[B4Ranch]

An assissin would do quite well in repairing the problem. Without Mugabe dictating events, the country might just return to it's dismal past economic level.

[Clive]

Actually, the dountry did not have a dismal past economic level.

This country was once the breadbasket of southern Africa, having a modern agrarian sector and was a net agricultural exporter.

Indeed, Mugabe not only turned a drought into a famine for Zimbabwe, he also deprived the rest of southern Africa a source of maize from his past summer's crops and now wheat from this winter's crops.

Zim can be a net agrarian expoerter again but it will take decades to undo the wreckage that was wreaked this past two years and possibly longer than that to get back to Rhodesian levels.

That can happen only if Zim (and the rest of southern Africa) gets past the mysticism of peasant agriculture and gets its minset redirected to modern technological farming that requires technology, expertise, and (in the veldt) large land holdings.

To take a North American example. A few hundred acres may be viable in the rich soil of the Shenandoah or Mohawk valleys but it takes at least a quarter section in prairie Saskatchewan.

The same imperatives apply to Zim and the difference between black alluvial soil farming as practiced by the autochtones and red soil veldt farming as practiced by the colonists.