The abrupt announcement by the government that farmers who benefited from the land seizures that took place two decades ago will be given full title, which will allow them to sell the property, had the hallmarks of yet another knee jerk policy decision.
Zimbabwe embarked on a radical land reform programme at the turn of the millennium, which saw the often violent seizure of nearly 5 000 commercial farms owned by white Zimbabweans and other foreign nationals ostensibly for redistribution to landless indigenous people.
Subsequent land audits done by the government revealed that some politically exposed people helped themselves to multiple farms. The biggest beneficiaries of the land reform programme were members of the ruling Zanu PF party and top civil servants.
A sizeable number of the beneficiaries are not utilising the land due to lack of capital and resources.
Some have, in the past few years, reached out to former farm owners to form joint ventures or to lease the land to them.
Zimbabwe was left saddled with a debt of over $3 billion after it made commitments to compensate the land owners.
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The government says the holders of the 99-year leases for the farms distributed under the programme will have them converted to tenure in a major policy shift.
Information minister Janfran Muswere made the announcement after a cabinet meeting last Tuesday out of the blue.
Zimbabwe is currently working on a land policy to guide the tenure systems and we believe it would have made sense for the government to wait for that process to be concluded before taking such a far reaching position.
The full privatisation of land has a lot of pitfalls, which include concentration of land on the few rich people in our society and displacing the poor.
Zimbabwe is already battling the menace of land barons in urban and rural areas, who use their connections to the ruling elite to amass vast tracts of land, which they sell to vulnerable people at exorbitant prices.
The government’s claims that privatisation of land will unlock value for the new owners is not convincing.
Research in other African countries shows that giving small-scale farmers full tenure for their pieces of land has not helped to unlock financial resources.
It is a known fact that Zimbabwe is under pressure because of its unsustainable external debt and will have to make some painful decisions, such as on the issue of land tenure.
Zimbabwe certainly needs well-thought out agrarian policies to extricate itself from the failures of the land reform programme.