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IMPLEMENTERS of land reform
had a clear vision of what the programme sought to achieve and within a short
space of time, the black majority had been empowered.
There is no other resource that can lead to full empowerment of the people than land. The vision hinged on land redistribution and agricultural production. Land reform has turned many people into landowners, something unimaginable some three decades ago. What has been disturbing though are stories about land not being fully utilised. In fact, what has been more worrying is the failure to explain the reasons for land under-utilisation. We have seen Government land audit teams visiting farmers to check the level of land utilisation This in itself is not bad. What is worrying however is the impression we get from the audits — that the visits are not carried out with a positive intent and that they assume everything is going wrong on the farms. While audit teams have been going round the farms, the same cannot be said of Government extension officers. We expected the land utilisation audit exercise would only be carried out after extension officers had played their role of advising farmers. This has however not been the case. There has been a tendency to push farmers beyond their capacity, yet capacity cannot be built overnight. There should be a transitional period allowed for farmers as they build up capacity. It is naive to think that once allocated land then a boom in agricultural production should be recorded. When farmers applied for land, they filled in five-year cash-flow projections, showing how much they had in savings, among other things. But before the five years are even over, threats to repossess under-utilised land have heightened. We would have thought that the situation needed to be fully explained. What seems to have taken place is that the millions of dollars the new farmers expressed in their applications have become worthless now because of rising inflation. When the empowered farmers applied for land then, the money was probably adequate for 40 hectares but now it is not even enough for half the hectarage. So it becomes unfair to continuously pin farmers against the cash-flow projections. As a matter of fact, the savings that most people expressed in the applications had not been made entirely for farming but were used to show interest for farming. There is no one, farmers included, who can claim to have money at any given time, to beat any level of inflation. That is not realistic. The land audit should not be concerned about repossessing under-utilised land but with the way forward and giving explanation to a host of problems that farmers face. It should not follow that the failure by a farmer to fully utilise land allocated means the land should be repossessed. If the farmer fully utilises 20 hectares out of 30 or 40 then the farmer must be given time to develop his potential. After all, we do not hope to see all new farmers being transformed into fully fledged commercial farmers overnight. Agricultural production should be seen as a development cycle where farmers are allowed time to build capacity before any drastic action is taken. Confidence is important in farming. The new land owners need confidence and there is no way they can have it when the threat of repossession is hovering over them. We hope the audit teams will take the issues we have raised into account, lest we lose the vision of land reform. The vision is not to give and take, but to allocate and help farmers build capacity so that they become self-reliant and reduce dependency on Government handouts. We have no doubt that the majority of beneficiaries of land reform have the capacity to make it and bring back the country to its status as the breadbasket of southern Africa. After all, Zimbabweans are inherently farmers. The season, which at one stage looked bleak, has suddenly sprung to life owing to the rains lashing across much of the country. The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
