Hopewell Chin’ono: Proper land reform is yet to happen on commercial farms in Zimbabwe

By Hopewell Chin’ono

The Zimbabwe land reform process started happening in 2000, and it is still an on going process eighteen years later.

It had to be done at some point although it was unnecessarily violent, chaotic and corrupt, but that is now history and as usual, history will determine whether the pro or counter arguments of how it was done are valid or not.

If the liberation generation wants to have some input into what will happen in Zimbabwe 50 years from now, they better do the right thing regarding land redistribution before they meet their maker!

They should clean up their mess whilst they still have the political power to do so!

I however don’t think that they will do it, their history speaks for itself and it is self evident that they are always consumed with power retention and not development.

We are in 2018 and only four months after an election, but they are already talking about the 2023 election in the midst of an economy spiraling out of control, if ever you doubted my assertion that they will not clean up their land reform mess, there is your answer.

They have spoken about land audits for over a decade now and nothing has been done, they are always sweet on talk and zilch on delivery.

However, land will have to be redistributed again ladies and gentlemen, there is no other way!

It might not be done this year or five years from now, but at some point, it will have to be done properly.

That is as true as Monday comes after Sunday, there is no way a normal country can sustain itself economically with the present land ownership registry.

After the year 2000, land fell into the same colonial ownership pattern, into the hands of powerful political families in ZANUPF.

Robert Mugabe alone has over 10 farms to his name by proxy or otherwise, other media reports say that he has 21+ farms.

That is unacceptable and that will be reversed at some point when all that political protection falls away with time, it always does.

We used to have powerful political names like Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Chief Chirau, Ian Smith, Didymus Mutasa, Joice Mujuru and the list goes on, father time always catch up with mother nature.

Robert Mugabe is not alone in owning ridiculous tracts of land in this country, there are many political big hitters that got land for their kids, nieces, sons and daughters in law, uncles and the list goes on.

That land redistribution will have to be revisited and that those farms will be repossessed at some point because the majority of them are simply lying idle is a given. Nothing lasts forever.

They got the best land for themselves, which is an act of oppression over your fellow citizens, where power and privilege gives you access to unpaid for resources that ordinarily other can’t access.

Many of these farms are today being rented out to fellow black farmers, is this what the liberation struggle was about, that those with political power should be allowed to get access to millions of hectares, so that they could rent them out to other black Zimbabweans?

Power and privilege are not constant, like time, they move and scenarios evolve.
We have November 2017 as a good reference point for that reality and fact of life.

The Mugabe family and all the other powerful political families linked to them were untouchable in 2000, but where are they today?

This is the reality of political life, Zimbabwe is not an island, no country is an island and no country can stand-alone. We can’t expect other countries both on the continent and beyond to help us when we cant help ourselves.

Zimbabwe will have to decide whether it wants to remain a rogue state for now, where the rule of law is not regarded as paramount when it comes to property ownership, or whether it wants to be like all other countries that don’t block their best from flourishing!

This has nothing to do with the current sanctions debate, this is about how a lot of black Zimbabweans feel that the land is not being properly used, and how those people misusing the land underpin their land ownership using politics and not production figures on the land.

We have thousands of agriculture and veterinary university graduates who today are just sitting at home or if they are lucky, they are working as till operators.

These are the people who could revolutionary transform the farming industry, but how can they do so when the land has been detained without use?

Today the country and its rulers are being cruel to both these graduates by denying them access to the land and to the citizen who has to pay a premium for imported food.

Currently all land is at the mercy of the state, so the state can decide who owns which piece of land and where and how.

That is not sustainable because farming is a business that requires loans and mortgages, that can’t happen when the land is not bankable and not transferable.

One can only be politically protected or a fool to buy a farm when 1. It can be taken away from you and 2. When you can get one for FREE depending on how connected you are.

Now that makes our country a purely banana republic where land is not owned on commercial basis that can allow you to develop it without fear of losing it and where one can’t borrow against that land as an asset!

I should be able to buy a farm, hire a team of agriculture and veterinary university graduates to manage it for me, and generate foreign exchange for the country through exporting produce.

Currently I can’t do that, I can only stand and watch the painful chaos taking place whilst the country is importing soya beans from Malawian peasant farmers when it has the best land in the region.

We have seen over two decades of free implements given to the current land reform farm owners and yet very little has been produced.

They have thrown that debt to the hard-pressed taxpayer and as usual, more scams of looting the treasury through land ownership emerge.

It is ironic that I produce more from a 5-acre piece of land at my ancestral village in Murewa breeding boer goats, than some people sitting on 500 hectares of land.

In any normal society, that would qualify for a late night comedy joke, but in Zimbabwe it is a lived reality and as the young ones say, it has all V11s available!

We have had cases of perennial land grabbers who do so using political power, to this very day nothing stops them from doing so again because the laws are exactly how they were when they grabbed those farms.

Anything that is not paid for is never properly looked after and as such, farming will only become successful when business principles are applied to it.

Land reform did something good, it gave so called peasant farmers access to acquire good and fertile land, and they are not the problem and have never been the problem.

In fact they produce more maize than the commercial farmers put together and they hold the most animals in this country, something those holding big tracts of land must reflect on.

The problem is with the few who are holding on to these huge tracts of land for speculative purposes, those are the ones that are sinking this country into a debt trap because those pieces of land should have been working for the country generating foreign exchange.

Ian Smith and the Rhodesian government didn’t only beat the sanctions imposed on Rhodesia through South Africa and sanctions busting, they actually worked hard, putting the land to good use and they developed industries through import substitution programs.

We haven’t been doing that, instead we looted a whole diamond find of the century at Marange, we have looted our parastatals, and we have allowed corruption to reign supreme both in government and private sector and we have nothing to show for it except expensive shiny cars and ridiculous mansions.

Thieves run even the civil society organizations that are supposed to shine bright torches in dark corners, some of them even sought alliances with G40 and their equivalent in ZANUPF!

Jonathan Moyo once said that ZANUPF didn’t worry about NGOs because people who ran them were as corrupt as those that they pretended to be opposing, a story for another day.

So the economic transformation of Zimbabwe will only come from the future leaders of our country especially if the current lot fails to understand that farming is a business, and that land is a commercial asset that should be paid for if one is to take farming seriously.

I have news for those who can make a positive change to land laws, ownership and usage.

Please do it now and do it properly, that is the only way you can secure the properties that you are holding on to today.

If you don’t do it now, one day you will lose power just like Robert Mugabe and Didymus Mutasa did, one day you be dead just like Solomon Mujuru and Chenjerai Hunzvi, the land in the hands of your children will not be secure, they will lose it the same way that you got it, through politics.

The new rulers will more likely chose to be part of the real economic world, they will seize that land and redistribute it on commercial basis as no other way will make farming attractive and productive except on commercial terms.

That process will see real farmers emerging and the phony ones disappearing, that will happen.

Many years ago, an old man who ruled Kenya called Jomo Kenyatta decided that he wanted to own land in Kenya, and that he wanted to pass it on to his family and kids that included the current Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta.

Jomo identified pieces of land that he wanted and he paid for them, partly using looted funds, but he understood that land couldn’t be grabbed from under the nose of fellow black people for free and expect to keep the same land in his family for generations.

You can’t have one country seized by white looters in 1897, and then 100 years later, the same country is seized by a group of black looters impoverishing their fellow black kith and kin, and you expect that to be the end of the story.

It can’t be and it won’t be, to be continued….

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning Zimbabwean international Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker.

He is a Harvard University Nieman Fellow and a CNN African Journalist of the year.

He is also a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Africa leadership Institute.
Hopewell has a new documentary film looking at mental illness in Zimbabwe called State of Mind, which was launched to critical acclaim.

You can watch the documentary trailer below. Hopewell can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter @daddyhope