by Aman Sethi, Kafila
Last month, I visited Harare to cover the Zimbabwe elections
but found myself fascinated by the controversial fast track land reform
process. This story was first published in The Hindu, but – as always – I am
happy to take questions here. A thought worth considering: In the context of
the discussion around the Land Bill in India, does Zimbabwe’s experience
suggest that questions of land are best resolved outside of the ambit of the
state?
For as long as anyone remembered, the border was a dusty
track of red sun-baked earth that separated the tidy communal lands in
Mhondoro, where the Shona people grew maize, from the fenced farms and private
hunting reserves where white farmers grew tobacco and foreign tourists shot
antelope.
Young men and women crossed over to work on estates like
John Dell, Solitude and Damvuri but hurried back before dusk lest they be
arrested for trespass. In the communal lands, children watched that the cattle
weren’t confiscated for grazing on white lands. One night in 1998, a young man
called Julius was fatally shot on the Damvuri hunting reserve on suspicion that
he was poaching wildlife meant for paying guests. Border relations, villagers
say, deteriorated from that day on.
A little over a year later, over 200 villagers from Mhondoro
walked into Damvuri, a 32,000-acre private game reserve, as part of a nationwide
wave of farm invasions that reverberated across the world. At the time, about
4,500 predominantly white farmers owned 11 million hectares, or about 35 per
cent of all agricultural land in Zimbabwe while the black population was
squeezed onto communal lands.
“For twenty years after independence we waited, we knew, the
land is ours,” said a shopkeeper from Mhondoro. Today, 181 families live, farm,
and raise cattle on Damvuri. The fences have been torn down and a new community
is coalescing around the local bar, pool tables and provisions store. Across
Zimbabwe, 170,000 families have settled on 10 million hectares of land since
2000.
For its critics, Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform was
violent, state-sponsored property theft that destroyed the national economy and
cemented the western characterisation of President Robert Mugabe as a ruthless
despot. The government, many argued, seized land for President Mugabe’s cronies
in the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the party
that has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980.
Today, the sheer scale of land redistribution suggests the
process has been more broad-based, and productive, than previously assumed. A
growing body of academic work contradicts the narrative that the land invasions
were masterminded in Harare by a small coterie including Mr. Mugabe. Those
involved in the struggle say their actions were autonomous, and intended as a
protest against the government, which the invaders felt, had compromised on the
rallying cry of the liberation.
“This re-radicalisation of the ZANU-PF, or radicalisation
from below, on the issue of land has fundamentally affected the nature of the
land distribution process by making it more democratic,” said Professor Sam
Moyo, Executive Director of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies in
Harare. Prof. Moyo spent the last decade studying the land invasions,
concluding that the dispersed occupations ensured that the distribution of land
was largely equitable. His most recent research, for instance, indicates that
Zimbabwe’s peasants now hold 79 per cent of all agricultural land compared to
49 per cent in 1980.
“The common thread of our struggles, right from the time of
colonialism in 1890, has been the land question,” said Patrick Chinamasa,
Minister of Justice and a senior ZANU-PF member. Yet, gaining the land proved
as hard as gaining independence.
In 1979, the British government negotiated a deal between
Robert Mugabe’s liberation fighters and Ian Smith’s white-settler regime:
property titles would be protected for 10 years under a “willing buyer, willing
seller” clause; there would be no forced acquisition and the British and
American governments would help the Zimbabwe government buy land and distribute
it to peasants. The deal was widely applauded as an instance of an African
leader choosing reconciliation over revenge.
Chinamasa said the model didn’t work as white farmers only
sold isolated pockets of marginal land that could not be coalesced into
meaningful resettlement policy. However, 75,000 families did receive land in
the 1980s.
In 1990, Mr. Mugabe’s government stood at a crossroads —
investments in health and education meant that 90 per cent of Zimbabweans were
literate, yet a bloated bureaucracy, corruption, and a sluggish economy was
forcing the government to run large deficits. In 1991, Zimbabwe agreed to a
five-year economic structural adjustment programme (ESAP) administered by the
World Bank, IMF and the African Development Bank (AfDB).
When ESAP ended in 1996, Zimbabwe’s currency had been
devalued by over 50 per cent, external debt had risen from 44 per cent of GDP
to 71 per cent of GDP, primary school enrolments had dropped as had spending on
health and education, and industry grew at 0.1 per cent according to the AfDB.
Soon after, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia jointly decided to
send troops into the nine-nation war raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC), an ill-advised endeavour that lasted four years and cost the heavily
indebted country $1.3 million a month in 1998, rising to $3 million a month in
1999.
As the country haemorrhaged money in the DRC, liberation-era
guerrillas, organised as War Veteran associations, revived long-standing
grievances over land and pensions. Mr. Mugabe’s refusal to relinquish power in
the face of an economic crisis mobilised a coalition of urban youth, trade
unions, white farmers and NGOs against the ZANU-PF.
In 1999, these groups coalesced as the Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC) — an opposition party that ZANU insists is a front for
western powers. Britain refused to continue funding any land acquisition and
threw its support behind the MDC. In a letter to the Zimbabwe government,
Britain’s Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, said
that Britain did not accept any special responsibility to support land reform
in Zimbabwe, adding, “My own origins are Irish and as you know we were
colonised, not colonisers.”
In the House of Commons, Ernie Ross, a Labour MP, praised
Britain’s political parties for a rare moment of consensus, “All three parties
working together provided crucial help for the Movement for Democratic Change
in Zimbabwe,” he said, “… for the first time since independence, the country
has a viable opposition party within parliament.”
The corruption in government was best illustrated by the war
victims’ compensation scam where senior ZANU-PF leaders, and their relatives,
received large sums of money on dubious compensation claims. In one instance,
Mr. Mugabe’s brother-in-law, Reward Marufu, was awarded close to $70,000 for a
scar on his left knee and ulcers. Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi, the head of the
war veterans association, embezzled almost $50,000 for impaired hearing and
“sciatic pains of the thigh”, according to Martin Meredith’s book, Mugabe:
Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe’s Future.
Bankrupt, isolated abroad, and unpopular at home, Mr. Mugabe
was at his weakest when the war veterans began occupying farms. The government
attempted to contain them, but realised the occupiers were essential to the
long-term survival of the party. In this context, the land occupations seem to
be a revolt against Mr. Mugabe rather than an illustration of his stranglehold
on power.
The Damvuri hunting ranch was invaded by a secretive group
of six war veterans. “The war veterans are everywhere in every district,” said
a participant, “They would decide which farm would be invaded when.”
“If a farmer had three farms and the veterans asked for one,
and he refused, they would take all three,” said another participant describing
how individual farms were targeted. The people would then follow the veterans
and the local village chiefs would help divide the land.
“When my daughter was born in 1998, I realised I had a
family but no job, no land,” said Tom, a farmer with six hectares in Damvuri,
“In the markets there was talk that village chiefs in Mashonaland West were
taking back land.”
Tom joined the invaders and signed up to the informal land
committee that was in charge of marking plots and negotiating with the local
administration. “The administration sent the police to evict us. The police
burnt all the houses,” he recalled, pointing to the early period when the
government tried to confront the occupiers with force. The land was transferred
to the occupiers when Tom used his leverage as a youth member of the ZANU-PF to
secure an audience with the governor, but he himself was denied as he was from
a different province.
When the nationwide invasions began two years later, he
visited Damvuri to attend a funeral and saw the ranch had been recently
occupied. This time the district administrator recognised Tom and put him on a
waiting list. “A few months later I got six hectares,” Tom said.
“We took the decision that this was a legitimate cause. [The
invaders] are the very people who liberated us, now they are reasserting that
which we failed as a government,” said Mr. Chinamasa, explaining the ZANU-PF’s
abrupt change in policy. “We followed with a law, we allowed the invasions to
take place.”
White commercial farmers liken the land reform to outright
theft.
“People just came in and threw you off…with no recourse to
courts, no compensation, with crops being raided, cattle being stolen,” said
Charles Taffs, president of the Commercial Farmers Union.
Land reform devastated the economy, Mr. Taffs said, “Eighty
five per cent of all money lent in the country was lent on the back of land.
You had massive impact on the banking industry, the resulting collapse in the
service sector [and] the manufacturing sector.”
Zimbabwe’s economy contracted 45 per cent from 1998 to 2008;
inflation peaked at 231 million per cent. When the national currency was
replaced by a multi-currency regime, the exchange rate stood at Z$35
quadrillion to U.S.$1. The economy has since rebounded; growing 20 per cent
from 2009 to 2011, with agricultural exports growing by 101 per cent.
“Our data shows that new farmers took a few years to adjust
to their lands,” said Prof. Moyo, “But now, we are seeing productivity
increase.” Tobacco farmers have done particularly well as big buyers have
offered small farmers credit in return for assured prices. This year, over
80,000 farmers registered to grow tobacco, almost half of who are beneficiaries
of the recent land reform. Nearly $600 million worth tobacco was sold in the
country this year, according to the tobacco marketing board.
Other crops have not fared as well. “The government needs to
give us support like seeds and fertilizer, or this scheme will be a failure,”
said Joseph, a cotton farmer at Damvuri, explaining that settlers did not have
titles to their land — only leases, “The banks won’t lend against the lease so
we cannot raise credit to buy seeds, or a tractor, or anything.” Joseph ploughs
his fields with his cattle and is unable to cultivate all six hectares of land,
“With credit we can farm more land.”
Mr. Chinamasa says the government is developing a lease
system that will allow the farmers to access institutional credit. But, in a
drought-prone region, one bad season could mean farmers like Joseph would lose
their land to their creditors.
This summer, Mr. Mugabe ran successfully for his seventh
consecutive Presidential term by recasting the messy and autonomous struggle
for land as the logical outcome of ZANU-PF policy.
His opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC, characterised
the election as a “huge farce,” noting blatant irregularities in all aspects of
the electoral process. Yet Mr. Tsvangirai’s obfuscation on the land issue cost
him dearly. “Land was the reason for the war,” said Ameena, a voter in Harare,
“We wanted to be masters of our destiny, not just workers on a farm.”
