500,000 homeless after land grab

, but across Zimbabwe more than 400,000 former farm workers have become homeless refugees and another estimated 100,000 have lost their jobs since the seizure of white-owned farms began, according to agriculture organizations.
Mugabe’s land grab, launched in 2000, is touted by the aged leader’s Marxist government to have benefited more than 200,000 people.
Yet the scheme has created almost three times as many losers and the Supreme Court has found the programme, under which more than 4,000 farms have been seized so far, to be illegal.
Thousands of homeless people have streamed into the hills of Makonde communal area, 150 kilometres north-west of Harare.
Michael Bhasera, 27, lost his job as an irrigation worker when the white farm
where he lived was seized in 2002. None of the 300 workers on the farm
was awarded any land by the government.
Bhasera returned to live with his parents in Chiwiti village, and the family ekes out an existence from a few acres of dry land.
The white farm near Raffingora had been his home for 21 years and he attended a school established by his employer.
Bhasera said: “I am surviving with my parents, but there is no school, no clinic, little food, nothing.”
As Mugabe’s land grab has gathered pace more thousands living on the few remaining white farms are now at risk.
The government claims that displaced workers will be given land, but Philip Munyanyi, leader of a farmworkers’ union, said the promise was being broken. He said: “It is a disastrous situation. They are just creating poverty.”