Clive Aslet: Remember Zimbabwe's pensioners
[Clive Aslet is Editor at Large of Country Life]
It is heart-rending to know that any group of elderly, respectable people should be reduced to spending Christmas in penury.
But when they are former Crown servants for whom the governments admits a moral responsibility, the blood boils. Zimbabwe's forgotten pensioners are such a case.
These are individuals who were recruited to run the civil service of Southern Rhodesia, as it then was, before independence. When Ian Smith's regime declared UDI in 1965, Harold Wilson urged them to stay at their posts.
During the Lancaster House talks of 1979, which negotiated the transition to majority rule, they were assured that their pensions would be secure. Since 2003, the ex-civil servants who now live in South Africa or the UK have received no pension at all. Those who have remained inside Zimbabwe find that their pensions won't buy so much as a postage stamp. All are eking out their final years in conditions of direst poverty and distress.
In a House of Lords debate last October, Lord Crickhowell, who was a member of the Thatcher cabinet during the period of the Lancaster House talks, spoke of his "sense of deep shame and embarrassment that we are now in this position" and expressed his "hope and expectation that this Government will do something to honour the pledges given". To which the whole nation, surely, would cry hear, hear.
Since 1973, Britain has been committed (under the Overseas Pension Act) to paying the pensions of the civil servants who ran other colonies.
Arrangements in Southern Rhodesia had always been slightly different. Being exceptionally well administered, it enjoyed a great degree of autonomy, recruiting its civil servants directly, often through Rhodesia House in London. Today, the Foreign Office is hiding behind this technicality in its refusal to honour the Lancaster House commitment. That commitment was partly enshrined in the constitution of Zimbabwe, paragraphs 112 and 113, which protected the pension rights of "public officers". While this placed the onus of paying the pensions on the new state, British ministers clearly believed that they had ensured, in the words of one of them, "full safeguards for public service pensions and their remittability".
Nobody foresaw the tragedy that Robert Mugabe's tyranny and mismanagement would inflict on a wonderful country. Now that Zimbabwe has become a failed state, the British government must surely honour the clearly stated intention to protect the pensions of Crown servants, to which some of them have contributed for 40 years.
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
It is heart-rending to know that any group of elderly, respectable people should be reduced to spending Christmas in penury.
But when they are former Crown servants for whom the governments admits a moral responsibility, the blood boils. Zimbabwe's forgotten pensioners are such a case.
These are individuals who were recruited to run the civil service of Southern Rhodesia, as it then was, before independence. When Ian Smith's regime declared UDI in 1965, Harold Wilson urged them to stay at their posts.
During the Lancaster House talks of 1979, which negotiated the transition to majority rule, they were assured that their pensions would be secure. Since 2003, the ex-civil servants who now live in South Africa or the UK have received no pension at all. Those who have remained inside Zimbabwe find that their pensions won't buy so much as a postage stamp. All are eking out their final years in conditions of direst poverty and distress.
In a House of Lords debate last October, Lord Crickhowell, who was a member of the Thatcher cabinet during the period of the Lancaster House talks, spoke of his "sense of deep shame and embarrassment that we are now in this position" and expressed his "hope and expectation that this Government will do something to honour the pledges given". To which the whole nation, surely, would cry hear, hear.
Since 1973, Britain has been committed (under the Overseas Pension Act) to paying the pensions of the civil servants who ran other colonies.
Arrangements in Southern Rhodesia had always been slightly different. Being exceptionally well administered, it enjoyed a great degree of autonomy, recruiting its civil servants directly, often through Rhodesia House in London. Today, the Foreign Office is hiding behind this technicality in its refusal to honour the Lancaster House commitment. That commitment was partly enshrined in the constitution of Zimbabwe, paragraphs 112 and 113, which protected the pension rights of "public officers". While this placed the onus of paying the pensions on the new state, British ministers clearly believed that they had ensured, in the words of one of them, "full safeguards for public service pensions and their remittability".
Nobody foresaw the tragedy that Robert Mugabe's tyranny and mismanagement would inflict on a wonderful country. Now that Zimbabwe has become a failed state, the British government must surely honour the clearly stated intention to protect the pensions of Crown servants, to which some of them have contributed for 40 years.