Thanks for your vids but i'm really depressed right now
Why did this happen? The video shows the symptoms but not the cause. The cause is an powerful hand undermining the economy of Zimbabwe.
Obama needs to shut up: President Mugabe is a hero!
- Thread starter Nzinga
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Why did this happen? The video shows the symptoms but not the cause. The cause is an powerful hand undermining the economy of Zimbabwe.
I would generally have to agree... Mugabe killed Tongogara, caused untold misery to Joshua Nkomo, and some even blame him for killing Herbert Chitepo (though cacs have stated that they assassinated Chitepo to foment confusion in the ranks of the liberation movement).
And the right way of getting CAC's out of his country would be??????
I also want to know the answer to this..
1. Diamonds at Chiyadzwa in Mutare were discovered recently. In 1999 no one knew about them. You are ignorant on facts about Zimbabwe my brother
2. The fact is that the UN and other independent observers have pointed at Mugabe for looting Congo's diamonds. His heir apparent Emmerson Mnangagwa has also being fingered for looting Congo's diamonds and appointing his friend Billy Rautenbach as the CEO of one of Congo's largest diamond mines.
3. The bottom line is that SADC did not endorse Mugabe's decision to go into Congo, that is why he went alone instead of going with all the other countries like they did in Lesotho. Even Mandela's successor Thabo Mbeki was against Mugabe's involvement in Congo. By the way Thabo Mbeki is more pan Africanist than Madiba
4.The audit was already done and the report submitted to Mugabe. Why won't he release it ? It was done by his cabinet minister called Flora Buka.
And the right way of getting CAC's out of his country would be??????
They was a better way in which he could have first trained the black farmers and then provided them with access to capital. This way when the black farmers take over the farms they will not be a negative feedback production wise. He didn't do that he just violently went to remove the whites from the farms without thinking about how he would feed the country. Everyone wanted a land reform but they were opposed to Mugabe's methodology. This is like chasing white doctors from a hospital without trained black doctors waiting in hand to take over.
Not true, De Beers had been there for almost 20 years...It was known that there were diamonds, however Mugabe respected the contract that gave DeBeers rights to the area... I know this because I have friends who have asked me to get involved in mining diamonds...But I do not have the money or the means to satisfy the high bar Mugabe has set..Secondly fuck the UN; it has a disgraceful record in Zaire. It went to war with the nationalist government in the 1960s and was at the root of Mobutu coming to power. The UN was nothing but a tool of American foreign policy. The best thing that ever happened is that the motherfucking UN Secretary General, Dag Hammerskjold, a cac from Sweden, died while on an airflight from Zambia to oversee the UN's disgraceful war of colonialism in Zaire, in the 1960s. And even better, the Zambian government demolished a stadium named after the motherfucker in Ndola, hoping but never succeeding to build a better one, for more than 30 years now...
How can Emmerson Mnangagwa, a Zimbabwean, appoint a foreign cac, to be CEO of a diamond mining company in Zaire? Since when did Zimbabwe control diamond mining in Zaire? What is the name of the company controlled by Zimbabwe? You are crazy; you believe all the false infor being put out to discredit your own government. The diamonds in Zaire are mainly in the Kasai provinces which is barely under Zairian government control, and certainly not answering to Zimbabwe..
So you are wrong...
When when did Zimbabwe, or for that matter any country in SADC become answerable to SADC?? When did being a member of SADC mean surrendering your sovereignity to SADC. Fuck SADC...It is supposed to be an economic body, not a political clearing house..
I never said he was a saint, and when he dies, hopefully, the land will be redistributed properly and likes of Ignatious Chombo dispossessed of any land that might have....
Complete bullshit. What training did Boers have? And where would he have found the capital, especially when they were choking it off from the country? Secondly white farmers do not feed anyone. They grow tobacco and flowers to export to Europe for dollars... That is true in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Kenya where they have cac farmers...
The Shona (Zezuru) to be specific, are some of the hardest working and most industrious people in the world. They are able to feed Zimbabwe if given subsidies and extension services by the government. The proof that proper agricultural policy would yield positive results is in front of us, in the form of Malawi... an overcrowded sliver of a country where subsidies have turned that little country into a food exporter to the likes of Zimbabwe and Kenya. Obama and the English are not happy, and have demanded that Malawi remove the food subsidies. Of course when food shortages result, then Americans will come in with food shipments from their own heavily subsidised farmers..
They also grew wheat and maize. They produced 50% of maize every year and over 80% of the wheat. Yes, it is true that they focused on cash crops.However, we have to realize that the cash crops brought foreign currency into the country.The whites had in their hands 15 million hectares of land which they were utilizing. I don't think that it was fair for 3000 people to have 15 million hectares of land. However, Mugabe allowed this to happen considering that from 1980-2000 he virtually did nothing about the land issue. Actually in 1996 when black peasants tried to grab farms he had them arrested.The Lancaster house agreement tackled the land issue but when Mugabe got into power he just didn't implement it. Money supplied by the British for redistribution of land to black farmers was misused. When his hold on power was threatened he tried to use the land issue as a populist stunt but it didn't work because Zimbabweans wanted jobs in the urban centers. The Lancaster house agreement tackled the land issue but when Mugabe got into power he just didn't implement it !
I love this healthy debate about Africa! You guys keep this going. The stuff I'm learning here is amazing!
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The Chiyadzwa diamond fields was discovered in late 2006. I come from that part of Zimbabwe and until 2007 there was diamond mining going on there. They might have been diamonds in other parts of Manicaland but it was at a very small scale.
Ask yourself after Kabila had been killed who temporarily took over power in Congo until his death was announced a week later ? You guessed it right - Emmerson Mnangagwa. He flew with Kabila's body to Harare and then returned to Congo to try and make sure that Kabila's son would take over his fathers position without any hustle from some sinister elements within the army.Zimbabwean government had more influence in Congo than you can imagine !
SADC has a body called Troika which deals with security and politics related issues.
How many excuses have you mad for the bastard now ? You said he is only human for selling the country to the Chinese, you said he made a mistake for killing the Matebele and now for corruption you say he is not a saint. Give up and admit Mugabe is not a hero - Obama was correct
By law in Zimbabwe all the maize tha was harvested was to be submitted to the Grain Marketing Board. The only maize allowed for stock feed was the yellow one known as Kenya maize in Zimbabwe.
Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts
LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.
But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.
In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.
Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.
Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers.
But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.
Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain.
Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.
“As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food,” Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have.”
The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research.
Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.
Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.
In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely.
Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.
In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.
“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.
Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn production leapt to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005, the government reported.
“The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”
“The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers wanted,” he said. Some economists have questioned whether Malawi’s 2007 bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain, found that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this year’s increase in corn production.
The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary report that a well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy “has the potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught.”
Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi’s southern and central regions said fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their bellies with nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi’s staff of life.
In the hamlet of Mthungu, Enelesi Chakhaza, an elderly widow whose husband died of hunger five years ago, boasted that she got two ox-cart-loads of corn this year from her small plot instead of half a cart.
Last year, roughly half the country’s farming families received coupons that entitled them to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer, enough to nourish an acre of land, for around $15 — about a third the market price. The government also gave them coupons for enough seed to plant less than half an acre.
Malawians are still haunted by the hungry season of 2001-02. That season, an already shrunken program to give poor farmers enough fertilizer and seed to plant a meager quarter acre of land had been reduced again. Regional flooding further lowered the harvest. Corn prices surged. And under the government then in power, the country’s entire grain reserve was sold as a result of mismanagement and corruption.
Mrs. Chakhaza watched her husband starve to death that season. His strength ebbed away as they tried to subsist on pumpkin leaves. He was one of many who succumbed that year, said K. B. Kakunga, the local Agriculture Ministry official. He recalled mothers and children begging for food at his door.
“I had a little something, but I could not afford to help each and every one,” he said. “It was very pathetic, very pathetic indeed.”
But Mr. Kakunga brightened as he talked about the impact of the subsidies, which he said had more than doubled corn production in his jurisdiction since 2005.
“It’s quite marvelous!” he exclaimed.
Malawi’s determination to heavily subsidize fertilizer and the payoff in increased production are beginning to change the attitudes of donors, say economists who have studied Malawi’s experience.
The Department for International Development in Britain contributed $8 million to the subsidy program last year. Bernabé Sánchez, an economist with the agency in Malawi, estimated the extra corn produced because of the $74 million subsidy was worth $120 million to $140 million.
“It was really a good economic investment,” he said.
The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it.
Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort.
But Alan Eastham, the American ambassador to Malawi, said in a recent interview that the subsidy program had worked “pretty well,” though it displaced some commercial fertilizer sales.
“The plain fact is that Malawi got lucky last year,” he said. “They got fertilizer out while it was needed. The lucky part was that they got the rains.”
And the World Bank now sometimes supports the temporary use of subsidies aimed at the poor and carried out in a way that fosters private markets.
Here in Malawi, bank officials say they generally support Malawi’s policy, though they criticize the government for not having a strategy to eventually end the subsidies, question whether its 2007 corn production estimates are inflated and say there is still a lot of room for improvement in how the subsidy is carried out.
“The issue is, let’s do a better job of it,” said David Rohrbach, a senior agricultural economist at the bank.
Though the donors are sometimes ambivalent, Malawi’s farmers have embraced the subsidies. And the government moved this year to give its people a more direct hand in their distribution.
Villagers in Chembe gathered one recent morning under the spreading arms of a kachere tree to decide who most needed fertilizer coupons as the planting season loomed. They had only enough for 19 of the village’s 53 families.
“Ladies and gentlemen, should we start with the elderly or the orphans?” asked Samuel Dama, a representative of the Chembe clan.
Men led the assembly, but women sitting on the ground at their feet called out almost all the names of the neediest, gesturing to families rearing children orphaned by AIDS or caring for toothless elders.
There were more poor families than there were coupons, so grumbling began among those who knew they would have to watch over the coming year as their neighbors’ fertilized corn fields turned deep green.
Sensing the rising resentment, the village chief, Zaudeni Mapila, rose. Barefoot and dressed in dusty jeans and a royal blue jacket, he acted out a silly pantomime of husbands stuffing their pants with corn to sell on the sly for money to get drunk at the beer hall. The women howled with laughter. The tension fled.
He closed with a reminder he hoped would dampen any jealousy.
“I don’t want anyone to complain,” he said. “It’s not me who chose. It’s you.”
The women sang back to him in a chorus of acknowledgment, then dispersed to their homes and fields.
Correction: December 7, 2007
A chart on Sunday about improvements in Malawi’s agricultural production, using erroneous information from a study by researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University, misstated the size of recent corn harvests. (Because of an editing error, the article also included the wrong figures.) The increase in production was in millions of metric tons, not billions. (Estimates show that corn production rose to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/africa/02malawi.html
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe says the government cancelled African Consolidated Resources (ACR)'s mining licence to exploit diamonds from Chiadzwa after the company fraudulently acquired the mining licence without the knowledge of the Zimbabwean government.
ACR replaced De Beers who had been mining illegally in the area for 15 years under the pretext of prospecting.
According to the president, a commissioner in Mutare improperly granted ACR a mining license and he could have been bribed to do so.
Speaking at a meeting with editors of media houses operating in Zimbabwe at the Zimbabwe House last Thursday, President Mugabe said a mining commissioner in Mutare had decided to issue the mining licence to ACR on his own in 2006.
The mining commissioner, Mr Giles Ruswa, was subsequently removed from the Mutare office after the discovery of the anomaly.
"ACR acquired its mining licence in a dubious way. Some commissioner in Mutare just decided on his own to give the company a mining licence," said President Mugabe.
"ACR just inherited the claims from DeBeers where they (DeBeers) managed to hide from us information regarding the Chiadzwa diamonds for more than 15 years.
“DeBeers was telling us that they were just testing to evaluate whether they were diamonds or not, ivo vachitokumba madiamonds edu kuenda nawo kuSouth Africa (whilst looting those diamonds and taken them to South Africa).
"When we discovered what was happening, DeBeers ran away and ACR inherited the claims.
"Ordinary people got wind kuti uko zvamuka uko (that there were diamonds there) and flocked into the area.
"Thousands of small diggers flooded the area and this gave us a lot of challenges. On one hand, we had to deal with the problem of ACR's licence and on the other, we had to deal with a group of diggers," said President Mugabe after a barrage of questions regarding the Chiadzwa diamonds.
He said the Government had initially wanted the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC) to exploit the minerals on their own, but the results of their operations were not pleasing.
"They were just getting a few gems and others were industrial ones. ZMDC had inadequate equipment and not doing a proper job.
"So far two companies, Canadile and Mbada, have been chosen to exploit the diamonds at Chiadzwa. We were shown their progress report by the ministerial team that was led by Deputy Prime Minister Mutambara and we are satisfied by their equipment," said President Mugabe.
He, however, expressed concern on the recent arrest of the director of Canadile (Pvt) Limited, Komilan Packirisamy.
Packirisamy was allegedly found with 57 pieces of diamonds worth $28 000 when he was stopped and searched at a police roadblock at Hot Springs.
Packirisamy is out of custody on $2 700 bail.
"I was dismayed when it was published that two senior officials of Canadile had been arrested for possessing diamonds. However, diamonds are always an attraction and I don't know how many of us would resist them. I haven't seen a single diamond from Chiadzwa, but bits from Riverside," said President Mugabe.
He said the Government was hoping to sell the Chiadzwa diamonds soon following the nod given by the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme to export the diamonds.
Last week, the Kimberly Process monitor for Zimbabwe, Mr Abbey Chikane, was in the country on a fact-finding mission and described it as a success. He said he would be coming back in few weeks to certify rough diamonds for export.
President Mugabe said the proceeds from the sales of diamonds would be channeled into the mainstream economy to help improve the people's standard of living.
On the relocation of Chiadzwa villagers who were affected by the mining operations, President Mugabe said they were working on the issue together with the local government.
"We have engaged the Manicaland Provincial Governor, Cde Chris Mushohwe and the Minister of Local Government, Urban and Rural Development Cde Chombo as well as the District Development Fund to work on the modalities of the relocation.
"This is not an overnight process. There should be infrastructure on the ground first before they are relocated. We don't want to dump our people in the bush," said President Mugabe.
Meanwhile, the ACR is challenging the Government's intentions to cancel its diamond claims in Chiadzwa.
In notifying the ACR about the Government's intention to cancel the diamond claims, Mines and Mining Development secretary, Mr Thankful Musukutwa, said the ACR claims were situated on the ground reserved against prospecting and pegging under Section 35 of the Mines and Minerals Act.
Mr Musukutwa maintained that the ACR claims were in an area reserved under Reservation Notice 1518 on February 19, 2004.
Yeah I read about this a couple weeks back......
Watch this documentary and you will understand what is really happening with the diamonds in Zimbabwe.
That is beside the point. Zimbabwe has its own diamonds, and it has no need to steal them from Zaire while risking the lives of 11 000 soldiers..
What was the proportion of this yellow maize?
Absolutely not true. People in Zimbabwe are obviously lying to themselves. Kabila was shot Jan 16, 2001 by Rashidi who may have been a Tutsi from Kivu. Kabila was flown to Zimbabwe for treatment where he died next day.
The circumstances surrounding his death, and the role of his "son" Joseph are the subject of much speculation. When his father was being killed, Joseph was said to be in Lubumbashi waiting for a plane to fly him to Kinshasa to take over from his father.
It is well known that Kabila had proved problematic for Clinton. He had declared that he would not pay the IMF loans taken by Mobutu. He had exercised independence in the trade of diamonds, selling them to an Israeli firm, instead of allowing them to be exploited by Americans as had happened under Mobutu.
Kabila, a disciple of Lumumba, hated the West. He also did not trust people from the Kivu whom he suspected to have Tutsi sympathies. To this end, he purged them from the army.
For this and other reasons, his cabal of enemies decided he had to go...It is noteworthy that within a few weeks of his "son" taking over, he was in Washington giving a status report to Clinton...It would surprise me, if what you claim is true, that after Kabila died, Zimbabwe and the US saw eye to eye. In fact, it is well known that the US simply imposed it will with Madeline Albright demanding adherence to the so-called Lusaka Agreement that had been hammered out under intense US pressure...
Your emotions are having the better of you. If you are trying to find a politician who has no sins, make my day and let me know when you find him, because I know of none.
Mugabe has been a vicious creature, and killing Tongogara is inexcusable... But he has also done very positive things, which in the long run wipe out such crimes as that committed against Tongogara.
I think Nzinga has hijacked and sabotaged his own thread ...why dont ya just peep the video .if this is about Obama then Nziga you are wrong ..if you are just soundin off ..then well n good..
Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwV5f-pQO4s
watch from 36:50
Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwV5f-pQO4s
watch from 36:50
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