Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe says a negative attitude by Britain towards its former colony’s land reform programme pushed the country towards a more radical approach to the changes, a newspaper said on Thursday.
It was the conflict with the country’s white farmers that helped his government acquire land from them more speedily than it might have done, Mugabe told the state-controlled Herald newspaper.
”The fact that Britain was negative made us also negative in attitude to the farmers and this negative attitude had positive results, which is the negative producing a positive because they were negative,” Mugabe said.
He said as a result his government had been spared from taking into account ”the feelings of the white farmers”, which would have slowed down the redistribution of their land to new black farmers.
British Prime Minister Tony ”Blair got us to work much faster on the land and we must thank him for that,” Mugabe added.
He was speaking in the central town of Chinhoyi, where his
ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party is holding its annual conference.
Mugabe’s government accuses former colonial power Britain of reneging on a promise it made to fund land reform in the country. Britain has said it will only support land reforms that it believes to be fair and transparent.
The Harare government claims to have so far resettled 374 000 small-scale black farmers on 14 million hectares of formerly white-owned land.
On the issue of food shortages currently threatening more than two-thirds of the country’s 11,6 million people, Mugabe said his government was taking measures to feed the entire nation — including his arch-political rival, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
”The measures are based on the principle that we must feed our nation — every person, including Tsvangirai and that we must have enough food for everybody and there is no politics about that,” Mugabe said.
Aid agencies and human rights organisations have accused the government of distributing food along party political lines. The government vehemently denies this. – Sapa-AFP