OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Wednesday
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe’s sister, Sabina, has hopped onto the land-grab bandwagon by driving up to a white-owned farm in her Mercedes-Benz and exhorting black squatters to grab chunks of the farm for themselves.
The occupiers seized 380 hectares of prime land, leaving farmer John Wilde with 420 hectares of arable land on which to run his corn-seed farm.
“This is an absolute catastrophe,” Wilde said.
Government officials have continued encouraging thousands of landless blacks to seize white farmland, despite a Supreme Court order demanding the government stop its program to confiscate 3000 white-owned farms and end ruling party militants’ occupation of 1700 white farms.
About 40 occupiers drove 200 cattle into the garden of a homestead northwest of the capital, Harare, blockading the house. Earlier they assaulted the owner after he refused to give them a farm vehicle.
Near the southern town of Masvingo, occupiers threatened to torch the homes of four farm owners if they refused to leave their land.
“The situation is very tense,” commented the Commercial Farmers Union, which represents the country’s 4000 white farmers.
Sabina Mugabe, who is a ruling party lawmaker, drove onto Wilde’s farm in the Norton farming district, 40km southwest of Harare, over the weekend and egged on occupiers to seize land, Wilde said.
Wilde, a specialist producer of corn seed, said his crop would be cut in half after such a huge chunk of his land was seized.
About 90000 hectares of corn, Zimbabwe’s staple food, are cultivated annually from seed produced on Wilde’s Parklands farm.
The farm had not been listed for confiscation under the government’s plan to seize white farms without compensation, divide them up and give them to landless blacks.
The Supreme Court ruled the government’s resettlement program illegal last week because it did not meet the terms of land reform laws passed in April that call for orderly, planned resettlement.
Despite the ruling, black families were escorted onto at least 50 farms across the country over the weekend by officials who said they had not been formally served with the ruling, according to the union.