I give a lift to people on my way home on Harare Drive and very often when I meet somebody, I speak to them in Shona, which I speak reasonably just zvishoma (enough, in Shona).
On one occassion when I was speaking to someone he said to me, “Oh! So you speak Shona…you must be a pastor!” I said, “Kwete, handisi pastor, ndanga ndiri murimi.” (No, I’m not a pastor, I was a farmer.) Then he said, “Oh, your pain is my hunger”.
The reality is we have talked a lot of economic issues here, we have talked of the loss that has occurred to the economy since the necessary to take land reform. I don’t wish to say these steps were not necessary. Clearly, I grew up under privilege and that privilege was not resolved exclusively by transfer of power at Independence. We need to do these things, we need to get it right.
The debate today is, how do we get it right?
We been floundering for too long?. We need to get to the point where our farmers are empowered and accountable. Access to land has come for many, that is democratising the space but with a growing population – we are always hearing (congratulations, on the birth of a new baby) because we have a younger generation coming in. Every time a new farmer is put on the land, we think he will mature and become an old farmer like me but 20 years on we still have new farmers.
I was only on my farm for 23 years which I leased in an environment where the farm had not been taken by Government after the war. Nobody wanted it. I leased it and I made my way: I didn’t have collateral to start with, I was a tenant. I had skills because I was a manager before. I got a stop order. After my stop order I got a five-year lease. On the basis of my five-year lease, once I ran out of money I went to the bank and said, “Help me shamwari, I can’t get through the season”.
On the basis of what they could assess, how much money do you want? How long do you want it for? How will you pay back? Can I trust you? What happens if you don’t pay back? Those were questions that were critical in getting finance. That side of the equation is not really and truly being truly addressed (currently). That’s our big problem.
Our farmers getting the 99-year leases won’t solve the problem of solve the problem of making our farmers accountable to the extent that the Minister (of Agriculture) maintains inordinate control over access…
I listened to my colleague from the Attorney General’s Office and one of the issues that is there – the unwritten law – is that the business or person that acquires land even under a 99 year lease needs to be an indigenous Zimbabweans. Now, I have been weaned from the origins of my colonial ancestors.
I’m a Zimbabwean. There are many others out there. We have a long queue of youngsters keen to restore Zimbabwe to a highly productive state. Their options to get access to land are very limited. If you are left on the farms as some few have been done – 300 odd farmers – getting an offer letter is like snake and ladders (game). You can’t get there easily. It’s dependent on a political process rather than objective criteria. That needs to end. It’s also dependent on rent seekers looking for signatures or money for signatures…we speak regularly about these and one of our issues is to show the stability of those farmers who have hung on. We have farmers out there: the thing that they are most afraid of is, which white vehicle is going to come at lunchtime (…) and say, sir it’s time to move.
We were investors. We invested substantially. I did run a farm until 1987. I invested everything I had. I left most of that behind. That is the case of 60 percent of commercial white farmers. There was an active market. That market is what sustained the industry. There was always failure. How did I get into farming? By buying the tractor from the guy that failed. How did I get into farming? Because the farm came up for lease and when I took it, I took on the risk and the responsibility.
There is something in this land process that says actually we want to defend land reform to the extent that those that benefitted must never lose that land. Sorry, I don’t buy that! The social justice of this means that in 1980 6000 white farmers owned half the land. We move on, we come to 20 years now, those people don’t own the land. The land has been captured by the State effectively but we still read in the newspaper everyday that Mr So-and-so owns this farm; Mr So-and-so owns that farm. Government is taking that farm from Mr So-and-so; why? Because he’s fallen out of favour. That’s not a way to run a business. If a man is capable and competent and productive he must be empowered.
We have 99-year leases waiting to be approved. They are not being approved because the property size is too great but if a man has an ability we don’t want to reduce everybody to a tuckshop seller when we could have big businesses operating side by side…
I was called into the lands committee (I was a rural district councillor) and I was asked why are all your farmers hanging in in here. I said, you only invited white farmers here where are there no black farmers?…Productivity was an issue. We saw land being removed from the market constantly from 1980. Four and half million hectares went out of the commercial sector for resettlement. Towards the end of that process a lot of land didn’t go into resettlement proper it went into the hands of well connected people and out of production.
