Harare – In a reaffirmation of its principled stance on Zimbabwe, and solidarity with its people and the ruling Zanu PF party, South Africa’s governing party, the ANC said it does not condone the idea of regime change in Harare, and that Britain and her Western allies must shoulder the blame for the challenges afflicting the Southern African country.
The West, angered by Zimbabwe’s land reforms under which the government compulsorily acquired excess farmland from white farmers to resettle landless blacks, imposed sweeping economic and other sanctions on the country, and drove efforts to diplomatically isolate it in the world.
The sanctions, meant to cause regime change, crippled the country, causing economic damage estimated by the government at around US$100 billion, and forcing mass emigration of Zimbabweans to neighbouring countries and abroad.
Promising to use experience gained in previous assignments to foster closer ties with the ANC’s “sister parties,” newly elected ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula voiced concern over the sanctions and their impact on Zimbabwe and the entire Southern African region.
“We must be very much concerned about what is happening in Zimbabwe and what role we need to play to solve what is happening in Zimbabwe because we do not subscribe to the idea of a regime change in Zimbabwe,” he told a press conference at the close of the ANC’s elective congress on Monday.
“We need to campaign very hard to get things right because Zimbabweans are coming to our country in their numbers because something is not right in their own country. Once that country becomes what it was there will be no Zimbabweans here.
“So, the British must think very hard about what they have done and the Americans. They must lift the sanctions so that Zimbabwe can grow as an economy and (they must) not use sanctions to deepen the pain and the impoverishment of Zimbabwe.”
Just last week, the United States added more Zimbabwean individuals and companies to its sanctions list, despite re-engagement overtures and spirited campaigns by Zimbabwe and African leaders to have the embargoes lifted.
This is also despite the fact that the US itself, recently admitted that it was fully aware that Zimbabwe was losing out on investment opportunities as businesses, citing sanctions as a risk factor, shy away from investing in the country, after years of downplaying the true impact of its sanctions regime on Zimbabwe.
Apart from sanctions, Mbalula said Britain’s blameworthiness on challenges afflicting Zimbabwe also stemmed from its refusal to fund the land reform programme as agreed to at the Lancaster House independence talks.
At the 1979 Lancaster House peace talks, Britain made a commitment to finance the redistribution of land in Zimbabwe but instead provided aid in the years after independence which could not fund a comprehensive land reform programme.
And despite repeated calls for it to honour the 1979 commitment, Britain reneged on that pledge in 1997 when the Tony Blair led Labour government came into power.
In an infamous letter, Clare Short, the then-international development secretary, advised the Zimbabwean government that the election of a Labour government “without links to former colonial interests” meant Britain no longer had “special responsibility to meet the cost of land purchases.”
But, Mbalula said; “The British know what they agreed to in Lancaster. They must come to the party and invest in the compensation of the Zimbabweans in the program of land redistribution. The forty or something billion pounds they promised (former President) Mugabe and Zanu PF they must come to the party and not use the issue of the land reform program as a scapegoat to run away.”
“So they must come to the party and Zimbabwe will be a better country. Zimbabweans never came to this country when it was a breadbasket of the African continent, it was an economy that was alive, and people were working in Zimbabwe.
“Now you have got Zimbabweans crossing, facing life and death, crocodiles coming into our country because there is no life and where life is here in South Africa and that has burdened our economy but as the ANC we will not agree in ideological terms that Zimbabwe must be turned into a client state next to us.”
