Zimbabwe on the Hudson

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, January 07, 2026

 

Cea Weaver may have missed her calling as the land-reform czar in Robert Mugabe–era Zimbabwe.

 

The same anti-white racism, quest for supposed equity, and contempt for private property that characterize Weaver’s worldview brought about one of the most catastrophic policy experiments this century.

 

By 2000, Robert Mugabe had governed Zimbabwe for two decades, to the country’s great misfortune. A revolutionary Marxist/socialist, Mugabe hated the country’s once-ruling white minority (many of whom had fled upon his initial ascension in 1980). In the name of justice and reform in the early 2000s, he blessed the seizure of white farms without government compensation.

 

This was a no-kidding application of the Cea Weaver agenda in the violent context of post-revolutionary Zimbabwe.

 

Weaver wants to, as she has put it, “Seize private property!”

 

In Zimbabwe, they really did, often via armed thugs.

 

She believes that “private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.”

 

So did Zimbabwe, although with the caveat that it was focused ESPECIALLY on commercial farms, not homeownership.

 

She’s outlined a vision wherein “families, especially white families, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one we currently have.”

 

Zimbabwe ensured that many white families did indeed establish a different relationship with property — namely, being deprived of it.

 

She’s an enthusiast for finding ways “to shrink the value of real estate.”

 

Zimbabwe did it! From just 2000 to 2001, commercial farmland lost about three-quarters of its value.

 

Food production dropped 60 percent over a decade, which was just one of the economic disasters caused by Zimbabwe’s adjustment of white farmers’ relationship to private property; it turned out that handing over commercial agricultural enterprises to people who knew nothing about running such farms didn’t work out very well.

 

This piece at the Cato Institute relates the tale of woe:

 

The farm seizures sent destructive ripples throughout the economy. Food processing companies and agricultural exporters shut up shop. Some 700 companies closed by the end of 2001 as industrial production declined by 10.5 per cent in 2001 and an estimated 17.5 per cent in 2002.

 

Unsurprisingly, export earnings collapsed. Declining domestic production deprived Zimbabwe of the ability to earn foreign currency, resulting in widespread shortages of imported goods, including food and clothing.

 

Banks, which had previously used land titles as collateral when extending credit to farmers, were suddenly saddled with a lot of bad debt. The financial system froze and dozens of institutions collapsed. With no guaranteed property rights, foreign direct investment dropped from a high of $444 million in 1998 to a piffling $3.8 million in 2003.

 

To meet its obligations to domestic and foreign creditors, the government ordered the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to print more money, sparking the first hyperinflation of the 21st century. In November 2008, hyperinflation peaked at a monthly rate of 79.6 billion percent — a rate 30 million times higher than that reported by the Zimbabwean government. At this point the daily inflation rate averaged 98 per cent, this means that prices effectively doubled every 24 hours.

 

The socio-economic consequences of land expropriation were extensive, and Zimbabwe experienced a truly miserable decade between 1998 and 2008. During that time, its economy contracted at an annual rate of 6.09 per cent and per capita income fell from $1,640 a year to just $661.

 

But white property owners were screwed more than anyone else, so that must be equity, then, right?

 

Weaver is heir to a longstanding, rancid revolutionary tradition that holds, as the anarchist and socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon put it famously, “What is property? It is theft.”

 

Unsurprisingly, she’s said the same thing.

 

Obviously, New York City isn’t going to experience anything like what went on in Zimbabwe, and may not even experience Mamdani’s vision for rent control.

 

One might think, though, that the new mayor would be highly allergic to people advocating race-based expropriations given his own family’s sad experience with this phenomenon.

 

Mamdani’s father, who was born in India, lived in Uganda as part of the large, successful Indian community there.

 

In his wisdom, in 1972, the newly minted Ugandan dictator Idi Amin decided to expel all so-called Asians and “reclaim” their property, from cars to homes to companies. Amin accused the Asians of all sorts of perfidy and claimed he was “giving Uganda back to ethnic Ugandans.” Equity demanded no less.

 

The elder Mamdani’s family had to flee. He himself stayed until the final day he was allowed and described to The Guardian how a professor at his university came to his family’s home to look for stuff to take for himself — since the Mamdani family and every other Asian in Uganda now had a “different” relationship to their private property.

 

According to Mamdani, the guy took bottles of Johnnie Walker Red (which, amusingly, turned out to contain only olive oil). Mamdani ended up joining his parents at a transit camp in London. They’d made their sacrifice for the reordering of private property in Uganda.

 

Again, this isn’t happening in New York, but it is disturbing enough that Cea Weaver’s worldview overlaps with that of some of the most rancid and destructive people on earth.