The Truth Of Zimbabwean 'Land Reform'

Zimbabwe :
The war veterans have been a little fractious in their continuing endeavour to secure agricultural land in Zimbabwe and have very recently stated that they will forcibly recover farms from multiple farm owners – predominantly senior members of Mugabe’s administration.

Now, we find out that Mugabe and his hierarchy own a total of five million hectares of agricultural land in Zimbabwe.

“President Robert Mugabe, his loyalists in ZANU PF, cabinet ministers, senior army and government officials and judges now own nearly 5 million hectares of agricultural land, including wildlife conservancies and plantation land, seized from white commercial farmers since 2000, investigations by ZimOnline have revealed.

This means that a new well-connected black elite of about 2200 people now control close to half of the most profitable land seized from about 4100 commercial farmers.
Even though Mugabe has consistently maintained that his land reform programme is meant to benefit the poor black masses, it is him and his cronies who have got the most out of it, according to our three month long investigations.

ZimOnline can conclusively state that Mugabe and his second wife Grace, now own 14 farms, worth at least 16000 hectares in size.

All ministers from Mugabe’s ZANU PF in Zimbabwe’s coalition government and ZANU PF deputy ministers are multiple farm owners. That probably explains why Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s determined push to have a new land audit done to uncover multiple farm owners has persistently hit a brickwall.”

Think about it - Mugabe has effected the replacement of 4100 commercial farmers with a new ‘agricultural elite’ of just 2200 - how is that ‘returning the land to the ‘landless blacks’?

And the majority of the ‘new’ landowners do not work the land, preferring to leave the land as something to include on their CVs…

“Mugabe’s deputy Joyce Mujuru, alongside his influential husband, former army general Solomon Mujuru, and their relatives, own at least 25 farms with a combined hectarage of more than 105000.

Critics who have consistently dismissed Zimbabwe’s emotional land reforms as a political patronage programme by the octogenarian Mugabe to reward supporters who have kept him in power are right after all.

But the veteran leader insists the programme is meant to redress colonial imbalances and benefited the povo. Mugabe, whose agrarian reforms have been criticised by the West, says some 300000 people have benefitted from the programme.”

Rather like the continual claims that ZANU PF ‘liberated’ Zimbabwe. Yes, the original aim was to remove the minority white government, but all Mugabe has achieved, is to replace one reportedly biased government with another government that is inherently worse than the one that they claim to have defeated.

Zimbabweans now struggle to make enough money to feed themselves and their families, whilst the life expectancy has almost halved to around the 35 year mark.

Only about 4% of the population are in employment and the disposable income of those that are lucky enough to work barely pays the bills each month.

“However, investigations by ZimOnline have shown that while at least 150000 ordinary people may have had access to farms, the majority own between 10 and 50 hectares each after some of the huge farms were subdivided into small plots. But these ordinary people only accessed land on the strengths of their ZANU PF party membership cards.

With the notable exception of Welshman Ncube, the secretary-general of a small splinter faction of the MDC, no high profile civil society and MDC officials have benefited from the land seizures.

But some 2200 well connected people - Mugabe, his wife Grace, their top allies, friends and relatives - have parcelled among themselves choice farms spanning from 250 hectares to as much as 4000 hectares in the most fertile farming regions in the country, in clear violation of the government’s own policy of capping farm sizes.

Government documents and investigations show that Mugabe and his top allies control nearly 40 percent of the 14 million hectares of land seized from white-owned farms, which if put together are the size of Slovakia, with a population of 5.4 million people.

Before 2000, the 4500 members of the largely white Commercial Farmers’ Union and another 1500 unaffiliated white farmers owned close to 15 million hectares of Zimbabwe’s most arable land and wildlife conservancies.

A decade later, less than 400 white farmers remain on the land, with the rest expelled and their properties handed over to politically correct blacks.”

Mugabe claims to have ‘delivered’ freedom to the Zimbabwean people, but in reality all his has done is superimpose his own greed upon the country, regardless of the fact that his own objectives are totally divergent from the needs of the Zimbabwean people - quite apart from the fact that he has systematically usurped every responsibility within government as his personal duty.

Nothing Mugabe has done is without personal consideration in the idea of adding to his already monumental wealth.

“The 86-year-old Mugabe and his young second wife, Grace, are the chief multiple farm owners, with 14 farms in total, including seven in his home province of Mashonaland West and in the agriculture rich district of Mazowe in Mashonaland Central.
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The farms measure over 16000 hectares - enough to build 160,000 medium density houses - and include a five-in-one 4046-hectare property named Gushungo Estate in Darwendale near Mugabe’s rural Zvimba home.

“This is a political programme camouflaged as land reform because it is clear that land has been transferred to high profile people and not the landless,” John Worsley-Worswick from the vocal Justice For Agriculture (JAG) farmers pressure group said.”
So what will the war veterans make of the apparent subversion of Mugabe’s much-lauded land liberation?
Robb WJ Ellis
The Bearded Man


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