Thousands of white farmers in Zimbabwe woke up on Thursday morning to an agonising choice: do they leave their homes and all they have worked for by midnight to comply with a government deadline, or do they stay and risk arrest?
Under new regulations brought in earlier this year, all farmers who had received official notice on or before May 10 that the government was seizing their farms for resettlement, had 90 days to move out of their homes.
That deadline, which affects an estimated 2 900 farmers, expires at midnight on August 8.
Farmers who defy the deadline face a fine of Z$20 000 (about R4 000), up to two years in jail, or both.
Tensions this week were running high in the farming community, with fears of mass evictions and arrests.
“[About] 2 900 of us will be criminals for living in our homes,” said Matabeleland farmer David Connolly earlier this week.
“I don’t think any of us know what’s going to happen [on Friday]. I think only [President Robert] Mugabe knows that,” he said.
Connolly is the chairperson of Justice for Agriculture (JAG), a group set up six weeks ago by farmers disenchanted with efforts by the Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU) to appease the government. One of the JAG’s aims is to keep farmers and their workers in their homes.
White farmers have been living with high stress levels since Mugabe’s militant supporters launched a violent campaign of land invasions 29 months ago.
Eleven have been killed. Another 650 have already been evicted by gangs of war veterans and some ruling party officials. If Thursday’s deadline is enforced, more than 1,5-million people — most of them farm labourers and their families — stand to lose their homes, according to the JAG.
The government has remained predictably mum about the deadline. State radio reports this week have instead been full of Mugabe’s attendance at a heads of government meeting in Malaysia, seen here as a victory over former colonial power Britain, which failed to get the 78-year-old ruler taken off the invitation list.
In June government officials played down the expiry of an earlier deadline for the same group of farmers to stop farming, but 15 farmers were subsequently arrested.
And there were veiled threats last week from the Minister of Local Government and chairperson of the national land acquisition task force, Ignatius Chombo.
“We want to be sure they [white farmers] comply with the dictates of the law. That 90 days, once it expires, [they] will go and a new order takes over,” Chombo said on the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.
While Connolly says he believes that most farmers “will stay in our homes”, it is clear that some are quietly scared. Jenni Williams, former CFU spokesperson and now the JAG’s official voice, says that in the past week there has been “a frenzy of chiefs [leaders] moving on to farms”.
By mid-week farms in the Raffingora area near Chinhoyi, central Zimbabwe, were said to be almost totally deserted, with all but one farming family having left.
Memories of scenes of mass looting and the arrests of more than 20 white farmers in Chinhoyi almost a year ago to the day, apparently die hard. Near the town of Mutare, in eastern Manicaland province, farmers whose properties are subject to Section 8 orders have been moving furniture and goods from their properties.
Meanwhile, as the food situation steadily worsens — about six million people may need food aid in six weeks — the government appears to be stepping up its pressure on the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
After last week’s threat to clamp down on “internal saboteurs”, ailing Bulawayo MP Fletcher Dulini-Ncube was briefly arrested on murder charges. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s house was searched for weapons of war on Sunday and Internet news printouts allegedly confiscated.
In hints of a further clampdown on dissenting voices, Home Affairs Minister John Nkomo warned that NGOs spreading “anti-government vitriol” will be banned, the state-controlled Chronicle reported.
Frustration and despondency are running high.
Author and social commentator Cathy Buckle, who herself has been chased off her farm, this week mourned that as a nation “we do nothing. Farm workers are now destitute peasants,” she said in an open letter. “Farmers are living in rented houses in Harare.”
“For 29 months we have been waiting for someone else to do something. Don’t Zimbabweans realise that no one can help us until we help ourselves?”
Buckle’s letter also called on farmers to urgently forward information to a group of South African lawyers, acting for the Zimbabwe Victims Coalition, an organisation formed last month to bring charges against Mugabe before the International Criminal Court.
“Making representation now is the least we can do. We owe it to ourselves, our children, our workers and our country,” Buckle said.
“This is our first and last chance to all stop being victims.”