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Sowing Political Capital and Harvesting Economic Regression: White Commercial Farm Seizures in Zimbabwe

Sowing Political Capital and Harvesting Economic Regression: White Commercial Farm Seizures in Zimbabwe

Francis Matambirofa
Copyright: © 2015 |Pages: 16
ISBN13: 9781466674059|ISBN10: 1466674059|EISBN13: 9781466674066
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-7405-9.ch017
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MLA

Matambirofa, Francis. "Sowing Political Capital and Harvesting Economic Regression: White Commercial Farm Seizures in Zimbabwe." Handbook of Research on In-Country Determinants and Implications of Foreign Land Acquisitions, edited by Evans Osabuohien, IGI Global, 2015, pp. 338-353. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-7405-9.ch017

APA

Matambirofa, F. (2015). Sowing Political Capital and Harvesting Economic Regression: White Commercial Farm Seizures in Zimbabwe. In E. Osabuohien (Ed.), Handbook of Research on In-Country Determinants and Implications of Foreign Land Acquisitions (pp. 338-353). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-7405-9.ch017

Chicago

Matambirofa, Francis. "Sowing Political Capital and Harvesting Economic Regression: White Commercial Farm Seizures in Zimbabwe." In Handbook of Research on In-Country Determinants and Implications of Foreign Land Acquisitions, edited by Evans Osabuohien, 338-353. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2015. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-7405-9.ch017

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Abstract

Since 2000, Zimbabwe has embarked on an unplanned “land reform” referred to as the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). The tumult experienced in its wake has infamously become known as the crisis in Zimbabwe. This chapter dissects and interrogates issues relating to competing variables such as land restorative and redistributive moral considerations, “hypocritical” political expedience, and, related to the latter, indigenous economic empowerment considerations that government used to justify FTLRP. The central hypothesis is that the economic and political crisis that FTLRP spawned was not, strictly speaking, “land reform,” but, by a figure of speech, only some aspirin that was meant to ease people's pain caused by economic and political challenges for which government did not have a solution. Adopting a stance of victim, underdog triumphalism, FTLRP was essentially a mischievous pretext for the ZANU(PF) government to coercively retain political power while sacrificing the economy, which inexorably imploded.

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