THE year 2024 promises to be one of the worst for post-independent Zimbabwe.
An El Niño-induced drought is already upon us and is set to wreak chaos and cause gnashing of teeth across the country as one of the country’s worst food insecurity situations loom.
Amid this looming disaster government is busy creating more chaos for Zimbabweans as it ploughs through the countryside driving out people settled on land they occupied under a land grab programme it sanctioned more than two decades ago.
As more and more reports of government-led evictions from State land continue to surface one can only wonder what exactly is happening in our deeply troubled country.
What is most perplexing and worrying is the fact that government strongly supported seizing of the land from which it is now kicking out the hapless villagers.
Given that the Zanu PF government perpetuated land occupations which it is now curiously telling us that it is illegal convinces some of us that, indeed, the gods have gone crazy as far as how this country is being run.
In the latest government evictions we hear that hundreds of food insecure villagers in Gwanda, Matabeleland South, were rallied last week to receive food assistance, only to be arrested and bundled onto trucks charged with illegally occupying State land.
Words fail to describe this kind of callousness.
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Even if the villagers had illegally occupied the said State land, this does not justify the government’s pouncing on them as if they were fugitives. Besides, given that we are now civilised having learnt from past experiences as far as land occupation is concerned, we cannot stoop this low as to treat our own people like diseased aliens from outer space.
The issue of land occupation has been too violent since the British colonial settlers invaded our land more than a century ago for us to continue this scourge in the 21st century.
There are too many questions around these cruel evictions needing answers. One of those questions is: Why were all these so-called illegal land occupiers allowed to live on the said land for all these years, only to be hunted down like vermin now?
Is there no humane way of evicting them besides using violence which is creating a needless humanitarian crisis in a country already facing a serious food insecurity situation threatening to drive many into starvation?
We cannot afford to have man-made humanitarian crises when mother nature is already not making life easy for us.
In fact, the purported illegal settlers have a right to a piece of Zimbabwe, so government should, therefore, find ways to afford every Zimbabwean a place they can call home. Evicting people without offering them an alternative place to resettle is downright barbarism and we should not be afraid to call out the government if it is erring.
As already mentioned above, government should have first found alternative land for the alleged illegal settlers and if they had refused to be relocated to the identified new land, then we would have probably supported the violent evictions.
