Farm invasions leave 66 000 homeless

The report by the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ) said many of the farm worker-families were now living in the open by roadsides and in mountains where they have set up squatter camps because they have nowhere else to go.

The report titled Fresh invasions and challenges faced by farm workers in Zimbabwe, said the former farm workers and their families that include young children and in some cases pregnant women were facing trying conditions with many of them for example forced to walk long distances from their squatter camps in the mountains to collect water from rivers.

Many of the senior Zanu (PF) and military officials involved in the latest farm grabs are not actively involved in productive farming or simply have too many farms already that they cannot utilise their latest acquisition and therefore see no need to retain the workers whom, in any case, they regard as loyal to dispossessed white farmers.

Chaotic land reform

Mugabes chaotic and often violent land reform programme has never recognised the need to also resettle farm workers many of who are immigrants from neighbouring countries such as Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi.

These families have gone for months living in the open. The camps have registered a good number of people suffering from chronic diseases (while) no medical attention has been delivered to them. Farm workers have been turned into nomads and that leaves them vulnerable to diseases, the GAPWUZ report read in part.

The farm workers union said that farm invasions were intensifying and displacement of farm labourers was now occurring almost daily.

Regular raids by the police and officials from the offices of district administrators on the squatter camps force the evicted farm workers to remain mobile, exposing vulnerable children and pregnant women, it said.

Grave security situation

Apart from the threat of wild animals, violence by police and militia employed by new farm owners left the ejected farm workers in a grave security situation.

The union has noticed with concern on the mental health of the affected, it is not from the land reform alone but the organised violence and torture they are facing each day. We have recorded a good number of farm workers beaten and property scorched to ashes, the union said in a report.

The report by GAPWUZ that reveals the great suffering of black farm workers because of Mugabes land reforms came as the veteran leader defended his controversial farm redistribution programme in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last week.

Mugabe told Amanpour that farm invasions were the “best thing could have ever have happened to an African country”.

Citizens by colonisation

The 85-year-old President appeared to suggest white Zimbabweans had not right to own land in the country or even to claim citizenship, telling Amanpour that whites were citizens by colonisation who seized the land from our people.

The land reforms that Mugabe says were necessary to correct a colonial land ownership system that reserved the best land for whites and banished blacks to poor soils, are blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into food shortages after Harare failed to support black villagers resettled on former white farms with inputs to maintain production.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who formed a unity government with Mugabe last February 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.

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 as many of Zimbabwes industries that depended on a vibrant farming sector scaled down operations or closed shop altogether.