If you live in Zimbabwe, a person who sleeps in the street is either insane or a street kid. Most of the later would have run away from abusive homes.
Yet the USA is the richest country in the world, and Zimbabwe is one of the poorest. Why is that? Why do Zimbabweans not end up living on the streets, homeless, despite the famed economic hardships in the country.
I believe a key part of the answer is a culture that is land based. We Zimbabweans believe in owning a piece of land somewhere (musha) which one can use for, at a minimum, subsistence living. Vanhu vane misha yavo.
If you have access to land you can always build a roof for yourself. You use your own time to mould your own bricks, cut your own grass, cut your own poles and build a hut. Thus the poorest you can ever be if you have land, is not be homeless sleeping on the streets but have a grass thatched hut over your head.
Yet recently we had the prime minister calling for people to be removed from the rural areas and be relocated to towns so they could look for jobs.
Prime Minister Tsvangirai does not understand the core problem around people being poor peasants. The people in so called communal areas (which were created as, and are still operating as, native reserves) are poor peasants because they do not have legally recognised ownership of the land they live on.
Their tenure on that land is not economically actionable. Apart from utilizing the land for living on and growing subsistence crops, they cannot use the land as an economic asset.
Let me put it this way, a man living on 6 hectares in Musana communal lands cannot go to a bank to get a loan for building say pig sties or a commercial chicken hatchery. Yet he has enough land to run those kind of operations.
On the other hand a man living in Kuwadzana on 250 square metres can go to any bank and get a loan using his house as collateral. But even if he gets the loan, where is he going to get the space to build a commercial hatchery and commercial pigsties.
What Tsvangirai is effectively saying is take a man who has six hectares, and therefore a chance of employing himself and probably one or two other people, and put him on 250 sqaure metres or in a lodger's room where he has absolutely no chance of employing anyone, but is one hundred percent dependent on being employed himself.
Don't forget that the man in Musana still has the option to compete for same job with the man in Kuwadzana, if he so chooses.
If they both find jobs, the man in Musana has got somewhere to invest his income. If both are working pensionable jobs, at retirement time, the man in Musana will have some cows plus a pension while the Kuwadzana man only has a pension.
The man in Musana can grow much of his own food, using his pension for other things. The man in Kuwadzana has to buy most of his food.
What people often mistake for poverty in rural areas is a lack of infrastructure. That lack of infrastructure is due to negligence by government. Colonial governments neglected the rural areas where blacks live because of racism. Today's government is failing to develop the rural areas mainly because of mismanagement and corruption. However some of it is due to the mentally colonised belief that rural areas should only be poor.
The cornerstone of land reform should have been to give people from the former native reserves, legal economically utilizable tenure on the land they live on.
Yes equitable re-distribution of land to de-racialise land ownership patterns is also important, but that on its own without reform of the tenure system is not sufficient to economically uplift people's lives.
Indeed white farms have been taken mostly to recreate the tenureless land occupation of the former native reserves. I do not know if the people implementing this type of land reform are at all aware that, in the first place, tenureless occupation was specifically designed to disempower the natives.
What is needed now is to give not only the people resettlement areas, but even those in the old native reserves, legal tenure on the land. Ipai vanhu kumamisha ma title deeds kuti vakwanisewo kutsvaga mari dzekuita maprojects anopihwa mari kuma bhanga pamisha yavo.
Of course there are risks, because if somebody mismanages a project they could loose their home. However there are many ways of mitigating or working around those risks. For example instead of getting a loan an the whole homestead, people could officially subdivide and get a loan on a portion. That way even if the project fails one will still have a roof over their head.
The prime minister was talking of taking people off the land and putting them into towns where they could end up on the streets.
Can he not see that by taking a man from where he has a chance to utilize 6 hectares, to a place where he has to first look for lodgings and then maybe get a job, you are actually drastically narrowing his economic options not expanding them.
Instead of giving your citizen a loan on six hectares, you want to invite someone and give them loans, while you force your citizens to look for jobs from those you are giving loans. That is exactly what is going to happen, if people are pulled out of resettlement areas so that 'commercial' farmers can be brought back.
The countries that Tsvangirai is trying to emulate, the Western countries, have got homeless people. That is people who live on the streets with not even a roof over their head. Yet in Zimbabwe it is difficult to find anyone who sleeps in the open because they have absolutely no other choice.
People who own land in those countries are considered rich. The ranchers in the United States and the Lords in Britain are all classes whose esteemed status is historically rooted in tenured land ownership.
The biggest problem with Zimbabwe's economy right now is politicians using their position to take money that is meant to provide services for people, and spending it on luxury lifestyles for themselves, their families and their cronies.
Politicians are also using their influence to help people avoid paying monies that are due to the state. This sometimes goes to the extend of aiding and abating tax evasion. Recently I came across a man who claimed that he doesn't pay toll fees because he claims he is related to a well known Zanu-PF politician.
Rural areas are poor because money meant for infrastructure development is being misused. The key to uplifting lives in Zimbabwe lies in upgrading the infrastructure and tenure system in rural areas, not moving people to towns so they can look for jobs.
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