South Africa needs another liberation � Mugabe
Bame Piet | Thursday May 21, 2015 15:58
He asserted that South Africa needs help to get full liberation. He said the absence of full liberation explains the xenophobic attacks in the country. The nonagenarian Mugabe was addressing journalists at the end of his visit to the SADC secretariat in Gaborone. He said other Africans should not be blamed for the unemployment problems in South African. “It is not the other Africans who are to blame. It is the whites who have kept opportunities for themselves, who have kept the rights they have allocated to themselves long ago before the political dispensation that was brought in by (Nelson) Mandela after his release. That political dispensation did not address the question of disparities between whites and blacks. Most of the land is in the hands of the whites who are a minority,” Mugabe said.
He added that most employment opportunities in South Africa are taken up by whites and the topic is never discussed in public forums. He said that this must be addressed before the blame can be allocated to foreigners in South Africa. He said that it is going to be difficult for the South African government to address the issue of unemployment when the same whites who oppressed blacks are still in control of the economy. “When you have people who are in fact those we called oppressors yesterday still in the position, occupying the positions, and the advantages and the opportunities that they had allocated to themselves during colonialism, and they still hang on to them, then you have a difficult situation. This is what South Africa must be helped to overcome,” he said. Mugabe said that South Africa is the only country in the African continent that is still lagging behind in land redistribution. “It is a different story in the whole of Africa. So we must help them. They need another liberation,” he said. The Zimbabwean leader said he was impressed with the manner in which the SADC secretariat management has given direction to projects agreed upon by leaders of the regional bloc. He was particularly happy with the progress of infrastructure development and regional integration. He said that the programme on transformation of SADC member states’ economies is on the right track. The programme is meant to create jobs and halt the exportation of raw materials to industrialised countries. Mugabe said the regional body is working on ways to grow the private sector to benefit the citizens.
Mugabe quotable quotes
Zimbabwean President and SADC chairperson, Robert Mugabe, faced local media yesterday in a historically rare occasion for both parties. Below are a few choice quotations from the briefing
* “Botswana is the headquarters of SADC and we can come here in order to know what’s going on or just to visit and acquaint ourselves with the processes. Do we have to mount a labyrinth of splendour in the environment of a state visit? No!”
* “My counterpart President Khama was kind enough to provide us with a sumptuous lunch. I don’t want to tell you how sumptuous it was, but the fact that our stomachs are full is evidence enough that we were well-treated.” “If you set out to find fault, you will find it. There’s no perfection. If you are proposing a girl and you see she’s beautiful; others may say ‘this man has not looked at her ears or manners or bent legs.’ This applies to our countries. However, what we say is not about hostility. We want to promote and not just find faults.”
* “Khama told me in Harare that he had to leave at 1400hrs. He had told me, but I don’t know where this nonsense of saying he walked out came from. We don’t push each other out at SADC; it’s the journalists who push us out”.