Mugabe Orders Businesses to Handover Part Ownership

(10 Mar 08 - RV) Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has signed a new law that requires foreign- and white-owned companies to hand over at least 51 per cent of their operations to black owners.


The Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Bill comes three weeks before the country’s March 29th elections. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change party believes this new legislation is an attempt to buy public support.


The impoverished African nation has experienced an economic meltdown and skyrocketing inflation since the government began ordering the seizure of white-owned farms in 2000. Now President Mugabe plans to distribute tractors, generators, gasoline and cattle to these farms and to the black farmers who have resettled there.


Gunther Simmermacher is the editor of The Southern Cross, a South African Catholic weekly. He says that it is difficult to predict how the new law will be executed.