Ramaphosa risks repeating Zimbabwe’s mistakes while deflecting from South Africa’s own corruption scandals.
Cyril Ramaphosa has the tendency of trying to be all things to all people but, unlike Nelson Mandela – who genuinely listened to many views and bring people together – we feel the president just does it to suck up to people, or to use them to prove a political point for himself.
That’s probably why he gushed so much in Harare over the weekend about the wonderful land seizures undertaken in that country.
Trying to draw parallels between the two countries, Ramaphosa said South Africa and Zimbabwe have a similar history of land dispossession.
He said it was necessary for the government of Zimbabwe to take measures that would remedy the situation that black Zimbabweans who were landless found themselves in.
What he didn’t note was that there were two land redistribution programmes in Zimbabwe, the first of which began in 1980 and stuttered to a halt through government neglect and incompetence, much as has happened here in many land restitutions.
Ramaphosa also didn’t say that the headline-grabbing seizure of white farms by Robert Mugabe, beginning in the 2000s, was motivated not by genuine concern for landlessness, but because Mugabe needed a scapegoat to divert attention from a soaring cost of living.
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Ironically, this had been triggered by an economic “structural adjustment programme” mandated by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as a condition for loaning money to Zimbabwe.
Mugabe was forced to remove food subsidies – again, ironically, these were introduced by the white government of Ian Smith as a population stability measure – which led to rising prices and a threat of revolt from the country’s “war veterans”, who saw their state monthly stipends going nowhere.
DA spokesperson Willie Aucamp said Ramaphosa had praised “a process which left Zimbabwe in tatters, destroying its economy, destroying its foreign relations, and creating famine for its people”.
He added: “Land was not legally transferred, the failed Zimbabwe model praised by Ramaphosa led to crippling financial reparations being due to former farmers and land owners.
“Ramaphosa is attempting to whitewash the disaster in Zimbabwe, to create momentum for the ANC’s land expropriation agenda in terms of the Expropriation Act of 2025,” said Aucamp.
But the DA is only partly correct in its criticism.
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While booting white farmers off their lands in Zimbabwe did radically disrupt agriculture and increase unemployment, which in turn led to mass migration to South Africa, it did not destroy agriculture.
It was the culture of deep-rooted corruption within the Zanu-PF government in Harare which was the main cause of the country’s collapse.
Agriculture may be bouncing back, but the rest of the country is in tatters as the looting of government coffers continues unabated.
That aspect of the land reform programme would have been a better political stick to beat the president… because there are plenty of signs that Ramaphosa’s ANC is identical in many respects to Zanu-PF, particularly when it comes to gorging at the taxpayer trough.
Ramaphosa may have missed those other parallels in trying to portray the ANC as comrades in the struggle with Zanu-PF.
Just as Mugabe tried to use land as a scapegoat to divert attention from serious problems, perhaps Ramaphosa is doing the same with our land question, hoping to distract people from corruption.
Let’s just hope history doesn’t repeat itself, because we don’t have a big southern neighbour to take millions of our refugees.
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