It’s all as clear as mud for 409 farmers in Zimbabwe

On a cool May morning with pink clouds in the dawn sky, I looked up at the waning crescent of the moon and thought about this Letter From Zimbabwe [column] that I’ve been writing and sending to people around the world every fortnight for 26 years.

It started with men at my farm gate throwing bricks and rocks as they began what became an eight-month road to hell, as they seized the farm and everything on it and devastated the lives of everyone who lived and worked there.

It was not an inherited farm, it had been legally bought and paid for 10 years after independence, with government approval.

But that made no difference to the men at the gate or the Zimbabwe government. Twenty-six years later, the headlines this week are: ‘We are not giving land back to white farmers.’

Read:

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Those were the words of the Minister of Agriculture Anxious Masuka, who was apparently clarifying widespread reports of a land reform reversal.

What followed was as clear as mud.

Sixty-seven farms that were protected by Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements, including from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, would be returned to their owners; 840 indigenous farms that were wrongly gazetted at the height of the land reform programme would be returned to their black Zimbabwean owners; and 409 white Zimbabwean farmers, whom the minister said have been ‘peacefully co-existing with local land reform beneficiaries’ would be allowed to purchase the farms they are now occupying, with a “set-off mechanism”.

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A “set-off mechanism” is explained like as follows: if the government owes a farmer whose land it seized $500 000 in infrastructure compensation, and the purchase price of the land is now $500 000, the debts are cancelled out to facilitate ownership.

“The land itself is being sold, not returned for free,” the minister said.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read this bizarre story, which surely requires a comprehensive and clear policy paper for the future of agriculture and food security in Zimbabwe, not to mention property rights, title deeds that are worth the paper they are written on and good race relations.

So far it’s all as clear as mud and aside from the 409 white farmers, the rest of us, around 4 000 “dispossessed” farmers, continue to wait for our compensation. It’s been 26 years now.

It begs this question though: if I go back and ‘occupy’ my own farm and ‘peacefully co-exist’ with the people who know they are living on contested land, would I be allowed to buy my own farm back again – the farm I’ve already paid for and whose title deeds I have? Why would I do that?

All of this is morally incomprehensible whichever way you interpret it.

I end this letter with an extract from a Letter From Zimbabwe [column] that I wrote in May 2000, called “Sacrificial Lambs”. It explained how 67 Marondera farmers were called to an emergency meeting held in the Ruzawi Club.

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I was there, and we were told that, in order to prevent 2 000 farms from being seized by the government, we had to decide who was prepared to sell their farms, who had had enough of land invasions and who was ready to give up.

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I described what happened: “It was all about who was prepared to be a sacrificial lamb. It’s all a farce really, because although 35% of farmers in one small area of Marondera said they would give up their farms, it had to be done with compensation.

Compensation, we were told, was not an issue that had been discussed yet because there wasn’t any money. What the government suggested was that farmers would be given an IOU and then, funds permitting, would pay us out over a five- or 10-year period.

These comments were met with the scorn and disgust that they deserve. What hope would any of us have of ever being paid, and how the hell would we survive in the interim?”

That was 26 years ago.

We are still waiting. Nothing has changed. Trust remains elusive.

#clear #mud #farmers #Zimbabwe