Professor Tony Hawkins was responding to recent publications, including a book, which attempt to paint the land ‘reform’ programme in a positive light. The book, Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land, was written by three scholars, including UK based Joseph Hanlon.
The research in the book and the subsequent articles Hanlon has authored is based on an assessment of three farms in Mashonaland Central during one month last year.
The research pays little attention to the inhumanity of the land grabs, ignoring the human rights abuses that took place and the illegality of the process. Instead the authors spoke to the ‘fast-track’ owners of the seized farms they visited and looked at their ‘successes’. The book details how black Zimbabweans have successfully “taken back their land,” and farms are returning to the positive production levels seen in the 1990s.
But these details are being criticised as an attempt to ‘sanitize’ what happened during the land seizures that began in 2000, as part of a wider campaign to clean-up ZANU PF’s image.
Professor Hawkins has since also countered what he called this “misleading and dangerous” information, in a paper published last month. He argues that, crucially, “the success or otherwise of land resettlement in Zimbabwe cannot be judged by how many people are on the land now, but by what is produced, what incomes are earned and whether the economy as a whole benefitted.”
Describing Hanlon as “an apologist for ZANU PF’s chaotic politically-driven land programme,” Hawkins explains how Zimbabwe’s agricultural production has all but collapsed since the land grabs began. And 13 years on the country’s food import bill is well over $600 million a year, despite it being self sufficient before the farm takeovers started.
Hawkins criticises Hanlon and the other academics’ research for failing to mention “these inconvenient truths,” and instead focusing on “extremely dubious employment and farm occupation data.” Hawkins argues that the analysis by Hanlon “ignores the spillover effects of land resettlement elsewhere in the economy.”
“The fact is that – regardless of how many people found poorly-paid jobs in agriculture – land reform sparked a 40 percent decline in Zimbabwe’s GDP,” Hawkins states.
The economics Professor told SW Radio Africa that it is this key fact that cannot be overlooked and which emphasises how destructive the land ‘reform’ has been for Zimbabwe. He explained that it was not just the farms that suffered, explaining that the collapse in farm output “is mirrored by Zimbabwe’s de-industrialisation.”
“Hanlon’s failure to even mention the devastating impact of land resettlement on industrial production and thereby on value-addition, highlights his political and racist myopia,” Hawkins said.
He added: “There was also a total refusal to deal with the institutional side it, the whole question of corruption and lack of accountability and lack of transparency and so on, which everyone knows happened in the land reform programme. And to pretend it didn’t, seems to me misleading and dangerous. Particularly now that we have moved on to another form of land reform (that) has been applied to mining and elsewhere.” – SW Radio Africa
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