“The EU, the United States and other countries should begin to support the farmers to plant, to get fertilisers, to get business people to invest in Zimbabwe,” South Africa’s foreign affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told reporters in the Belgian capital city, Brussels, where the EU is headquartered.
“It will help the people, they will get jobs, they will get money, they will be able to plant, they will be able to have food and not only to rely on aid,” she added.
Last month South Africa said it had set aside a whooping R300 million to assist Zimbabwe’s crippled agricultural sector.
The US and EU have since 2002 maintained visa bans and asset freezes on President Robert Mugabe and senior officials of his government following controversial elections and human rights abuses. US sanctions also bar Americans from engaging in any transactions or dealings with them.
“They (the sanctions) hurt the ordinary people . . . if you have sanctions against the government then obviously investors will not want to deal with that government, tourists get frightened,” Dlamini-Zuma said, adding; “They hurt the people that deserve the help, they hurt the whole people.”
Once a net food exporter, Zimbabwe has seen its agriculture fortunes plunge along with an imploding economy largely blamed on Mugabe’s populist nationalist policies such as the land seizures and plans to forcibly grab major shareholding in foreign-owned companies, especially mines.
But the ageing Mugabe, who has held power since independence in 1980 instead blames Zimbabwe’s misfortunes on bad weather and Western sanctions he says have crimpled the importation of fertilizers, seed, and other farming inputs. – ZimOnline