Zim assesses land reform
20 YEARS: ECONOMICALLY A FAILURE, BUT A BLACK EMPOWERMENT WIN
Agriculture’s share of GDP has fallen from about 15 to less than 10% – economist.
Eighty-year-old Isobel Simons calmly narrated how she and her late husband lost their 728-hectare Zimbabwe farm two decades ago to Robert Mugabe’s controversial land reforms.
Then she broke down and sobbed. “It was my home for 47 years,” she said.
Sixty kilometres away in Glendale, Benard Chinyemba, 60, took over an 80-hectare farm in 2002, offered to him by the government as part of land redistribution to blacks. The ex-engineer is thriving, growing maize and soya beans, while rearing goats, sheep, fish and chickens.
Twenty years after Zimbabwe’s land reform began, the cases of Simons and Chinyemba illustrate the deep lingering divisions over what became a symbol of Mugabe, who ruled for 37 years until he was toppled in 2017. He died two years later.
Two decades ago, Mugabe seized more than 4 000 farms from the country’s 4 500 white large-scale commercial farmers.
He justified the land grabs as a way to correct historical wrongs by claiming back land that was forcibly taken from the blacks. Economic output fell by half following the land seizures and the economy has been hobbled since, shrinking 7.5% last year, according to the International Monetary
Fund (IMF).
Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube, in a letter to the IMF in April, projected the economy could contract by between 15 and 20%, partly due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Food shortages experienced over most of the post-land reform years are widely blamed on the loss of white farmers. The coronavirus pandemic has only worsened the shortages. Two successive droughts have stunted agricultural harvests, leaving 7.7 million, half the population, food-insecure.
According to the World Food Programme, 56 of the country’s 60 districts are experiencing “crisis” hunger and the pandemic risks driving people into “deeper desperation”.
For Chinyemba, the government was right “repossessing” land from whites, but they deserve compensation, if only for improvements. “The land belongs to the indigenous people.”
He said while black “people were killed” when their land was taken from them, “in all fairness, [whites] should get compensation” for improvements.
For white Zimbabweans, the programme was an invasion of their property. To the blacks, it was the final battle in the country’s liberation.
The land issue almost derailed the negotiations with Britain that led to the birth of Zimbabwe in 1980. Ultimately a deal was struck that the new government would not embark on any land reforms in the first decade. After that, a “willing buyer, willing seller” principle came into effect with
Britain to fund the buying of white-owned farms.
But in 1997, Clare Short, then British secretary of state for international development, told Harare that London had “no special responsibility to meet the cost of land purchases”. Sporadic invasions of white-owned farms ensued, but the government curbed them.
Simons said white farmers deluded themselves into thinking they were indispensable because agriculture was key to the economy. All that changed when in February 2000 after a constitutional referendum with a clause that would legalise expropriation of white farms without compensation, was rejected.
Days later, veterans of Zimbabwe’s liberation war started running white farmers off their land. A year later, the government formalised the reform programme. Farms were either sub-divided into six-hectare plots or handed out whole to blacks.
Thirty kilometres west of Harare, 60-year-old Israel Pasipanodya Mushore inherited Rasper farm. But it is rundown. His showpiece is a herd of 70-plus cattle.
In 2016, government introduced the “command agriculture” scheme to supply farmers with seeds, fertilisers and insecticides – and they pay back on harvesting. The scheme brought hope, but not enough. Inputs were not timely disbursed to farmers, or just didn’t get to them.
Funding remains one of the biggest challenges. Currently, all land belongs to the state and farms operate on 99-year leases.
Financial institutions refuse to lend in the absence of collateral.
“The 99-year lease on its own has not inspired confidence in financiers,” said Paul Zakariya, head of the Zimbabwe Farmers Union, which represents smallscale farmers.
Ben Gilpin, who lost a farm, agrees. “If the farmers were on the land with title or some bankable entity that is truly tradable and can be honoured by the banks, government wouldn’t have to fulfil the role,” the director of the Commercial Farmers Union, which represents mostly white farmers, said.
Zimbabwe’s government insists it will only pay compensation for improvements on the farms taken and for not the land. John Laurie, 83, lost two farms in 2002, then valued at $9 million (R157.9 million). He is one of the farmers’ representatives negotiating compensation with the government.
But 20 years on, land reform remains a work in progress. After carrying out a land audit, government vowed to slash the size of underutilised large farms.
Opinions on the reforms remain split. Economically though, the reforms are widely seen as a failure. Independent economist Tony Hawkins said agriculture’s share of GDP has fallen from about 15 to less than 10%.
Despite several attempts, government did not respond to requests for comment. But for the Zimbabwean leadership, Mugabe’s farm legacy continues to empower blacks. “Our land reform programme remains a fundamental cog in our independence and sovereignty,” President Emmerson Mnangagwa said in April. “There is no going back.”
The 99year lease as not inspired confidence