Mugabe selling us a dummy

When Robert Mugabe says Zimbabwe will not pay for land seized from white farmers under his needlessly rushed and violent land redistribution program which benefited only his cronies and cohorts, he is selling us a dummy. In typically flawed logic, Mugabe says the Brits should pay for the land while Zimbabwe pays for so-called improvements, as if the two could have any value outside of each other. As we have learned over the past decade, a farm is not just a piece of earthly real estate; on the contrary, the most valuable asset on a farm is not the soil, but the people who manage the farm and put the soil to good use.
I know it is not viable for politicians, especially the so-called opposition in Zimbabwe, to take Mugabe to task over this matter. Since I have no plans to run for office in this life, I will try to express what I think is a widely held view among ordinary people in Zimbabwe. If you asked Zimbabweans if they thought it was smart to wipe off the book value of most commercial farmland in Zimbabwe at the stroke of a pen ostensibly to redress the wrongs of the past, you would receive a resounding no. And yet that's precisely what Mugabe's land reform program has done: Zimbabwean land is nearly worthless as an asset which one might use as collateral security to borrow from commercial banks.
It is clear that unless there is a final resolution of questions around the seizure of land by Mugabe and his relatives and cohorts, our country will not be able to restore the value of this vital asset. Morgan Tsvangirai says there will be a land audit to take this matter forward but one wonders what else we need to know about this program other than the fact that it has been a national disaster. We could have had a more just land reform exercise which recognized and benefited the real victims of settler colonialism, not the beneficiaries of it. It goes without saying that there was no wisdom in uprooting the continent's most accomplished farmers.
One of these days, when Mugabe moves out of the way (and one hopes this will be sooner rather than later), Zimbabweans will find themselves with a massive bill in their hands. The only way to pay it will be to negotiate with those who Mugabe says we should we despise. If Zimbabweans are going to pay this bill, we should at the very least demand a more just land reform exercise under which those who already have a means to earn a living (such as the president and his wife and relatives, cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, army and police officers), would be the last to be given land. After all, the poor and unconnected deserve something too.