Zanu (PF) threatens war over land

Mnangagwa made the threat during a live television interview with the state-run Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation last Tuesday during the burial of national hero Richard Hove in Harare.

Zanu (PF) has repeatedly insisted that its chaotic and often violent programme to redistribute land from whites to landless black peasants was irreversible, a stance which analysts is meant to protect powerful officials of the party who grabbed most of the best farms taken from whites.

Let it be known to anyone wanting to deny us this heritage we got from God that we are ready to fight them, said Mnangagwa who has in the past mobilised the army and the feared Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) against anyone seen as a threat to Zanu (PF)s entrenched system of political patronage.

Zimbabwe has faced severe shortages of food since 2000 when President Robert Mugabe sanctioned the violent seizure of white farms for redistribution to landless blacks.

The disturbances on the white farms that produced the bulk of the countrys food needs resulted in more than half of Zimbabwes 12 million population requiring food handouts from international relief agencies.

Mugabe — who denies that his land reforms caused hunger blaming the food crisis on natural causes — insists that farm seizures were necessary to correct a colonial land ownership system that reserved the best land for whites and banished blacks to poor soils

But critics say Mugabes cronies and not ordinary peasants benefited the most from farm seizures with some of them ending up with as many as six farms each against the governments stated one-man-one-farm policy.

Poor performance in the mainstay agricultural sector has also had far reaching consequences as hundreds of thousands of workers have lost jobs while the manufacturing sector, starved of inputs from the sector, is operating below 40 percent of capacity.

Analysts say the unity government headed by Mugabe with MDC party leader Morgan Tsvangirai serving as Prime Minister offers Zimbabwe its best chance in a decade to end its crisis and begin afresh on the road to sustainable economic and social recovery.

But many say major differences between Mugabe and Tsvangirai over fundamental issues such as the highly contentious issue of land reform could yet derail the unity government.

Both men agree on the need for land reform but differ on the way this should be carried out. Tsvangirai has called for an audit to establish who owns which land in Zimbabwe before an orderly land reform programme can be implemented but Mugabe has in the past accused the MDC leader of wishing to return land to former white owners.