African Development Bank to help Zimbabwe pay white farmers $3.5 billion

On Monday, May 15, 2023, president of the African Development Bank Akinwumi Adesina told reporters and creditors during a press conference in Harare that the African Development Bank is devising a plan to help Zimbabwe “fast-track and frontload” a total of $3.5 billion in payments to whites whose farms were confiscated by the administration of former President Robert Mugabe beginning in 2000. According to APA News, the compensation to the white farmers is for improvements they made on the infrastructure of their farms before they were expropriated by the government and not the land itself. Zimbabwe’s largest creditors like the IMF and Paris Club stipulated that the southern African nation’s government would have to compensate the white farmers “before they accept a proposed debt-clearance program” for the $17 billion Zimbabwe owes in external debt. As per the same source, Zimbabwe has been unable to secure financing from international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank for more than two decades because of its external debt in arrears. The white famers rejected a proposal from the administration of current President Emmerson Mnangagwa in 2020 for them to receive payments over 10 years in treasury bills. According to Reuters, Adesina “is co-chairing a process that aims to clear $6 billion of external debt arrears and that reforms the exchange rate and central bank, which [he] . . . said has a quasi-fiscal role that fuels inflation.” According to Africa Briefing, Adesina said his proposal would “help leverage the capital markets to fund the compensation without adding debt to Zimbabwe.”