OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Saturday
BARELY a week after Zimbabwe’s highest court declared that President Robert Mugabe’s “fast-track resettlement programme” violated farmers’ rights, Mugabe’s elder sister Sabina has demanded that a white farmer leave his house so she could move in.
The Commercial Farmers’ Union said in its latest bulletin on the anarchy in rural Zimbabwe that Sabina Mugabe, the local ruling ZANU PF party MP, had told farmer Terry Ford she intended to take over the farmstead on his Gowrie farm in the Norton district west of Harare.
Mugabe’s government on Friday listed another 23 white-owned farms for seizure, as government officials continued to defy Supreme Court orders to stop the latest wave of lawless land-grabbing.
Sabina Mugabe has been reported to be driving round commercial farming areas in her black Mercedes limousine, leading illegal occupations on to white farms in the district.
Earlier this week she forced one of the country’s major producers of highly specialised seed crops to stop farming on half of his land in Norton so that self-styled guerrilla war veterans could plant their maize on already ploughed and fertilised by the farmer.
Friday’s “notice of compulsory acquisition” published in the state-owned Herald newspaper brought to 2318 the number of farms listed for Mugabe’s bid to grab 3000 white-owned farms.
The “fast-track” has been under way for a month, with government officials – usually accompanied by armed soldiers and police – trucking hundreds of would-be settlers on to white farms and declaring them to be “state land” in violation of the government’s own laws on land acquisition.
The bulletin said more and more farmers were being told told to halt their farming operations as the arrival of summer rains marks the height of crop planting for the new season.
Economists warn that the new harassment will lead to severe food shortages next year.
On Friday last week the Supreme court ordered the government to stop “fast track” occupations, and instructed police to remove squatters from all white-owned farms.
But up to Friday, the court order “has had minimal tangible effect,” said the CFU bulletin. “There are no indications that instructions have been communicated down the police ranks and local government structures.”