Abstract
The chaos surrounding land re-distribution and re-settlement in Zimbabwe follows on state denial and even open hostility to a number of people driven reforms. This covered irrigation settlement, access rules, pricing and management; District Planning, budgeting and land and member re-organisation and rights; communal wildlife integration; and land resettlement under a regional and national (Association of District Councils) proposals.
In each case the state, often the President, moved to stop fundamental reforms that would have produced autonomous rural communities with considerable financial competence. Nothing that disturbed party or state ability to patronise and to manipulate the countryside was tolerated although the reforms were also praised and used for ZANU electioneering purposes.
Most of the proposed reforms required a re-definition of village membership from a defunct right to a free good, land, to equal adult (men and women) democratic ownership of an asset holding and managing body. This reform is the most fundamental yet to come out of Africa: it acknowledges the structural shift from land abundance to land shortage, an ignored piece of history and of policy analysis.
A new government in Zimbabwe will probably pick up the national dialogue from these reforms. The UN Country Team's Relief and Recovery Plan for Zimbabwe, August 2001, does much the same and has the support of the MDC.
The paper also reports a similar exercise of reflection and of planning carried out by 121 villages within the Lubisi Dam Development Forum in the Eastern Cape in 1998/99. This is the most complete rural programme yet devised in South Africa, both internal membership, access, pricing, investment rules but also regional economic development and the means for the state and business to financially partner reform communities in investment, production, regional trade, service delivery and intra-district transport.
The right to equal ownership, to open but competitive access to productive resources, to working local economies, to membership of powerful investment bodies within and on new land bases and in cities by reform communities are profound developments awaiting more formal support. It is altogether a rights driven programme that opens up economically and financially efficient forms of partnership with the state and business.
The Preamble to our Constitution records our commitment to the attainment of social justice and the improvement of the quality of life for everyone. The Constitution declares the founding values of our society to be "human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms." These people created and centered reforms lay the foundation for the achievement of the nation's basic goals. They also require the restoration of working local economies to our dual, global and marginalised, economy and society model.
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