Mukaka waAmai?

Zimbabwe’s farms are like an old dairy cow; ZANU (PF) ties its legs; Mugabe squeezes the last drops of milk from its shrivelled udder, while his wife feeds it raw grain; the masses sit patiently waiting for milk by the cow’s rear end—only for Nestlé and Grace to lift the cow’s tail as it dumps bovine excrement onto the heads of the hungry populace. 

Nestlé Zimbabwe, confirmed media reports that one of its milk suppliers is Gushungo Dairy Estates, controlled by Grace Mugabe, and that the estate supplies ten percent—the equivalent of one million litres—of Nestlé’s raw milk intake.  However, Nestlé Switzerland has issued a statement blessing the arrangement in a condescending announcement, which confirms Nestlé’s place as an enabler of tyranny and an eager accessory to crime.

Switzerland is taking a position that is consistent with its national interest of protecting its banking industry—essentially the ATM for politically exposed persons. This system is the rock underneath which dishonest leaders who enrich themselves from looted state funds hoard so-called potentate funds (dictator’s assets).

Switzerland is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) and upholds the obligation to return illicitly acquired assets.

However, Switzerland has proposed to donate funds stolen by despots to aid agencies instead of repatriating them back to the countries of origin. In other words, Zimbabwe gets aid, Mugabe pilfers it, and his wife Grace secretly banks the loot with help of Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono in numbered Swiss bank accounts.

If the people of Zimbabwe ever trace these funds, the Swiss government would then donate the loot to the next aid agency for onward “lending” to another despot. The vortex of sleaze and corruption starts all over again. In the meantime, Switzerland appears to be a benevolent aid giver to suffering Africans and yet, in practical terms, is merely sending interest earned from Africa’s stolen wealth back to the very despots who are encouraged to steal it all again. Africans become permanently anchored in bottomless pit of debt and poverty with the complicity of the societies that offer us aid.

The Swiss Federal Criminal Tribunal requires sufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing in order to effect restitution and these proceedings may take up to fifteen years.

Zimbabweans expecting Switzerland to censure a dictator is akin to a farmer chopping down a tree in order to harvest its fruit. Potentate funds are the mother’s milk of the Swiss banking system, and Mugabe is one of the clients who buttress the system.  

Gushungo Dairy Estates is the 4000-hectare farm, part of a criminal enterprise, a vast agricultural land holding owned by Robert Mugabe and his immediate family. He stole state land and allocated it to himself under the guise of correcting a colonial imbalance.

In this melee, 350 000 farm workers, whom Mugabe in his xenophobic tirade on CNN, referred to as aliens, are now classified as internally displaced persons (IDPs), and survive on foreign humanitarian aid handouts.

What happened to the one-man one farm policy? What happened to a maximum farm size (450 hectare) policy? What became of the promise that no farmer shall go without land and the declaration that no absentee landlord may own land in Zimbabwe?

Instead of allocating or distributing “acquired” farms and land to deserving landless peasants, all prime land is now the private asset of absentee landlords, the freedom fighters from yesteryear. Zimbabwe’s entrepreneurs consisting of farmers, hoteliers, and bankers, are facing an unprecedented onslaught from the pillaging ruling party bourgeoisie who unashamedly misappropriate private property for personal gain.

Under the pretext of land reform, indigenisation, and decongesting communal areas, ZANU (PF) politicians now control 95% of Zimbabwe’s prime agriculture with its leader becoming one of Zimbabwe’s largest private landowners.

Switzerland has a moral obligation to side with the suffering people of Zimbabwe and help bring this deplorable chapter to a close. Criminal gangsters, mobs of illicit cattle rustlers, murderers and rapists who trade in misappropriated assets, loot state coffers and launder ill-gotten wealth, must never become the preferred trading partners to Switzerland.

“Chinokanganwa idemo” - What forgets is the axe, but the tree that has been axed will never forget.

The old dairy cow must be now be replaced by a younger milking heifer that will provide real milk for the ordinary people of Zimbabwe.

Phil Matibe – www.madhingabucketboy.com

 Let your umbrage with Nestlé’s trade with Robert and Grace Mugabe be known – http://www.nestle.com/Common/Header/ContactUs.htm