1,000 evicted resettled farmers get land

Patrick Chitumba Midlands Bureau Chief
The government has identified land to resettle part of a group of 1,000 landless farmers who were ordered off Chemagora farms in Gokwe South. The farmers were served with eviction orders following findings that they had been resettled on farms owned by indigenous people. Midlands Provincial Lands Officer Joseph Shoko said yesterday that some of the farmers had started moving to Mapfungautsi Forest owned by the Forestry Commission.

The new area is close to Chemagora farms.

Shoko said the farmers would be allowed to continue working on their crops while they start putting up structures in the Mapfungautsi Forest area.

“We’ve identified an area where these farmers are going to be resettled. It’s an on-going process aimed at removing the farmers from Chemagora farms.

“On humanitarian grounds, we’ve allowed them to work on their fields until they harvest their crops,” he said.

Shoko said the ministry had also identified three farms whose leases had been cancelled so some of the landless will be resettled there.

He said they had recommended to the Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, Dr Ignatius Chombo, that the farms be repossessed by the government and be used to resettle more farmers.

Shoko said the farms would accommodate about 50 farmers.

“We no longer want to create congestion since the area is already congested.

“So we’ll continue looking at alternative government pieces of land for purposes of resettling families,” he said.

In December, the government temporarily stopped the eviction of the farmers saying the exercise was ill-timed as it was being done during the summer cropping season.

“The families want ample time to prepare to relocate. If they relocate now (during the summer cropping season) there won’t be enough time for them to prepare the land for tilling.

“We want those people to be relocated after the summer cropping season when they would’ve harvested their crops,” Dr Chombo was quoted as saying in December.

The government had earmarked 35,000 hectares of land in Chirisa Game Reserve for the resettlement of Chemagora families and other families from Gokwe South and North.

However, chiefs in Gokwe successfully objected, demanding that their subjects should be given first priority.

Chemagora families had illegally occupied about 54,000 hectares of black-owned farms resulting in a row that caused their houses to be torched by police.

The rightful farm owners had been granted an eviction order against the illegal settlers by the courts.

The families were last year left homeless after being evicted from the 48 farms and forced to live in makeshift shelter by the roadside along the Gokwe-Kwekwe highway for close to a month before the government intervened.