Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe: Beyond White-Settler Capitalism

4. Nyabira-Mazowe War Veterans’ Association: A Microcosm of the National Land Occupation Movement

4 Nyabira-Mazowe War Veterans’ Association: A Microcosm of the National Land Occupation Movement Louis Masuko Introduction Land reforms have taken shape in many countries of the world, across all continents and at different stages of their respective development. In Zimbabwe, the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP), an outcome of invasions and subsequent occupations of Large Scale Commercial Farms (LSCF), shook the Zimbabwean and Western aristocrats’ establishment in 2000 and has been characterised as the ‘first radical shift in agrarian property rights in the post Cold War world’ (Moyo and Yeros 2005). The FTLRP radically changed, not only the unequal and inequitable land distribution in Zimbabwe, but insecurity of land tenure and unsustainable and suboptimal land use as well. It ended the hegemony of the minority whites on land and in the agriculture sector (Masuko 2004), empowered the landless black majority and set a solid pathway for solving the long standing land question in Zimbabwe. Opinion surrounding the causes of Zimbabwe’s land reform, the forces behind it, its timing, its outcome and its legitimacy differs, largely along lines of the diverse interests of the different contenders and/or their ideological inclinations. The overall controversy on the route taken by Zimbabwe’s land reform is whether it was indeed a part of a broader development strategy to propel the country to a sustainable social and economic growth path Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe: Beyond White-Settler Capitalism 124 (see Chambati and Moyo 2007), or meant to serve immediate political ends. The first perspective views land occupation and the FTLRP as a strategy to address the land question (Masuko 2004, 2008; Moyo and Yeros 2005; Moyo, Murisa and Helliker 2008). Central to this opinion is the understanding that the occupations were a culmination of a process that had been unfolding under the surface, to address a national question, since 1980 (Masuko 2004; Moyo and Yeros 2005; Sadomba 2008). The occupations, according to this view, were a protest by the landless against the ZANU-PF government (Masuko 2004; Moyo and Yeros 2005) for not utilising the two-thirds majority that it enjoyed in the 1990s to speed up the land acquisition and redistribution process. Indeed, this was a direct challenge to the neoliberal state, capital and the laws that protected the system (Masuko 2008). Conversely, an opinion is advanced that the occupations and the FTLRP were a political gimmick meant to bolster the waning support for the ruling ZANUPF party (Raftopoulos 2003; Hammar 2003; Sachikonye 2003). They highlight the strong hand of the state in the process, including the violation of the rule of law, human rights and good governance. Indeed the ‘beleaguered’ state had to create a crisis in order to sustain itself in power. Land occupations are viewed as an event that was only triggered by the rejection of the draft constitution of 2000 (MasiiwaandChipungu2004;RaftopoulosandPhimister2004;Hammar2003). Sustainability of the programme was brought into question as the land occupation movement was reduced to a single- issue partisan strategy focusing exclusively on the immediate question of land repossession, its distribution to Mugabe’s cronies and not meant to address long-term political, social and economic questions. Without losing focus on the substance at the core of these two contending opinions, this chapter explores the sustainability of Zimbabwe’s land reform from a social movement perspective. As a case study, it uses the Nyabira-Mazowe War Veterans Association (NMWVA), one of the many micro-organisations that led the invasions and occupations of Large Scale Commercial Farms (LSCF) in Zimbabwe. Two issues come to the fore. First, this chapter considers whether what some observers have seen as one movement or a top down state intervention was indeed a national movement made up of small groups of people controlled and led at the micro level, employing different strategies and tactics to achieve the same objective. Second, the chapter illuminates how new social and political structures, networks and institutions, that never existed before the land occupations, developed in the occupied areas. Such networks and institutions, it is argued, provide the necessary social capital and social structure conducive for future movement activity to take land reform beyond the single issue of land repossession. 125 Three questions are raised here to provide the theoretical framework within which the issues raised above are examined and analyzed. The central questions asked include: (i) what is the process that results in individuals engaging in occupations?; (ii...