December 4, 2009
Abigail Mphisa

I ADMIT, maybe it should not be called a land reform. The word “reform” tends to carry connotations of improvement.

I just call it that because that is what it is called by the President and First Secretary of Zanu PF, who is also that revolutionary party’s supreme leader and oh, lest we forget, who is also the President of Zimbabwe and Head of State and Government, in addition to being the Commander in Chief of the Zimbabwe defence forces. Phew!

Some prefer to simply call it a “land grab” exercise. I doubt very much if the greatest looter of them all, the Honourable Minister Ignatius Chombo, would argue with that. In place of the Zanu-PF government policy of one person one farm, he somehow managed to secure a total of 11 farms – yes eleven!

At the commencement of the programme, it was argued that some of the farms were too big to be owned by one person. They had to be reduced in size so that more people could be accommodated. Quite a number of white owned commercial farms were reduced in size in accordance with this policy.

I have to digress a bit. So it was that when I last went home I bumped into a former friend who happens to be a prominent member of the legal fraternity. The circumstances that led to her being a former friend were quite regrettable really.

In my library I have a copy of the report on the Gukurahundi massacres authored by the Catholic Commission for Justice and peace, the one entitled “Breaking the Silence: Building True Peace.” My friend was furious when she came across it, labelling it a pack of lies. As one who was schooled in Matebeleland and worked there for some time, I could put faces to some of those who disappeared without trace – teachers, a headmaster, some nurses…To say I was incensed would be an understatement.

I must confess that it was not just the Gukurahundi tiff that ended our friendship of several decades. It limped along for a while. At the onset of the fast-track land grab exercise we used to have long discussions about the injustices of it all. We wondered why it was necessary to kill people who could easily have been driven off the land by other means. We wondered at the inhumanity of simply throwing out farm labourers on to the streets and moving multitudes on land without basic amenities such as schools and clinics.

But then again, one can never claim to know another person truly intimately. Two years into the land grab exercise a shocking headline in The Cape Times stared me in the face. My friend had grabbed a farm and given the owner three days to vacate his property. Needless to say, when I got back home I sought an explanation.

When she initially responded, “he should consider himself lucky because we allowed him time to pack his stuff. Many left empty-handed”, I thought I had not heard her right. I begged her pardon and she went on to repeat the statement. I was quiet for a good 15 minutes and then she sought to justify her behaviour by saying her husband’s business had gone bust because of the sanctions which had been enforced by the white famers’ ancestors. That was the last we spoke. Our friendship had suffered irreparable damage and I realised then I no longer had anything in common with my friend.

So when I bumped into her and her husband four years after they grabbed a farm, I enquired about the farming activities at their “property”. Curious to know if they had bettered the previous farmer’s production levels, I was treated to a catalogue of excuses so long that I just marvelled at their creativity. I quipped that the reason Barclays and other banks found themselves in financial dire straits when the previous farm owners were forced out overnight was due to the fact the commercial farmers had borrowed to finance operations. “Ah, but government should help….”

I then asked them if by any chance they had diesel. As proud new farmers they had plenty, of course, courtesy of NOCZIM. I, however, declined the offer to buy some from them.

Here is why I declined. I argued that I wanted it for free or at best I could match the price at which they had bought it from NOCZIM – an equivalent of 5 United States cents per litre. I was not prepared to pay the dollar per litter that they were unashamedly asking for – not to those looters anyway. I told them in no uncertain terms that it was a national resource and since I was also a bona fide citizen of the soil I was entitled to the loot. They could not fully explain their justification for wanting to make a 1900 percent profit from me.

Back to the topic. We have a situation where all the people who were allocated farms claim ownership based on a piece of paper dubbed an ‘offer letter.’ I am struggling to comprehend how such a letter could have been written 11 times for Ignatius Chombo, 10 times for Peter Chanetsa, 10 times for one Isaiah Shumba,6 or more times for Edna Madzongwe and 7 times for Jonathan Moyo. It would be remiss of me to leave out Gersham Pasi, the ZIMRA chief, who is the proud “owner” of 6 farms and Air Vice Marshall Perrence Shiri, who also “owns” a similar number. Robert and Grace Mugabe, at 4 and 3 farms respectively, though not doing badly themselves, are not the worst of the lot.

None of the looters have, thus far, invited us to see what exactly they are doing with this land. What is clear is that they have failed, dismally, to feed the nation.

This is a negligible percentage of the list of multiple farm owners, among them members of the first family. These ‘offer letters’ have been described as legal documents that are meant to prove ownership. A common feature of beneficiaries, needless to say, is their membership to Zanu-PF. Former Masvingo Governor Willard Chiwewe, who allegedly has six farms to his name, famously threatened to expose his partners-in-crime if he were forced to surrender any of them.

Here is what I have been pondering. Does it mean that when these people pass on, these farms will automatically be inherited by their partners and offspring? Are they entitled to list them down in their wills and dish them out to whomsoever they wish? So, future generations are supposed to accept that Chombo owned 11 farms based on letters written by Didymus Mutasa and his children will be entitled to hold on to them as their own while the rest of our children look on with envy?

Let us suppose that one day we actually become a lawful country once more, with a desire to be treated like any other civilised country. The land looters have so far managed to hold on to their ill-gotten wealth because they have disregarded court rulings and even passed legislation in retrospect to legitimise their the looting.

Future generations will want to know why Bona, Robert and Chatunga can claim ownership to land whose title deeds are in the possession of Skea’s children. Will future courts uphold Bona’s ownership of stolen land based on the argument that Robert Mugabe grabbed it from someone who, even though they had bought it after government expressed no interest in it, was deemed an illegal owner because of his/he ancestry?

We already have a foretaste of things to come in the form an international court ruling in favour of the Dutch farmers whose land, which they had bought well after independence I might add, was forcibly taken. Any of our planes could be confiscated if it landed in a country willing to enforce the judgment. The SADC Tribunal, though trashed by Mugabe, Chinamasa and their colleagues-in-land grabbing, also gave us a foretaste of what a saner future Zimbabwe will have to deal with.

Some of the looters are so young that they will outlive President Mugabe by decades. Will Chombo et al hire a team of defence lawyers to defend legal “ownership” of all the 11 farms? What happens if a post Zanu-PF lands minister issues another set of offer letters granting ownership to a new set of new farmers? Can the current and future “owners” refuse to vacate, seeing that we have known of senior Zanu-PF members getting letters from Didymus Mutasa which overrode older ones, thereby forcibly removing earlier “owners”?

Not so long ago, Justice Ben Hlatshwayo was forcibly removed from a farm which he had forcibly taken from a white farmer. He was ordered to make way for the first lady. Ironically, he sought redress from the courts. Needless to say the same courts he has consistently used to benefit Zanu-PF and government did not give him a sympathetic ear. The judge must be a bitter and devastated man. Could it be that that he honestly did not know there is no honour among thieves?

As a matter of fact, Herbert Murerwa, the current lands Minister could also issue offer letters nullifying those issued by Mutasa. To crown it all, what would stop future generations from staging the same kind of invasions invented by Robert Mugabe as a way of correcting past injustices?

And to think that Robert Mugabe is immensely proud of this mess, touting it across Africa as one of his major, if not the only achievement in three decades of ruling Zimbabwe! Africa too has rejoiced over this tragedy, venerating the looters to levels never witnessed on the continent before. “They fixed the white man!” is the cry one hears from our brothers and sisters across the continent. It is as if it is okay for black people to experience intolerable hardship as long as the whites are made to suffer a little bit in the process.

Ironically, none of our African brothers have followed in Robert Mugabe’s footsteps. Instead, there has been a scramble for white farmers fleeing Zimbabwe. Interestingly former Nigerian President Obasanjo argued that it would be foolhardy for Africa to lose such world class farming skills, as he laboured to put into place all manner of incentives to lure them to his country.

How come it was okay for Zimbabwe to lose them?

Additional reporting: The Zimbabwe Times