A Cabinet minister in Zimbabwe has categorically denied the government is inviting white farmers dispossessed during the controversial land reform campaign back to their farms, it was reported here on Friday.
”No white farmer is being invited back,” State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa told the privately-owned Zimbabwe Independent newspaper.
The minister, one of the most senior in President Robert Mugabe’s government, said reports that the authorities were backtracking on the land reform programme, launched to international criticism in 2000, were wrong
”They are lying. I have never spoken to any foreign journalist and all their claims are wrong,” Mutasa was quoted as saying.
There has been confusion over claims the authorities, worried by the downturn in agricultural production, might be considering inviting back white farmers. Several press reports have said that
white farmers are applying for leases to rent back their land from the state.
Mutasa said that white farmers still on their land were being told to apply for leases because in some cases the government wanted to cut down their farm sizes.
”If the state considers that the farm is too big then it is going to be reduced … That is what is happening,” he said.
About 4 000 white commercial farmers used to own most of Zimbabwe’s most fertile land before 1999. Now most have been replaced by new black farmers and there are only a few hundred white farmers left on the land.
”We hope that these white farmers will refrain from doing agriculture in a political way; they must just be farmers and resist from politics on the land,” Mutasa told the Independent.
White farmers stoked the ire of Mugabe because in many cases they were believed to be supporters of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change. — Sapa-dpa