HARARE - A 79-year white widow handed a suspended jail term for defying an order to vacate her home and farm to pave way for a new black owner has appealed to the High Court seeking to block the government from evicting her. Harare Magistrate Archie Wochiunga more than a week ago slapped Hester Theron with a three-months jail term wholly suspended for five years for defying a government order to vacate her Friedenthal farm in Beatrice, near Harare.
The government says it wants to hand over the farm to a new black owner as part of President Robert Mugabes controversial land redistribution programme.
Wochiunga gave Theron up to December 8 to leave the farm that has been her home for the past 57 years. But her lawyer Godfrey Mamvura said last week lodged an appeal with the High Court seeking the court to stop the government for evicting the widow.
“We have filed an urgent court application seeking an order to stop her eviction,” said Mamvura.
Mugabe has over the past decade driven most of Zimbabwes white farmers off the land in a campaign that derailed the mainstay agricultural sector to plunge the country into food shortages and economic crisis.
The Zimbabwean leader insists his land reforms are necessary to correct a colonial land tenure system that benefited whites and deprived blacks of arable land.
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.
The Southern African Development Communitys Tribunal has declared Mugabes land reforms discriminatory, racist and illegal under the regional Treaty.
Post published in: Politics