Let them eat potatoes, says Mugabe
September 19, 2005 Edition 1
New York - The African leader some call a hero and others a destructive despot suggests people in his country aren't hungry: they just can't eat their favourite food.
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has told Associated Press his people are "very, very happy" although aid agencies report that 4-million of his country's 11,6-million people face famine.
"You describe it as if we have a whole cemetery," Mugabe said of a reporter's description of his nation's plight, blaming "continuous years of drought".
The problem was reliance on maize, he told the interviewer, "but it doesn't mean we haven't other things to eat: We have heaps of potatoes but people are not potato eaters ... they have rice but they're not as attracted (to that)."
But the cost of potatoes is beyond the means of many ordinary Zimbabweans.
Mugabe has maintained that "we pride ourselves as being top, really, on the African ladder ... We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards."
Yet on September 8, setting out Zimbabwe's aims for the UN's millennium goals before heading to the world leaders' summit, he said the number who could not afford one balanced meal a day rose from 20% in 1995 to 48% in 2003, and that 63% could not now satisfy more comprehensive basic needs.
In Africa, Mugabe's seizure of lands taken by whites when they colonised the land in the 1800s is applauded, and many see him as a towering hero.
Internationally, he has become a pariah and at the weekend looked set for further isolation when the US government said it was preparing sanctions against him, his government and family, which would prohibit them from travelling to the US.
That would be punishment for alleged gross human rights abuses, including the torture of opponents and theft of elections.
Zimbabwe became one of Africa's most vibrant economies under Mugabe, elected in landslide 1979 elections after a seven-year guerrilla war forced an end to white minority rule in Rhodesia.
He assured nervous white farmers, then fleeing the country, that "there is a place for you in the sun".
Zimbabwe became the regional breadbasket, with 5 000 white commercial farmers growing enough to feed the nation and even to export.
In the 1990s, Mugabe's rule became repressive against an increasingly vociferous opposition, and corruption grew rampant. He then seized on the hot-button issue of land ownership. - Sapa-AP
