'Flying home to die'– proud Scot ruined by Mugabe

Published on Sunday 31 May 2009 22:13

A FORMER Fife coal miner who has lived in Zimbabwe for 51 years will this week fly back to Scotland – after the country's ruined economy left him penniless.

Fred Noble, 78, is one of the first five of many hundreds of impoverished elderly Britons in Zimbabwe who are scheduled for repatriation by the UK government. Mr Noble retired 13 years ago from his job with the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ), formerly Rhodesian Railways.

But his pension and medical aid were withdrawn five years ago as Zimbabwe government policies, under president Robert Mugabe, triggered hyper-inflation now running at hundreds of millions per cent.

His blue-chip investment portfolio, which he built after he and his wife left Scotland in 1958 with just 100, also evaporated as a consequence of Mr Mugabe's economic and political mismanagement.

Under pressure by the Ex-Services League and other organisations, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office decided three months ago to repatriate more than 750 elderly British passport holders who could no longer survive because their pensions, savings and investments had been wiped out by Mr Mugabe's policies.

Mr Noble, widowed four years ago and with no children, was the second to apply at the British Embassy in Harare, the Zimbabwe capital, after the repatriation decision was quietly spread among the British community.

"I have done more good than wrong," he said as he prepared to leave his one-roomed cottage in Harare, provided by an ex- servicemen's organisation. "I helped more people than helped me and I deserve a Christian burial.

"We didn't do anything wrong. We paid taxes, invested for our old age."

He said that when his pension and investments dissolved his wife told him: "All this place has is sunshine. We are wasting our lives here."

Most of the elderly whites have no relatives left, or their children have quit Zimbabwe to escape the financial chaos and violence of the past decade.

The public health system has collapsed and private healthcare is unaffordable to all but the very rich and corrupt.

The final collapse of Mr Noble's dwindling wealth came when he fell ill and he had to go into a private hospital, the fees for which made him a pauper.

"I had to sell my flat," he said. "One day you are very well-off, and the next day you are a poor man."

Mr Noble quit work in Fife, after training as a fitter at the National Coal Board's workshops in Cowdenbeath, out of fear of redundancies in the pits.

He said: "I don't want to get ill again in Zimbabwe. They don't want some old white in the public hospitals in the (black] township moaning."

The only possessions Mr Noble plans to take with him are the Bible his wife gave him, a book of Robert Burns poems and a collection of photographs.

He sold a battered 32-year-old pick-up truck and a TV set and gave away a treasured elephant-skin waistcoat and two pairs of "the best handmade Rhodesian shoes".

Unsure of where he will live in Britain under the repatriation scheme, Mr Noble added: "I am not a young man any more, and I am going home to die – that is how I look at it. I came to a beautiful country and I will remember it as that."