To rectify matters we have to compensate the people who used to own the land and all the improvements. We owe them many billions of dollars. It’s not just a moral obligation, it’s what is written down in international law, it is part of the UN Charter. Even our own Judges in the SADC Tribunal agreed, we must pay compensation. We know that, how many times have we assured the international community that we would. What have we done? Nothing. In the meantime, these people, the majority of whom are Zimbabweans, are living destitute and dying of old age, it is a gross violation of their legal and moral rights. We cannot restore our agriculture or move into the future until this is addressed and properly. If we fail, the farmers and their descendants will have us in court for another 20 years.
For the community of nations, we have not even managed our affairs in accordance with our own Constitution. We agreed to draft our own constitution after 33 years under a colonial arrangement imposed on us in 1980. We consulted our people and in the end they overwhelmingly agreed that this is how they wanted to be governed. Yet I doubt if 10 per cent of the terms of that far reaching supreme law, has been implemented properly. We know that over 400 laws will have to be amended. We know that if this is carried out many of the objectionable features of our legal and political system will be addressed. But again, we have made promises and then done very little and half-heartedly.
A leading member of the Zanla Command during the Liberation war once said to me that the fight was for the freedom of the people of Zimbabwe. In 2018, a group of elderly men talking around a fire in the rural areas described to me that they lived in a detention camp, similar to how the Nationalists were held for 10 years by the Smith Government, except that then they got three decent meals a day. In the Book of Isaiah in the Bible he said to the leadership of Israel, ‘you pretend to be religious, but you oppress the poor and place a yoke on the necks of your people’. Give us our freedom as you promised, break the yoke of corruption that is dragging us down, and you will see a new dawn break over Zimbabwe, and it will not come from Washington, London or Beijing.
Eddie Cross
3rd May 2020
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