Mugabe: Let Them Eat Potatoes

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 favorite food.

Zimbabwe became one of Africa's most vibrant economies under Mugabe, who was elected in landslide 1979 elections after a seven-year guerrilla war forced an end to white minority rule in Rhodesia, once a British colony.

Zimbabwe became the regional bread basket, with some 5,000 white commercial farmers growing enough to feed the nation and export.

That changed in the 1990s. Mugabe's rule became increasingly repressive against a growingly vociferous opposition and corruption grew rampant. Mugabe then seized on an issue that long has preoccupied Africans - land ownership.

Pointing to a distribution that had a few thousand whites owning tens of thousands of acres of rich lands, the government began appropriating white farms in a violent campaign in which some white farmers were killed.

Tens of thousands of farmworkers lost their jobs and most land was distributed to the family and friends of politically connected Zimbabweans, though some ordinary people got small plots.

Last week, the Commercial Farmers' Union said fewer than 1,000 white commercial farmers remain, working a fraction of land they once sowed. A parliamentary committee said there would be no farming season this year, even if the drought breaks, because there are no seeds, no agricultural chemicals because there's no foreign currency, and no fuel to transport products or work tractors.

Everyday in Zimbabwe queues more than a mile long form for basics like bread and gasoline.

The age old lesson of Class Envy and Redistribution of Wealth, everyone becomes equally miserable.