The man at the centre of a black-white battle
for Zimbabwe’s tobacco trade has links with a
former CCB agent, reports Jan Raath
The delicate perfume of freshly cured, silk-
textured, golden tobacco leaf wafting from the
sprawling tobacco auction floors in Harare is
the setting for Zimbabwe’s latest race tangle.
A bitter black-white war of words and
political wheeling and dealing has erupted,
with the prize the control of the pickings
from the tobacco trade in Zimbabwe that this
year is expected to earn US$720-million.
The main protagonist in the struggle is Roger
Boka, a short, stocky former small-town
insurance salesman who has become the champion
of militant black empowerment in Zimbabwe.
His campaign is being fought through a long-
running series of crudely phrased full-page
newspaper advertisements, in which he vilifies
whites, and demands government action to drive
them out of commanding positions in the
economy, and to replace them with blacks.
The weed was the engine of the country’s rapid
post-World War II economic growth, and remains
the most important contributor to national
GDP. Zimbabwe is the world’s biggest exporter
of tobacco and European manufacturers are
dependent on the Zimbabwean leaf, whose
expertly cultivated aromatic qualities make it
indispensable to high-quality international
cigarette brands.
Solidly connected to the hierarchy of
President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu(PF) party, Boka
claims that 98% of the economy is controlled
by “Rhodesian Selous Scouts disguised as
economists and accountants” who “killed our
brothers and sisters”. The time has come, he
says, “to clean our society once and for all”.
Boka has himself had links with unsavoury
“third force” elements, according to the
independent Financial Gazette, which three
years ago quoted senior Zimbabwean
intelligence officers as saying that Arnoldus
van Eck, the self-confessed former Civil Co-
operation Bureau agent, worked out of Boka’s
Harare offices. Van Eck has since admitted
acting as a patron for Zimbabwe’s black
“indigenisation” lobby so he could use it as a
conduit for drugs and stolen car rackets.
Boka chilled white Zimbabweans’ spines earlier
this year with an ad picturing a giant python
crushing the life out of a crocodile, and the
message that this was how whites would be
dealt with.
On Monday this week, the staunchly pro-
government Herald, the country’s main daily
newspaper, refused to carry another Boka ad
because of its inflammatory content. The week
before, the Financial Gazette said he was “a
racist”.
In the last fortnight his campaign turned its
attention to the tobacco industry. Accompanied
by bellicose rhetoric, advertisements said he
was tendering to buy the entire 1996 tobacco
crop of 200-million kg, a move that, if it
succeeded, would effectively allow him to hold
Europe’s cigarette makers to ransom. He also
said he was building the world’s largest
tobacco floor on a 12,5ha site on Harare’s
outskirts, to challenge the monopoly of the
existing floors.
Then, at the start of the week, he said he had
managed to see to it that the Tobacco
Marketing Board, the state-appointed body that
regulates the trade, refused a new company a
buyer’s licence because it was run by whites.
Agriculture Minister Denis Norman, the
longest-serving white on Mugabe’s Cabinet, and
who earlier directed that the company be
approved, was denounced for having “a hidden
agenda which seeks to promote white
supremacy”.
It had Peter Richards, the president of the
Zimbabwe Tobacco Association who opened the
auction season this week, talking of
“disruption” of the industry, and of
“mischievous” attempts to unsettle the trade.
“It has done a fair amount of damage,” said
marketing executive Brenda Mee. “It is shaking
the confidence of our customers that we can
continue to supply.”
Apart from his advertisement campaign —
which cost him R160 000 in February alone —
Boka maintains a low profile. What is known of
him is not pleasant. He threatens business
people and journalists, and earlier this year,
when a Reuters executive called on him, Boka
ordered him out of the office and told him to
send a black instead.
Boka appears to have prodigious influence in
high circles. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe
allows his merchant bank to operate under much
easier conditions than those applying to other
banks. Earlier this year, the central bank
granted the first licences for the private
buying of gold. One went to vice-president
Joshua Nkomo’s troubled Development Trust of
Zimbabwe, and Boka got the other. He has
already achieved significant changes to
tobacco marketing laws, and is after more.
“The man is obsessed, but you cannot dismiss
him as a loony,” said a Western diplomat. “He
has lots of money and lots of influence and is
potentially very dangerous. Change the word
white in his ads to Jew and you could find the
same thing in propaganda leaflets in Nazi
Germany.”
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