Zimbabwe’s white farmers are fighting for their land

Zimbabwean commercial farmer Dave Connolly has seen it all before: the intimidation, the threats, the patronage system, and the legal battles.

Having managed to hang on to his farm when more than 4,000 of his contemporaries were violently dispossessed of theirs in the years that followed the introduction of the government’s controversial land reform programme in 1999, he now faces an uncertain future.

Since August he has been in a legal battle against Ray Ndhlukula, one of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s top aides, who arrived on his property two months earlier and said the farm now belonged to him for free.

“This guy arrived with an offer letter on my farm and said he was moving in on August 1st and that I should pack my bags and go,” recalls Connolly, who farms in the Figtree area of Matabeleland.

Zimbabwe’s land reform programme officially began in 1980 at the start of independence from white minority rule with the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement, and as long as the willing-buyer, willing-seller principle was applied the British government had agreed to fund it.

The programme’s stated intention was to resettle landless blacks in a bid to tackle the ownership imbalances created by British colonial rule. However, it descended into chaos in 2000 when land invasions spearheaded by so-called war veterans became the order of the day; of the thousands of white farmers at the time, only between 300 and 400 are still there.

Now, it seems many of these individuals are under threat again. In January the government said white farmers had 90 days to leave their farms, although those who supported Zanu-PF – Mugabe’s ruling party – would be spared.

‘Offer letter’

Under the land programme farm beneficiaries must obtain an official “offer letter” from government for a property before they can take it over.

Connolly asked Ndhlukula to produce his original offer letter. Ndhlukula failed to produce it, and instead went to a magistrate’s court, got an eviction order and moved into Figtree Farm on August 1st, evicting Connolly, his 75 employees and their families.

Refusing to back down, Connolly secured a high court order allowing him to stay until an original offer letter was produced, but Ndhlukula has refused to budge – even though he is threatened with 90 days in jail for ignoring the Bulawayo high court’s direction.

“This has been going on for 15 years now but there has been a recent upsurge in prosecutions and court cases where commercial farmers are fighting to keep their land,” said Connolly, who farms beef, dairy and market vegetables.

Connolly was targeted in 2002. However, he says he refused to be intimidated and fought and won his eviction through the courts: “From 2003 until May 1st last year they left me alone because they did not have the courts on their side, and they saw I wasn’t going to lie down, but Mugabe has nothing to give his supporters any more to fuel his system of patronage.

“I think the common demominator in all of these recent cases is that the people taking over the land are from the president’s office. One of the reasons this has sprung up again is that some of the farmers who survived got into bed with the Mujuru faction in Zanu-PF [the ruling party] to do so.”

Former vice-president Joyce Mujuru was, along with her alleged supporters, purged from the ruling party by Mugabe over the past few months because they were a perceived threat to the ageing dictator.

Indeed, a number of farm beneficiaries suspected of being Mujuru supporters are also facing state-backed eviction.

The state owns all the commercial farm land in Zimbabwe, which amounts to 7.2 million hectares.

Connolly’s case is down for hearing at the supreme court of appeal on June 10th, and it is a case which will likely be closely watched by the EU.

‘Wrong signals’

In March EU head of delegation to Zimbabwe, Philipe Van Damme was quoted by the local

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newspaper as saying recent remarks by Mugabe about taking all the remaining white farms was sending the wrong signals to potential investors and undermining government’s economic revival plans.

“The EU has never questioned the need for land reform, but it has to be implemented in the interest of all and in strict adherence to the constitution and the principle of respect for the rule of law,” he said.

Last year Zimbabwe's state-run newspaper The Herald claimed that 300,000 families had benefited from land reform since 1999. However, critics maintain the programme primarily supports the system of patronage Mugabe uses to retain support.

According to Africa Check, a non-profit organisation, official figures from the Ministry of Lands and Rural Resettlement suggest the number of recipient families is closer to 169,000, but some of these no longer benefit.

However, according to members of the NGO community in Zimbabwe, thousands of black farmers are becoming successful, especially in the tobacco and poultry production sectors, albeit on a much smaller scale than the commercial farmers they have replaced.

Harare-based agriculture consultant Charles Taffs said that traditionally black farmers also grew much of the country’s maize, producing between 1.2 and 1.4 million tonnes each year out of the 1.8 million tonnes needed to feed the population. The commercial sector could be relied upon consistently to produce the rest using irrigation, he added.

“We can no longer rely on this as the small farmers are entirely dependent on rain-fed crops, and when you get a season like we just have had now, which had poor rains, I doubt we will reach 500,000 tonnes of maize ... Add this situation to the regional shortfall, which is expected to record a deficient of six million tonnes, and you can see we are in trouble.”

First in a series of three.