President Robert Mugabe promised at a rally on Tuesday that he would intensify efforts to transfer wealth to black Zimbabweans by continuing to force companies to cede control to them.
An indigenisation law, which requires foreign companies in Zimbabwe to give 51% of their shares to local investors, was passed in the country in 2007, FOX News reports. Mugabe, who won another 5-year term in an allegedly rigged election a little over a week ago, said the law was a path to independence, and that he would continue "[t]he indigenisation and empowerment drive […] in order to ensure that indigenous Zimbabweans enjoy a larger share of the country's resources."
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party has called the indigenisation efforts “a deliberate attempt to undermine the country and its people.” The indigenisation policies in Zimbabwe scare off many foreign investors and businesses, and according to MDC, benefit “not the ordinary man and woman, but the well-connected elite and the Zanu PF chiefs.”
Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera, Wikimedia Commons