Kunonga’s land grab: former 10-ton-club farm lies idle

15 kilometres from the stone-clad cathedral of St Mary’s in central Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, where he officiates.
A visit to St Marnock’s at the weekend revealed a classic tale of the disastrous effects the sullied agrarian reform programme. The Zimbabwean found Kunonga’s son reclining in the grabbed seven-bedroom farmhouse overlooking a dam and what were once 2,000 acres of wheat and soya bean fields, now abandoned.
This farm used to be one of the areas under the prestigious “10 ton club.” But now what remains are derelict fields with overgrown grass. Equipment is locked away and there no agriculture taking place here, despite the fact that the nation is desperately short on food.
Round about this time, back in the day when St Marnock’s was still under the management of the previous owner Hale, who studied with the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, the farm would have been teeming with green fields of a knee high soya bean crop and a winter wheat crop.
The highly mechanized farm has been reduced to a wasteland, without virtually nothing under irrigation. The machinery is all lying useless in the sheds. And this year, no one has done anything about planting a crop for this season.
Hale was kicked off his farm some months before the 53- year-old bishop took it over.
Kunonga reportedly wanted the farm for property development because it was close to Harare. But this has not taken place.
It is believed Kunonga was given Hale’s farm by President Mugabe as a reward for his outspoken support, a move that has sharply divided Anglicans in Zimbabwe. The sycophantic bishop has mocked the president’s opponents as “puppets of the West”.
Mugabe’s policy of land seizures, which has plunged the country into its worst crisis since independence from Britain in 1980, is largely being blamed for a hunger crisis that threatens the lives of 4,1 million Zimbabweans.