Zimbabwe - Elections 2000 - Sustainable Democracy

The redistribution of land and resettlement of landless peasants in Zimbabwe has been the critical issue of the fifth parliamentary elections with media attention focused on land invasions and struggles over white commercial farms.

But one of the country’s leading experts on land reform, Professor Sam Moyo, says it would be wrong to see the controversy simply as an election issue, which will disappear after the polls close next Sunday. It is more than merely an issue of violence and the invasion of 1,500 white commercial farms by liberation war veterans.

Moyo, director of the Southern African Regional Institute for Policy Studies (SARIPS), said today in a media briefing that the strains on land across most of the southern African region were escalating and would continue to increase under pressures from agriculture, tourism, urbanization and population growth.

“The invasions and violence - which no one condones - are indications of how urgent the land question is for the region. It is too important to dismiss as simply a political issue during this election. When you talk about land, you are talking about the country, a country dependent on land for its very survival and the survival of its people.”

Most southern African countries are not industrialized; many grew out of an armed liberation struggle against the historical imbalances of settler colonies. He said these imbalances existed at independence and then were exacerbated in the post-colonial era because of the control of land, by white settlers and new elites.

He pointed out that land redistribution around the world has been violent in nature. “Just look at thousands of deaths in Latin America. Asia and the Indian sub-continent and you will see that Africans are not the only ones who have had to fight for their land for a fair distribution of it following colonial and settler regimes,” he said.

Moyo estimates it will take at least another 15 years before most countries in the region will have a development model that is less dependent on land.

“Don’t diminish the issue as an electoral problem. The land invasions are not nice but the war veterans are not monsters. Most of them were recycled out of the state system for farmland but it didn’t work, they were demobilized for what? It is a real problem and needs to be solved.”

He said countries coming from a liberation war background were faced with the complex and sensitive issue of absorbing former combatants into society with some reward.

“What do you do with a country-after the war- with big military movements; armies that are organized? In Zimbabwe, the problem is on both sides, the black war vets side and the former Rhodesians”, he said.

Various models of land redistribution have been proposed and tried since 1990 when the Lancaster House Constitution clauses expired, allowing government to acquire land other than the willing-seller, willing-buyer model. Much of the problem was due to a lack of trust between donors, governments, commercial farmers and civil society, Moyo said.

He also pointed out that Zimbabwe had redistributed about 3.3 million hectares by 1997, leaving another five million still to be redistributed to reach the government target of eight million.

He said there were a number of methods for redistributing the land to address the historical inequities: negotiation, market purchase, compulsory acquisition and, more latterly, invasion. And there are four basic parties involved: government, white commercial farmers, civil society and donors.

“We came very close to achieving something concrete with the 1998 land reform conference which included these stakeholders,” he said, “but there was a lack of trust on all sides even though we managed to identify 841 farms for redistribution. But the trust broke down. Donors said the farms would go to the new elites, farmers went to court, government didn’t allocate enough money and Britain, especially, failed to honor its earlier commitments.”

By this time, he said, Zimbabwe failed to approve a new constitution earlier this year and the whole matter was on hold.

Moyo said that land was not simply a political concession of President Robert Mugabe; it is a massive concern for at least 70 percent of the people. All the political movements support land reform in one way or another; it is the method where there is disagreement.

“The problem will not go away, not in Zimbabwe and not in most of the region ’s countries. We have to deal with this land pressure and recognize its urgency. For the president it is his only priority, for some opposition parties it is not high enough on their list of priorities.”

Moyo said it was a mistake to blame one party (ZANU-PF) for the violence around the land issue. It is every party’s fault. Any new government will face the same problem, they may get masses of money but if they forget the land question, they do so at their peril. (SARDC)