via Govt repossesses two farms in Masvingo | The Herald November 20, 2013 by George Maponga
Government has repossessed two farms in Masvingo East farming district following a probe which exposed that the purported black owners were fronting white former farmers. The repossession of the two farms follows a directive issued by the Lands and Rural Resettlement Minister Dr Douglas Mombeshora who, last month, ordered a probe into the ownership status of at least 17 farms in the agriculturally-rich district after landless villagers invaded them arguing that their black owners were fronting white former farmers.
Minister of State for Provincial Affairs Masvingo Province Cde Kudakwashe Bhasikiti, while refusing to divulge the names of the two farms, yesterday confirmed the repossession adding they were being partitioned for allocation to landless people in the province.
He said the two farms had been taken over by the State with pegging already underway to regularise the settlement of people already on the properties.
He said a total of 17 farms were probed in Masvingo East district to authenticate their ownership structure.
“We successfully completed a probe into the ownership structure of at least 17 farms in Masvingo East district. Out of those farms, we managed to establish that two of the farms were not owned by blacks who claimed to be the owners and we immediately repossessed them. As
I speak pegging of plots is already underway so that our landless people get plots there.
“We carried a thorough probe and the black owners who claimed to own the two farms that I cannot name at the moment failed to produce any documentation to authenticate their ownership of the properties and we repossessed them,’’ he said.
Minister Bhasikiti said Government wanted to speedily regularise the occupation of the two farms by hundreds of landless people who moved into the properties in search of farming land.
He added that Government would not hesitate to repossess farms from blacks who front white farmers as a way evading the land reform programme which sought to redress colonially-engineered inequities in the land ownership system in Zimbabwe.
Hundreds of landless villagers from Zaka, Bikita, Gutu and Chivi have since the beginning of last year, been occupying farms in Masvingo East district setting up make-shift structures arguing that the new black owners were proxies of white former farmers.
Police moved in and destroyed the structures on the farms in Masvingo East and evicted the landless people in September this year but the land hungry villagers refused to move off the land insisting that the new black owners were fronts.
Dr Mombeshora then ordered a probe by the Masvingo provincial leadership to verify the ownership structure of the farms before the eviction of people who had occupied them.
During the probe, black farm owners were asked to produce documentation such as title deeds and receipts showing how they purchased the farms in question from white former farmers.
Masvingo has over 5 000 people on the waiting list for land but officially the province has run out of land for resettlement.
COMMENTS
Rather than evict farmers purported as to being ‘fronted’ by blacks in Fort Victoria – issue ‘partnership’ licenses that allow the better trained white man to assist the black man to make a buck!
Let them rot in hell. This reverse racism has to stop. For heavens sake – there’s no bloody food in this country – what difference does it make if a white man is working for a black man? Or if they take on a partnership, or if the white does lease land from a black? THEY ARE BOTH ZIMBABWEANS. But to turn productive land back into subsistance farming is the work of idots.
How do we expert investors to come?most who are whites?
Masvingo is not an agriculturally rich district as the writer would like us to believe. The whole province is fit for wildlife and game ranches. People should not be settled to cut down and burn the sensitive vegetation in the province because soon the whole area will be a desert. The land reform exercise in this country has largely been on tribal lines where fertile land in Mashonaland was parcelled out to Zezurus and a few of their ‘good’ shonas and ndebeles.All the productive game ranches and conservancies were looted by the politicians and now they are fighting among themselves because they promised to give land to the electorate. The people of Zaka and Bikita have large swathe of underutilised land. What they need is water in the form of small dams to establsig irrigation schems. Parcelling out more land will not solve the water challenges in the area. If Basikiti thinks he will get votes by this exercise he is clearly wasting his time because the people of Masvingo have been abused too many times when they have been used as graders to clear up land only to be evicted later.
“Masvingo has 5 000 people on the waiting list for land…..”
But we were told the land grab exercise was for resettling the landless and this exercise has been ongoing for over ten years now, how come there are still landless people?
If truth be told, there will always be landless people in Zim because the land grab exercise was never meant for the landless. It was for the gukurawundi party ZANU PF’s survival. Most of the farms grabbed went to the party elite and today we have people with five farms each. This is why there will always be a shortage of land for resettlement purposes. What happened to the land audit? Wahy was it resisted by the gukurawundis?
I pity the ZANU PF supporters – they vote but they continue suffering. What a foolish and stupid lot!!
landless________. how does that work. People are just moving from one piece of land to the other do not say landless. The country needs production not this land grabbing by people.