressive” as it depended on which class interests were being advanced.
Nzimande supports the accelerated transfer of white-owned land to blacks however and warned earlier that South Africa would become like Zimbabwe if whites continue to own land.
Nzimande said the people needed to know why banks were still financing farmers using the “same [free market] methods used during apartheid”.
“One of the biggest obstacles facing land reform is the willing buyer-willing seller principal,” he said.
He said with that principle, it was those who already owned the land—and not the landless—who benefited.
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