A leader of a mainly white Zimbabwean farmer’s group told growers on Wednesday to abandon politics, saying it hurt efforts to deal with the government over its seizure of white-owned farms.
It was the first time a white farm leader has publicly called on the community to wave the white flag in the face of President Robert Mugabe’s land seizure drive.
After two years of being targeted by Mugabe as relics of colonialism, Zimbabwe Tobacco Association (ZTA) President Kobus Joubert said ”farmer politicians” posed a serious threat to the future of commercial agriculture.
”These people are playing with our future, our lives, our very existence,” he told a largely silent audience at the ZTA’s annual meeting.
”The time has come to recognise reality, that the ZTA and farmers must work with the government of the day,” he said.
The association has about 2 000 mainly white members, representing nearly half the country’s white commercial farmers.
More than 300 tobacco farms have been forcibly closed since the beginning of the land reform exercise.
The land drive began in February 2000 when militant government supporters, led by veterans of the 1970s liberation war, began invading hundreds of white-owned farms.
At the time, many of Zimbabwe’s 4 500 white commercial farmers openly identified themselves with the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which posed the first serious threat to Mugabe’s two decades in power.
But after the MDC lost parliamentary elections in June 2000, and its leader Morgan Tsvangirai was declared the loser in disputed presidential polls in March this year, there were reports that many white farmers had decided to abandon politics.
Battered by the land invasions and crippling shortages of foreign exchange, some farmers have left for neighbouring Mozambique, Zambia and South Africa.
Joubert said white farmers must recognise that
Mugabe’s land redistribution drive was a reality, and that to continue farming they must share available land with landless blacks.
”The time has come to make a choice: We offer a subdivision (of land) and co-exist and try to keep a productive unit or we pack our bags and go,” he said.
Joubert said he had long advised white farmers not to get involved in politics, but ”farmer politicians” — political party activists who campaigned, raised funds or ran for office — had refused and some were still refusing to listen.
He urged farmers to be ”completely apolitical” and recognise that land would be redistributed whatever their opinion and that a racial or arrogant attitude would not help their case.
Farmers could not sit back and hope the country’s political situation would change and the status quo would remain in the countryside, Joubert said.
Joubert’s comments were echoed in a speech to the group by John Chiweshe, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Association of Tobacco Merchants and a member of Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party.
”Let us try not to be too clever. Let us not push the government to the wall because we are going to lose a lot,” he said of farmers getting involved in politics. – Reuters