adminPerspective Stephen Mpofu
IN pilloring Zimbabwe over land reform, the West tried to make its hobbling, one-legged and weak-kneed case for sanctions to stand on its foot by accusing the Zanu-PF government of practising ethnocentrism in equalising land rights for indigenous people. But, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. For the charge by Western governments was for all intents and purposes, steeped in ethnocentrism itself as the West wanted their kith and keen to squat in perpetuity on vast tracts of land and on some of which wild like cattle cantered off at the sight of blacks, but stopped to sniff the white fragrants of their white owners when sighting them.
The Zimbabwean government went ahead with the acquisition of some farms owned by whites after Britain with her cousins in tow reneged on promises made at Lancaster House during independence talks to provide the first black Zimbabwean government with loans to pay compensation to white farmers whose land would be secured for re-allocation to indigenous people.
But it would have never made any sense whatsoever for the Zimbabwean government to pay compensation — in other words buy back land from white settler farmers — because no whites carried pieces of land among their baggage in the scramble for Africa and for Zimbabwe, which would have legitimised an African government forking out cash to pay for land much of which was acquired by force from blacks in the first place.
As a matter of fact, the case for the land reform programme in Zimbabwe remains unshakably strong even in the face of the illegal Western economic embargo which has wrought incalculable harm to the economy and to the social lives of Zimbabweans.
This is because no government that waged a revolution to reclaim its land from colonial occupation would allow the people, who gave it the power to rule, to continue to scratch the soil, like chickens searching for a stray worm to gobble and keep its wings flapping while foreigners skimmed the cream off their land.
It is in that light, therefore, that the land reform programme should be viewed as a re-empowerment tool for people who had been stripped naked of both their human rights and the right to use their own land over which a protracted armed struggle was waged with a huge toll on the lives of freedom fighters.
[A forthcoming book by this pen, Little Hearts Can Also Dance (the land dance) will demonstrate just how indispensible land is to the survival of Zimbabweans and how compatible it is with their soul.]
For the reasons of dispelling any unfounded claims that in implementing land reform, the Zanu-PF government blatantly discriminated against white settler farmers.
A forensic land audit that the revolutionary party government has ordered, should also go a long way in assuring any Doubting Thomases that the government has absolutely nothing to hide in its quest for putting land back into the hands of all who need it the most.
As such, the government should make good its promise, and be seen by all to be transparent, by taking land from those that wrongly have two or more farms under their thumb while peasants in the neighbourhood or elsewhere in the country still till patches of land, in some cases barren, to keep soul and body together.
Any Zimbabwean who possesses more than one farm, whatever their social status, qualifies for indictment over a hegemonic bequest to them by white farmers from whom the surplus land was procured.
At any rate, such people, however monied they might be, cannot by any stretch of the imagination be expected to work their multiple land possession to the maximum to produce food to restore this country’s fame as the bread basket of southern Africa.
And yet, come to think of it, the very peasants that white settlers and their ilk abroad wrote off as being inconsequential, produced more food than their rich white settler farmers did even while these poor people reeled under white racism in Rhodesia.
That young people well below the age of majority are known to also own farms is nothing but anathema and a parallel of corruption which has to be stamped out with those who allocated the farms to the youngsters being made to roast their fingers in hot political and administrative coals.
When that is done, with the land in question being allocated to the needy, the country will have demonstrated to a sceptic world that Zimbabwe has nothing to hide whatsoever as land is the most important fundamental, God-endowed asset for all to enjoy.
Moreover, the Zanu-PF procured agricultural loan scheme should go a long way in effecting a renaissance in the agricultural sector in this country.
That only inputs – and not cash which some people may just pocket and squander in whirl-wind celebrations of the sweatless bonanza – will help revive the production of food and cash crops to feed the nation and for export to earn the much needed foreign exchange, while also reviving the beef industry, now virtually on its knees, to resume exports to the European Union and also earn the necessary capital to bolster the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-Asset).
But the sine qua non for success in Zim-Asset is total loyalty to the country and dedication to the cause of national development and success by all bona fide Zimbabweans.
Online Reporter