Zanu-PF land-grab policy
Jaspreet Kindra
African National Congress secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe this week endorsed Zanu-PF’s stand on land appropriation, denying the ruling Zimbabwean party was manipulating the issue for electoral purposes.
Motlanthe said in an interview the situation in Zimbabwe had suffered from “misrepresentation of facts” by the media, claiming press reports had inflated the number of people slain in the conflict.
Motlanthe described the war veterans’ farm invasions as a “protest action” against the failure of land reform.
He said the Zimbabwean government had had “no choice” in resorting to the appropriation of land, following the failure of the “willing buyer-willing seller” approach prescribed in the 1980 Lancaster House Agreement with Britain.
Both Motlanthe and Dr Joseph Made, the Zimbabwean government’s strategist on land affairs who also heads the country’s Agricultural and Rural Development Authority, said the imbalance of land ownership in Zimbabwe was immoral.
They pointed out that the majority of the landowners were English war veterans, who had been given the land in the 1890s.
Motlanthe and Made claimed only one-third of the land on communal farms in Zimbabwe, the average size of which is between 3E000ha and 4E000ha, was being utilised by the farmers.
Motlanthe said Zimbabwean farmers were increasingly sensitive to such inequities and have been participating in meetings attended by war veterans on the matter.
He said he was confident that this month’s general elections would be “free and fair” as there were Zimbabwean laws to ensure the unfolding of a just process.
Responding to reports on intimidation of opposition parties in Zimbabwe, Motlanthe said the Movement for Democratic Change had rejected his suggestion to form an all-party political forum which could tackle “problems as and when they arose to reduce the tension”.
Motlanthe attributed the low turnout in the March referendum – which the ruling party lost – to Zanu-PF’s refusal to campaign and mobilise voters ahead of the referendum. “They wanted it to be an independent process – they sent out NGOs, community leaders and so on, to campaign.”
Motlanthe said that while the media had been citing a figure of “25 dead” in the political turmoil, the official estimate was much lower.
“In fact, according to the figure I have been given, among the dead are four whites and seven blacks. This is the problem with violent clashes – truth becomes a victim.”
The ANC’s alliance partner, the South African Communist Party, took a harder line on the Zimbabwean crisis in its strategic conference held last weekend. Noting the “unacceptable levels of intimidation and violence” in the run-up to the Zimbabwean elections, the party said: “These events represent an intensification of what has been an ongoing harassment of progressive trade unions, media, student and other social movement forces over several years.”