Renowned Professor Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba has expressed his unreserved views on Zimbabwe’s current ongoing situation during an interview with Godfred on The African Passport Show. According to him, the decision to compensate the white farmers for the lands is insensitive to the historical realities of the matter at hand.
He opined that “This idea that some people came from Europe and took people’s farms and then they are to be compensated; if a thief comes into your house and remove you out of your house and then furnishes your house, and then you remove him, how do you compensate the thief?
The breakdown is that Ex-President Mugabe initiated a land reform program decades ago to restore lands that were forcefully grabbed from Zimbabweans by Europeans during colonial era; with that, Mugabe’s regime seized lands from white farmers and resettled black farmers in the country.
A very important point to note is that, when the European powers captured the lands, there was no compensation for the Zimbabwean victims for the inconveniences they suffered many years before the reform policy.
However, these powers sanctioned Zimbabwe for the reform program implemented by Mugabe and used the restoration and compensation for the white farmers as the condition for the lifting of such sanctions that seriously affected the Zimbabwean economy.
The happening in Zimbabwe is that, the current government has planned to return lands to some white farmers after initially compensating them with $3.5 Billion for supposed values they have added to the lands that were retrieved from them.
This is what PLO Lumumba saw as an injustice and spoke against; since there was no compensation for our people, should there be a compensation for their people? Let’s discuss.