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Joram Nyathi Spectrum
ZIMBABWEANS should thank God that we have people like Eddie Cross and Ben Freeth. We tend to have short memories, or quickly get complacent about the future of this nation and what the liberation struggle was able to accomplish.
These two gentlemen, symbolically, never miss an opportunity to remind the black people of this country, Zanu-PF and its Government in particular, of the huge debt we owe to white former land occupiers, who were kicked out during the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme from 2000.
They are a constant reminder that our struggle for economic independence is far from over; that the claim to independence in general is a sham and that the policy of reconciliation proclaimed by President Mugabe in 1980 to appease whites was a big mistake.
While they use every international platform to pretend to be Zimbabwean, they believe they are a special race not governed by the same rules of social justice which apply to blacks.
Their source of justice is extraterritorial, while the resource they seek for themselves is the land we call Zimbabwe.
Eddie Cross is mentioned here because he has been working furiously on compensation figures for white commercial farmers who lost “their” land.
That is regardless of explicit provisions in the Constitution of Zimbabwe that any compensation to be paid would be only for improvements on the farm, not for the land itself.
In other words, to Cross and company, our Constitution is wrong; the people of Zimbabwe who approved it in 2013 don’t know what they are doing.
So we should be governed by external laws, which sanctify white colonial land theft as property rights. A pointed racist insult.
After a seeming lull since that infamous Sadc Tribunal ruling of 2008, the gloves are off once again. The spearhead of that assault on Zimbabwe remains the same: the Afrikaner outfit called AfriForum. And who best to speak for it besides the embittered Ben Freeth of Camel Farm in Chegutu!
It is telling that Freeth and his sponsors chose August, the month of our heroes, to remind us that our people sacrificed their lives in vain.
Land remains the white man’s private property until Zimbabwe buys him out in cash.
The blood of our dead was not enough. Freeth is described in media reports as a spokesman for something called Sadc Tribunal Rights Watch, sponsored by AfriForum. The defunct Sadc Tribunal is alive in the white world to secure and protect only white rights.
So at the weekend, Freeth made an important announcement to sleepy and complacent Zimbabwe that the land war is far from over.
We want to quote the statement for the benefit, especially of forgetful Zanu-PF members busy fighting each other on the misplaced assumption that the “real enemy” has been vanquished.
We quote the ominous statement also for the benefit of the youth President Mugabe is engaging, so they are aware of the mammoth task ahead, that the revolution is far from secure if ownership of our land is still a contested fact. That the revolution remains under threat.
So here goes Ben Freeth: “Dispossessed Zimbabwean commercial farmers have launched a new international legal initiative to seek justice and compensation for the loss of their farms and livelihoods and to stop the ongoing farm seizures which are ravaging the economy.
“We have a final and binding judgment from the Sadc Tribunal in 2008, which held that fair compensation should be paid by the Zimbabwe Government for land it had taken and the Government is in contempt of it.”
In case the “international” community missed the moral imperative in the appeal, Freeth was ready to ram it down: “Unless the culture of impunity stops, no investment will take place in our country and the economic crisis will deepen.
“Without property rights and the rule of law, our negative trajectory as a failed state will accelerate.”
Let’s give the statement a cursory examination. Who are the dispossessed Zimbabwean commercial farmers?
There is a disingenuous attempt to mask the racial composition of the commercial farmers, not to mention that a majority of them were indirect beneficiaries of a racist settler Government which seized land from blacks without paying compensation. (It’s all documented in Dr Felix Muchemwa’s book, “The Struggle for Land In Zimbabwe, 1890-2010”). The focus is, therefore, on a privileged few white farmers who were recently “dispossessed” as against a whole nation dispossessed for the better part of a century.
The “international” community is being asked to “seek justice and compensation” for about 4 000 white farmers and ignore the aspirations of those who went to war to get back their land stolen at a time of colonial conquest following the Berlin Conference of 1884/ 5.
What kind of justice is that? Justice without conscience, but racial consciousness? Add to this the insinuation that only white farmers can save “the economy”. Which is to ignore the strides ill-equipped and poorly-resourced resettled black farmers have made since 2000.
It took white settlers nearly 100 years to go fully commercial on very fertile virgin land using free African slave labour. Why are the new farmers expected to perform miracles?
Freeth tries to give the defunct Sadc Tribunal a legal status and jurisdiction it never enjoyed in Zimbabwe.
Not to mention that Justice Patel in 2010 rejected its ruling as unenforceable because it went against national public policy after it sought to do justice for 79 white farmers by reversing the land reform programme.
Such a judgment can’t be deemed “final and binding” on any sovereign nation. But then we know the “new international legal initiative” appeals to a racist legal sensibility in which the sins of “colonial dispossession” of land must be forcibly forgotten.
Colonialism never happened. If it did, it must be forgiven and forgotten. After all, says Lady Helen Zille, it was all beneficial to Africans, including their enslavement.
Which, at the end of the day, is what this whole “new international legal initiative” for compensation amounts to.
We are supposed to compensate white settlers for getting back land taken by force from our ancestors because we benefited from colonial rule and occupation and enslavement.
Hence the objection and resistance to any talk of reparations for 300 years of slavery, 100 years of colonial occupation and continuing neo-colonial exploitation and plunder of our natural resources.
We must still pay for the sin of being black! One can’t talk of compensating former white farmers for land without justifying African colonial occupation and dispossession. Which is why this “new international legal initiative” against Zimbabwe can only be directed and make legal sense to the white world.
It can never find traction with the formerly colonised and dispossessed of Africa.
It is for this reason, if nothing else, that President Mugabe’s youth rallies must emphasise the ongoing war over land. And there is no weapon more potent in this war than laws which protect colonial privileges and seek to obliterate African history.
So as we continue to lose and bury more liberation war stalwarts, we should be grateful that we have friends such as Eddie Cross, Ben Freeth, Helen Zille etc constantly reminding us that the struggle for social and economic justice is far from over. And it’s going to be fought in racist, white courts.
Online Reporter