Following the systematic destruction of the world’s second-largest tobacco prod‧ucing country, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Gabriel Mugabe now presides over an all but withering wasteland. A decade ago, the backbone of this nation’s wealth was found in the tall tobacco plants that stood ramrod straight under an African sun and accounted for nearly 50 per cent of Zimbabwe’s foreign currency earnings. TJI’s reporter Cindy-Lou Dale travelled to Zimbabwe to meet with the minister of agriculture, ZANU-PF’s Dr Joseph Made, but on arrival was repeatedly refused an audience with him. Instead she turned to the opposing MDC camp and spoke with the yet to be sworn in deputy minister of agriculture, Senator Roy Bennett, a third-generation Zimbabwean, whose farm also became a government statistic. |
