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Land reform: moral and spiritual issue of our existence
This article was written by Itayi Garande on 27 January, at 12 : 37 PM
Land has been the moral and spiritual issue of our existence. It is the most pressing moral and spiritual issue today, thus it demands serious public discourse.
A recent review by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Former UK Defence Secretary and Foreign Secretary of a book by Joseph Hanlon, Jeannette Manjengwa and Teresa Smart entitled “Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land” read:
“Land and farming rights have been the most powerful issue in Zimbabwe for over 100 years, as I discovered when I wrote my MSc thesis on this subject in the 1960s. … agricultural production is now returning to the level of the 1990s. If tens of thousands of poor Zimbabwean farmers are now able to make a livelihood from the land, some significant good will have emerged from a terrible period of Zimbabwe’s history.”
The book makes some bold observations, devoid of the usual politicisation of the subject of land by the media.
Based on a range of studies, complemented by data obtained on the ground, it offers an antidote to many myths on the land question and a balanced, positive and nuanced assessment seldom found in many political or media writings on the subject.
One of the boldest and courageous criticisms in the book was against Amnesty International. The authors accused the human rights organisation of exaggerating the plight of farm workers who were forced off formerly “white” land. They say that by 2011 the number of people working on resettlement land had increased more than fivefold, from 167,000 to over a million.
As a human rights organisation, AI should have celebrated the resettlement of the over one million people.
The book also breaks the myth that white farmers were very successful in Rhodesia and later in Zimbabwe after independence. White farmers underutilised the land that was taken after various notorious pieces of legislation were passed by the white minority regime, including the Land Tenure Act, Land Husbandry Act and the Land Apportionment Act.
White farmers were given huge subsidies by the Smith regime, but nevertheless before 1980, 30 percent of them were insolvent and another 30 percent broke. Almost 66 percent of rich arable land lay fallow.
Contrary to popular belief, it was the post-independent government and communal farmers who delivered to the Grain Marketing Board that earned Zimbabwe the status, “Breadbasket of Southern Africa” allowing the country to take responsibility for sub regional food security.
Meanwhile many white commercial farmers were producing cash crops for the export market.
Public discourse on land is important for Zimbabwe. It has to be put high on the agenda, because of its capacity to drive people out of poverty, but also to enrich them spiritually and morally.
The moral outrage we face today comes from the alienation we face, alienation from the land. That alienation has made us complacent, self-deprecated and in some sense left us feeling relatively impotent.
We are not as passionate about our land anymore. Yet, through land we will dissipate reactivate the energy we had before, that made us demand our independence and create a multiracial, multiethnic society where one person enjoys one vote.
Politicians from all sides have a role to play and desist from the usual political overtones that do nothing for the people, and undermine their ability to think critically and challenge deeply rooted assumptions.
We need a public discourse that addresses the national question – the land question. More importantly, we need politicians who can understand this need, not fight it because by doing so they are demonizing their own people.
We should shatter the stereotypical perception that land reform is evil.
The media has a role to play in this process. It has been complicit in extending the usual line against the land reform programme in Zimbabwe without the accompanying research, and thus has been a vast wasteland on this issue.
Media platforms are at their best when used to challenge people’s perceptions on the views they hold, not reinforce bad ones. The media should help Zimbabweans expand their inventory of ideas, and help them look at their collective future through a different prism. It should also help them understand the Socratic principle of what it means to be human.
So far Zimbabwe has been held in place by the fight back of the people, and no so-called progressive politicians can claim to have transformed their thinking. Zimbabweans have an inbuilt resilience learned through years of struggle. This has made them creative, social entrepreneurs, and made their families always able to pull together.
The fight back of normal people should lift our spirits. The least politicians can do is reconnect people with the land. It is where their ancestral bones are interred, and where their sustenance comes from.
Most of all, land is not just about material prosperity, it is where the dignity of all those who suffered for centuries as second class citizens comes from.
*Itayi Garande is the editor of the Zimbabwe Guardian. He can be contacted via info@talkzimbabwe.com. If you would like to take part on the programme Bottom Line, please email info@talkzimbabwe.com.
One Comment
1.
Brett Mashingaidze, 1 hour ago Reply
A great show. I liked the way in which you tied in the land reform exercise with Davos and the neoliberal agenda. Many of our people do not understand the link between these issues. We need more programmes like these not the usual half-baked reportage we get from other Zimbabwean sites. Well done George Shire, very articulate and incisive.
Labels: GEORGE SHIRE, LAND REFORM, MEDIA, NGOs
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Political settlement should not fail
George Shire - Opinion
Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:39:00 +0000
MOST people will be aware that MDC-T’s constitution stipulates that its president can hold that office for a maximum of 10 years. If this is true, then it means that come February 2009, Morgan Tsvangirai will no longer be president of MDC-T and maybe then the party will choose another "surname". He will not be able to sit in Parliament either unless by some miracle somebody else resigns their seat and offers it to him, never mind the electorate who may have other ideas.
The party may even choose Bennett as their new "surname", or, better still, Chamisa-Bloch if that other fellow they used to call Bismarck for organising strikes and sit-ins about sadza and butter beans at Goromonzi High School does not join the fray. Some of us have had enough of Tsvangirai’s and his party’s antics.
He signed the Memorandum of Understanding that set out the agenda for the talks and he signed the political deal itself which, among other things, spells out that the deal is most certainly not about the transfer of power, but a political settlement laying the basis for an inclusive Government with Zanu-PF in the driving seat.
It is about resolving the political and economic challenges facing Zimbabwe.
That political settlement does not give MDC-T any power of veto, what they are given in order to sit at the high table other than the number of chairs they can sit on.
They should stop playing hard ball about those issues that they failed to achieve during the negotiations.
The real problem for the opposition is that they do not understand politics as a production.
They fail to understand that their political fate depends on whether or not they can construct a politics that is able to address itself to a range of different points of antagonism in Zimbabwean society.
They have fallen into the trap of the old mechanical economism and believe that if you control the Ministry of Finance you can move the rest of life. Somebody needs to remind them that the nature of power in the modern world is that it is constructed in relation to political, moral, intellectual, cultural and ideological questions.
Somebody needs to remind them that they will arrive in the ministries that they cavort and discover that power has moved to somewhere and to somebody else.
Morgan Tsvangirai does not like the deal that he put his signature to.
David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, is of the same view.
He says so in his latest statement published on the British Foreign Office website.
They are determined to see the efforts that Zimbabweans have so far made in the form of the political settlement fail. Morgan Tsvangirai signed up to the deal which spells out the composition of the Executive.
There is already unanimity on who the President and Head of State is; who the two Vice-Presidents to be nominated by the President and/or Zanu-PF are; we know there will be an Office of the Prime Minister following Constitutional Amendment 19 and that office will be occupied by Morgan Tsvangirai; we know that there will be two Deputy Prime Ministers; 31 ministers and 15 deputies.
The order of seniority and authority is clear for all to see.
The problem for Tsvangirai is that he had promised his supporters that he could deliver more.
One prominent MDC supporter in London who supplements his living as bus driver for London Transport has been handing out invitations to journalists in the West to attend his inauguration as the next Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Critics of the Zimbabwean Government and Zanu-PF are once again in full throttle.
They had hoped to sabotage Cde Thabo Mbeki’s efforts in facilitating dialogue between Zimbabwean political leaders.
George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice conveyed their so-called reservations to Cde Jacob Zuma.
Cde Zuma told the Americans that the ANC and its government back Cde Mbeki in his role as mediator as per Sadc and AU resolutions on the subject. What is clear for all to see is that Tsvangirai and his handlers would like to see the political deal fail.
Morgan’s choreographed antics about passports are the stuff of lessons learnt in tutorials given to him at those boring golf matches.
While a majority of ordinary Zimbabweans are struggling to make ends meet and other heads of state who have full schedules of their own are busy trying to find a solution to our crisis, he goes out to play golf.
I guess when the Council of Ministers finally meets he will be able to tell them what efforts he has taken to turn around the economy during his golf matches.
British and American interest goes beyond killing the political settlement and their daft regime change agenda. Their desire is to integrate "parts" of Africa into the world economy.
Those parts contain raw materials and oil.
In Zimbabwe their interests are about land, fresh water, energy and natural resources, education, health, and the privatisation of the entire public sector.
They are also interested in promoting a level of law and order — control of populations — under the guise of development in states with resources and those without.
In Sadc all those political parties and institutions that grew out of the national liberation movements are now the West’s main enemies.
It is not far fetched to entertain the possibility that the CIA and MI5 may have something to do with the tensions that are going on in the ANC or the spread of xenophobic attacks that gripped South African cities recently among communities that have lived together as migrant workers for hundreds of years.
The United States initiative to create Africom, to securitise the continent and provide a rationale to intervene, should be understood in that vein.
What we now see is greater incorporation of some states and promotion of paternalistic development in others.
This leaves Africa vulnerable and dependent upon the West.
It is a dependency that is shaped by the West’s desire to access Africa’s resources and drive primitive accumulation.
It is all about an attempt to modernise Africa for dispossession, and in Zimbabwe this has been characterised by the struggles over land, mining, fresh water, new technology, and labour.
The poverty of Zimbabwe and Africa is a reflection of the continent’s having been a playground of neo-liberal zealotry from the 1970s onwards.
The West refuses to engage Africa on how the continent’s uneven incorporation into the world economy has been constructed historically, how responsibility for that can be addressed, and how Africans themselves can build local agendas for national and regional development without the interference of NGOs, donors and the G8.
That is why they love Morgan Tsvangirai so much. Good governance is one of those labels that are conveniently attached to any state that is in a subordinate relationship with the West. Development in the age of neo-liberalism has come to mean a dependant relationship.
Need I say Botswana, Botswana, and Botswana?
Attempts by African states to control national resources, to promote alternative development, to empower ordinary people are crushed and donor assistance is only forthcoming if you toe the line.
You do not have to be a genius to realise that the Zimbabwean Government’s efforts to turn around the economy through the land distribution programme have been thwarted by the combined effect of the European Union’s not so smart sanctions and the US’s so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA).
Globalisation in Africa has come to mean that you have an active civil society but making sure you control it; have an electoral politics but ensure that no radical politician takes power; have improved transparency around minerals, the land, oil wealth and the like but do not allow indigenous people control over resource access.
Zimbabweans deserve better.
The political settlement provides a real opportunity for our people to come together.
It must not be allowed to fail because of somebody’s ego.
Equally, Zimbabweans cannot be held to ransom by an individual whose personal ambition has nothing to do with the hopes and aspirations of all our people, the Sadc region and the rest of the African continent.
Labels: GEORGE SHIRE, MDC, ROY BENNETT
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George Shire gets a word in (notice the negative scrawl that starts as soon as he starts to speak - Australian tv doesn't trust it's audience to make up it's own mind - or perhaps they know how thin their anti-Zimbabwe lies are and how easily they are punctured).
Roy Bennett shows what an insufferable rhodesian dirtbag he really is. This doesn't bode well for the future of Zimbabwe.
From the website:
With no challenger after the opposition leader announced his withdrawal, and with this Friday's presidential run-off virtually meaningless, is it time for the international community to intervene in Zimbabwe? Will the elections become a referendum on Mugabe's policies?
Labels: GEORGE SHIRE, RHODESIA, ROY BENNETT, SANCTIONS
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