South African support for Mugabe land grab

Mbeki says it's the UK fault for not giving them money, but the article goes on:

Mbeki’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs headed by Foreign Minister Dlamini-Zuma has long since found Mugabe’s land grab policy ‘acceptable’, and has said as much in press releases including a statement that it would be “unrevolutionary” to criticise Zimbabwe.

President Mbeki must surely know, that after funding land reform to the tune of forty four million pounds, the British government in 1992 discovered that the resettlement programme operated by Mugabe was plagued with corruption.

Instead of benefiting the ‘landless poor’, a large number of the best white owned commercial farms ended up in the hands of Mugabe’s family, relatives, friends and political cronies.

After 1992, Britain made funding for land acquisition conditional on transparency and the implementation of controls to ensure that acquired white commercial farms ended up in the hands of the ‘landless poor’ - and not in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies. Mugabe refused to accept the conditions imposed by the British.

In 1998, Mugabe arranged a three day ‘donors conference’ in order to raise $6 billion for land acquisition. Some 22-donor countries attended the conference and pledged financial support on stringent conditions, requiring Mugabe to formulate a policy that met transparency and poverty alleviation criteria.

Land acquisitions were also to be on a willing ‘buyer - seller’ basis at market related prices. Mugabe failed to implement the necessary mechanisms and received no donor aid.

When asked what went wrong with the donor conference, he quite incredulously blamed Britain for not coming up with the funds.