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Bernard Bwoni Opinion
TO BUILD means to shape or to improve something. It entails the formation and development of something new. Building requires skill, it is about learning that building skill and building something with those skills learned. To BUILD anything is a revolutionary process and there is need for a strategy, a plan and the right tools for the project.
It appears that the BUILD blueprint that is being circulated with the signature of the former Vice-President Joice Mujuru, has “tools” as its drafters and no tools for the actual building work itself. A builder has a plan, there is something tangible to look forward to, involves a skill, follows a pattern and you follow a logical step-by-step path.
The architects of the BUILD blueprint have been haphazard, elusive, and indecisive and not keen to be publicly associated with their work. It is going to be difficult to sell the contents of a blueprint whose architects are refusing to claim ownership. To build requires the ground preparatory work, it is about laying down solid foundations and construct something that would withstand anything.
There is nothing revolutionary about an economic blueprint with a disturbing preoccupation with “property rights” and carefully worded statements like “all persons who call Zimbabwe ‘home’ shall be entitled to access land and participate in its sustainable utilisation.”
What is interesting is most of the architects of the BUILD are clearly aware of the contents of the country’s constitution, they were until recently part and parcel of the ruling party. The document reads, “We shall enforce, promote and respect property rights and address historical compulsory acquisition through fair and transparent compensation”.
The property rights argument is not exactly absolute and BUILD bring forward the unimaginative arguments for the free market economics and private property system whilst neglecting the injustices that shaped the property rights narrative Zimbabwe had to dismantle to get where we are today.
The issue of property rights has been done and dealt with exhaustively within the provisions of the country’s constitution. Conquest and coercion may have enforced legal rights to property in the early days of colonisation but did not create moral rights to land grabbed illegally.
The new Zimbabwe constitution addresses the issues of property and property relating to agricultural land sufficiently. Those trying to choke the nation with this property rights gospel have to realise that most property rights arguments say very little about the justice and injustice of the original claims to property, that is the holdings of those who first wrestled property from previous inhabitants.
The document reads, “we shall give immediate value to agricultural land by providing transparent land policy framework that attracts investment, creates, promotes and supports security of tenure and bankable leases.” This persistence with property rights throughout the whole document is worrying and has the marks of a neoliberal agenda. Chapter 4, Part 2, section 71 and 72 of the constitution addresses the issue of property rights in Zimbabwe.
The BUILD document goes on to state “we shall facilitate availability of adequate and affordable lines of credit through guarantee of property rights, sanctity of contracts and other investor protection mechanisms.”
There are a lot of “guarantees” that are being offered within this document and most of them relate to these “property rights” relating to land. What they are arguing for as a transformation approach to property rights is in fact a finders-keeper approach and claims by those who want a reversal of the country’s land reform is based on the first occupancy argument.
It is important to understand the full property rights argument and for Africa because of a history of illegal occupation, property rights in terms of land need to be addressed in the way they have been addressed in the Zimbabwe constitution. The argument that BUILD and MDC-T have been fronting is the first occupancy, that the first person to transform an unoccupied field into a farm owns the farm. The transformation approach claims that any person who transforms an ‘unowned’ resource owns what he creates, thus owns the transformation.
This is just absolute nonsense because merely being the first person to observe something does not give you any right to full private ownership.
Online Reporter