Laws on land use

Zimbabweans. He said this was the only way the country’s entrepreneurs would boost agricultural output. Cde Mangwana said it was futile to have land ownership without production, hence the need to have a Constitution that addressed the economics of agriculture. He said this during a public debate at the Bindura University of Science Education on Friday.
“We need laws that allow commodity exchange of land among blacks. To prohibit commodity exchange in a commodity like land is destroying the economy,” he said.
Cde Mangwana was responding to concerns raised by a political analyst, Mr Danny Msukuma, who had condemned a clause in the draft constitution allowing transfer of land.
Mr Msukuma said allowing that clause would open floodgates for white former farmers to repossess the land taken away from them since they were well resourced.
“What is land ownership without production. Let’s deal with the economics of agriculture. How do we resource our farmers for them to get money to work on the land. That’s the next struggle we have to deal with. One of the reasons we cannot borrow is that we cannot collatoralise anything. Banks need collateral,” he said.
Prohibiting transfer of land under the guise that whites would repossess the land would destroy the economy, said Cde Mangwana. He said some of the people who got land under the agrarian reform programme were not real farmers.
“Those who got farms were only 300 000 out of a population of 13 million and not all of us are good farmers for that matter. Some of us got the farms because it was fashionable. But now as we move forward, real farmers are going to be identified, those should get land,” he said.