The government on Thursday asked more than 800 white farmers to claim compensation for properties seized under the state’s land redistribution programme, but the main farmers’ support group described the proposed compensation as ”daylight robbery” in Zimbabwe’s hyperinflationary economy.
The group Justice for Agriculture, representing hundreds of displaced white farmers, said that a four-page notice in state media on Thursday calling on former landowners to lodge claims for compensation with the Agriculture Ministry was a sham intended to convince outsiders that the farmers were being fairly treated.
In five previous notices, the government had said compensation would not be paid for land, but only for buildings and improvements made on about 5 000 properties seized from white farmers since 2000 in an often violent programme that the government says is meant to return lands taken from blacks during the colonial era.
”It is nothing short of daylight robbery,” said John Worsely-Worswick, head of the support group.
Since the land seizure programme began, nearly 15 000 blacks have received parcels of former white-owned land for commercial agricultural production. Another 141 000 families received small plots.
But the often chaotic seizures disrupted Zimbabwe’s agriculture-based economy, plunging the former regional breadbasket into its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980. At more than 1 000%, official inflation in Zimbabwe is the highest in the world, and the country also suffers acute shortages of food, hard currency, gasoline and essential imports.
In the past four years, nearly 300 displaced whites have accepted offers worth five to 10% of the independent valuation of their farms, with some taking the money because ”they were destitute and couldn’t pay medical bills or put food on the table,” Worsely-Worswick said.
Those who accepted compensation offers forfeited ownership and title deeds to their land.
He said independent surveyors had valued one farmer’s large cattle, corn and tobacco property at the equivalent of $1-million, but he was offered compensation of Z$5-million ($20 000)– or about enough to buy a secondhand car or four of the latest cellphones available in Zimbabwe.
The Commercial Farmers Union also said some of its white members had been forced to accept minimal compensation because of their indebtedness and ”personal circumstances”.
”We are advising farmers to follow up and find out what the situation is so they simply don’t lose their co-issue 99-year leases to black farmers allocated land seized mostly from white farmers.
President Robert Mugabe described the first 128 leases as a landmark in his redistribution programme that would improve farm production by giving new farmers security of tenure for more than a generation.
The land remains state-owned, but loans for production can be secured against buildings, dams and other facilities on it.
A handful of displaced white farmers are expected to get leases, but not on their former properties, and white farmers’ support groups have expressed skepticism over the lease programme.
An estimated 400 white farmers are still working on their original farms, but seizures have continued, with at least 30 receiving eviction notices from the government in recent weeks. ‒ Sapa-AP