Zimbabwe admits land reform a failure
By: TONGAI MUDIWA
Published: Friday March 19, 2010
ZIMBABWE – HARARE – The Government of Zimbabwe has admitted the failure of its much talked about Third Chimurenga and has announced plans for a redistribution of farms, including reduction of farm sizes, ZimDaily has learnt.
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Mashonaland Central governor Martin Dinha made the announcement this week.
“Some farms are too big for occupiers to cope with,” Dinha said, stating the obvious.
The land grab was characterised by greed, with people, mainly politicians, grabbing large farms and running them down over the last 10 years.
“Government will re-demarcate land allocated to farmers who are failing to attain optimum productively due to resource constraints,” said Dinha.
Resource constraints would seem to be a lame excuse as the “new farmers” have been pampered with all manner of support over the last decade, from seed to diesel to tractors and scotch carts.
The whole exercise has gone off the rails spectacularly.
When it was launched, commercial farmers were supposed to demonstrate their capacity to produce without support and to show cash flow projections and other fancy documentation.
ZimDaily understands that the greater number of eventual beneficiaries did not file these documents at all but just used their political clout to grab as much land as possible.
“We are, however, working on rationalising the allocations so that people have pieces of land they can fully use,” Dinha said.
“While we are still waiting for an official land audit, we want to downsize their farms, especially for farmers who are not capable of using them.
“We believe the people who have leased out their land took more than what they could manage and the rationalisation programme will provide more land to the people.
“We want them to use available land that is commensurate with their resources and capacity,” he said.
Dinha’s statement rings hollow given that his party led a land audit before the 2008 elections in which it identified more than 110 farms lying idle.
The matter was swept under the carpet as it emerged that most of the land belonged to Zanu PF functionaries.
Lately, the former ruling party’s leaders, including President Mugabe, have largely accepted that the “land reform programme” as it has been loftily called, has not been the glowing success they have liked to portray.
“Acceptance is the first step.
“Perhaps now we can get back to having people who can farm on the land, not just a collection of hunter-gatherers practising what Mugabe himself has called “primitive “farming,” said a commercial farmer in Mhangura.
