General Chiwenga admits land reform destroyed agriculture
By Tatenda Dewa | Harare Bureau |
Constantino Chiwenga, the commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF), has admitted that the fast track land reform programme destroyed agriculture.
He was speaking in a wide-ranging interview with a government-controlled media outlet just before Heroes Day commemorations some two weeks ago.
President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF government in early 2000 launched the unplanned land redistribution exercise that lasted years and forced some 6,000 commercial white farmers off their plots.
The exercise was purportedly carried out to resettle hundreds of thousands of land-hungry Zimbabweans.
However, former senior officials in the government, among them ex-Home Affairs minister, Dumiso Dabengwa, have dismissed it as a populist move to win back votes at a time Zanu PF’s fortunes were nose-diving.
Mugabe’s government had just lost in a constitutional referendum in which civil society and the newly formed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party campaigned for a “No” vote.
Chiwenga blamed the destruction of farming on loss of vital equipment, though.
“Agriculture had been destroyed after the land reform programme as a lot of machinery got destroyed, some was broken down and some exported to neighbouring countries,” said Chiwenga.
He, however, conceded that the remaining equipment suffered negligence.
“There was no maintenance of the existing equipment, and consequently the infrastructure got destroyed and this is what the responsible ministry is trying to answer,” said the military chief.
Since the start of the fast track programme, Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector has struggled, offsetting downstream closures of industries, services and other businesses linked to farming and pushing unemployment up.
Experts insist that, besides the destruction and neglect of agricultural equipment such as irrigation facilities, farming during and after the land reform programme suffered due to crumbling extension services, bad management skills, insufficient inputs and corruption.
Successive droughts also played a part as they severely affected yields, while the majority of poor beneficiaries of the programme were resettled on unyielding land as the elite got prime farms that they failed to run.
The often violent land reform programme had a domino effect as Zimbabwe got internationally isolated over a poor property and human rights record, a development that acutely affected the economy, leading to critical shortages of basic commodities and deterioration of social services. Nehanda Radio
