Zimbabwe blacks might take control of white-owned firms

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Whites in Zimbabwe found themselves a step closer Thursday to losing control of their businesses to blacks under new government legislation.
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The legislation has yet to be approved by the ruling party and signed into law by Robert Mugabe.

The ruling ZANU-PF party in the Parliament in Harare approved the Indigenization and Economic Empowerment Bill on Wednesday night. The proposed law calls for whites to hand over 51 percent of their business interests to blacks.

Opposition lawmakers walked out of the late parliament sitting during acrimonious debate, saying the bill was racist, unconstitutional and against accepted principles of equality.

The legislation has yet to be approved by the ruling party-dominated upper house, or Senate, and signed into law by President Robert Mugabe, its main architect. Those formalities are expected to be completed within a month, parliament officials said. Legal formalities afterward could take months.

The step recalled the government's order in 2000 that more than 5,000 white-owned commercial farms be seized -- in some cases, amid violence -- and handed over to blacks. The agriculture-based economy of the former regional breadbasket went into free fall after land redistribution began. The nation is now facing chronic shortages of food, basic goods and gasoline.

The move on white businesses "is scary. It's the farms all over again. What next, our homes?" said the white owner of a small engineering firm. He spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of drawing the attention of a government that has jailed and beaten critics.

"Keep me out of this or I'll be the first on the list. I'd be out of here if I could," said the Zimbabwe-born businessman. He said he was looking for a black partner for the family firm but "it breaks my heart. I spent my life building the business for my kids and keeping it in the family. It was my pension plan."
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On Tuesday, Paul Mangwana, the minister in charge of black empowerment, said only whites "disadvantaged by the colonial system" before independence in 1980 were defined under the bill as "indigenous" Zimbabweans who would be allowed to keep majority control of businesses.

"The bill is not about economics, but politics. It is about the total liberation of Zimbabwe," he told a panel of lawmakers Tuesday. "All blacks fall within the definition of indigenous."

In the parliament Wednesday, he dismissed accusations the legislation was racist. He said the wording deliberately avoided use of the words "white" or "black."

Like the farm takeovers, the bill was to correct colonial era imbalances in business ownership by the white minority, the official media quoted Mangwana saying.

"If a white person wants to start a business he should partner with indigenous persons. We are not stopping anyone from starting a business. It is not racism to correct wrong things," he said.

Lawyers said whites who argued they were disadvantaged or discriminated against under colonial era white rule so as to qualify as indigenous were unlikely to win any court challenges to keep their businesses.

Since independence, white political activists and even conscientious objectors who refused to fight against black guerrillas in the bush war that ended white rule have not been favored in citizenship cases.

An estimated 30,000 whites still live in the population of 12.5 million, down from about 275,000 at independence.

The state central bank reported earlier this year a fivefold drop in foreign direct investment and loans in the crumbling economy since 2000, with concerns over the farm seizures, ownership rights and human and democratic rights violations being mainly cited by foreign businesses and financial institutions.

In the economic meltdown, official inflation stands at nearly 7,000 percent, the highest in the world. Independent estimates put real inflation closer to 25,000 percent and the International Monetary Fund has forecast it reaching 100,000 percent by the end of the year.