The Corner - Since Zimbabwe’s president-for-life Robert Mugabe began to implement “fast-track land redistribution” (which is to say, forcible dispossession of white farmers) in 2000, Africa-watching cynics have been trading the following joke. Q: What is the difference between Zimbabwe and South Africa? A: About five years. Well, well, many a true word is spoken in jest. South Africa’s Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, a government body set up to return to black people land lost under apartheid, says it will for the first time force a white farmer to sell his land.
South Africa’s government further says it wants to hand over about a third of white-owned farmland to blacks by 2014. Ominously, deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, urging an acceleration in the pace of “reform,” added that: “We may need the skills of Zimbabwe to help us.” Alas, the actual skills of Zimbabwe, the ones that formerly made that nation one of the richest in Africa, have mostly fled abroad to escape the depredations of Mugabe and his thuggish cronies. Zimbabwe is now sunk in a condition of near famine, chronic unemployment, rampant inflation, and diplomatic isolation. South Africa’s prospects look dire indeed if Zimbabwe is to be its model for “reform.”
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