Resettled and Happy in Zimbabwe

As a teacher for 13 years on a commercial farm in this rural backwater, Dozen Mhembere made less than $40 a month. His wife toiled on a neighboring farm, where she lived with their five children, a table and a shelf. They slept on the floor. They had no savings.

Today, the Mhemberes own a dining room set, a new sideboard, a portable television, a bed and a cot for the youngest child. They’re saving for a new house and car.

“When we were working on the commercial farm, we were unable to drink tea daily,” said Mhembere, 46. “Now we are able to drink rich tea, with lots of milk.”

The change in the family’s fortunes came in November 2000, when Mhembere received his own plot of land under a controversial government program to seize property from white commercial farmers and distribute it to landless blacks.

As Zimbabweans head to the polls today and Sunday to cast ballots for president, they are concerned about jobs, food and law and order, but their real hunger is for land, and it is this issue that will ultimately determine the country’s direction.

The election pits incumbent President Robert Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, against Morgan Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist who leads the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC.

Mugabe has critics both at home and abroad who blame him for Zimbabwe’s collapsing economy. They say he has run a corrupt government and used violence and repressive laws to rig this weekend’s election and cling to power.

But thousands of downtrodden rural dwellers praise the president--an articulate and well-educated former schoolteacher--as a champion for black empowerment. Many fear that without Mugabe at the helm, Zimbabwe might slip back under the yoke of former colonial master Britain, and that his moves toward redressing the inequity of landownership between black and white Zimbabweans might be reversed.

“Land is our priority, and it always has been,” said Mavis Gumbo, a Ministry of Information official in the capital, Harare.

Pitting blacks against whites in a struggle for a bigger slice of the country’s resources, the land redistribution program has elicited strong interest and, the ruling party argues, interference from the West.

Farm Takeovers Often Fraught With Violence

The government has listed for takeover and distribution to landless blacks about 95%, or 20 million acres, of the farmland owned by about 4,000 white farmers. Hundreds of the farms have been occupied, often violently, by ruling party militants and veterans of the country’s war of independence from Britain, which was won in 1980.

In the mayhem, nine white farmers have been killed and thousands of black laborers displaced. In the two years since the program began, 90,000 people have been resettled nationwide, some government officials estimate.

Government supporters say white farmers brought the land seizures on themselves by ignoring government pleas to sell their property in the 1980s and ‘90s.

“We wanted to do it in a civilized manner and buy the land on a willing buyer, willing seller basis,” said Edwell Hukuimwe, information officer for the district of Mazowe, 75 miles north of Harare, where hundreds of families have been resettled. “But there were no willing sellers.”

Critics call the land resettlement program a desperate attempt by Mugabe to muster votes and deflect attention from other pressing problems.

“The workers are concerned about bread-and-butter issues,” said John Makumbe, chairman of Transparency International-Zimbabwe and a political science professor. “They are concerned about jobs, food and education.”

International efforts to resolve the crisis have included a pledge of British funds for land reform in return for Mugabe’s agreement to end the farm invasions.

Tsvangirai, who campaigned on issues of good governance and economic recovery, has promised a land commission to review the farms listed for confiscation. His party’s campaign manifesto pledges that 7 million hectares, or 17.3 million acres, will be distributed to landless blacks.

“Land reform in Zimbabwe is an unfinished national agenda,” the MDC leader has said. “Our goal is to resettle people in a way that ensures that the resettled people produce lots of food to fight poverty and starvation.”

Mugabe Vows to Press Ahead With Program

But Mugabe has accused Tsvangirai of trying to recolonize Zimbabwe by ensuring that the country’s prime farmland remains in the hand of whites. Despite Western opposition, the president has promised to push forward with the program of seizing farms, calling it “the last phase of the liberation struggle.”

His message has resonated among many Zimbabweans such as the Mhemberes, who were allocated land from a sprawling farm called Three Sisters, near the town of Mvurwi in Mazowe district. The property had belonged to one farmer. Now, 102 families, 20% of them war veterans, have been resettled there. Each family received six hectares of arable land and another six hectares to live on within a communal settlement.

“We never used to have a single black farmer here,” said Hukuimwe, the district official. “All these years, we were abandoned to those hilly areas where nothing used to grow.”

A retired police officer, Stepford Musinake now cultivates maize, groundnuts, beans and sugar on his plot at Three Sisters. He hopes to sell enough of his crops to acquire more land so that he can try his hand at growing cotton and soybeans.

Although a drought that has devastated much of southern Africa has stunted his crops this year, Musinake and his family are living off last season’s bounty--he reaped 550 pounds of beans and 12 tons of maize--and say they are even assisting others.

“Life is much better today,” said Musinake, 51, a father of seven, who acquired his plot in November 2000. “I have never been to a supermarket to fetch a packet of mealy meal [made from ground maize] or a packet of beans. That’s why we support land reform and we are behind our president on this issue.”

Owen Chinogurei said growing his own crops on his own land has given him an unprecedented sense of independence and self-worth.

“I feel very happy, because now I am free,” said Chinogurei, 54, an electrician by trade who always had aspirations to farm. “All I have to do is plan what I want to do. And even if I don’t use the land, it’s still mine. [Whites] have had their time. It’s enough. They should now leave things to us.”

Critics charge that the government has been rewarding party loyalists and politicians with land grants at the expense of those who are really in need. They also argue that without proper support, such as fertilizer, which is in short supply, and with no farm experience, the new landowners will never produce enough food for an increasingly hungry nation.

Kossam Mutsinze is determined to prove them wrong. A former war veteran and Foreign Affairs Ministry employee who became a commercial farmer in the nearby town of Concession, he is confident that hard work, increased government assistance and sufficient rainfall will help him prosper.

These factors made success easy last year when he reaped 1,200 tons of maize and 150 tons of soybeans from about 500 acres of land. Profits from that harvest have allowed him to build a sprawling home and stockpile sacks of grain to see him and his 10 workers through this year’s drought.

Proponents of land reform reject assertions that Zimbabwe’s agricultural industry would collapse if left in the hands of blacks, calling such pronouncements racist.

“I’ve never seen a white man holding a hoe or weeding a field,” said Hukuimwe, the local government officer. “We have been doing the job for years, so we have nothing to learn.”

Mutsinze said Mugabe was “bold” for tackling the land issue at the risk of being shunned by the West--and to the chagrin of Zimbabwe’s white minority.

“They are saying that we are robbing them [of their land],” he said. “But we are saying, we are taking back what already belongs to us.”