Zimbabwe struggling with land redistribution program

Toussaint Loisier

A decade ago, Zimbabwean Memezi Nyoni was pursuing an honors degree in English Literature at the prestigious University of Cape Town in neighboring South Africa.

“When I was in school, I was studying to be a lawyer,” Nyoni said. “I would never have dreamed of being a farmer.”

Today, he and his parents run Fountains Fresh Farms, an agricultural company on a sizeable 4,200 acre tract of land thirty minutes outside of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city.

With ample space for grazing cattle, raising chickens, and crops like onions, butternut and potatoes, Fountain Fresh Farms has offered a range of prospects to its new owners. Unlike other black Zimbabweans who gained access to land through their country’s controversial land reform program, the Nyoni family negotiated with the departing white farmer to purchase the machinery and other vital assets.

“This bought goodwill and the farm managers stayed on,” said Nyoni, ensuring some stability for the new farmers in the midst of a now six-year economic crisis. “2003 was the worst year, as costs went up and it wasn’t clear whether we would pull through. Even now, there are times where we can’t buy fuel, fertilizer, or farm equipment, which makes even planning for the next year very challenging. But at least it’s up to you – you run things for yourself.”

In Zimbabwe, land reform is generally known as “the third chimurenga,” or liberation struggle, rooted, first, in the dispossession of the indigenous Shona and Ndebele people by British settlers in 1896-7 and, then, the struggle against the white-settler Rhodesian government in the 1970s.

“Historically,” explained Nyoni, “this is a continuation of what started in the 1970s – a war over land.”

The promises of this war, however, were delayed when the formal negotiations that paved the way for independence in 1980 restricted the new ZANU-PF government’s ability to correct the severe racial inequality caused by British settler colonialism.

With ZANU-PF legally bound to redistribute land only on a “willing seller, willing buyer” principle, white farmers, although less than 1% of the population, continued to own more than 70 percent of arable land.

Throughout the 1990s, the ZANU-PF government sought out various land redistribution, including a 1998 plan to appropriate nearly half of all privately owned farmland while offering owners fair compensation.

However, these plans were consistently delayed by unwilling landowners, reluctant Western donors, and corruption that often resulted in government officials and business elites receiving the bulk of seized farms.

It was not until 2000 that the threat of a robust political opposition ultimately spurred President Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party to employ forceful seizures of white-owned farmland.

Two weeks after voters rejected a proposed constitution that called for land redistribution without compensation, the pro-Mugabe War Veterans Association organized seizures of white-owned farmlands.

Over the next several years, ZANU-PF supporters seized an estimated 27.2 million acres of land and evicted hundreds of white farm owners. In 2005, the ruling party passed a constitutional amendment nationalizing Zimbabwe’s farmland, replacing title deeds with 99-year leases.

Reflecting on the events of the past few years, Nyoni remarked that “a huge slice of wealth and assets has been transferred to black people. The fact that we have productive assets in our possessions means we have won the war. If we mess it up that is our problem.”

While some rural subsistence farmers have been able to add to their lands, political and business elites have again gained the most from this process, but often without the skills, equipment, and financing to maintain the profitably of commercial farming, once 40 percent of Zimbabwe’s economy.

This hasty and poorly planned process of land redistribution has resulted in the sharp decline in production from commercial farms, affecting downstream industries and drastically undercutting an already fragile economy. In Dec. 2005, President Mugabe acknowledged at a ZANU-PF conference that there had been a lack of planning and implementation in the land redistribution program.

Although the haphazard manner of land redistribution has hindered economic recovery, much of Zimbabwe’s current crisis is firmly rooted in its economic policies. In the years following independence in 1980, Mugabe’s government expanded quality education, health care, and other services to the black majority.

In the early 1990s, Zimbabwe sought to cover growing budget deficits with financing from the International Monetary Fund. In exchange for IMF loans, the government adopted a structural adjustment program requiring lower taxes, import tariffs and social spending. Instead of bringing promised economic growth, these policies resulted in less money for social welfare, increased budget deficits, rising inflation, growing poverty and greater debt.

In 1999, the ZANU-PF government refused to apply even more stringent conditions and the IMF revoked balance of payments support, effectively cutting the country’s line of credit for purchasing foreign goods and service.

With no credit, Zimbabwe’s government has had to pay for all imports in cash, resulting in shortage of foreign currency as well as restricted supplies of fuel and other key commodities. As of Dec. 2005, Zimbabwe still owes the IMF an estimated US $150 million.

Over the past six years, inflation has risen dramatically, with a loaf of bread priced at 21 Zimbabwe dollars in 1999, currently running at Z $45,000. The recent series of droughts which have plagued Southern Africa have further lowered yields from tobacco, corn and other cash crops.

With the deterioration of a commercial farming sector that once employed a large portion of the population, unemployment now stands at an estimated 80 percent and millions have left the country. Aid agencies suggest that more than 75 percent of Zimbabweans survive on one frugal meal a day.

In the midst of this economic crisis, the United States, Britain and other Western countries have placed travel and financial sanctions on President Robert Mugabe and his cabinet ministers, criticizing the ruling party for human rights abuses and election fraud.

The ruling ZANU-PF government has also drawn criticism for last years Operation Murambatsvina, or “say no to filth,” a recent slum clearance effort that forcibly removed an estimated 700,000 families from informal settlements in Zimbabwe’s larger cities, splnitering an informal economy that many in the cities depended on for their livelihood.

In spite of these recent difficulties, Nyoni is largely optimistic about what is to come.

“Having survived everything that has happened in Zimbabwe over the past several years, there must be a bright future ahead.”

Already, he hopes to increase to the number of cattle from 220 to 500 in the next two years. In that time span, he also plans to see the farm double the number of egg-laying hens to 30,000.

Ironically, in spite of the pitfalls of ZANU-PF’s land redistribution efforts, Zimbabwe’s economic prospect largely rests on the shoulders of new black farmers like Memezi Nyoni. If they are able to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by one of Africa’s few land reform attempts and revive Zimbabwe’s once widely respected farming sector, they will have done a great deal to secure their country’s future prosperity.