Harare/Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe has
handed out millions of US dollars worth of imported brand new
agricultural equipment, vehicles, generators and cattle in what
critics said was a massive vote-buying exercise ahead of elections
this month.
Simultaneously, the state media reported Sunday that 84-year-old
Mugabe, seeking to add another five years to the presidency in his 28
years of rule, had signed into law new legislation that demands that
all public or white-owned companies ensure that the majority
shareholdings in their businesses are owned by blacks.
Presidential elections on March 29 - to be held simultaneously
with parliamentary and local government elections - pit Mugabe
against his former finance minister, Simba Makoni, trying to win
large-scale defections from Mugabe's ruling ZANU(PF) party, and pro-
democracy leader Morgan Tsvangirai of his faction of the opposition
Movement for Democratic Change.
Already churches, human rights organizations and Western diplomats
have warned of 'ominous signs' of attempts by Mugabe to rig the poll.
On Saturday, according to the ruling party-run Sunday Mail, Mugabe
presided over the distribution of 300 40-seater buses, 500 tractors,
20 combine harvesters and a range of other modern farming machinery,
as well as 50,000 ox-drawn ploughs and thousands of other peasant
farming implements, 5,000 electricity generators, 3,000 mills for
grinding maize, 680 motorcycles and 100,000 litres of diesel.
Mugabe said at the ceremony that the goods were part of an
agricultural mechanization programme that would 'consolidate the
gains of our land-reform programme,' a reference to the lawless and
violent eviction of over 4,500 white farmers and 300,000 farmworkers'
families from 2000.
The seizures were followed by a crash of what was regarded as
Africa's most robust agricultural industry that supplied food to
scores of famine-stricken African nations.
The newspaper did not say who received the goods, but in two
similar handouts last year - where 25 million US dollars worth of
farm equipment was distributed - the recipients have been identified
mostly as cabinet ministers, legislators and ruling party bosses.
Human rights groups say they have evidence that the manual
implements were given out in peasant farming areas only to people who
could produce ruling party cards or chant ruling party slogans.
'Your vote will ensure you benefit from the agricultural
mechanization programme,' Mugabe said last week.
'This has more to do with vote buying than with agricultural
production,' economist John Robertson said.
Local press watchdog the Media Monitoring Project Sunday referred
to 'the now endemic ruling party donations' meant to influence voters
into supporting Mugabe.
No mention has been made of the cost of importing all the goods,
or where the effectively bankrupt government found the hard currency.
Zimbabwe, in 1998 with the second highest GDP in sub-Saharan
Africa, is in its ninth year of economic catastrophe, with inflation
running at 100,000 per cent, the currency worth just one ten-
thousandth of what it was a year ago and GDP down 70 per cent of its
value.
The value of the equipment and vehicles was 'heavy stuff,'
Robertson said. 'They must have paid cash because no-one anywhere in
the world will give us credit.'
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