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Moving forward in Zimbabwe Reducing poverty and promoting growth 3.8 Land reform and resettlement in post independence Zimbabwe 1980-1992 Upon attainment of independence in 1980 the state was committed to a planned programme of land resettlement in accordance with the Lancaster house agreement. With matching grants from the UK’s Overseas Development Administration (now DfID), the state launched the intensive resettlement programme in September 1980, with the declared aim of resettling 18,000 families on 1.1 million hectares of land over three years (Chitsike, 1988: 15). Land had been one of the core grievances that led to the war of liberation and as part of the Lancaster house settlement it had to be addressed somehow. What is clear however is that during the transition to independence (1977-80) the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia state had produced a rural development plan that sought to create a smallholder irrigation-based resettlement programme. During the 1979/80 financial year 86,000ha of land had been acquired in the South Eastern Lowveld to resettle smallholders. This meant that at independence the only plans that existed revolved around producing a new breed of capitalist farmer on modern smallholder farms quite distinct from the communal lands. This was at variance with campaign manifestos published in December 1979 that seemed to show that the main guerrilla movement, if elected, would ‘promote on newly acquired land the establishment of collective villages and collective agriculture’. While the technocrats planned modern agricultural settlements, peasants emerging from the war wanted to spontaneously move onto white-owned commercial farmland to correct the land imbalance. In the end the programme announced by the state in September 1980 was driven by technocrats and sought to: • Alleviate population pressure in communal areas. • Extend and improve the base for productive agriculture in the peasant farming sector through individuals and cooperatives. • Improve standards of living among the poorest sector of the population. • Ameliorate the plight of people affected by the war. • Provide opportunities for people who had no land and no employment, who may therefore be classified as destitute. • Achieve national stability and progress in a country that had recently emerged from the turmoil of war (GoZ, 1983). The programme targeted returning refugees, those displaced by the war internally, the poor and unemployed, those displaced by large public projects and the landless. Purchases of 223,000 ha in the 1980/81 financial year and a further 1 million ha by the 1981/82 season increased the amount of land available considerably. By 1982 the targets for resettlement had been scaled up to 35,000 households, rising a year later to 162,000 on 9 million hectares in plans announced in the Transitional National Development Plan of 1983/84. The shift in the official target number of households to be resettled and even the basis for the targets is subject to different interpretations. What is clear, however, is that in the early stages of the new Zimbabwe state, the policy pronouncements that had initially been radical started to show a more neo-liberal tone. The first official economic policy document was published in February 1981 with the title ‘Growth with Equity’. With regards to the rural areas, fair land distribution was deemed a priority. According to the policy ‘land is a common heritage and no one should enjoy absolute ownership of it’ (p 4). The policy document, however, still described the resettlement programme as having an ‘emphasis on voluntary co-operative arrangements among peasants’ (p 5). While the policy document talked about ‘building upon the traditional co-operative approach in the Zimbabwean culture’, the technocrats at implementation level insisted that resettlement processes and procedures were in place to ‘transform peasant agriculture, to remould society’ and discourage any attempts to revert back to traditional methods and systems of agriculture and administration’ (Geza 1986): 37. What was clear at this point is that the college-trained professionals had ideals that differed fundamentally from the political leadership. The factional divisions between the professionally-trained technocrats concentrated in Model Name Model A – Normal Intensive Resettlement Model B – Cooperative Farming Model C – Specialised Crop Farming Model D – Livestock Ranching Table 3.4: Models for resettlement in Zimbabwe during the 1980s. Characteristics Individual settlement in nucleated villages with individual arable land allocation and communal grazing. Each settler is allocated 5ha arable land and a grazing right to depasture 4 to 10 livestock units depending on agro-ecological region. Households reside in nucleated village settlements. State provided the basic infrastructure before the settlers moved in. In the variant of model A, the Accelerated Intensive Resettlement Model, households moved in before infrastructure was in place. After 1992 some model A2 were introduced with self contained residential and grazing units. Cooperative ventures on farms suitable for specialised enterprises. State assistance in the form of establishment grants for equipment and technical assistance. Households resided in nucleated villages with basic infrastructure provided by the state. Resembled model A in individual plots except that it was based around a central estate that mentored the specialised farmers. Settlers contributed labour in return for free tillage, training and extension support. Used for sugar, tea and tobacco estates. Applicable to drier parts of the country. Initial version involved resettling households on commercial ranches with a minimum of arable land. A later variant the Three Tier System involved nucleated villages where basic services were provided, then grazing for five livestock units (subsistence use) and, the third layer had scope for 10 livestock units per household for commercial livestock production. Number resettled by November 1998 51,006 7,936 636 19,048 Source: GoZ, 1998c: 6. 44
Moving forward in Zimbabwe Reducing poverty and promoting growth the economic ministries and the political leadership who wanted radical agrarian reforms to appease the peasantry would resurface again towards the 2000 elections with dramatic consequences. Early dominance of technocrats in the resettlement programme helped limit the active cultivation of a system of political patronage based on access to land. If an asymmetrical patrimonial relationship existed at all, this was skewed in favour of the peasant communities which during early independence showed broad disregard for the bureaucracy and the political elite alike (Kriger, 1992). Four models were adopted for implementation. Table 3.4 gives an outline of the main features of the models and the number of households resettled by 1998. As Table 3.4 shows, the majority of beneficiaries were resettled in Model A schemes that emphasised individual smallholder agriculture. Minimum infrastructure and service standards were also set for these settlement models. A borehole was planned for each village of 20-25 households. A clinic was planned for every 500 families, while a primary school classroom and a teacher’s house were envisaged for every 20 families. Further, each herd of 1,400 cattle was to be provided with a dip tank. It was also envisaged that it would be feasible to effect physical separation between each resettlement scheme and surrounding communal areas through the use of fencing. Within each resettlement scheme, fences would also separate residential, grazing and arable land use zones. The state planned to spend about Z$3,086 (the equivalent of about US$12,000 in 2008 dollars) in resettling each of the 162,000 households planned (Government of Zimbabwe 1982b). At the time (in 1981) planners set an annual income target of Z$400 (about US$1,420 in 2008 dollars) for each settler household. This was double the incomes obtained in the communal land areas at the time. 3.9 Land reform and resettlement December 1992-2000 Several key policy developments make this a defining decade in land resettlement in Zimbabwe. The first was the introduction of a programme of economic reform launched in 1990. The ESAP of 1991-1995 was launched to make the economy more ‘competitive and productive’ by ‘moving away from a highly regulated economy to one where free market forces are allowed to play a more decisive role’ (GoZ, 1990). This was a significant shift in economic policy and put an end to the socialist rhetoric of the 1980s. Key components of the programme relating to agriculture concerned deregulation of agricultural prices and marketing. It was hoped this and other measures elsewhere in the economy would yield agricultural growth of 3.2 per cent a year. For the land resettlement programme, however, agreement was reached at the Paris Donors meeting which agreed on the ESAP aid package, that extra-judicial approaches to property redistribution would have to be renounced. This meant that outright seizure of land would not be possible under the new dispensation. The Second Five Year National Development Plan published in December 1991 also marked this shift, maintaining that: ‘… land redistribution and resettlement programmes are not lasting solutions for over-population problems in the communal areas’ (GoZ, 1991). This represented a significant shift in the conceptualisation of land resettlement. It was announced that the emphasis would now be on ‘communal reorganisation, population planning and establishment of agro-industries and other off farm activities’ (GoZ, 1991). Although under ESAP the need for land reform was acknowledged, it was stated that ‘the large scale commercial farming sector is of critical economic importance and will continue to be one of the pillars of economic growth’ (Government of Zimbabwe 1990). The programme therefore advocated for a market-based mechanism of transferring land, and more focus on re-organising production in communal areas. By the time ESAP was initiated, the land resettlement programme had been ongoing for ten years and had missed most of its targets, resettling only 52,000 households by 1991 against a target of 162,000 households. As Table 3.5 shows, the amount of land available was falling over the years and there was a corresponding decline in the average number of households resettled per year between 1985 and 1997. Several other factors apart from ESAP can help to explain the decline in the amount of land and the number of households resettled. The First Five Year National Development Plan (1986- 1990) published in April 1986 had identified dwindling financial resources for land purchase, along with drought. In addition there was less land on the market, largely because those farmers who had wanted to sell off their land had done so. Although the state attempted to get more land available on the market by introducing the Land Acquisition Act in 1986 to give it the right of first refusal in all rural land transactions, not much land became available as a result (Moyo, 1995). Donor funds had all but dried up. Although the promised grant from the UK government had not yet been exhausted, there was an unannounced policy shift in the UK government in the late 1980s. The thinking was that resettlement was expensive and was benefiting fewer people (Cusworth, 2000). It was felt that more could be achieved through donor aid by focusing on the communal lands which were still home to the majority. In addition, some internal shortcomings in the programme were identified, especially a lack of capacity to implement the programme following the disbandment of the then Department for Rural Development and its merger with the District Development Fund. Further, there was a perception that Table 3.5: Land acquired for resettlement and households resettled, 1980-1997. Period Land acquired (ha) Households resettled Land acquired Average per year People resettled 1980-1984 2,147,855 28,568 429,571 5,714 1985-1990 447,791 19,110 74,632 3,822 1991-1997 789,645 23,322 157,929 3,332 Total 3,385,291 71,000 211,581 4,438 Source: GoZ, 1998c: 11; GoZ, 1993a. 45
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