Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has lambasted the “inferior mentality” of those members of his country’s black population who want to work for white people.
He said: “Even if government urged black business people to form partnerships with each other, they say, ‘no’. They want to see a European invest and go and work for that European as directors, managers, chief executives. We would want to see our people turned into entrepreneurs. Have we really become producers of our own goods? Have we become masters of our own economy? Or are we still thinking of whites as the best entrepreneurs and Africans as the labourers for these entrepreneurs?”
Mugabe, who has been in power since 1980, also claimed there were “surreptitious” operations in agriculture, where white Zimbabweans offer to run farms owned by black people. Following Mugabe’s ‘land grab’ policy introduced in the year 2000 in which many white-owned farms were seized, hundreds of white farmers jobless and bankrupt. At the same time, agricultural production of the once-rich southern African country has fallen dramatically.
New black-owned farms often do not have sufficient numbers of labourers and there are reports that many workers on them have abandoned jobs after not being paid. Mugabe’s government has threatened repeatedly to put black farm owners who lease their land to whites out of business, but so far this has not happened.
The number of whites in Zimbabwe has decreased substantially over the last 20 years following campaigns of violence and intimidation against them.
