ANOTHER FAILED “PEOPLE’S REVOLUTION:” Mugabe Lashes Out.

A familiar scene is playing out in Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe’s followers, roving bands of unemployed young men who thirst for land, are once again invading and occupying farms. But they are merely pawns in the old man’s game. Land is the board upon which Zimbabwe’s politics are played and Grand Master Mugabe always manages to maneuver his pieces into the right places.
To anyone who follows Zimbabwe, it should come as no surprise that Mugabe, the country’s nonagenarian dictator, is still using the land issue to reward loyalists and punish dissenters.

When mostly white-owned farms were seized by similar bands of young men just over a decade ago, for the most part they weren’t distributed to poor black farmers. Instead, choice farms were handed out as patronage to members of the ruling ZANU-PF, Mugabe’s party, and many of these farms underperformed or were left fallow, for their new owners—well-connected politicians, lawyers, and military types—had little experience with farming. With Zimbabwe’s commercial farming industry in shambles, exports of tobacco and cut flowers plummeted. Harvests of staples like wheat collapsed as well, ushering in a major malnutrition crisis in a country that had once been the breadbasket of southern Africa.

But a recent NYT piece has a curious gloss on the land reform disaster in Zimbabwe. . . .

The oddly muted account of Mugabe’s terrible policy would be the most striking part of this passage, were it not for the irony of Mutambara’s quote. The former ambassador complains about how well-connected government officials were given “huge farms.” But Mutambara was one of those well-connected officials who got a farm. Does he really expect us to believe that the way land reform went was actually “contrary to what [they] had expected”? Did anyone actually expect most of the land to be evenly distributed to poor black farmers instead of well-connected officials like him? Or, alternatively, perhaps he is suggesting that his 530-acre farm isn’t all that big compared to the larger farms given to higher-ranking government officials. Either way, it is difficult to sympathize with his plight. Once Zimbabwe’s government dispensed with property rights, and a dictator was empowered to hand out land willy-nilly to his cronies, it opened the door to a cycle of predation that vitiates whites and blacks alike.

Mugabe has long gotten a pass because of the racism of “anti-colonial” Westerners, who are unwilling to hold a black leader to the standards they set for whites. Meanwhile, over a decade ago, Nick Kristof reported that black Zimbabweans were nostalgic for the days of white rule:

The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970’s.

“If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we’d do it,” said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. “Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job.”

Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: “I want the white man’s government to come back. Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today.”

His wife, Mugombo Mudenda, remembered that as a younger woman she used to eat meat, drink tea, use sugar and buy soap. But now she cannot even afford corn gruel. “I miss the days of white rule,” she said.

That’s just sad.