Land-hungry pow are gnawing at Zimbabwe’s stability

Press, 10 January 1984, Page 15

Land-hungry pow are gnawing at Zimbabwe’s stability

From

ALLISTER SPARKS

in Hoyuyu, Zimbabwe

The drive along the narrow dirt road from Mrewa to Hoyuyu in north-eastern Zimbabwe is like travelling through an archaeological site. Ruins dot the countryside — abandoned farmhouses and outbuildings with roofs gone and walls crumbling, the relics of an age that has passed.

The village of Hoyuyu is a pile of rubble. Its two main buildings, the Anglican church and the country club across the street, are jagged shells being stripped of their bricks.

Five years ago this was .the centre of plantation society in what was then Rhodesia. Forty-seven white families owned extensive cattle ranches and tobacco plantations, leading lives of moneyed ease, with black servants to do the heavy work and wait on them in their spacious homes. Today, the white farmers have gone and their land has been turned over to 1887 black peasants on 12.5-acre plots. In place of the abandoned farmhouses there are 90

cluster villages of little, round, mud-daub huts with thatched roofs. This transformation Lies at the heart of a social revolution which Prime Minister Robert Mugabe has been trying to bring about since his country became independent in 1980 after a long and bloody guerrilla war. The resettlement programme is

crucial to satisfying the post-inde-pendence expectations of the black population — but it is running/into trouble. The trouble was exacerbated last month when the United States cut its aid to Zimbabwe by nearly half, reducing the already inadequate funds needed for the programme’s implementation. Land, rather than the right to vote, was the main driving force behind the war which ended white minority rule and gave Zimbabwe its first black Government. When the white settlers divided up the farmland 53 years ago, they kept the best for themselves and forced the blacks into the drier, less productive regions which were called tribal trust lands.

“The war was about land,” says Moven Mahachi, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Lands Resettlement, and Rural Development, in an interview. “The people went to war because they felt the land had been taken away from them by their colonial masters.”

President Mugabe drew support for this guerrilla forces by promising the povo, as the black peasants are called, that he would give them back their land when independence was won. His political future could hinge on how far he can deliver on that promise. His difficulty is that the 4250 white commercial farmers who still occupy 33 per cent of the best farmland are vital to Zimbabwe’s economy. They account for 80 per cent of its agricultural output and more than 50 per cent of its badly needed foreign exchange earnings. So the land-hunger of the peasants has to be balanced against the need to keep white farming viable. President Mugabe’s economic advisers have warned him that if too much farmland is transferred from the whites to the black peasants, not only will Zimbabwe soon cease to be one of the few countries in Africa that can feed itself, but its population, which is one of the fastest growing in the world, could be headed for famine before the end of the century. At the same time his political advisers have warned that if too little is transferred, the Govern-

ment could soon run into a crisis of unfulfilled expectations. The incipient political crisis is illustrated by the fact that Zimbabwe’s industrial growth since independence has created only 30,000 new jobs a year, while its educational programme — greatly expanded to meet the other significant post-independence demand of its largely illiterate population — will soon be turning out 200,000 school-leavers annually. “We are awakening the hopes of all these young people and if we can’t give them jobs in the cities we must be able to give them land,” says Mr Mahachi. To try to balance this seemingly impossible equation, Mugabe’s Government devised the resettlement < scheme soon after independence for resettling 54,000 black families in three . years through schemes like the one in Hoyuyu. The scheme required about 10 million acres which’ would be added to the 40.28 million acres of tribal trust lands, now called “communal lands.”

The idea was to acquire this land without cutting too deeply into the commerical sector. Some would be white farms abandoned during the guerrilla war or bought by the Government from willing sellers. The rest would be from vacant land which still exists in this only partly developed country. Realising that its best protection lay in helping the new black Government solve its problem, the powerful Commercial Farmers Union prudently offered to cooperate. President Mugabe accepted and appointed the union’s president, Denis Norman, as his Minister of Agriculture. However, the Government underestimated both the costs and the time required to implement the resettlement programme. It fell badly behind schedule. When the three years were nearly up in November last year, just over 20,000 families had been resettled and officials in Mugabe’s Z.A.N.U. Party were warning that pressure from the immpatient povo was building up dangerously.

President Mugabe made an extensive tour of the countryside in that month and he appears to have been alarmed by what he heard. Soon afterwards he announced that the resettlement scheme was to be trebled: 162,000 families were to be resettled in three years.

That is more than a million people, or nearly a seventh of Zimbabwe’s population. The commercial farmers were aghast. They estimated that it could be done only by taking over more than twothirds of the commercial farmland. “I’m convinced the Government could purchase and resettle 15 million acres of commercial land without too much of a negative impact on the economy,” says David Haslock, deputy director of the Commercial Farmers Union. “If it goes beyond that, we shall all be in very deep trouble.” In fact, it is the over-ambitious scheme itself that has run into trouble. A year after the new target was set, still only 33,000 families have been resettled, including the original 20,000. The

world-wide recession, coupled with a two-year killer drought that slashed agricultural exports, has left Zimbabwe critically short of foreign exchange and forced a cutback on all projects. “This will have to be a year of consolidation,” says Mr Mahachi. “We realise the target is unattainable in three years, but we are keeping the 162,000 families as the figure to aim at. It will be difficult, but I’m sure we can get there.” Mr Haslock is blunt to the point of contemptuousness in dismissing this possibility. “That ambitious plan is as dead as the dodo,” he says. “It is being kept alive only for political purposes. They haven’t got the money.”

What Mr Haslock fears now is that, to meet the political pressure from the povo, the Government may resort to seizure. A new Land Acquisition Act has been drafted giving the Minister of Lands the power to confiscate “under-util-ised” land, either whole farms or portions of farms.

Mr Mahachi confirmed the exist-

ence of the draft bill, which he said would become law about February, but he denied that its purpose was to get round the shortage of funds. He says that he meets the farmers union regularly and relations were still “excellent.” But conversations with union officials suggested tensions were increasing. Mr Haslock thinks the new Bill will be a violation of the Lancaster

House constitution and the union is preparing to fight it. The cut in United States aid, from $75 million to $4O million, seems likely to increase these tensions. President Mugabe told a

press conference that some of the American money had been earmarked for the resettlement programme and the Government would now have to consider acquiring the land 6n a credit rather than a cash basis.

‘We might have to think about that, a kind of 1.0. U. on land,” he added.

That, too, might be construed as a violation of the constitution, which guarantees cash compensation to any white farmers who are expropriated. Copyright — London Observer Service.