Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa met with business leaders Monday to discuss ways of boosting the country’s troubled economy. He suggested companies are contributing to shortages by holding back essential goods, but one of the businessman said the accusation is not true. Columbus Mavhunga reports for VOA News from Harare.
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When massive gold deposits were discovered about a decade ago in Chimanimani, eastern Zimbabwe, the rural district became famous for attracting hundreds of artisanal miners from across the country every year.

Wealthy small-scale prospectors regularly offer residents generous deals for their land, locals say. To many widows selling their unused land, that kind of money can be life-changing and a source of greater autonomy.

But in recent years, widows in Chimanimani have found that taking a deal can have consequences. Many say they have been taken to tribal courts by their husbands’ families for selling portions of their land.

“I feel bruised,” said Mavis, a 63-year-old widow from Haroni village who did not want to disclose her surname.

“I lived in peace as a widow in my home until last year, when I sold an unwanted acre of my late husband’s land to korokoza,” she said, using a colloquial term for an artisanal gold miner.

He paid her $2,000 in cash. “All hell broke loose,” Mavis explained.

When her male relatives found out about the sale, they reported her to the tribal court.

“The accusations were insane. They said I bewitched my husband, even though he died way back in 1979, in the colonial war,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The cultural norms of the Ndau people, who make up the majority of the population in Chimanimani, forbid widows from owning land their husbands leave behind or selling that land unless a male family member controls the transaction.

As her uncles laid claim to her late husband’s property, Mavis joined a growing number of widows whose male family members have denied them the right to sell land they are supposed to legally inherit.

“In our village, I am the fourth widow since 2017 to be brought to (tribal court) for selling land without male approval,” she said.

Her case is still ongoing.

Tribal Justice

According to Zimbabwe’s latest census, which was conducted in 2012, there are more than half a million widows in the country.

Throughout rural areas, widows routinely find themselves harassed and exploited by in-laws claiming the property their husbands left behind, rights activists say.

O’bren Nhachi, an activist and researcher focusing on natural resources and governance, said the problem has gotten worse in Chimanimani over the past few years, as the gold rush has pushed up the value of land.

“Chimanimani was a poor backwater district until gold was discovered. Suddenly, local land prices shot up because artisanal gold diggers are paying huge sums to snap up plots,” he said. “This has brought conflict, with male family members using patriarchy as a tool to dispossess widows of potential land sales income.”

Although Zimbabwe’s constitution gives women and men equal rights to property and land, in many rural communities tradition overrides national legislation, experts say.

Tribal custom dictates that chiefs are the custodians of communal land, and responsible for allocating land to villagers.

“A woman cannot sell land unless she has obtained permission from my Committee of Seven,” said Mutape Moyo, a tribal headman in Chimanimani, referring to the group of elders — all men — who hear cases in the local customary court.

But this makes it unclear who has legal ownership of land, Nhachi said.

“The laws of the country say the state is the owner of all land. Tribal chiefs are merely ‘custodians’. Does custodian mean they are owners?”

In a country where women carry out 70 percent of the agricultural work – according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization – Nhachi said more women need to be made aware of how to legally hold onto their land if their husbands die.

He said he would like to see the government implement legal awareness programs and properly define who owns and distributes land in rural Zimbabwe.

No Recourse

Provincial administrator Edward Seenza, the head civil servant of Manicaland province, where Chimanimani is located, said that if widows lose their land in tribal courts, there are ways for them to appeal and reverse the ruling.

“If anyone is unhappy with a village head’s decision, they can speak to a chief,’ he said. “Where this does not produce the desired result, they can take their complaint to the district administrator and further up to my office.”

But activists say few rural women know they have that option. And those who do are often too poor or too scared to travel to a government office.

Seenza said that so far, not one woman has come to him to appeal a tribal court ruling.

And without legal help, widows denied the right to sell their land can be left devastated.

Rejoice, a 38-year-old widow from Chipinge district, sold her late husband’s mango orchard two years ago to a wealthy gold digger for $4,000. She needed the money to pay for medication to treat a kidney tumor.

Her father-in-law took her to tribal court.

“I was ordered to refund the buyer, in cash, with punitive interest; pay court fines for ‘disrespect’; and surrender the rest of the land to male family custodians,” said Rejoice, whose name has been changed to protect her identity.

She paid back the buyer as much as she could, but still owes him some money. And her husband’s family is still fighting for ownership of the land, she added.

The court told her that if she does not honor the ruling, she could be thrown out of her home.

“I will end up a destitute, living on the roadside,” she said. “The thought of this gives me sleepless nights.”
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Far more men than women think their companies offer equal pay and promote the sexes equally, yet younger generations are wising up, a U.S. entertainment industry survey found on Monday.

Only a quarter of women think their employers pay them the same as men, while twice as many men believe their company has no gender pay gap, according to the survey by CNBC, a business news channel, and job-oriented social networking site LinkedIn.

About one third of women said both sexes rise up the ranks at the same rate in their workplaces, while more than half of men think the promotion rates are equal, according to responses from at least 1,000 LinkedIn members who work in entertainment.

“Men, typically we found across industries … they’re not as cognizant as their female counterparts to these issues,” said Caroline Fairchild, managing editor at LinkedIn.

Other surveys in finance and technology have revealed similar findings, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Congress outlawed pay discrimination based on gender in the federal Equal Pay Act in 1963, yet public debate over why wages still lag drastically for women has snowballed in recent years.

Last year in the United States, working women earned 82 percent of what men were paid, the Pew Research Center found.

According to the CNBC-LinkedIn survey, four in five women said the workplace holds more obstacles to advancement for women than for men, but only about half of men held the same opinion.

However the survey found that younger men were more likely than their older peers to say they were aware of the obstacles that stop women from succeeding at work, according to Fairchild.

“Perhaps the old guard of the industry is thinking a certain way, but we are seeing a perception change in what perhaps younger people in the industry are thinking,” she added.

A U.S. appeals court in San Francisco ruled in April that employers cannot use workers’ salary histories to justify gender-based pay disparities, saying that would perpetuate a wage gap that is “an embarrassing reality of our economy.”

A handful of U.S. cities and states ban employers from asking potential hires about their salary histories.

The World Economic Forum reported a global economic gap of 58 percent between the sexes for 2016 and forecast women would have to wait 217 years before they are treated equally at work.

Gender inequality in the workplace could cost the world more than $160.2 trillion in lost earnings, according to the World Bank. The figure compares the difference in lifetime income of everyone of working age and if women earned as much as men.
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South Korean conglomerate Hyundai’s cancellation of a major Iran construction project due to problems related to U.S. economic sanctions has been met with silence in Iranian media.

In a brief regulatory filing published Monday, Hyundai Engineering & Construction said it canceled a $521 million contract a day earlier for building a petrochemicals complex in Iran.

“The contract was canceled because financing is not complete, which was a prerequisite for the validity of the contract, as external factors worsened, such as economic sanctions against Iran,” Hyundai said.

Twelve hours after Hyundai made the announcement, there were no mentions of it in Iranian state-controlled media. There also was little Farsi-language discussion of the move on Twitter.

The United States is set to reimpose sanctions on Iran’s key energy exports on Nov. 4 to try to pressure Tehran into agreeing to a new deal to curb its nuclear and other perceived malign activities. Energy exports are the main sources of revenue for the Iranian government. 

For months, international companies in sectors such as energy, aviation, autos and shipping have been withdrawing from or scaling back business with Iran to avoid being hit by secondary U.S. sanctions for continuing such business as the primary U.S. sanctions take effect. 

Speaking to the Monday edition of VOA Persian’s News at Nine program, Johns Hopkins University applied economics professor Steve Hanke said cancellations of Iranian construction contracts by Hyundai and other foreign companies cause significant delays in the construction process.

“Now, the Iranians have to more or less start over and find somebody new. All of this takes time. As it takes time, the Iranian economy sinks,” Hanke said. 

Facing growing domestic discontent with Iran’s faltering economy, President Hassan Rouhani won parliamentary approval Saturday for a reshuffle of economic posts in his cabinet. He also said Iran can withstand U.S. sanctions by turning to other nations for business.

“Russia, China, India, the European Union and some African and Latin American countries are our friends,” he told parliament. “We have to work with them and attract investments.”

Hanke said it is more likely that Iran will finance the petrochemical project abandoned by Hyundai with Chinese and Russian partners than with the EU. Washington has put particular pressure on its European allies in recent months not to undermine U.S. sanctions against Iran. 

The EU has said it will try to circumvent U.S. sanctions by setting up a “special purpose vehicle” to facilitate transactions between European businesses and Iran. The 28-nation bloc has said it will abide by a 2015 deal between Iran and world powers, curbing Iranian nuclear activities in return for relief from international sanctions. U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from that deal in May, saying it was not tough enough on Iran. Tehran denies seeking nuclear weapons. 

South Korea, a key U.S. ally in East Asia, has not vowed to defy U.S. sanctions, but it does appear to want to salvage its remaining commercial contracts with Iran. South Korean media said Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha spoke by phone with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday and asked Washington to be flexible in exempting South Korean companies from U.S. penalties for Iran-related business. There was no immediate readout of the phone call from the U.S. State Department. 

Hyundai had signed a contract to build a petrochemical complex on Iran’s Persian Gulf coast near the southern town of Tonbak in March 2017. South Korean and Iranian media said the contract was for the construction of the second phase of the Kangan Petro Refining Complex in the South Pars Gas Field. The reports valued Hyundai’s contract with Iran’s Ahdaf Investment Company, an affiliate of a state-run oil firm, at $3 billion. 

Hyundai, in its Monday statement, did not explain the discrepancy between the initially reported $3 billion valuation of the contract and its latest $512 million valuation. 

This article originated in VOA’s Persian Service. 
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The United States urged European Union governments on Monday to reflect on whether it was really in their interest to go ahead with a trade dispute over U.S. metals tariffs, and said it was hopeful of settling the issue with Mexico and Canada.

The U.S. tariffs attracted an unprecedented seven requests for WTO adjudication, as well as a slew of criticism, at a fractious WTO dispute settlement meeting, while the United States hit back with legal actions against its critics.

Shea not surprised

U.S. Ambassador Dennis Shea said he was not surprised by China’s opposition, since it had massive overcapacity in metals production and was a non-market economy, but that Washington was “deeply disappointed” with the EU’s stance.

“We would encourage the European countries to consider carefully their broader economic, political, and security interests,” Shea told the meeting.

“We will not allow China’s party-state to fatally undermine the U.S. steel and aluminum industries, on which the U.S. military, and by extension global security, rely.”

China’s representative responded by saying the United States was shifting its arguments to disguise its protectionism.

Canada and Mexico have also challenged the tariffs — 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminium — but a U.S. trade official told the meeting that, after constructive discussions, Washington was hopeful of reaching an agreement with both.

Adam Austen, a spokesman for Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, told Reuters the best outcome would be for Washington to rescind the tariffs.

Taboo no longer

Norway, Russia and Turkey also asked the WTO to judge the legality of the U.S. tariffs, despite Washington’s assertion that they are based on national security and therefore outside WTO jurisdiction.

National security claims were taboo for most of the WTO’s 23-year history, because trade diplomats feared a domino effect as countries cited national security to get out of a wide range of obligations. But Shea suggested it would be even worse to try to challenge the U.S. national security claim.

“The United States wishes to be clear: if the WTO were to undertake to review an invocation of (the national security exemption), this would undermine the legitimacy of the WTO’s dispute settlement system and even the viability of the WTO as a whole,” he said.

Trachtman turns to Twitter

On Twitter, Joel Trachtman, professor of International Law at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Jennifer Hillman, an American former WTO judge, said Shea’s position was not supported by WTO law.

Canada’s representative at the WTO meeting said fear of a national security threat was “inconceivable”, while Norway said it was “evidently divorced from real-world security concerns.”

Canada, China, the EU, Mexico and Japan argued that the U.S. tariffs were “safeguard” measures that could be addressed with sanctions under WTO rules. Washington for its part requested WTO adjudication of their retaliatory measures taken by Canada, China, the EU and Mexico.

All the requests for WTO adjudication will need to be confirmed at another meeting next month before going ahead.
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U.S. stocks fell on Monday in a volatile session, with the S&P 500 ending just shy of confirming its second correction of 2018, hurt by fresh worries of an escalation of U.S.-China trade tensions and a sharp drop in big tech and Internet names.

Following a morning rally, major U.S. indexes pulled back steeply after a Bloomberg report that the United States is preparing to announce tariffs on all remaining Chinese imports by early December if talks next month between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping falter.

“Obviously this trade skirmish is metastasizing potentially into something worse than it already is,” said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia.

After the S&P 500 dropped more than 10 percent from its Sept. 20 record closing high during the session, the benchmark index pared its losses late to close down 9.9 percent from its peak. The Dow industrials also fell more than 10 percent from its Oct. 3 record close during the session, before ending down 8.9 percent from the mark.

On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 245.39 points, or 0.99 percent, to 24,442.92, the S&P 500 lost 17.44 points, or 0.66 percent, to 2,641.25 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 116.92 points, or 1.63 percent, to 7,050.29.

Major tech and growth stocks, such as Amazon.com, Google parent Alphabet and Netflix, posted sharp declines. The S&P 500 technology sector fell 1.8 percent.

The so-called FANG growth stocks – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet – have lost more than $200 billion in market value in the past two sessions.

The industrials sector, which is seen as sensitive to trade issues, dropped 1.7 percent, with Boeing tumbling 6.6 percent.

“The concern about global growth and global trade … continues to create an overhang for U.S. corporations and global equities,” said Chad Morganlander, senior portfolio manager at Washington Crossing Advisors in Florham Park, New Jersey.

“Growth stocks typically do poorly in situations of global growth decelerating,” he said. “You set yourself up for a more defensive market until there’s a clear sign that investors can grab hold of.”

Market volatility has spiked in recent weeks, stemming from higher interest rates and worries about the economy and trade tensions. Investors also may be increasingly nervous about uncertainty surrounding U.S. congressional elections, now just a week away.

“Probably the most pervasive headwind is concern about midterm elections,” said Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco. “That is weighing down stocks, particularly technology as there is greater concern about regulation.”

Internet stocks also may have been wounded by Britain’s plan to tax the revenue from online platforms.

In corporate news, shares of software maker Red Hat surged 45.4 percent after the company agreed to be bought by IBM Corp for $34 billion. But IBM shares fell 4.1 percent, weighing on the Dow and S&P.

Investors who are bullish about stocks point to strong corporate profits this year and economic strength. But there are also concerns about the extent of a slowdown in earnings growth next year, while weak housing data has raised some worries about the economy.

Data on Monday showed U.S. consumer spending rose for a seventh consecutive month in September. But income recorded its smallest gain in more than a year amid moderate wage growth, suggesting the current pace of spending was unlikely to be sustained.

Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by a 1.45-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.45-to-1 ratio favored decliners.

The S&P 500 posted three new 52-week highs and 65 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 23 new highs and 260 new lows.

About 9.3 billion shares changed hands in U.S. exchanges, above the 8.5 billion daily average over the last 20 sessions.
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