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81 Healing & the Future The land ‘reform’ programme, with its ‘one-off satisfaction’, would leave Zimbabwe having to inherit many problems. Regaining agricultural productivity and halting ecological depredation are only two of them. Equity, however, will be the key issue. What was meant, crudely, to establish an equity in terms of racial ownerships of the land has become a series of inequities in terms of which black person now owns what. Many people now have a stake in not giving up what they have acquired, because what they have acquired – at no personal cost – is so attractive. How, I asked Morgan Tsvangirai, do you set about a process of national healing when people still retain what they have inequitably gained? Well, I think unscrupulous gains are not equitable. What we need is a rationalisation process. We cannot allow people to have five farms whilst others don’t even have a small plot of land. I remarked that a certain well-known intellectual, an aficionado of Shivji ’s vision of peasant revolution and peasant ownership, is rumoured to have acquired four farms. (Laughs.) Yes, yes indeed. But the question is: what rationalisation programme? There is a Land Commission trying to deal with the equity aspect and the legal aspect. But you cannot move to that stage unless you have done a national audit of what’s there. This is where you establish whether Mr well-known so-and-so has four farms, or what. But you must understand we have to break the political patronage that was used by ZANU(PF) to distribute this national asset. We can’t go back to pre-2000 but, at the same time, we are not going to endorse what ZANU(PF) has done. Without in some way endorsing, or just accepting it, how will healing begin? I asked whether any other course would not simply inflame political difficulties. No, the rationalisation programme will be equitable to the extent that those who have will have something which is equitable in relaHealing & the Future Citizen of Zimbabwe: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai 82 tion to others – rather than ‘what I have got cannot be touched’. We cannot have such a solution. After all, it’s ZANU(PF) patronage to ZANU(PF) followers. What about the majority – who just happen to be MDC supporters? So again it needs to be thought through. The rationalisation programme must be seen to be equitable, legal, transparent – so the land tenure system that is put in place is seen as transparent by everybody. Besides, we are not only talking about the new areas. We also have other neglected areas, the communal areas for instance. The small-scale farming areas where people have farms but they are not doing anything with them. That’s why the audit is important because it will tell you who has to be there, how it is to be done, what kind of land tenure system, with what objective . Because I am sure that within a period, and I don’t foresee this as a short-term issue – this is a five- to ten-year national programme , this is the kind of period I am looking at – it has to be slow, but it has to be final. I noted that the agricultural consequences of land seizure and redistribution did not reveal any great agricultural thinking on ZANU(PF)’s part. What expertise will the MDC be able to draw upon for a longterm rationalisation programme? We have already got people who are agricultural experts. And the Commission itself, with Professor Rukuni who has done the first Commission report, we believe that we can utilise that kind of expertise , we can bring it in. What is the feature of the ZANU(PF) methodology is that it is haphazard, it is unscientific, it is chaotic. What you need is to bring order and legality, a long-term tenural system, so that people can start investing and making productive use of the land again. And I stress that the rationalisation programme is not a revenge programme. Even Mr Well-known So-and-so, even if he no longer has four farms, we are not revenging. We are putting in order a system which will create the healing you are talking about. Because there are so many people who have been excluded from the whole process. How do you justify that we are replacing a white minority elite with a black minority elite? The asset has to be equitably shared...

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