The MDC urgently calls for a comprehensive, transparent and non-partisan land audit during the tenure of the 7th Parliament of Zimbabwe in line with the requirements of the Global Political Agreement to reassert agricultures pole position as our economic mainstay.
The party sees the urgency of the audit as paramount to national survival following latest reports indicating the misuse of a large swathe of prime land seized during the last 10 years of Zanu PF madness that annihilate commercial agriculture and plunged the nation into famine and food insecurity.
For the first time, the normally pliant state media, in a report published on Wednesday, 1 December 2010, acknowledged the undisputed failure of Zanu PF false, faulty and primitive accumulation economic model inspired by a fiefdom script which has turned serious farmers into land tenants of Zanu PFs elite. The so-called invader-sponsored land leases bear testimony to Zanu PF and Mugabes insincerity about land reform. They knew, right from the beginning, that none of the senior officials who now control a whooping five million hectares of choice plots of this finite resource were ever interested in commercial agriculture beyond fulfilling a sucking, vacuum cleaner mindset of licking out and pillaging anything that moves.
The story of Hurungwe, in particular, and several hubs of commercial agriculture, in general, provides ample proof that Mugabe and Zanu PF merely wanted to loot the farms and strip them of all their valuable assets while enjoying their last super in power. It beggars belief that after what Zimbabweans went through supposedly in the name of correcting historical imbalances, the same Zanu PF officials are now sitting back advertising the farms and pleading for rent-paying tenants.
Article V of the GPA is very specific. It requires Zimbabwe to undertake a land audit to clean up Zanu PFs fetid waste spluttered on our national heritage and primary resources in the name of land reform; and to stop the disastrous actions of the new landlords and ladies. This must be done before the retirement of the 7th Parliament of Zimbabwe. For a whole decade, Zimbabweans remain amazed that theirs is the only country in world where a president, close to 2 000 Mugabes loyalists in Zanu PF, cabinet ministers, senior army and government officials and judges are the only ones with prime commercial farms in a nation of 14 million people.
The people of Zimbabwe have never understood what has befallen them, to be so unfortunate to have the nations political elite purport to combine the demanding affairs of state, governance and public service with an equally complex industry like commercial agriculture. For that reason, the people are pressing for a land audit to enable them to revisit the Mugabe and Zanu PFs land reform exercise; and to work as a nation for the restoration of full productivity on all agricultural land that would have been redistributed irrespective of race, gender, religion, ethnicity or political affiliation.
The chaos in the former commercial farms, plantations and wildlife conservancies, where certain individuals are now being subjected to blackmail and rent-seeking schemes, smack of deliberate effort to continue the looting; to subject other Zimbabweans to aura of permanent insecurity and abuse. There can never be any meaningful production in an insecurity business environment, hence the reduction, by Mugabe and Zanu PF, of the entire Zimbabwean land mass into dead capital today.
Indications of this heinous and scandalous plot were exposed by, among others, a Robson Goredema the Mashonaland West secretary of the war veterans association who boldly claimed, in The Herald story, that he has been leasing the farm he invaded for an eight percent rental fee from another Zimbabweans farming business. He even had the audacity to claim that he wants to raise the stake to 51 percent in line with Zanu PFs indigenisation policy! The ideals of the liberation struggle abhor such behaviour where a new Zanu PF crony society of about 2 000 people now claim to own territory the size of Slovakia at a time when millions of desperate Zimbabweans continue eke out a living on rocky outcrops in scattered villages dotted around poor rainfall areas. The area under the control of this minority clique represents nearly 40 percent of the 14 million hectares of prime land now either lying fallow, derelict or abandoned.
That all Zanu PF ministers and their deputies, security service chiefs, senior civil servants are multiple commercial farm owners explains the difficulties the MDC has faced to nudge the inclusive government to put people first, improve the economy and bring Zimbabwe back to life in a short period of time. Our much needed exports from agriculture have fallen from about 50 percent in 2000 to negligible receipts in 2008. Lack of activity on the farms proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Zanu PF elite was never interested in agriculture; but in looting and dispersing unionised farm workers Mugabe assumed to be a potential catchment area for MDC support.
What is more disconcerting is the plight of these former farm workers who suffered immeasurably in the past 10 years; and today, lie scattered in the bush after the Zanu PF merchants of violence and deceit wilfully started a ruckus and tampered with their livelihoods and basic sustenance. Unless the land audit commences soon, the signs of instability shall remain deeply etched in the peoples hearts and minds. Fortunately, the MDC is fully behind the nation in the call for order. Together, we are confident that we shall win.
Together, united, winning, ready for real change!
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