More to land issue than Mugabe’s land grab

IT seems for many people Zimbabwe’s land issue has been reduced to a little more than ‘Mugabe land grab’ issue. The land question has shaped Zimbabwe’s politics for the last century. It is being extremely short-sighted and naïve to reduce it, for no reason other than anti-Mugabe emotions, to a simple Mugabe land grab problem. No matter how large he might loom in the sight of some, the land issue is much bigger than Robert Mugabe.

I once came upon a story about an elephant and a villager. A hardworking villager built his hut at the edge of large savannah woodlands. One day a mighty elephant came charging out of the forest. It wrenched the farmer out of his hut and hurled him aside. It then barged into the hut and somehow managed to fit its large frame inside.

The puny little villager tried very hard to get the enormous elephant out of his hut. First he pulled at the tail, and then he pulled at the trunk. He hung on one of the tusks, then the other. He tried his best to wrap his arms around a leg and tug. But he simply couldn’t make the huge elephant budge.

As he escalated his efforts to liberate his hut he took a spear and started to stab the elephant. The skin was too thick. Then he lit a fire under the elephant’s belly.

“Hoo! Stop! Stop!” shouted the elephant. “Let us make peace.”

So the villager entered into negotiations with the elephant.

“Here is the agreement” proposed the elephant. “I stay where I am, but I will allow you some space in the hut.”

“But it was my hut in the first place, and given the amount of space you have already taken for yourself I won’t have enough space” complained the villager.

“I am willing to move some of my limps to give you more room. But we do it only when I am willing. Also you have to compensate me for loss of space.”

The villager was not happy with the terms but what could he do. The elephant was too big and fighting it out of the hut would be too much of a cost and maybe even result in the destruction of the hut itself. He forlornly and half-heartedly nodded his head.

“That’s it my man!” whooped the elephant happily. “Now we are friends. To make sure we know which space belongs to whom here, take this.”

He whipped out and brandished a piece of paper.

“This is my hut occupancy certificate, this is proof that I own the hut” he said pointing a tusk at the piece of paper in the villager’s hands.

“This piece of paper certifies that I own the hut. If there is a disagreement my friend Mr Rhinoceros will listen to our arguments and pass judgment. That way we will maintain the rule of law.” The elephant explained.

“But where was the rule of law when you were pulling me out of the hut,” the villager complained.

“My friend let’s forget the past. Let’s look to the future. After all you didn’t have the rule of law yourself did you?” the elephant asked.

“No, but I had my customs and system of rule. Everyone in my hut lived by those….”

“Your customs were primitive and backward my friend” the elephant intoned, interrupting the villager. “The certificate of hut occupancy I have introduced is modern, advanced and state of the art.”

“But it leaves you with all the good space. Besides you have taken so much space that me and my children are packed like sardines in a little corner.”

“Look my friend,” said the elephant, “You shouldn’t complain. You have an advanced state of the art system in your hands all because of me.”

Robert Mugabe is not even the villager in this story. The villager, Zimbabwe’s people, still needs equitable land redistribution urgently. The debilitating effects of racist pieces of legislation passed by colonial settlers such as the Land Apportionment Act, the Land Husbandry Act, the Land Tenure Act and others still need to be countered and reversed.

What Zanu-PF chefs are doing, taking white farms and mostly occupying them themselves is like a hippo butting out the elephant and occupying the hut. The villager still needs his hut back.

Some people are currently so incensed by the hippo butting out the elephant. They are focusing solely on the hippo and forgetting the original sin of the elephant. I hope they are equally incensed by the elephant wrenching out the villager.

I am sure we all know that the practice of kicking people out of their homes with only the clothes on their backs was not invented by Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF. I believe I don’t have to explain again where the popular name for a squatter shack in Zimbabwe, chitangwena, comes from. What happened to the people of Chief Rekai Tangwena was actually the tail end of colonial displacement. All the people who are now settled in the massive former native reserves (maruzevha) were forced there without any compensation and barely the clothes on their backs.

A very recent example of the precarious and insecure tenure afforded to those in the native reserves by colonial laws is the plight of the Chiadzwa people. After discovery of diamonds literally in their fields, these people are now being evicted from an area they have lived for generations. They only depend on the goodwill of government for compensation.

Their biggest problem is they don’t own the land they live on. Remember native reserves were originally Crown Land (land owned by the Queen), then they became TTLs (Tribal Trust Lands) after UDI, and lastly Communal Lands (after independence) owned by the government.

Unlike white farmers who were granted title deeds and can take their cases as far as the SADC tribunal, the villagers do not have and never had title deeds. The villagers are victims of a system designed in colonial times to disempower the natives. The government of the day could evict them as and when it wished. What leaders like Robert Mugabe have done is usurp the powers of colonial masters without enhancing the rights of the people at all.

The people of Chief Rekai Tangwena faced the eviction problem under Ian Smith. Now the people of Chiadzwa are facing the same problem under Robert Mugabe. The whole import of this is that land reform has not been properly done. Land rights and security of tenure have not been passed on to the people, the victims of colonialism. Now everything is being left to the whim of politicians.

Let me hasten to clarify that this is not an attempt to defend Robert Mugabe. I am simply trying to make it clear that there is a huge mass beneath the tip of the iceberg. Melting the tip will only make more of it emerge. Let us not forget the entire context and complexity of the land problem in our haste to demonize Robert Mugabe.

As far as I am concerned both sides are taking people for granted. An honestly pursued land reform program would see white farmers losing the bulk of their land to peasants, anyway. The peasants are definitely not in, and will never be in a position to pay full compensation for the land at present market values. Given that they form the bulk of the population, there is very little chance that the government will ever collect enough tax to pay for the land. In my view this reduces the “willing seller willing buyer” principle to a mere ruse to slow down land reform in the hope that it will eventually fizzle out living most peasants without land, and the colonial occupiers enjoying use of the land.

On the other hand the current black elite have their eyes firmly on personal enrichment. They are clearly hoping to skim off the cream of the land and give it to themselves or have already done so. This scenario again leaves peasants severely shortchanged.

In short none of the two chief antagonistic sides, the white former colonial settlers or the ruling black elite is particularly keen on an honest fair and transparent solution. Both would like to see their respective privileges preserved on enhanced. Unfortunately preserving the privileges of either amounts to doing nothing concrete for the masses.

One of the great weaknesses of Mugabe’s opponents is that they hopelessly chew their words when it comes to specifying when and how land reform is going to happen. Talk of land audits and properly doing things does not assure the peasant that he is going to get a bigger piece of land now. Mugabe’s policy of allowing people to just invade land means that at least some people have access to land now. As more time passes it is going to be more difficult to remove them from that land without use of violence.

The question of who should pay compensation is simple if it is honestly approached. Whoever inherited the British South Africa Company (BSAC) which claimed ownership of Zimbabwe in 1890 should be pursued and made to pay. Alternatively whoever gave the BSAC ‘permission’ to own Zimbabwe must be held responsible. The BSAC were given ‘permission’ by means of a Royal Charter. Surely one doesn’t need to be the Scotland Yard sleuth Sherlock Holmes to figure out who issued that charter and must therefore bear primary responsibility for compensation.

Lastly, let me again express my utter disgust at the notion that blacks need white farmers if they are to avoid starvation. Calling such assertions hogwash would be insulting the bathwaters of pigs. Having grown up in rural Zimbabwe, not for a single day did I witness families around us depending on white farmers for food. Black Zimbabweans have always worked hard to grow their own food and still work hard to do so. The greatest impediments to food security are weather patterns and lack of access to adequate land. It is definitely not lack of the work ethic or skill.

Around 1906 one of the native commissioners reported that the major reason natives did not want to work in the mines and farms set up by settlers was that the average native had his good patch of land on which he grew enough for his needs and therefore saw no need to work for the settlers.

Indeed those who are familiar with the history of Zimbabwe’s urbanization will know that most local people shunned living in towns and depended on their rural homes for livelihood which is why most of the early suburbs in Harare like Mbare, Old Highfields, Mabvuku, Dzivarasekwa and Tafara have houses mostly owned by Zimbabweans of Malawian origin. Do people ever ask themselves what happened for these people to be forced to stop depending on agriculture for their livelihood.

People who attribute Zimbabwe’s agricultural problems solely to the eviction of white farmers are deliberately and dishonestly choosing to leave the bigger part of the picture hidden. The problem of idiosyncratic controls on commercial activity, including price controls on agricultural inputs and commodities, restrictions in the movement and trade of agricultural commodities was a big disincentive to agricultural producers.

Even if the white farmers had not been disrupted, Zimbabwe would still have not produced enough food with the kind of price controls and restrictions that were introduced by the government from around 2003 to 2008.