Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe on Thursday urged his supporters to debate his succession but expressed dismay that some officials had already started consulting occult and supernatural specialists over the issue.
”Some people are consulting spirit mediums, diviners. This has nothing to do with spirit mediums, but it’s all about the will of the people. It should be debated,” he told thousands of his loyalists in the region that is his party stronghold, speaking in
Shona.
He said he would draw confidence from knowing he had ”strong” people around him, not puppets.
”But for this country to be taken over by (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair, no, not over my or our dead bodies. We can never be a colony again,” he told a rally in this rural Tsakare village, some 160 kilometres northeast of the capital.
Mugabe contended that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is a puppet of the former colonial power Britain.
He also accused gold mining firms, some cabinet ministers and foreign diplomats of involvement in illegal gold trading deals and externalising earnings from gold sales.
He said that there was a lot of illegal gold panning across the country and that the gold was not being sold to the central bank, but being smuggled out of the country by foreign diplomats and cabinet ministers which he did not name.
”We are told there are… ministers involved in buying gold from panners. Even diplomats clandestinely buy gold from them,” Mugabe said at a rally attended by about 7 000 party loyalists.
Mugabe said some transnational firms involved in gold mining were taking the desperately needed foreign exchange earned from the gold exports out of the country. Gold has been the second top earner of foreign exchange after
tobacco in Zimbabwe.
”The monies from the gold that is being exported, is not being remitted here…. Be truthful, be honest, we don’t want crooks,” Mugabe said.
Mugabe was addressing the first of a series of rallies to assess the recovery levels from last year’s drought that hit the country. He was also preparing for a national review of the country’s land reform scheme, in which land was taken from whites and given to blacks.
He admitted that some of the land that had been allocated to blacks was now lying idle, especially under the commercial farming scheme, saying the uptake rate had been low.
”Those who have been allocated and taken up their land are few, the majority have not taken up their land, the land is lying idle,” he said.
He said that land that has not been put into production would be forfeited to the state and re-allocated. Mugabe said the review will also track down officials who
awarded themselves more than one farm or more land than permissible, and take up the excess land. – Sapa-AFP