LAWRENCE BARTLETT, Harare | Saturday 4.00pm.
ZIMBABWEAN President Robert Mugabe will use special powers to begin seizing white-owned farms within weeks, the government announced on Saturday, as farmers reported new violence by land invaders.
“Within 10 days the legal framework to take land and redistribute it to the people will be in place and we will immediately proceed to take and give it to the people,” Justice Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa said.
He said that with parliament having been dissolved ahead of elections, Mugabe would use the Presidential Powers Act to repeal a law which requires compensation to be paid for seized farms.
Mugabe has already changed the constitution to allow the seizure of land without payment, but needs to repeal the old Land Acquisition Act before he can take the farms.
Opposition lawyers and farming officials have condemned the move.
The director of the Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU), which represents Zimbabwe’s 4000 white farmers, said: “The CFU feels that this is a lack of good faith on behalf of the government while we are trying to negotiate in good faith with the war veterans in an attempt to stop violence and prepare the situation for a free and fair election.”
Hasluck said at least 27 farm labourers had been badly beaten in attacks on workers’ compounds on farms in several parts of the country overnight, despite a peace pledge by war veterans’ leader Chenjerai Hunzvi.
Hunzvi, who has spearheaded the invasion of hundreds of white-owned farms by thousands of squatters since February, had agreed with the CFU on Friday that the squatters could remain on the farms but would end the violence.
Mugabe has backed the invasions, in which two white farmers and at least two black labourers have been killed, saying the squatters are simply reclaiming land stolen by colonialists.
Critics charge, however, that he is using the land issue in a desperate attempt to bolster his party’s chances in parliamentary elections due in May, and has deployed the war veterans as shock-troops to intimidate rural voters.
David Coltart, shadow justice minister for the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), said the use of the Presidential Powers Act meant that Mugabe would be ruling by decree and could provoke “a major constitutional crisis.”
“I have no doubt this will be challenged in the Supreme Court — by the Commercial Farmers’ Union if they have not been totally intimidated by the events of the last few weeks,” he said.
Coltart said he believed the move to invoke the Presidential Powers Act could be a response to the failure of talks in London this week in which the Zimbabwean government demanded that Britain, the former colonial power, should pay for the farms it seizes.
“I think they will take measures prior to the elections to forcibly evict farmers,” he said.
Mnangagwa said the special presidential powers would remain in force for six months, within which time a new parliament would be elected and asked to ratify the law.
He said the government was not concerned about the reaction of Britain, which has promised to fund land reforms only if they are fair, free of corruption and carried out legally after the withdrawal of the squatters.
The UN Food and Agriculture Authority warned Friday that Zimbabwe’s food supply was jeopardised by farm seizures and disruption of production. — AFP
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