IRIN Focus on land conflict

Roy Siziba and Max Rosenfels seem to have nothing in common except the soil they both lay claim to and now grudgingly share. The land - an expansive game hunting and produce farm southwest of Bulawayo - belongs to Rosenfels. But 38 families from surrounding communal areas say it was stolen from them in the 1890s, so they have moved onto the farm and carved out plots for themselves with government sanction and assistance. Forty-five-year-old Siziba, his wife Thereza and their four children are one of the families. The men’s stories are not unique. Across the country, landless peasants, war veterans and ruling ZANU-PF party supporters have occupied commercial farms - sometimes violently - as the government presses ahead with its plan to fast-track land redistribution. The government argues that 4,500 mainly white commercial farmers own more than 11 million hectares of the country’s prime land. Some six million dirt-poor black Zimbabweans are squeezed on to marginal communal lands - a direct legacy of the country’s colonial history that advantaged white settlers at the expense of the indigenous population. Independence in 1980 brought little change, with rural whites maintaining their privilege. The government’s controversial solution to that imbalance has been simple: unable to afford the market rate for the land, and declaring that the soil historically belongs to black Zimbabweans, it has chosen to expropriate at least five million hectares to resettle families. But the fast-track programme comes after 20 years of government inaction on reform, and more pointedly a liberation war which at its core was about ownership of the land. Introduced now, critics allege, the programme is more about the determination of President Robert Mugabe to win re-election next April by promising fertile land to rural voters, rather than real economic empowerment and social justice. That strategy allegedly became apparent during legislative elections in June last year, with the ruling party directing political violence in the countryside, which resulted in a donor freeze on land reform funding. Then as now, the target has been the commercial farmers who, having backed the newly-emergent opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), are reportedly being driven off the land. The consequence for an agriculture-dependent economy has been to plunge the country deeper into crisis, and worry neighbouring countries where land hunger has remained unresolved. In employing a fast-track process, the government has ignored court orders declaring it illegal. Claiming that development would follow resettlement, it has been criticised for failing to provide adequate services and support to the resettled, and punishing tens of thousands of farm workers thrown out of work. The accompanying violence has claimed lives, and served to further politicise the police and army who have either had to stand aside and ignore the rule of law, or have been directly involved in the programme. As far as white farmers like the Rosenfels are concerned, they paid good money for their farms, developed the land, and rooted their lives there. As far as those who have occupied the farms believe, they were robbed of the land during a British imperial drive north from South Africa in the 1890s and did not benefit from the Lancaster House independence agreement, which instead cemented their poverty. According to the agreement, white land ownership was guaranteed for 10 years and land redistribution was to be market-based, with the government buying land from willing sellers at market value with money from the British government. Critics have argued that Lancaster House contained no pro-active mechanism that would release enough land for a comprehensive rural resettlement scheme. The farms that were put up for sale were on an ad hoc basis. They did not solve glaring structural disparities where a single farmer could own several vast estates next door to an overcrowded communal area where, according to UNDP, poverty typically affects more than 84 percent of the population. After Lancaster House, there were repeated promises by the government on reform. While it introduced the principle of compulsory land acquisition at market-related prices into the constitution in 1990, passed laws to this effect in 1992 and designated a number of farms for acquisition in 1993, again not enough land was put up for sale to meet people’s demands. By the end of the 1990s, the government was under pressure from spontaneous land invasions. It responded in 1997 by designating 1,471 large farms for compulsory acquisition, an initiative which stalled over a lack of consultation with “stakeholders”, analysts suggest. In 1998 the government turned to a national land conference, but collided with the donors supposed to fund reform over issues of transparency. When the unilateral fast-track programme was introduced, Siziba, like others, decided to seize the opportunity. Taking a short break from building his new home on Rosenfels’ farm, Siziba told IRIN he was there to stay. “We come from Nthunukwe, Bezwe and Mlongwe. We were too crowded and we thought we were cheated out of the Lancaster agreement in the past, we decided to do what we should have done 10 years ago when we were supposed to have this land. So we are not actually at war. We are negotiating. We have come to an agreement with some of the commercial farmers and their association, so we are now on terms ... We thought we must come to occupy this land because it was agreed a long way back by the war veterans association,” he said. He added that like other war veterans, he was given a US $909 (Zim $50,000) pension payout in 1997. He bought four cattle with the money (he now has seven) but there was no space to graze them on his communal land. “We don’t have anywhere to plough. Our cattle have nowhere to graze. There are many people still there (on the communal lands). They still want more land and there is no space there ... This land, it looks like it could do better for our cattle,” he explained. The only primary school from the new settlement is at least six kilometres away. Siziba says the government has promised to build more schools, clinics and shops closer by. Its public agricultural support arm, Agritex, has also promised to help find suitable land for their maize fields and to help the new settlers obtain water for their crops. The land is harsh, cattle rearing land and any attempts to plough it would need plenty of water. “We want schools, clinics and boreholes. We are negotiating with government officials about these things,” Siziba said. He added that he was aware that the farm he has settled on is actually a hunting farm, but that he has not seen any game yet. “What we are saying is that we saw that from the rural areas up to this portion there was nothing actually being done here. It was just land lying about, so we took it and left them (the Rosenfels family) there where they can use their wildlife,” he said. “We plan to stay here and farm vegetables and rear cattle.” But stay is exactly what Max Rosenfels, a former ZANU-PF member of parliament, wants to do to - and he wants to do it on his farm. The 76-year-old explains that his Afrikaans grandmother and his German grandfather trekked with their ox wagon from South Africa to Bulawayo in 1894. “I was born in Zimbabwe and so was my father. We were born on a farm about 50 km south of here. I am one of nine children,” he told IRIN. The Rosenfels family arrived in Bulawayo at a time when Britain’s Chartered Company and the British South Africa Company was acquiring large tracts of land to further their mining ambitions. Many of the communities who were evicted by the colonial authorities were dumped on “Native Reserves” - with little or no compensation - or forced onto the wage market. Rosenfels says his grandmother saved money to buy the family’s first farm, about nine kms outside Bulawayo by running the city’s first laundry and livery stable. His father was a travelling salesman, trading in coffee, cloth and beads. The family sold the first farm after a few years and bought another in Marula, about 50 kms from Figtree. “Once a month my grandmother and my father could catch the coffeepot steam engine from Bulawayo, get off at Marula station and walk 12 kms to the farm to pay workers and buy any cattle available - generally to supervise the farming and to build a dam. She built the second dam in this country and it is still there today,” he said proudly. With the dam, the family was able to grow potatoes and other vegetables. Along with money from their businesses in the city, in 1947 the family bought the 24,000-acre farm that the Rosenfels family now lives on. Rosenfels, himself a war veteran, says his father bought him the farm from the BSA Exploration Company after he returned from Italy, where he served in the second world war. Then, in 1967, Rosenfels and a brother got together and bought another piece of land adjoining the farm. This piece of land, he says, was designated for acquisition by the government in 1993. In 1997 a number of people were resettled on the land. “We objected because the farms were in full use. The rhetoric of the time was that if you were actively using your farm you had nothing to worry about. So we challenged the intended acquisition and after four years of battling, we managed to reduce it to ‘take one farm and we keep one farm’. That was after negotiations right up to the level of then Vice-President Joshua Nkomo,” he said. “Initially, upon our objection to the designation, that was there plan they accepted, but they did it the wrong way around. They said they were going to take this one and we could have the one we didn’t live on. That was the beginning of negotiations that went on for four years. We were actually told not to worry, that we would not be harassed any more - that is part of our mistrust of this government,” said Peter Rosenfels, Max’s 37-year-old son who runs a thriving bottled pickles business from the safari farm. He raises cattle on the family’s third farm in Marula, which he inherited from his grandfather in 1969. He is furious about the fact that his family’s property has been invaded. “Every bit of development you see here, every fence, road and dam, you are looking at the source of that development - my dad,” he said emphatically. He says that the government has not yet offered the family compensation for the land they took or for the land they seem intent on taking. All three Rosenfels farms are now listed for redistribution. In fact, he says, the farms have been going to ruin. “This is a fully developed game farm with a 16-strand game fence around the entire outer perimeter. It has fully developed hunting roads throughout, a safari camp and more than 30 species of game,” he explained. Now that the farm has been invaded, however, the fence has been ruined and much of the game has been “eaten”, Peter Rosenfels says. “There is nobody who does not agree that there has to be land distribution. But they (Siziba and his community) are being committed to a lifetime of drudgery and being sentenced to poverty immemorial,” he stressed, referring to the dry land. This is not how Siziba sees it. He believes the soil will nurture his cattle and support his family. Rosenfels has no problem with this as long as it is not his land.