adminGeorge Chisoko Senior Assistant Editor
IN everyday conversation, some people describe themselves as leaders, as people with unbridled leadership qualities yet there is much more to leadership than just talking about it. Peter Drucker, in his book: Management, the Individual and Society (2001) posits that leadership is doing the right thing, a definition that brings to the fore the shortcomings among many of us in that we find it hard to do the right thing.
While it has been difficult for many people to live up to Druckers’ definition of leadership, President Mugabe has been a breadth of fresh air in that regard through the various empowerment programmes that he has championed. He has proven his leadership qualities beyond any doubt through land reform and through indigenisation.
These are programmes that have empowered thousands of Zimbabweans with access to land in the most fertile districts of the country, previously reserved for white former farmers. It is the question of land that saw young men and women abandoning their families and studies to fight in the liberation struggle and the right thing for any person gifted with leadership was to deal with the question of land and mineral resources. Those opposed to seeing the right thing being done, such as the MDC-T and the now irrelevant Commercial Farmers Union, fiercely resisted land reform and indeginisation.
Which brings me to the news clip flighted a couple of weeks ago on Al Jazeera in which Peter Steyn of the CFU was interviewed by a female journalist by the surname Mutasa and waffled about land reform being controversial and attempts by the CFU to want to work with the Government to increase productivity and production on the farms.
What Steyn and Mutasa discussed got me really thinking that as a nation we continue to deal with a group of very unrepentant white former farmers who find it hard to accept that land is not their birth right but the birth right of the indigenous people of Zimbabwe and that continuing to describe land reform as controversial will not bring the land back to the likes of Steyn and company.
The question that immediately hit me upon watching and listening to the news clip was how and why land reform is controversial when President Mugabe lived up to his true leadership qualities as posited by Drucker and did the right thing of making sure the rightful owners of the land took back that which belongs to them. How and why land reform should be considered controversial when the indigenous Zimbabweans reclaimed ownership of their land from white former farmers, the likes of Steyn, who were holding it.
There is a vast difference between ownership of a resource and simply holding it.
White former farmers were landholders whereas we are landowners and no rocket science is needed to understand that and in Shona we say, “Kunzi dzipakate handi kunzi dziridze” but for a long time we allowed the white former farmers kuridza and made them develop the warped view that they were landowners.
In the world of ought, the world we expect people to do the right thing, white former farmers as landholders were expected to, without any fight, relinquish the land to indigenous Zimbabweans, the landowners but they chose to exist in the world of is, in which any action is possible and put up a fight for the land they naturally knew was not theirs. Understandably so, for in the world of is, if you lend someone a car, land or anything for that matter, for many years, there is the tendency to want to assume ownership.
When the white former farmers as represented by the CFU, chose the world of is, which the Goverment also chose and forcibly evicted them from the farms they had been keeping for the owners, the exercise was deemed controversial because it was in the interest of the majority of the hitherto landless Zimbabweans. That should not worry us a bit for the most important thing that the agrarian revolution achieved was to parcel out land to close to 400 000 families which are eking out serious living from working on the land.
Without the CFU and the likes of Steyn our farmers have, against many odds, managed to turn the vast tracts of land into a greenbelt of crops.
No one expected the land owners upon reclaiming the land to perform wonders on the farms as they were settling in new environment, acquiring farm equipment and mobilising inputs and obviously production was expected to suffer as people were emerging from the land revolution. Now the landowners have settled on the farms and production has started increasing with tobacco on a massive rebound.
That is when Steyn starts waffling about working with the Government as CFU, to improve productivity and rebound crop production. Surely we do not want any partnership with the CFU neither do we want Steyn to be telling us how to use our land.
The CFU, like the MDC-T, ceased in 2000 to be a factor in the crop and livestock production matrix of this country. Honestly it boggles the mind why the white former farmers would want to cry more than the bereaved on account there is some land lying idle. For us, while we remain seized with matters of production in an environment of illegal sanctions imposed by the West, the most important thing is that land is firmly in the hands of the rightful owners. Period.
Now the white former farmers want to regain relevance through the back door by agitating for the formation a farmers’ federation and selling the idea to the Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union and other unions and sadly the ZFU, for some unknown reasons, seems to be supporting the idea.
The CFU lost the opportunity to be involved in land reform when it resisted Government’s appeal to release for resettlement, the extra land they were holding and also to apply for land under land reform and no one today takes them seriously when they want to get involved. The CFU’s situation can best be described by author, William Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar when he said: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, taken at the flood leads to fortune, omitted, will lead to sorrow and misery”. This aptly describes the situation the CFU and the likes of Steyn now find themselves in.
The fortune, through access to land, that the CFU now seek is what they refused to take at the flood when opportunities were being presented by Government to them and now wallow in sorrow and misery.
Which brings me back to how I started the article. Leadership! The CFU exposed itself greatly that it lacked leadership to guide it to do the right thing, which was to accept the offer that Government had extended to the union to partake in land reform.
But the leaders had other ideas. Leading and leadership are two different ball games altogether. President Mugabe is an embodiment of leadership and that is why to him doing the right thing comes naturally and to those among us without leadership to do the right thing is simply asking for too much. A case in point is Morgan Tsvangirai.
Online Reporter