At the 1982 Land Policy workshop, R.M Mupawose (from the Zimbabwe Ministry of Lands, Resettlement and Rural Development) proposed that: “… land policy … has so far been focused on land redistribution, that is, acquiring land from commercial landlords and transferring it to landless peasants”. It took fifteen years for Mupawose’s assertions to become a reality, and during that time, the policy underwent some interesting changes. Most notably, for the first fifteen years of the redistribution program, most of the “landless peasants” that were initially targeted to receive land did not receive the distributions they were hoping for. The distressing reality is actually quite different from the plan’s initial objectives. In 1997, fifteen years later, “Mugabe also suddenly announced that at long last government would begin implementing the Land Designation Act and 1500 mainly white-owned farms were identified for redistribution” (Bond and Manyanya, 39). What neither Mupawose nor Mugabe mentioned was that “recipients of the farms would include wealthy politicians ahead of land-starved peasants” (39). The unabashed inequity of the Zimbabwean reallocation scheme has sown the seeds of civil unrest that future regimes will have their work cut out to manage. To be workable, a reallocation scheme must be even-handed and egalitarian. Part of the problem specific to Zimbabwe is that the “acquirable commercial land”, as Mupawose termed it in 1982, is land which has long since been adapted to modern, technology-intensive agricultural usage patterns. The difficulty with redistribution is that these farms are high-efficiency, high-intensity agro-commercial assets, orders of magnitude more productive than individual farm units of comparable acreage. The Zimbabwean reallocation policy is neither sufficiently nuanced nor flexible to take this into account. In inadequately managing what is essentially a re-nationalized resource, the Zimbabwean government has failed to act in the interests of its people.
Tobacco exports have generated massive foreign exchange revenues for the country in the past, and it is clearly in the national best interest to continue to exploit a valuable revenue stream. Inefficient farms and failed harvests are incalculable damaging, as Mugabe is now realizing to his cost. Reallocation, as a process, is like many other aspects of national management where a valuable, scarce resource is allocated by a government not well known for transparency and accountability. Corruption and nepotism have been widely documented.
Zimbabwe’s recent history of dubious election results and food lines illustrates the unequivocal failure of Mugabe’s government to take an opportunity to even what was an inequitable distribution of wealth.
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