Guptas and Zim – Why politically inspired laws are truly an ass

The trouble with politically-inspired legislation is it can be a very blunt instrument. Especially when one broad group is promoted at the expense of another. Take the debacle of Gupta-owned mines favoured over Glencore, being celebrated in some quarters as the return to SA of a foreign owned asset.

How can anyone classify the Gupta family which arrived in SA in 1994 from India and is now apparently living mostly in Dubai as previously disadvantaged? And if trade union Solidarity is right the deal will kill 1 700 mining jobs, then how does all the backroom bargaining, including the mining minister's intervention, add value to the national cause?

Another example was highlighted by one of the best read stories in the Times of London yesterday which reported that Phil and Anita Rankin, who occupied one of the few remaining white Zimbabwean farms, were forcefully ejected from their tobacco plantation by two truckloads of about 20 paramilitary police. Mugabe's Government had lost patience with them after a drawn-out legal struggle.

The Rankins were merely the latest of 4 000 victims of "revolutionary land reform." What outraged readers of the newspaper this time, is the new owner of the Rankins farm is one Sylvester Nyatsuro, a Zimbabwe-born doctor with British citizenship who lives in Nottingham where he runs a weight loss clinic. Dr Nyatsuro's lawyers say he has taken possession of the farm legally. If so, the law truly is an ass.