Mining confiscation?

LINK

Much of the article is blasting Marxism, but there are a few interesting points:

Mugabe has been encouraged to believe that he will continue to enjoy the economic support of a South Africa headed by president Thabo Mbeki. He has already had the begging bowl out, seeking an estimated $700 million in emergency financial support from the South Africans. That would have helped him, perhaps, pay the $290 million Zimbabwe was supposed to have repaid to the IMF last week.

Mbeki is concerned that total collapse will lead to a flood of desperate Zimbabweans into South Africa -- 3 million of Zimbabwe’s 15-million citizens are already living and working in South Africa, giving rise to a back-lash from many ordinary South Africans who see their jobs being taken by their country’s energetic northern neighbours....

Three million "economic" refugees? that's 20 percent of the Zim population...


And now Mugabe has been scampering around Beijing seeking money to support his increasingly-ramshackle regime and apparently pledging his country’s minerals for decades and offering mining rights to Chinese miners in exchange for support. Mugabe’s government has pillaged the farms. Now it is on the brink of pillaging what remains of the mining sector, even those new mines set up under his government in terms of what were supposed to have been cast-iron guarantees against expropriation.

Even when Mugabe shuffles off this mortal coil, will his successors be likely to change tack unless absolutely forced to do so? In private, cynical, unscrupulous foreigners who have invested in Zimbabwe often declare that they have the Zanu-PF party bosses in their pockets and that they have also ’bought” party bosses in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Ah, but will they "stay" bought?