not in dispute. There is rarely any attempt to show the economic decline as attributable to sanctions. The few articles that do so are usually disingenuous and little short of fatuous. For example, one such article claimed that Zimbabwe’s 300 000 new farmers were unable to obtain financing because Agribank, as an SDN which provided finance for farming, was unable to obtain lines of credit on account of sanctions. The article points out that Zimbabwe was then an agro-based economy and 60% of the inputs for local manufacturing came from agriculture. The notion that Zimbabwe ceased to be an agro based economy because Agribank could not obtain lines of credit (the previous extent of which, if any, is not stated) from US banks seems fanciful.45 However, the point that Zimbabwe used to be an agro-based economy is well made. At the height of the land redistribution exercise ZANU PF’s own slogan was that “Land is the economy and the economy is land”. The economy was then dependent on large scale commercial agricultural production. That Zimbabwe’s steep economic decline after 2000 was mainly due to the loss of its agro-base seems obvious to all except those ideologically opposed to attributing the fall to Zimbabwe’s land policies. Zimbabwe has never recovered from this. SADC’s anti-sanctions day seems little more than an opportunity to parade the sanctions scapegoat for misgovernance, where economic rationality was sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. To date, the Mnangagwa government has been unable to climb out of the economic hole dug for it – a hole dug by President Robert Mugabe and successive ZANU PF administrations, and not by “illegal western sanctions.” _________________ 45 Unpacking the ‘targeted sanctions’ Farce The Herald 24.10.19. 13