Government shelves Chitsa clan relocation

the Gonarezhou National Park (GNP) in Chiredzi owing to a lack of funds.
The Chitsa families occupied the park in 2003, in a move that threatened the roll out of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park project.
The massive project seeks to join the Zimbabwean Park with South Africa’s Kruger and Mozambique’s Limpopo National parks to create a vast wildlife corridor transcending national boundaries.
However, the Chitsa clan have been resisting government’s move to relocate them arguing the land belongs to their ancestors, who were pushed out from the park by the colonial Rhodesian regime.
Masvingo governor and resident Minister Titus Maluleke last week said the Chitsa families, who invaded part of GNP at the height of land repossessions by landless blacks, were no longer going to be relocated.
Governor Maluleke said the revised boundary for GNP no longer included the area occupied by the Chitsa families as efforts to relocate them repeatedly failed due to lack of funding.
“The Chitsa families are no longer going anywhere the issue of their relocation is now water under the bridge because there was need to secure substantial funding for the relocation exercise and also identify suitable land to resettle them.
“We failed to secure both the funds for the relocation exercise and also to get the land to resettle them, so they are not going anywhere.
“We also resolved that a new boundary for the national park be demarcated because the area occupied by the Chitsa families was never inside the Gonarezhou National Park area in the first place so the correct position is that the Chitsa families have never settled inside the park,” he said.
The Masvingo provincial governor allayed fears that the Chitsa families posed a threat to the Gonarezhou National Park arguing that there were many communities in Zimbabwe that shared a common border with game parks.
“Why should it be a cause for concern that the Chitsa families live near a national park, that situation is not peculiar to Gonarezhou National Park only but there are other similar cases in other parts of the country where communal areas share a common border with national parks,” said Governor Maluleke.
The Governor also dismissed allegations that Chitsa families posed threats of runaway poaching in the Gonarezhou National Park saying the Parks and Wildlife Management Authority had the duty to curb poaching of wildlife by people anywhere.
There have been persistent fears that the occupation of GNP by Chitsa clan members in 2003 might result in the destruction of the park’s naturalness and also lead to the decimation of wildlife through poaching activities.
Thousands of cattle belonging to Chitsa families have also been increasingly encroaching deep into GNP and scaring away wildlife in the process.