Mercedes Sayagues
Copycat land invasions are spreading in Zimbabwe, six weeks after villagers first moved on to four commercial farms in Marondera, near Harare.
Across the country hundreds of families have peacefully and briefly occupied land on dozens of farms.
The harvest is over; there is a lull in farm work. A donor land conference is scheduled for September. This is a good time to show how land hungry Zimbabwe is.
Last Sunday ex-political prisoners, who are demanding benefits similar to those accorded war veterans last year, warned they would move on to state farms leased by ministers.
Some of the farms are listed by the government for compulsory acquisition; some are not. Most belong to white farmers, but one in Nyamandhlovu is reportedly leased from the state by Deputy Minister of Industry and Commerce Obert Mpofu.
One farm under siege in Chiweshe belongs to Joseph Msika, minister without portfolio and Zanu-PF chair, who is in charge of resettlement.
Many of the recent occupations are led by war veterans. Government officials visit the squatters, persuade them to wait for organised resettlement, and often they go home again.
But not all invasions fit this pattern. In Masvingo, 14 war veterans allocated themselves portions of Roy Miller’s vast farm. Last month the courts granted Miller an injunction against a veteran who repeatedly threatened to settle there.
In Nyamandlovu, in Matabeleland, foreign hunters on safari at Harry Greaves’s 18 000ha game farm shunned the area where more than 200 squatters camped out.
Last week Msika appeared at the game farm with TV cameras to talk to a group of elderly squatters. By that night, reports said they had agreed to leave the farm, but this week Greaves said the squatters were still there.
The squatters need land, says a local farmer, as most resettlement plots were given to local officials. “Local politicians are using people as pawns. Peasants were told to join the party or no land would be available to them,” said Greaves.
The land conference should shed some light on the future of land redistribution in Zimbabwe. The present is land invasions, to keep up the pressure on the government.