WHILE the principle of land reform in Zimbabwe was primarily to address the skewed legacy of colonial land ownership imbalances, the late former president Robert Mugabe and his family engaged in greedy accumulation of farms establishing themselves as the new landed aristocracy.
Owen Gagare
By the time of his death on 6 September 2019, Mugabe had became a top land baron with 24
farms in violation of his regime’s one-man-one-farm policy.
A white former Zimbabwean commercial farmer says most landowners who were dispossessed of their farms during the country's violent land grab programme post-2000 would prefer financial compensation as opposed to land offers by government.
Government recently inked a US$3,5 deal with farmer representative groups in what would see the use of the giant figure to compensate former landowners for infrastructural improvements they made on the properties.
- The social distance at the farms implies that farmers must limit the number of labour force-carrying an activity at a time.
South Africa’s land panel finally produced its report at the end of July. At 144 pages it’s an impressive document, making all the right noises. South Africa, like Zimbabwe, left the land issue for too long. 25 years after freedom, at least now a serious move is being made in South Africa. But will it make a difference?
Former Zimbabwean deputy Prime Minister Professor Arthur Mutambara has warned South Africa against implementing a chaotic approach in the expropriation of land calling on them to learn from their northern neighbours.
Said Mutambara at a presentation at Rhodes University:
“There is a problem that you must watch out for as South Africans, land expropriation is a good idea but might be abused by the elite who take a good idea and use it as a political tool.”
For Zimbabwean organic farmer, Elizabeth Mpofu, access to healthy food is liberation.
Millions of people across the world go to bed hungry. Scores do not have access to nutritious food owing to an inequitable global food system focused on industrial mass food production. The food from this system is less nutritious, more expensive and less friendly to the environment.
HARARE, Zimbabwe - Zimbabwe’s dispossessed white farmers are trickling back to their land, this time as tenants to Black farmers, officials from the country’s governing and opposition parties claimed Monday.
In an interview with Anadolu Agency, George Makombe, a top official of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party and liberation war fighter, said reports of Black farmers renting out the land they repossessed from white farmers two decades ago are true.
It is a windy day in Marange, Chanakira village. Small clouds scuddle the blue sky giving it a blurred look. About 110 kilometers southwest of Mutare, Norah Mwastuku (48) a subsistence farmer sits at the verandah and contemplates when the first rains will arrive.
She anxiously looks at her fields, decorated with mulched holes.
Mwastuku is one of the farmers who have embraced the Pfumvudza program — a concept where crops are planted on zero tillage in a bid to conserve water and inputs on a small piece of land.
Delegates from 12 countries united in Lomé, Togo for the 3rd Conference by the African Land Institutions Network for Community Rights (ALIN); They highlighted successes and challenges from ongoing community land rights reforms in their countries, and charted a roadmap for the future; The conference, hosted by the Government of Togo, was initiated by the Rights and Resources Initiative (www.RightsandResources.org) and co-organized by International Land Coalition, Africa.