EC offers to fund probe into farm ownership. The embattled Commercial Farmers Union of Zimbabwe (CFUZ), which represents scores of white farmers who have lost their farms as a result of Mugabe’s controversial land reform programme, has been protesting for the government to proceed with the audit, which was recently shelved..
The Mugabe family’s personal agricultural enterprise is believed to comprise more than 12 large commercial farms.
“We want a land audit done as soon as possible. Our concern though is that the audit will not be done by a truly independent team according to international standards,” said Deon Theron, president of CFUZ.
The Zimbabwean government recently announced that it was seeking to establish an independent land committee – an inter-ministerial body to be made up of permanent secretaries and other senior government officials – to drive the land audit.
The audit, which was proposed to ensure the government’s “one-man-one-farm” policy, was called for in the 2008 Global Political Agreement for power sharing, and is one of the major targets set by Zimbabwe’s inclusive government during a ministerial retreat at Victoria Falls in August.
It was a key element of the power-sharing agreement in September last year that resulted in the formation of a unity government between Mugabe and the opposition Movement of Democratic Change, headed by Morgan Tsvangirai.
The audit, scheduled to have started last month, was shelved after lands minister Herbert Murerwa told Zimbabwean media that the government did not have the estimated US$31-million to conduct a process that is expected to take nine months.
The government has not commented on the European Commission’s offer this week to fund the entire audit. But the commission, which is the executive body of the European Union, has stated that it would only fund an inclusive, transparent and comprehensive land audit.
On Friday, Xavier Marchal, the head of the commission in Zimbabwe said the commission had has expressed its availability to support “a meaningful” land audit.
“We need now to discuss its content. What the European Commission would like to support is a land audit that resolves the land issue,” Marchal said. “We are aware that government said they need US$30-million for the land audit. But we have not received any concrete request with concrete explanations of what is needed. We remain ready, of course, to discuss this at any time.”
The farmers’ union welcomed the EC’s offer, but was critical of government’s involvement in the process, saying that it was “ridiculous” that the government would be involved in conducting and steering it.
“As an interested party they cannot be involved in auditing themselves. The final results of such a audit would be very questionable,” Theron added. “We want a land audit as soon as possible, but then it needs to be done by an international, independent body with no vested interest,” he said.
According to the union, an independent audit would not only reveal multiple farm ownership, but would also show “how corrupt the identification, allocation and evictions have been”.
Since 2000, when Mugabe began encouraging the invasion of the country’s white-owned commercial farms, food production in Zimbabwe has withered, hunger has afflicted millions of people and the national economy has collapsed.
The land grabs set off a scramble for the best farms among the country’s ruling elite, who often had little knowledge or interest in farming and simply used the seized farms for holiday getaways.
Mugabe’s relatives, as well as generals, judges, ministers and members of parliament, have been beneficiaries.
Today many farms lie fallow or are poorly managed and yield a fraction of their potential output.
Last month, the UK newspaper Sunday Telegraph reported that Mugabe’s wife Grace owned properties totalling about 4856 hectares.
The most important of these is Gushungo Dairy Estate, which until recently supplied milk to Nestl Zimbabwe, the local subsidiary of the Swiss company. The farm, which was reportedly selling up to one million litres of milk a year to Nestl, is managed by Russell Goreraza, Grace Mugabe’s son from her first marriage.
Last month Nestl SA’s Zimbabwean unit announced that it was no longer sourcing milk from the Mugabe farm.
Mugabe’s wife, who has assumed control of at least six of Zimbabwe’s most valuable white-owned farms since 2002, seized Gushungo Dairy Estate following a campaign of violence in the area over several months in 2003.
Sunday Times (SA)
Post published in: Politics