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Features (Zim Independent)

Candid Comment

“PEOPLE who thought we were using land as an election campaign tool now realise they were wrong.”

These are words attributed to the Minister of Lands, Agriculture and Resettlement, Dr Joseph Made, published in the Herald of August 30.
If these were indeed Made’s words, then his statement has exploded the myth that President Mugabe did set out to form a government partly composed of technocrats after the June election. In time the rest of the citizens will come to realise that maybe only one, up to a maximum of two, of those ministers can be described as technocrats.

The rest of the new faces in that cabinet are actually Zanu PF apparatchiks who were previously deployed in other capacities elsewhere. It is patently clear that Made is out of his depth at the policy level. He was correct when, soon after his ministerial appointment, he described himself on ZTV as a “nuts and bolts man”.

A political heavyweight would have been preferable at that post, if only because for such a personality, the need to display excessive political sycophancy would have been somewhat diminished.

Take for instance the previous Minister of Agriculture, Kumbirai Kangai. Despite all his other failings, Kangai was both a politician and a farmer at heart and at appropriate occasions, he spoke the language of agriculture.

To date, I personally have not yet heard Made speak the language of agriculture, let alone agricultu- ral economics, which ought to have been his core business. Each time he speaks, I hear him doing his best to echo the voice of the King and trying to excel in Zanu PF racist bigotry.

How can someone that should be both literate and numerate, and is said to have earned a PhD in some agricultural science discipline, fail to comprehend that what should have been done in stages over a 20- year period cannot now be done in three months?

How can a scholar, a rational person, fail to comprehend that it is impossible at best, and calamitous at worst, to resettle some 500 000 families, which means approximately three million individual Zimbabweans, that is one quarter (25%) of the entire country’s population, on 5 - 7 million hectares of land in a time interval of three months?

How can educated and rational administrators fail to comprehend or anticipate the dire conse- quences of subjecting three million Zimbabweans to conditions of existence that are devoid of every form of infrastructure, namely shelter, potable water, clinics, roads, shops and schools?

How can an agriculturalist, qualified at PhD level, fail to realise the folly and madness, in terms of the national GDP and food security, of transferring millions of hectares of land from commercial agricultural production to subsistence agriculture?

The rulers of this country must be warned, in the comfort of their third heaven, that they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction down here.

Throughout history, it has been demonstrated that people can only take so much abuse and man- made suffering and no more. In that respect all people, I mean all races, all nations and all nationalities manifest the same limits of tolerance.

The sections of our population, Zanu PF followers and pretenders, that are presently being doled out with large tracts of land, 15 - 35 hectares per family, will have become sorely disappointed people in a year’s time from today. They could easily turn into the government’s bitterest critics. For by that time they will be starving and they will be poorer than they are today. This turn of events is inevitable because it will be impossible for the new settlers to work the land without the means to do so.

Don’t tell me that a government that cannot provide panadol pills, detergents and bandages in its hospitals, and chalk for teachers in schools, can know where to scratch resources to provide tools, draught power, seeds and fertilisers for 500 000 families spread on five million hectares of territory in the period between now and November 2000! Made and his masters are about to perform miracles. Let’s see them perform them.

However, what is telling is that the demagogic and belligerent policies of the rulers have resulted in the flight of capital from the country and the reduction of our money, the Zim dollar, into suitcase currency.

The tourist industry, which prior to the campaign of state-sponsored lawlessness and confrontational propaganda in the country was growing in leaps and bounds has collapsed and thousands of workers thrown onto the streets; the same has happened to horticulture, and industrial and commercial companies are falling like dominoes.

The overall result is accelerated poverty and widespread destitution, complemented by high mortality and high morbidity rates right across our society.

We are now saddled with a social set-up where a vast majority of the populace have no stake in the stability of society. Remember the saying that “where there is nothing to lose there is nothing to fear”. Against this background, I fear that our rulers are living on a precipice. The whole of our society, all of us, are living on a precipice.

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