Francis Murape
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s recent land offer to ex-combatants may be a little too late. The liberation war veterans’ protests have assumed, not only anti- corruption, but anti-government overtones as well.
About 500 of the former fighters, demanding payments from the corruption-riddled War Victims Compensation Fund, on Monday drowned Mugabe’s speech at the National Heroes Acre in Harare, chanting: “Don’t fool around with the blood of the fallen fighters.”
In the farming centre of Marondera, to the east of Harare, another group disrupted a commemoration of Heroes Day, telling Governor David Karimanzira that the government would not be allowed to “honour dead heroes while we the living heroes suffer”.
A more ominous message came from a Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association representative in Bindura, north of Harare, who declared before government officials, army and police officers, that “peace and security cannot be guaranteed in this country if our problems are not resolved quickly”.
The war veterans shunned Mugabe’s promise to allocate them some of the 1 772 large- scale white-owned commercial farms he said his government had identified for compulsory acquisition under the controversial Land Acquisition Act of 1992.
They were also unimpressed by Mugabe’s offer of a $50-million (R25-million) War Veterans Fund to finance business projects for them.
Since 1980 the government has managed to resettle 70 000 mainly peasant families on formerly white-owned farms. But most of the land has gone to politicians, senior civil servants, senior army and police officers, and their relatives. Almost all the ministers in Mugabe’s government lease state farms.
While Mugabe justified the leasing of the farms as a bid to promote the emergence of black large-scale commercial farmers, the protesting veterans – mostly poorly- educated peasant farmers – doubt his sincerity about addressing their needs.
They would rather the government continues to pay them compensation and pensions.
However, the disbursement of these funds was suspended early this year after it was discovered that senior politicians and government officials, some of whom had never been near a war zone, had looted the fund, siphoning off about R900-million in eight months.
These are allegedly the same “chiefs” in the same government the veterans say they can no longer trust, and whose ousting from government they are demanding in increasingly shrill voices.