IRIN Focus on Dombadema resettlement scheme

A maze of creases map Amos Maduma’s face as the sun sets behind him. He says he is “seventy-something” and it shows - the years have taken their toll on this retired farm labourer who seems to have worked himself to the bone his entire life. Maduma lives in Dombadema, one of Zimbabwe’s oldest government land resettlement schemes in Matabeleland South. It lies about 140 km southwest of Bulawayo, the country’s second city. From Plumtree, a small town on the border of Botswana, one has to rattle along a 20 km dusty dirt road to reach Dombadema. The land is harsh and dry, suitable for game and cattle farming. However, the people who inhabit about 30 small villages which make up Dombadema, plant whatever they can and rely on the rain for healthy crops. “We raise cattle, and we grow maize and potatoes and nuts, but this wasn’t a good year,” Maduma says. “We are going to make up by selling cattle or goats. To raise money for school fees, we sell our cattle to the local cold storage company and our maize to the GMB (Grain Marketing Board) and other private buyers.” He says a good harvest yields about 42 bags of maize, roughly about 4 mt, and that while the parastatal GMB is offering his 28-family village about Zim $4,500 per mt (US $82), a 20-litre drum of the staple food can be sold for for Zim $200 (US $3.6) on the “black market”. He knows that the government, trying to prevent food shortages across the country, has banned the sale of maize on the private market, but says that the GMB will not pay him enough to survive and he will have to break the law. Squinting into the sun, which is casting long shadows over the circle of mud and brick houses surrounding his discoloured, plastic chair, Maduma says, however, that he is content. “I am very happy because we have enough land to graze our cattle. I have 20 of them. We are managing to survive as subsistence farmers and we can usually sell our food too, depending on the harvest,” he told IRIN. Then his thoughts turn to the rest of Zimbabwe, particularly its central and eastern provinces, where the government’s fast-track resettlement programme has spawned widespread violence. “I benefited from the government’s resettlement programme. I was the first to agree to this resettlement scheme and to come here. But things are different now,” he says. “There’s a very big difference in the manner they are settling people now. The people who are being settled on the commercial farms are very violent. They go there and harass people on that land. When some of us were settled here, in 1982, the government had already bought this piece of land and we came here in an orderly manner. We are not happy with the way people are being beaten on the farms at the moment.” Maduma says the people of Matabeleland reject political violence. And even though President Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF party gave them land 19 years ago, the people still hold the party - and Mugabe - responsible for about 30,000 deaths during a vicious security crackdown against armed dissidents soon after independence in 1980. “This is why you don’t see so much violence in these provinces. Violence and violent tactics will not work with our people here,” he says, referring to the bands of ruling party supporters who have invaded farms in many other provinces, particularly Mashonaland West. Recalling the time he moved to Dombadema, Maduma says that while the government did not keep all its promises - Dombadema still does not have electricity - it did help his people create basic infrastructure needed to farm. “Me and some of the other people living here were working on farms near Figtree (more than 60 km away) before we moved. The farm I worked on, Spring Fountain, was sold to a black businessman from Beitbridge. Then we were joined by squatters and the police moved us off the farm after the court said we should move. The government advised us not to resort to violence and to respect the new land owner while they looked for land for us. We were told there was going to be this Dombadema resettlement on some four farms the government bought here. We were even given riot police for protection while we were building here because it was during the disturbances that were going on at the time,” he says. It was tough going, nothing was free. “When we started, the closest water was 4 km away. There were no clinics, shops or schools or houses here. The government promised us a lot of things, like boundary fences, food, ploughs and carts, schools and clinics. They said they would give us bulls and calves to start our own herd too. It was just political rhetoric. They did not give it to us. See, we have no title deeds for this land. The government said we were just settled and we did not buy the land. “They brought a planner, but we built the schools ourselves - four of them. They lent us ploughs though, and in 1984, the ministry of water sunk some boreholes on our farm and on the other farms in the settlement,” he says. Then, in 1994, after years of complaining, the government funded a dam on the settlement with money sourced from donors. The community built the dam. Maduma says that materials for the brick houses which dot the village were sold for about Zim $2,600 (US $47) each and that because of the interest which has piled up, some people are still paying the government for the houses. Still, says Maduma, he and the rest of the Dombadema community were provided with seeds and some tools by the government and are happy that they have land on which they can live, grow their crops, graze their cattle and bury their dead - even if the land itself is too harsh for mass-scale “food farming” and rainfall is erratic. “I was happy when they (the government) started (its land redistribution programme) because it meant our children would have land. But what is troubling us now is the violence on the farms. It is from our government, this violence. For those people to be there, it is from the government. We also settled here in a fast manner, but it was peaceful and orderly. The people are just being dumped there (on government acquired commercial farms). It’s just a word that they are being ‘resettled’. They are being put into the bush to disturb commercial farmers.” Maduma thinks the people being resettled on commercial farms could be doomed to starvation if they do not receive help from the government. “This is the bad thing. The government won’t help them and they have no resources to be successful farmers,” he says. Closing his eyes in thought, he adds: “It’s like if I take your car. I have no licence or money for fuel and repairs. What am I going to do with it?” When asked what he thinks the solution is, considering that Zimbabwe’s peasants need land desperately to eke out a living and that the government seems to be under pressure to keep its promise and deliver land to the poor, Maduma measures his words: “Things should be said. If we don’t say them and we don’t talk, then ... The government did a good thing for us, but now it looks like something else. “The government should first have identified people with the resources to farm, and should have established irrigation schemes and then resettled those who are capable of farming and doing something with the land. The problem is that people who have benefited are people who don’t need land. For instance there are ministers who have five farms. The government should target ministers with more than one farm and also parcel out that land to landless people. Yes, some war veterans could be getting land, but they are just being dumped there.” Then he says that people also have to work hard for their wealth. His community, for example, may have been given land and provided with expertise, but they built the small rudimentary schools, the dam, the tiny shops, the two local clinics and their houses themselves. “It was hard work, hard work, not violence that has given us what we have,” he says, surveying his village as the sun finally goes down behind him.