According to the state-controlled Sunday Mail newspaper, the National Agricultural Land Audit which was conducted in the country’s 10 districts and 10 provinces between October and November last year and only covers 6 per cent of the targeted land, also revealed that some farmers sold the farms and others leased them without government approval.
Tendai Bare, chairperson of the Zimbabwe Land Commission that was in charge of the auditing process which involved over 18,000 farmers, told the newspaper that fraudulent land allocations and other gross irregularities resulted in low agricultural output in the country.
As a result, the commission recommended a thorough clean-up exercise to ensure that land is utilized accordingly unlike today in which thousands of farmers are failing to till the land due to lack of financial resources, poor planning and multiple farm ownership, which has resulted in haphazard land tillage, improper record keeping, employment of unskilled managers and different government departments issuing lease agreements and other documents.
Agriculture Minister Perrence Shiri says he has seen the audit report and expects the government to work on it soon. Zimbabwe seized productive white-owned commercial farms in 2000, leaving over 4,000 whites stranded, a situation that angered Britain and other nations tied to white Zimbabweans.
Agricultural expert, Mandla Nkomo, says the audit may result in the transformation of Zimbabwe’s land reforms, leading to huge investments by local and international business entrepreneurs.
“I can say without any equivocation that, as I speak to you I’m in The Netherlands, people are aware of the potential of Zimbabwean agriculture, people are willing to participate in reforming Zimbabwean agriculture … What they need is confidence and if this audit can be used as a tool for creating confidence I think it will attract the right kind of partners around the table to move this forward.
“We just need to manage the process better and I think people will step up and make sure that we move this forward and remember that the private sector does not mean companies only listed on the New York Stock Exchange, it means people like you and me. We also have a role to play and we can play a role if the right conditions are created for us.”
For the last two decades Zanu PF has denied that its land redistribution was flawed and now its own funded land audit tell us the process was “fraudulent and (full of ) other gross irregularities resulting in low agricultural output in the country”. The consequences of the collapse of the agricultural sector were not just the country losing its prized position as the breadbasket of the region and the failure to produce enough for our own consumption. The collapse of the agricultural sector triggered the collapse of the economy too because the agricultural sector was the engine of the national economy. The economy collapsed and its recovery is dependent on the reviving of the agricultural sector.
Zanu PF cannot be trusted to revive the agricultural sectors because the same reasons of incompetence and corruption behind the fraudulent and other irregularities in the allocation of the farms are still valid today. Besides, the people of Zimbabwe were denied a meaningful say in the allocation of the seized farms because Zanu PF rigged the elections. It is makes sense that the people’s right to a meaningful vote must be restored to make sure the mistakes of the past are not repeated.
Zimbabwe’s land redistribution, economic recovery and restoration of the individual rights to free, fair and credible elections are all intertwined. Zanu PF rigged last year’s elections and the party must step down to allow for the appointment of a interim administration that will be tasked to implement the reforms designed to end the curse of rigged elections.