Playing the no rules game

IT would appear agriculture in Zimbabwe must endure a little more confusion yet. For instance, when is a minister not a minister? Or are Zimbabwean farmers to be landed with two ministers? By late last week, the redoubtable and generally popular Mr Kumbirai Kangai was, we all thought, back in the seat. But maybe he wasn't, for at a press conference to announce a maize price, Mrs Joyce Mujuru, the acting minister these last few months, presided. Both she and her permanent secretary were evasive on the question of who is who in agriculture. Reporters who wanted clarification were referred to the president's office. Twenty years of experience meant that few bothered.

And yet at the Commercial Farmers' Union there was better news. The Task Force established to talk with war veterans has been suspended, if not disbanded. That is welcome news. A week or more before Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections, the war veterans themselves unilaterally stopped talking. With immense patience the CFU has waited for progress. None was forthcoming - at least not at that level. Instead progress - and yes, painfully slow progress - has been initiated at a CFU to government level.

This indicated that the Task Force established by the union has accomplished its task - and that task was to reduce the level of violence on farms and, above all, to stop the murder of farmers and farm workers. It was never the Task Force's job to find a solution to the larger issue of land resettlement in Zimbabwe, something that only the presidential trio has a mandate to negotiate after consulting their members.

In just a few weeks time, the CFU faces its annual congress, likely to be the most interesting for some years. Emotions have been running high and there is a need to be fair - and perceptive. The union has been "playing a game" which has no rules, no umpire and, most unsportingly of all, different goals for the competing teams. It cannot be said that they've done badly. But it can be said, after looking closely, that they've done remarkably well. Ploughing a path through anarchy, it is something of a miracle that farmers are farming at all, and yet they are. Much of this is because neither the CFU nor its membership was divided, something that those shadowy forces lurking behind the anarchy would have welcomed. Divide and rule is the oldest ploy on earth and this paper is aware that there was a desire to split farming leaders down the middle. It didn't happen, but there is still a need to make sure it doesn't happen.

That desire lay not within the union, nor among farmers. It was a strategy dreamt up by the engineers of the chaos, not the victims of it. It remains a threat to the community - and to the greater good of farmers and Zimbabwe as a whole. It suddenly seems terribly important that, with an annual farmers' congress coinciding with the eleventh hour (we hope) of the crisis, farmers don't play into the hands of the spoilers by driving a wedge through the farming world. Unity has kept the system together and will continue to keep it together.

And, no, it has not been perfect unity because nothing under the sun is perfect. But critics, always necessary, should analyse just what it is they believe has gone wrong. It seems highly unlikely that there was any course to chart other than the one charted. Confrontation would have seen more farmers killed, more people terrorised. Appeasement, or offering up to government anything they desired, would simply have resulted in greater demands with the ruling party putting the boot in harder and faster than ever before. This was always about playing a waiting game, offering little and accepting little. It had to be about closed door negotiations that led to small successes but smaller losses.

It's been done well, or as well as it could have been done given the absence of the rule of law. The frustration farmers are feeling now is a result of a crisis of expectations. All this was supposed to end with the elections, but as this paper pointed out in a story not long ago, the ruling party always had plans for the post-election period. Still, having a plan isn't the same as implementing one and Zimbabwe will discover that a genuine parliamentary democracy, with all its checks and balances, will mean that whatever Zanu-PF's plans might have been (and we have more than a shrewd idea), they'll be hard pressed to put them into action after parliament is called.

That doesn't have to happen immediately. Mr Mugabe can call parliament anytime between now and mid October. That means farmers… well, all Zimbabweans, really, are going to have to box clever for a little longer. Given recent events it shouldn't be too difficult because there really is light at the end of the tunnel at last. Not that there's room for complacency, which takes us back to farmers and their leaders.

Not much kudos has been given to farmers or the CFU. That's unfair and should be put right. Congress would be a good time to reconcile differences of approach and opinion, but it would also be a disastrous time to create needless division - unless you subscribe to the spoilers' philosophy. The things that have been achieved (and sometimes preventing the worst is an achievement) have been greater than most people will ever realise. They've been achieved by individual farmers, by farming associations, by the union and by the task force that worked for the union. There were, inevitably, differences, but the structure of the system ensured that quiet common sense prevailed. The need for that structure remains, for the time being at least.