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Perspective Stephen Mpofu
Zimbabwe’s agrarian revolution was not, and is not, meant racially to punish white settler farmers by “seizing land belonging to them” — a charge favoured by the foreign press and its audiences — and parcelling the resource to blacks, to appease them.
Never ever that sought of thing.
Land reform was undertaken to correct obscene imbalances in that vital resource by repossessing it from a minority squatting on most of the land and redistributing it to a majority who needed the resource the most.
Moreover, it was the peasantry, not white commercial farmers, who at independence in 1980 had turned this country into the breadbasket of Southern Africa using their small pieces of sometimes infertile land to feed shrunken bellies both in this country and elsewhere on the African continent, to the amazement of the international community.
The objective of the land reform programme is thus settled now and forever. It was, and never will be, to turn land in this country into a status symbol for sluggards, whatever the pigment of their skin.
Therefore, in the exercise by government now underway to fine-tune land reform, not only those black beneficiaries of land who fail to pay the land rental, but also those who fail to use the land given to them to the maximum should have the resources allocated to them taken away and given to those who possess both the will to make it more productive and the capacity to pay the rentals to be used in financing a land commission due to be set up after approval by parliament to supervise land utilisation in the country.
Of course, it is to be hoped that such land rentals will be suspended, or reduced while the country remains under the grip of a drought that has wiped out crops in many parts of the country, or prevented planting altogether.
Corruption by land officials involved in the downsizing of large farms and redistribution of the subdivisions, as reported in some districts recently, must be severely punished.
This must no doubt be one of the matters that, when finally approved by parliament, a land commission will look into its audit of land as prescribed by the constitution. It must be understood without any equivocation by all Zimbabweans and other (bona fide) residents here that any mismanagement of the land reform programme will negatively impact other, African states wishing to introduce reforms modelled on our own.
A book by this pen Little Hearts Can Also Dance (the land dance) — a fictionalised history of land reform in Zimbabwe does clearly show what negative effects of a misplaced land reform scheme can have on neighbouring countries. But not only that. If Zimbabwe’s land reform fails on account of human bungling it will have given additional ammunition to countries in the West that impose illegal sanctions to claim that they were justified in punishing this country by trying to achieve regime change and reverse the land reform programme.
So it should be abundantly clear to all and sundry in this country that should land reform fail, Zimbabweans will have failed both themselves and those in neighbouring countries who look to us as pace setters or role models in the agrarian revolution on the cold ashes of colonial rule.
Little Hearts Can Also Dance also shows how Zimbabweans have dismally failed to take the environment as a vital component of land reform — a shortcoming that must necessarily provoke a call to arms by the government to fight those who willfully or ignorantly vandalise the environment to the detrimental of the agrarian reform programme.
For instance, countless hectares of trees are wantonly cut down across the country year in and year out with obscene relish to clear land for agricultural activity, or for timber to use in building new homesteads, or for firewood for sale in urban centres.
Add to that destruction, the veld fires lit by villagers to scatter seeds for new, fluffy grass to grow in pastures for livestock to graze, and fires used by villagers in hunting mice. This ghastly picture emerges; weeping or smoking tree stumps, and soil rendered fragile for erosion by the wind and by rainfall after the grass is incinerated by fire combine into a rich recipe for desertification and its dire consequences for our nation.
It is high time that government officials and all other stakeholders became vocal in making Zimbabweans aware that through flagrant violations of the environment in their everyday lives they dig a grave for our much-vaunted agrarian revolution meant to usher Zimbabwe into a brave, new economic destiny. But such warnings can and will produce the desired results only if combined with punitive measures to drive the message to the fuller home of environmental vandals that their irresponsible actions cannot and will not be countenanced by any responsible statal authority.
Surely, none of us Zimbabweans, desires in the final analysis to become an object of ridicule in the outside world for destroying a programme meant to be our own economic lifeline?
derick.khumalo