Chronicle Editor
Vincent Gono, Features Editor
THERE is no doubt that Zimbabwe’s biggest post-independence achievement remains in the area of land reform. Land was the primary cause of the liberation struggle, in fact its seizure was the immediate cause, for from it (land), livelihoods were anchored and sustained.
The land question was therefore the matchstick that lit the liberation bonfire although other factors such as forced labour and burdensome taxes were an oil-soaked rag that were waiting for the spark that the land issue provided.
The question of land therefore features prominently in the shaping of the liberation struggle and in post independent Zimbabwe, as the country is still smarting from its effects in the global political matrix.
Land ownership without proper land usage for economic production however, remains hollow. It shames those that sacrificed their life in the liberation struggle and laughs off those that sacrificed friendship on the altar of equality and land redistribution.
The country therefore, needs to take stock of that and see if the prime land taken from the whites is not being wasted under the guise of ownership. Historical narratives has it that prior to the taking up of arms, reserves such as the Gwayi and Shangani were established for the black population. These were rocky and tsetse-fly infested areas where stones grew better than plants and where rainfall rarely visited. They were not suitable to sustain both crop and livestock production which was and still is the life giving artery for many African families.
The country’s development can therefore be traced not only to the availability of land but most importantly its usage to develop the country’s economy.
It is the ability to work on it that inspired the ideology of nationalist fathers such as Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere who were not slow to take it up, sanctify it and develop it into a pragmatic discourse that sought to wean Africa off the dependence on imperialists.
Almost forty years into independence, Zimbabwe has moved mountains in addressing the land ownership question to ensure productivity although more needs to be done to ensure maximum productivity. The land reform was officially supposed to take effect in 1980 with the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement. The programme intended to alter the ethnic balance of land ownership.
There were marked inequalities in land ownership because of population growth and escalation of poverty in the subsistence areas parallel to the underutilisation of land on commercial farms. The Lancaster House Agreement provided for the willing buyer, willing seller basis where the British Government was to provide the funds but Britain reneged on the agreement in the late 1990s when Prime Minister Tony Blair terminated this arrangement after funds that were availed by the Margaret Thatcher’s administration were exhausted. He refused all commitments to land reform.
On 5 November 1997, British secretary of state for international development Clare Short, described the new Labour government’s approach to Zimbabwean land reform. She said that the UK did not accept that Britain had a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe.
Her government’s position was spelt out in a letter to the then Zimbabwe’s Agriculture Minister, Kumbirai Kangai:
I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers.
After this position was spelt out Zimbabwe responded by embarking on a “fast track” redistribution campaign, where through the national land policy Government would acquire land as it saw fit for redistribution to landless Zimbabweans.
And in the spirit of transparency, the Government embarked on a land audit that is ongoing and is expected to expose corruption and a number of irregularities in the land allocation patterns. The audit is looking at how many farms an individual owns, land usage, and size of the farm.
According to President Mnangagwa, this will see a lot of land being possessed from land barons who hold on to land for speculative purposes for redistribution to other landless citizens. He said his Government was seized with the issue of ensuring that those who were allocated land were given the proper hectarage, that there was no multiple ownership and that there was proper land usage. This, he said, was going to be uncovered through a land audit.
And today the chorus of land ownership in Africa is growing louder and louder with regional populations urging their Governments to sing from the same land reform stanza with Zimbabwe as the only way to empower their communities and give them the means of production.
The entrepreneurial spirit that Africa was blinded to by colonial education is quickly gaining traction with calls for all systems to be aligned to ensure the destiny of the continent finds residence in its people.
Nyerere argued that for development, Africa must first and foremost depend on its local people and its resources.
“It is we, the people of Africa, who experience, in our lives, the meaning of poverty. It is we, therefore, who can be expected to fight that poverty. Certainly, no one else will do it if we do not.”
The first requirement for development according to Nyerere was therefore not reliance on richer nations and their resources but dependence on the local resources and manpower.
He prohibited the poor from depending on money as the basis of development. He objected to this stance arguing that a poor man does not use money as a weapon. By this, he was suggesting that a poor person who chose money as his “weapon” to get him out of poverty was doomed to failure because he had chosen to fight poverty with a weapon he did not have.
Poverty must be fought with weapons to which Africans could lay claim on and the weapon to fight poverty that most African countries have in abundance is land.
He called on public institutions to be given land, something that also later finds expression in Zimbabwe where schools, prisons and hospitals own farms although the question is whether the land is being used ideally to produce for those institutions’ self-sustenance and surplus for sale.
Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Air Marshal Perrence Shiri recently made similar calls to the country’s prisons when he urged them to make full utilisation of the land that they own to produce for their sustenance and the country.
He said the Government would continue supporting agriculture through inputs and mechanization programmes as well as providing the necessary guiding framework to ensure maximum productivity on the land.
He added that schools, prisons and hospitals both public and private that own land should also work towards self-sustenance so that they do not rely on donor hand-outs.
Land ownership therefore remains the pillar of Africa’s economic and social development hence the call to redistribute it as Zimbabwe has done but the story should not end there. I should go beyond ownership to productivity where everyone must play ball and claim total independence from imperialism.
Online Reporter