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108 Introduction A large part of the explanation of the stagnation and decline of Zimbabwe ’s economic development, as assessed in Chapter 5, relates to the changing fortunes of its agriculture. No account of Zimbabwean politics, economics and social development would therefore be complete without assessing the significance of the land question. The issue of land – its ownership, control and utilisation – has been central to Zimbabwean politics for over a century, indeed since the country was colonised in 1890, and granted independence in 1980. Thus the history of the land question unfolded over many decades, depositing a residue of memories of dispossession , trauma and hardship amongst deprived blacks, and of conquest, superior production techniques and subsequent dispossession amongst white landowners (Palmer 1977; Moyo 1995; Sachikonye, 2004). State-sanctioned evictions of blacks from better-endowed land began in the 1890s and continued well into the 1950s and 1960s. Memories of dispossession were stoked by the liberation struggle which was mainly waged in the rural areas, including areas where there was commercial farming land, in the 1960s and 1970s. During the lost decades, there was no serious effort to resolve the land question. It was only in 2000, the year of the parliamentary elections, that it became a major political resource for ZANU-PF. For the first time since independence, its hold on power was seriously threatened by a fledgling opposition party, the MDC. The survival of the Mugabe government in the 2000 election ultimately hinged on the use of both the ‘carrot’ of land reform and the ‘stick’ of violence. In this chapter, we will not attempt to provide a full review of how the land question was addressed after 1980. There is plentiful literature on this (Raftopoulos, Hammar and Jensen 2003; Alexander 2006). We will confine much of our assessment to the land reform of 2000 to 2003 and the wider ramifications that constituted its aftermath. Without ignoring the key contours of the land question at independence and the significance of the largely peaceful and orderly first phase of 6 Land Reform & its Aftermath 109 109 Land Reform & its Aftermath reform in the first two decades, the chapter explores the consequences of jambanja (land occupation by force) and patterns of agrarian decline after 2000. We draw on some field research we carried out on the fate of farm workers and white farmers in 2003 as well as reflect on the subsequent rise of a black landed elite. The Land Question and the First Phase of Reform The structure of land ownership and use was clearly inequitable at independence . About 6,000 white commercial farmers owned 15.5 million hectares of land while 8,500 small-scale African farmers had 1.4 million. The rest, an estimated 700,000 communal farming households, subsisted on 16.4 million hectares. In other words, these households occupied less than 50 per cent of all agricultural land, of which 75 per cent was in the drier and less fertile agro-ecological regions 4 and 5. There was therefore a keenly felt sense of historical injustice and deprivation over the question of land, making it one of the most contentious issues negotiated at the Lancaster House conference. There were unconfirmed reports that the US and UK governments promised a package of USD1.5 billion to break the log jam in the negotiations about how land reform should be addressed. Whatever the actual promise might have been, the pledge was not enshrined in the Lancaster House Constitution, which instead contained onerous clauses on the protection of private property, including land. Indeed, the Constitution proved to be the major brake on the speed and scope of land reform during the first ten years of independence. It restricted the purchase of land for redistribution by means of the stringent ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ provisions. In general, the cost of land was high, to the degree that the purchase involved immediate payment of full value in foreign exchange, which significantly restricted the government ’s room for manoeuvre on the land question during the first decade of independence. This was the wider structural context in which the government’s land reform programme operated, with its centrepiece being the resettlement of the poor and landless. It was a programme whose overall objective in 1982 was to resettle 162,000 households on nine million hectares of land over three years. This would have represented a transfer of 23 per cent of households from congested communal lands onto new land. This did not [18.119.160...

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