This Tuesday 25 September we host the Ambassador of Zimbabwe in Canada Florence Chideya. We discuss the decision by the ruling party Zanu PF and the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change to unanimously pass the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment Bill Number 18. The opposition party had all along opposed what they called the piecemeal amendment and yet in what it called a “confidence building measure” it has allowed the amendment to pass. The amendment allows for the harmonization of the presidential, parliamentary and local government elections that take place in 2008.
Is President Robert Mugabe going to Portugal for the European Union-African Union Summit that has been postponed since 2003 because of a stand off between the two regional blocs over the debate whether President Mugabe should be invited or not?
The parliamentary legal committee has also passed the Indigenization and Empowerment Bill which provides an opportunity for Zimbabweans to own at least a 51% of shareholding in the majority of businesses in all sectors of the economy.
What has brought about this unity? Are we seeing a genuine desire by ZIMBABWEANS to start solving their problems?
Listen live on 105.5 FM in Toronto or online on http://www.chry.fm/ worldwide as we discuss this issue. To contribute, call our studio number on +1 416 736 5656 or write to africanperspective@chry.fm
About African Perspective
African Perspective is a current affairs programme that reports and analyses news and events from an African viewpoint. It broadcasts on Tuesdays at 10am-11am Eastern Time/2pm-3pm Greenwich Mean Time on CHRY 105.5 FM in Toronto and http://www.chry.fm/ on the Internet worldwide. The programme provides Africans with a platform to articulate their experiences, challenges and celebrate their achievements to both the Canadian public and policy makers.
Presenters: Kuthula Matshazi and Shadya Yasin
3 comments:
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The British role in land reform
The Zimbabwean
Wednesday, 24 October 2007 15:29
PETER FREEMAN, the first British development agency representative to
Zimbabwe in 1980, gives an insider's view into the workings of the early
stages of the British-funded land reform programme.
THE BRITISH ROLE IN LAND REFORM
AN INSIDER'S STORY
For over a century, in colonial Rhodesia and post-colonial Zimbabwe,
the right to own and occupy land has driven political struggle and dominated
the economy.
For over 20 years, working for successive British governments, it was
part of my life too. As millions of people now go hungry and agricultural
production plummets what happened to frustrate the hopes we had at
independence and to bring about our worst fears? This is what I saw.
In the early 1980's I was the British government's representative on
the committee in Harare that approved resettlement projects that both
governments financed. The cost of land purchase and of the necessary
infrastructure - water, roads, power, clinics and schools - was shared
equally between the two governments. Each scheme was identified and
developed by Zimbabwean officials and the land price was negotiated with the
commercial farmer. They were appraised for economic viability by British
advisers and we visited most of them. Other donors, including the EU and the
African Development Bank, helped to finance infrastructure (though not land
purchase) in other schemes. Independent evaluations showed subsequently that
the great majority of them worked well, enabling thousands of small-scale
farmers and their families to make a productive living. Over 2 million
hectares changed hands in this way.
This programme stemmed from the much-criticised compromises made at
Lancaster House in 1979. ZANU(PF) and ZAPU argued that buying out the white
farmers was something for Britain alone to do, and many farmers would
certainly have welcomed being paid in sterling with a British government
guarantee rather than in Zimbabwean dollars. For a government in London that
was cutting back heavily on public spending at home such largesse to people
who had supported a rebel government, who were often not British citizens
and mostly had no wish to live here, was never a starter. Watching the
negotiations in 1979 from the Zimbabwe desk in the British aid ministry I
remember being surprised at how easily Mugabe and Nkomo settled for pledges
of future assistance for land reform, not even insisting on a figure for the
amount of money.
More fundamental realities also favoured land reform in 1980. The
Muzorewa regime had bought substantial tracts of farmland at cheap rates in
areas where war (the cost of security) during the independence struggle hit
commercial profits, and immediately after independence there were few
alternative purchasers in the market. The planning bureaucracy in the
Agriculture and Rural Development Authority (ARDA) and other government
departments, and the availability of people and machinery to implement the
plans, was also comparatively strong.
However from the start there was a serious problem. President Mugabe
showed no interest, then or later, in solving the complex and sensitive
political issue of land ownership via this negotiated route. In 1981 a
target of 180,000 settler families in three years suddenly appeared, many
times higher than the capacity of the programme that British and Zimbabwean
Ministers had signed up to. To do it would probably have produced the same
dreadful results that we have seen 25 years later. But the announcement had
a political impact. The initial enthusiasm for the joint programme of Mr
Movern Mahachi and Dr Sydney Sekeremayi, the first of many Ministers
responsible for land reform, cooled as they failed to get support from State
House. During the years that followed the flow of new proposals slowed down
and the Zimbabwean capacity to implement them was dismantled.
When we reviewed the programme in 1989 we found that the British aid
funds that had been pledged after independence, which Zimbabwe ministers had
criticised as hopelessly inadequate, had not been fully claimed. The
Ministries of Land and of Finance had not asked for aid money due for work
on approved projects and new proposals were not coming forward. Lynda
Chalker, then Minister for Overseas Development, wrote to Zimbabwean
ministers reminding them of the debts that Britain owed and promising new
money when the post-independence pledges had been used. There was no
response.
This depressing lack of activity continued into the 1990's while the
political pressure built up. Amendments to the constitutional provisions for
land purchase changed nothing on the ground. The practical proposals of the
commission on land tenure, which might over time have revolutionised farming
practices throughout rural Zimbabwe and given renewed impetus for land
reform on a sustainable basis, were brushed aside. And the British side,
finding little pressure from Harare, buried its head and hoped the issue had
gone away.
Shortly after I became responsible for British aid to Africa in June
1996 the Ministers for Land and for Local Government, Kumbirai Kangai and
John Nkomo, arrived unexpectedly in London. They told Lynda Chalker they had
come to reopen the Lancaster House settlement on land. Mugabe had, as usual,
fought the recent election with grandiose promises of land transfer to be
financed by Britain. They wanted the money, would stay as long as it took,
and would be reporting back each evening to their President at his London
hotel.
Three days of discussion followed, during which they were embarrassed
to be given copies of the 1989 letter and surprised to discover that the UK
Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind had researched the colonial Land
Apportionment Acts while at law school in Salisbury in the 1960's. He knew
more than them about the historic wrongs that needed to be put right through
land reform. A memorandum signed by both sides promised a fresh pledge of
British aid for a renewed joint programme. It offered technical help to
develop it. Back in Harare, once again, nothing happened.
The following year Mugabe tried again. He hoped the arrival of a
Labour government would enable him to tear up the compromises he had made,
but never acknowledged, eighteen years before. He wrote to Tony Blair asking
for a fresh start based on the British government accepting full
responsibility for buying out the white farmers and handing the land to his
government to distribute as he thought fit, the position he had consistently
taken. He claimed, wrongly, that a previous Labour government had offered
such a deal twenty years earlier when David Owen and Andrew Young had
proposed a "Zimbabwe Development Fund".
Clare Short wrote a letter in reply that became famous when Mugabe
read an extract to his party congress. The reference to her Irish background
that he held up for scorn was intended to acknowledge that Zimbabwe is not
the only place where land expropriation by the colonial power had had a
negative impact on local people. Her encouragement to look forward, to work
together to design a land reform programme that would meet Zimbabwe's needs
in the 21st century rather than to focus wholly on the past, was either
beyond his understanding or did not suit his political aims.
The part of her letter he did not read out offered a fresh start,
though not the free hand and unlimited budget that he wanted. She offered
financial and technical assistance for an organised, Zimbabwe-led, programme
of land purchase and resettlement in partnership with other donors and
within the context of a British development effort now being focussed
world-wide on eliminating poverty. This was not what Mugabe wanted his
people to hear.
Further efforts by Britain, the UN and the World Bank over the next
two years to negotiate a sustainable rural development programme that would
meet justifiable political expectations were brushed aside. In September
1999 the Bank Board in Washington approved a US$5 million credit that had
been negotiated with Zimbabwean Ministers. It was meant to jump-start the
planning process and to start up a land acquisition fund for groups of
communal area farmers to draw on. I don't know whether anyone in Harare had
dared to tell Mugabe before the announcement. As ever he refused to endorse
it and it was never implemented. Turning his back on the outside world he
acted alone with the tragic results that The Zimbabwean continues to report.
So where did it all go wrong? 25 years ago many of us recognised that
the pace of change, beneficial though it was, could not meet the political
demands in Harare. But over many years attempts by politicians and civil
servants in Harare to reduce the bottlenecks in planning and implementation,
to allocate government funds for sustainable resettlement and to negotiate
foreign aid to support them, gained little or no support in ZANU(PF), in the
Cabinet or in State House
Did Mugabe and his circle all along want to allocate land as a means
of patronage, not as a route to development? Did they see land as simply a
symbolic issue and simply fail to understand its economic importance? Could
a more active British policy in the early 1990's have produced a response in
Harare that might have got a programme going again before frustrations
boiled over? Could the commercial farmers, rather than hoping to stay
forever, have acknowledged their fate and negotiated a phased handover to
productive successors?
These questions and others are unfortunately academic. The gap between
what Britain and other donors were prepared to offer and what Mugabe
demanded proved unbridgeable. Rather than compromise he has produced a
famine.
Masvingo governor grabs farm for daughter
Zim Online
Tuesday 30 October 2007
By Regerai Marwezu
MASVINGO - Masvingo provincial governor, Willard Chiwewe, at the weekend
evicted a white commercial farmer in Chiredzi district in southern Masvingo
province as fresh farm invasions sweep across the country.
Chiwewe, who chairs a government land allocation committee in the province,
stormed Senuko Farm last Friday in the company of armed soldiers and
forcibly evicted John Alfford from his 40 hectare piece of land.
The resident minister also seized farm equipment at the property that used
to produce over 1 500 litres of milk per month in addition to fresh fruit,
vegetable seeds and sugar cane.
A former farm worker at the property on Monday told ZimOnline that Chiwewe
had also threatened to have the Alffords arrested if they defied the order
to vacate the property.
"We were surprised to see a group of armed soldiers invading the farm," said
Onias Chimba, a former worker at the farm.
"We were given just hours to leave the property by the soldiers and we had
to comply since the governor also threatened to have us arrested."
Chiwewe confirmed taking over the farm adding that the Masvingo provincial
land committee had since allocated the property to his daughter whose name
and age could not be immediately verified.
"We had to seek the assistance of soldiers because some of these white
commercial farmers have become dangerous," said Chiwewe without elaborating.
"We gave the Alffords enough time to leave but they did not listen hence we
had to behave in the manner that we did. My daughter has since taken over
after the land allocation committee gave her the property," said Chiwewe.
President Robert Mugabe's government has since the beginning of this month
intensified a drive to expel white farmers following the expiry of a 30
September deadline to do so.
At least 10 white farmers have already been dragged to the courts while
several others have been threatened with arrest for defying the directive to
vacate their properties.
Zimbabwe has grappled with severe food shortages over the past seven years
after President Robert Mugabe began seizing white land for redistribution to
landless blacks seven years ago.
The farm occupations slashed food production by 60 percent resulting in most
Zimbabweans requiring food handouts from international relief agencies.
Less than 600 white commercial farmers remain in Zimbabwe after the
government began seizing land from white farmers, then numbering about 4
000, for redistribution to landless blacks seven years ago. - ZimOnline
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