A US academic has said the West has imposed sanctions against Zimbabwe due to its agrarian reforms that seek to empower its people and correct colonial land ownership structures that benefitted the white minority.
In a video circulating on social media, Bikrum Gill, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech in the US, said Zimbabwe was among countries that have been sanctioned by the West for their policies meant to correct colonial legacies that drained their nations’ resources.
“So now those States that have particularly been targeted by the sanctions regime are those States that have actually started to implement policies or impose measures that can overcome that deficit that is the result or legacy of colonialism, the deficit of capital, the deficit of access to investible resources with which they can undertake sovereign development and what are the means to this? What are the specific policies?
“These are the things like nationalisation of resources, things like agrarian land reform that can overturn the colonial property structures that facilitate the trade of surplus, and if you look historically, it is those States at which sanctions are at most acutely targeted. We can talk about Zimbabwe which is an excellent example. When Zimbabwe seeks to overturn the inherited colonial property structure, they are subject to sanctions where the neighbouring South Africa never actually undertakes any form of radical agrarian land reform that overcomes the inherited colonial property structure and South Africa is not subjected to sanctions,” he said.
Zimbabwe has been under the illegal sanctions regime for the past 20 years that the West imposed as a direct response to the fast-track land reform adopted by Government.
The US’s Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act sets as a condition that Government has to restore the land tenure that existed before the fast track land reform if the illegal sanctions were to be removed.
