Mugabe vows to forge ahead with land reform

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has vowed to relaunch a controversial land redistribution programme that was blocked by the courts earlier this year, state media reported at the weekend.

Mugabe, addressing his ruling party’s central committee on Friday, said:
“Correct procedural steps [will] be reinstituted where the court has found them flawed”. He said the process would start again from scratch, regardless of international opinion, and follow the letter of the law.

A court had ruled in February that correct legal procedure had not been followed in the case of some 840 out of 1,500 white-owned farms the government had wanted to acquire for redistribution to landless blacks.

The bulk of Zimbabwe’s prime farm land is owned by a few thousand white commercial farmers. Millions of dirt poor rural Zimbabweans struggle to eke out a living on overcrowded and barren communal lands. The government has made repeated pledges since independence in 1980 to institute land reform, which has not been effectively implemented.

“The government uses the land issue to drum up support, it has become deeply politicised,” a political analyst told IRIN today.

Under current legislation farmers are entitled to full compensation for land acquired by the cash-strapped government for redistribution. At a land conference last year, Western donors agreed to help fund the programme if they could be assured of its transparency and economic benefits.

However, the donors preferred an “inception phase” in which initially far fewer farms were acquired, and where progress could be monitored, rather than the wholesale approach favoured by the government, a Western embassy official told IRIN.

He added that donors were adopting a wait-and-see approach to be convinced that the government’s new initiative is in keeping with the “process agreed at the land conference.”