into poverty and confusion
Jan Raath
It’s official. The people don’t want land. They want jobs in a market economy, and an opportunity to work for a decent living.
This information is tucked away in a comprehensive study on poverty released two weeks ago by the Zimbabwean Ministry of Social Welfare. Members of about 18 000 rural and urban households were interviewed and asked, among other things, what they believed were the main causes of poverty and how they could be combated.
One percent of those responding said poverty was caused by a shortage of land. Only two percent said poverty could be resolved by the provision of land.
The two assertions went unnoticed in the uproar over President Robert Mugabe’s list of 1 772 communal farms to be confiscated by his government, even though the government has budgeted enough money to pay for only 10 farms, and even though it has no solution to the complex problem of resettling thousands of peasant farmers, and no money to do it with.
But the cheffes (elite) want land. That much was apparent in the 1993 free-for-all that followed after the government terminated white farmers’ leases on scores of state-owned farms and then rented the farms to officials of the ruling ZANU (PF) party, including a number of Mugabe’s closest associates and supporters.
The comrades want farms, too. Mugabe, capitulating to a campaign by veterans to be rewarded for the role they played in the war against Ian Smith’s white Rhodesia, has promised them not only R1,4-billion in a generous package of benefits, but also farms.
A third new category of claimant, the “indigenous [black]” commercial farmer, has been approved by Mugabe as having a valid claim to expropriated land.
There have been no suggestions made publically as to how the 4,8-million hectares of currently white-owned land is to be apportioned among the different groups of would-be farmers, but peasant farmers are being shuffled to the back of the queue.
Land reform is as critical an issue in Zimbabwe now as it was at independence in 1980.
Mugabe took over a country warped by its race-based system of land tenure. Land was divided between about 5 000 white farmers who held freehold title on 18-million hectares, and about 650 000 peasant farmers occupying a slightly larger area.The peasant farmers were allocated land according to a vague leasing system, administered by tribal chiefs.
The legislation that had divided the country into white and African land areas allowed commercial farmers to expand and prosper. But African peasant farmers found themselves restricted, no longer able to follow their ancient practises of shifting cultivation. The result was overcrowding, overgrazing, rapid depletion of soils, environmental degradation, regular crop failure and deepening poverty.
It is widely acknowledged that in the last 17 years, the situation in the tribal trust lands – now renamed communal areas – has worsened severely. Attempts at land reform and resettlement have been amateurish.
In 1983, the Zimbabwean government launched an international appeal for post-war rehabilitation, including resettlement. Agricultural experts and donor agencies recommended a programme for the resettlement of 54 000 families in five years as a reasonable chance of success.
Those chances were immediately sunk by Mugabe and his cabinet, who said the number was too small to make a political statement and multiplied it by three to set a new target at 162 000 families.
Fourteen years later, about 70 000 families have been resettled. Of the 3,5-million hectares of white farmland bought for resettlement, an area of 450 000 hectares is vacant.
In 1990, the first parliamentary report on resettlement said land had been allocated to people with no idea of how to farm, and the schemes were overrun by squatters.
A 1993 report by the auditor general’s office found that the 3,5-million hectares bought for resettlement were “grossly under-utilised” and the programme fraught with political interference.
Seti Source, a productive commercial farming area in southern Zimbabwe where Afrikaner farmers were driven out by guerrilla warfare, was the first formerly white area to be resettled. Press reports in 1993 quoted settlers appealing to the government to be resettled elsewhere.
In the last five years, settlers on land schemes have had to contend with a new problem: politicians and civil servants muscling in and helping themselves to chunks of resettlement schemes.
Shasha Fountains farm south of Chivhu in the midlands was resettled in the late 1980s. It now has an assistant district administrator, a district education superintendent, three agriculture ministry officials and four businessmen officially allocated plots there. None of them live there, but use the land for weekend getaways where they grow maize to supplement their income.
This pattern is pervasive. “But at least these ones have a bit of money and know- how, and they seem to be putting something into their plots,” said one official.