Zimbabwe’s long road to redemption seems to be well under way after the government announced that race will play no role in the land restructuring programme (LRP) it intends to roll out in the agricultural sector.
Addressing parliament last week Douglas Karoro, the deputy minister for agriculture among other things, said white farmers would be part of the process and that farmers who had been ejected from their land could expect to have it returned to them.
An extensive land audit is currently under way and expectations generally support the view that a significant review process is at a play, the kind of redress-in-the-making that will hopefully see a return of skilled expertise to Zimbabwe’s agriculture sector.
The audit and subsequent announcement of the LRP heralds a complete about-turn of the violent dispossession of farm land that was started in 2000 under Robert Mugabe’s presidency, resulting in the displacement of 6000 white farmers.
Some 300 000 black families benefited from Zimbabwe’s expropriation of land, most of which now lies fallow, bleeding billions out of a GDP that has been crippled by years of misrule under Mugabe.
In a show of intent by President Emerson Mnangagwa’s government to turn the agricultural sector around, at least one farmer, Andreo Malus, appeared poised to re-take land that was violently wrested from him.
But perhaps the most befitting form of redress might come in the shape of Mugabe himself who owns at least 21 farms.
If the LRP’s one-person-one-farm is properly applied, he may have to forfeit the lion’s share of his ill-gotten assets.
However, although news of the LRP has been well received, trade consultancy Africa House last year said it would take substantial reconstruction and investment to restore Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector to the glory days it once enjoyed as the continent’s so-called “bread basket”.
