Will Trump help or hinder Zimbabwe’s white farmers in their compensation battle?

Desperate and ageing white farmers whose land was seized during Robert Mugabe’s rule more than two decades ago hope Donald Trump may be able to help them get billions of dollars in unpaid compensation owed to them by Zimbabwe’s government. After all, some of them argue, the US president intervened last year to fight for the rights of white farmers in neighbouring South Africa, where he feels they are being “persecuted” because of their race – claims that have been widely discredited. Trump has offered members of South Africa’s white Afrikaner community, many of whom are farmers, refugee status in the US.

Most of the Zimbabwean farmers are not keen to go down that route – they just want their government to honour a deal made in 2020 by Mugabe’s successor, and former deputy, President Emmerson Mnangagwa. And some see Zimbabwe’s vast and untapped deposits of rare-earth minerals and the transactional nature of Trump’s politics as key to unlocking the cash. After Mnangagwa took over, he was eager to heal the wounds of the chaotic land reform programme of the early 2000s when 4,500 mainly white-owned farms – half of the country’s best farmland – were taken over by black Zimbabweans and around 2,500 white farmers evicted.

The seizures – meant to redress a colonial-era land grab – led to the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy. The agricultural sector had been its backbone – and was further crippled by sanctions slapped by Western nations outraged by the disorderly nature of the redistribution of the land to black farmers. Mnangagwa, as part of his mission to reform Zimbabwe’s tarnished reputation following the toppling of Mugabe, promised to pay the white farmers for infrastructure and improvements to the land – a package that came to $3.5bn (£3bn).

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The hitch has been that Zimbabwe, grappling with a debt burden of a whopping $23bn, cannot afford to settle up with the former farmers. Instead it offered a compromise deal last year – those who signed up for it got 1% of their total compensation, while the rest was issued as treasury bonds that mature in 10 years, with 2% interest paid twice a year.

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