Police in Zimbabwe’s grain belt are delivering orders to white farmers to get off their land by Sunday, in a move that may finally remove nearly all of them from the area, farm union officials said on Friday.
Since late on Thursday, teams of police have been travelling around the commercial farming areas in Mashonaland West and ordering farmers already issued with eviction orders to leave with all their possessions by 2pm on Sunday.
A total of 25 farmers out of about 150 in the area had been visited by midday on Friday, said David Rockingham-Gill, local administrator for the Commercial Farmers’ Union.
”They are still driving around so there are still more to go,” he said.
”They (police) said, ‘the workers have got to stop work and anything you leave on the farm is ours’.”
Police were targeting farmers with who had already received ”section 8” eviction orders under President Robert Mugabe’s notorious land-seizure legislation, which gives landowners 90 days in which to wind up their affairs and abandon their property.
The Mashonaland West area, stretching from just outside Harare to 200km north of the capital, is the richest grain producing area in the country. Maize, wheat and barley, as well as other crops, are grown extensively under irrigation.
The police were making their rounds as the country’s bakers warned of worsening bread shortages in urban areas and Mugabe made a policy U-turn and agreed to imports of genetically modified maize as emergency food aid to try to avert the worst famine in the country’s history.
”It’s very serious,” Rockingham-Gill said. ”I don’t know where we go from here. There are all sorts of confusing messages coming from all the different police vehicles.”
Farmers visited included many with eviction orders that had been annulled by court orders, others whose orders had not yet fallen due and some who had not been issued with any eviction orders.
At least five of those ordered to leave owned only one farm.
Mugabe told the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, this week that only farmers with more than one farm would be targeted.
”People are ‘phoning their lawyers,” Rockingham-Gill said. Only one farmer had begun to pack, he said.
Douglas Taylor-Freeme, vice-president of the CFU, was among the farmers visited by police. He said he showed them he had been issued with an eviction order that gave him until the end of November to leave.
”I told them I have 400ha of wheat in the ground which will be ready for reaping in October …tobacco which I should be planting and 500 head of cattle to look after.
”They said they don’t care, you have got to be off,” he said.
”Then they went to the workers and said they had to stop work, and told them to claim retrenchment packages. I will have to see if I can keep going and get some sense out of this,” he said.
Mugabe told a group of visiting journalists on Thursday: ”We have sworn that no one will go without land, but they (white farmers) are greedy, greedy colonialists.”
The official in charge of land seizures in Mashonaland West is provincial governor Peter Chanetsa, also the top local ruling Zanu-PF party official. He is reported to have seized five white-owned farms for himself. – Sapa