Mugabe Tells CNN's Amanpour Land Reform Was 'the Best Thing' for Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe used a rare interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour to defend Zimbabwe’s seizure of white-owned farms, telling her on Sept. 24, 2009, that the land reform program was “the best thing that could ever have happened to an African country.” The interview, conducted in New York the day before Mugabe addressed the United Nations General Assembly, was his first with a major Western network in several years.

Amanpour pressed him on Zimbabwe’s economic collapse: falling life expectancy, a shrunken manufacturing base, food shortages severe enough that roughly 1 in 14 people were malnourished. Mugabe blamed sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union rather than the land program itself, saying the two together, combined with years of drought, accounted for the country’s troubles. When Amanpour noted that most independent observers pointed instead to mismanagement, Mugabe replied flatly, “It’s not true.”

On the land question, Mugabe was unambiguous. “Zimbabwe belongs to the Zimbabwean people,” he said. “Pure and simple.” Told that many of the farmers being removed were Zimbabwean citizens who had bought their land with government-issued certificates of approval, he said they were “citizens by colonization, seizing land from the original people, indigenous people of the country.” The farmers he was describing numbered about 4,500 by the time Zimbabwe’s fast-track resettlement program began in 2000, according to Human Rights Watch; at independence in 1980, a similarly sized group of roughly 4,000 white landowners had held close to half the country’s farmland, a legacy of colonial-era policy that gave rise to the land question in the first place.

Amanpour also read Mugabe a comment from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who had said Mugabe “destroyed a wonderful country, a country that used to be a breadbasket,” and that he risked indictment at The Hague unless he stepped down. Mugabe dismissed it as “devilish talk” and called the Nobel Peace Prize winner “the little man,” adding, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Mugabe insisted Zimbabwe had grown enough food the previous year to no longer be “a basket case.”

The dispute over the seized farms outlived Mugabe’s presidency, which ended in a 2017 military takeover. In 2020, his successor’s government agreed to pay $3.5 billion in compensation to about 4,500 farmers who had lost their land; after repeated delays, the first installments went out in April 2025.