Robson Beans 🇿🇼

AI Enthusiast, Software Developer, Christian, Curious Sapiosexual, I write when I'm bored...and if you cut my veins, I bleed Liverpool RED. CIO @vanadiumtechzw

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

Some deem it divine retribution - a penance for rebellion. Others, a cosmic duel between good and evil. Yet the enigma persists: Why does the battle endure? Two millennia post-Calvary, the faithful still grapple. The battlefield eludes sight, yet its echoes reverberate. Our strategy? Our leader?

The truth crystallizes: We fight not against flesh and blood, but against unseen principalities. Our battleground? The human heart - the theater of choices. Our strategy? The armor of God - truth, righteousness, faith, salvation, the Word. Our leader? The One who conquered death - the risen Christ.

https://t.co/VN5rVeSmM1

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

@MitchellMGumbo There are many times I’m unsure of my position regarding issues or ideas. This is not one of them. He has an almost uncanny affinity for vulgarities. Moreover, the message of the cross is never about putting down people because of sin. This sounds sexist, actually.

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

@PhinaCreations A huge disappointment

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

Do yourself a favour and don’t watch ‘Nemesis’ on Netflix. Dstv channel 301 stuff.

What a colossal waste of time…

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

@Tebogo095583674 You should have seen the ending…comical

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

@JulzZoey The overacting, the script. All a mess.

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

@Prof_Tringindi Agreed.

[Baba Ruhamah @MitchellMGumbo]

Zimbabwe’s uber rich are sometimes vulgar in how they flaunt their wealth in the midst of so much penury

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

@MitchellMGumbo I’m at a loss for words

[Baba Ruhamah @MitchellMGumbo]

I turn a year older today . May I be empowered and enabled to leave this world better than I found it !

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

This is a sober analysis of the situation Mr Chin’ono. However, allow me to push back a little on some issues.

One thing worth naming. You frame this as Zimbabwe correcting its own legal mess. That’s partly true. But they are doing this now because Western creditors have made it a condition for debt relief. We are over 13 billion in debt, billions in arrears, locked out of global capital markets for two decades. This, by no means, is principled correction; it’s structural coercion.

And the people paying the price for that coercion are the resettled farmers currently on those 67 farms. You somewhat dismissed them with ‘I can guarantee many weren’t utilised anyway.’ That guarantee deserves evidence. Because those are real families. The state that took land from white farmers is now taking it from Black ones - some of whom received it through official state allocation in good faith, with no knowledge of the legal encumbrances attached: because Europeans have BIPPAs and resettled Zimbabweans don’t. That asymmetry needs to be named, not glossed over.

And let’s ask something fundamental. Did those resettled farmers know the land they were allocated carried BIPPA encumbrances? Almost certainly not. The state allocated it to them. They built on it, farmed it, raised families on it in good faith. Now the same state is reclaiming it to honour agreements it should never have violated. Will they be compensated for developments made?

Given that the govt hasn’t paid the 2020 $3.5 billion white farmer compensation deal, the answer is obvious.

And let’s apply your own standard here Mr Chin’ono. You argue land must go to people who can actually produce. Do we have any evidence these 67 farmers are productive? Has anyone assessed their agricultural output, their utilisation rates, their farming capacity? No. They are getting the land back purely because of treaty agreements: not merit, not competence, not productivity. The very standard you used to critique the resettlement programme is being quietly abandoned the moment European nationals are the beneficiaries. Do we assume they’re productive simply because they are European?

Yes, BIPPA obligations are legally binding on Zimbabwe regardless of who currently occupies the land. But the legal obligation to foreign nationals doesn’t extinguish the moral and potentially legal obligation to resettled farmers for improvements made in good faith. Both obligations exist simultaneously. Zimbabwe is choosing which one to honour.

The resettled Zimbabwean farmers have no BIPPA, no title deed - most have revocable offer letters, no treaty. They were political pawns in 2000, now they are collateral damage in a debt relief negotiation. How exactly is this correcting mistakes if new ones are being made in the process?

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

@MitchellMGumbo The problem is at the source

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

@Rebel_wit_a_coz @ReutersAfrica Exactly. Which confirms the land reform was always a negotiating chip, not an irreversible ideological commitment.

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

I see this as cynical and structurally coerced.

We are being squeezed by creditors to undo, selectively, what the regime spent decades justifying. The losers will be resettled farmers with no legal recourse, no treaty, no lobby. The winners are European nationals and Western lenders. The ideology gets sacrificed; the debt gets managed.

When creditors make debt relief conditional on land restitution and we fold: it confirms what critics always said: the land reform was never purely principled.

It was wielded as political theatre when convenient and it’s now being abandoned when financially expedient.

Agreeing to this is essentially admitting the debt problem is more urgent than the ideology.

[Reuters Africa @ReutersAfrica]

Zimbabwe will return 67 farms seized from foreigners from four European countries covered by bilateral investment pacts, the country's agriculture minister said, as it seeks to mend ties with Western countries while it battles for debt relief. https://t.co/2JTapoUTek

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

I think the ‘tribes did it themselves’ narrative is a false equivalence.

Intra-African slavery was largely captive integration, debt bondage, or war captivity: non-racialised, often non-hereditary, with paths to absorption into the host society.

The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade was hereditary chattel slavery, racialised by law, industrial in scale: 12.5 million people extracted, children born enslaved by statute. Same word but completely different institutions.

Also, the Middle Passage killed roughly 1.8 million people in transit (the gap between embarked and disembarked). No intra-African system had a comparable death-by-logistics signature, because no intra-African system moved people at that volume across that distance for commercial sale.

[𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒂𝒍𝒕 𝑶𝒇 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑬𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒉 @Shadaya_Knight]

Unpopular opinion: Black people are not owed anything for slavery or colonialism. Them being enslaved or colonised wasn't because they were good people BUT simply weak

What white people did, enslave and colonize black people, the black tribes did that as well amongst themselves. It's not about morality but power. The weak get conquered simple as that

If black people had developed the weapons that matched or better than what the whites had, they'd have never been enslaved or colonized. Maybe we would have been the conquerors

Stop this victim mentality, your ancestors were conquered because they were weak. You're still oppressed not because you're good guys, but you're weak

The only solution is POWER not this pity party. It's the way of the world - the strong do whatever they can and the weak suffer what they must.

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

Firstly, reparations claims aren't about morality of conquest, they're about unjust enrichment. The legal principle is straightforward and applies in any commercial law system: if value was extracted through a system later recognised as illegal (slavery was outlawed precisely because it was deemed wrong), and that extracted value compounded into present-day institutional wealth, restitution is owed.

Germany pays Israel. The US paid Japanese internees. Britain compensated slave owners £20 million, only finished paying it off in 2015. The 'weakness' argument doesn't engage with any of this.

Secondly, empires like Mutapa here at home, or the Ashanti in Ghana, were NOT 'weak' at point of contact. The balance shifted in the late 1800s with the invention of the maxim gun, steamships et cetera: not before. Conflating 1450 and 1885 to call a continent 'weak' is simply not history.

Lastly, by your own rule: 'the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must': descendants organising politically to demand reparations IS power being exercised. It should be respected, not dismissed as a pity party. By that logic, is Germany weak for paying Israel? Is Britain weak for compensating its own slave owners?

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

They worry about the enormous arbitrary power they wield, power they cannot entrust to any one than them or even share in a way that can reduce political anxiety.

The normative, institutional, and ideological mechanisms that would have made this power subject to constitutional constraints and accountability have never been prioritized from colonial times.

After using it as their sole leverage to amass wealth and to ensure personal and economic security long enough, they grow increasingly fearful about what seems to them to be the grave consequences of losing to their rivals in the competition for the control of state power.

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

They are screwing over Bayern there by Munich…

[Baba Ruhamah @MitchellMGumbo]

Got to begrudgingly give it to the Caucasians . So far they have all other races trying to be accepted by them and seen as their deputies .

You do not know pain till you have to share spaces with a fellow minority trying to be seen as a model minority

[Robson Beans 🇿🇼 @BeansRobson]

“Except for a few countries such as Botswana, politics remained a zero-sum game; power was sought by all means and maintained by all means. Colonial rule left most of Africa a legacy of intense and lawless political competition amidst an ideological void and a rising tide of disenchantment with the expectation of a better life.”

Claude Ake.