Zimbabwes Land Reform Program: …

1 zimbabwe s land Reform Program: underinvestment in post -Conflict TransformationBILL H. KINSEY*Free University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The NetherlandsUniversity of zimbabwe , Harare, ZimbabweSummary. In zimbabwe s current crisis, it is easy to overlook the fact that the country had aresettlement program for two decades before the large-scale, politically motivated land occupationsbegan in 2000. This paper does four things. First, it creates an historical bookmark for the earlierperiod of land Reform in the hope that the lessons from that experience will not be lost. Second, itreviews some of the major outcomes of resettlement from almost a quarter century of , it partially sets the stage for some of the papers that follow in this section. Finally, as a cau-tion for those who will shape zimbabwe s future, it provides some reminders of the interlockingrelationships among property, poverty and conflict.

2 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights words Southern Africa, zimbabwe , land Reform , conflict, resettlement1. INTRODUCTIONThe agrarian question and politically moti-vated violence are zimbabwe s most enduringcolonial legacies more than two decades afterindependence. The two are intimately the some 90 years the country was a settlercolony, the adoption of discriminatory agricul-tural policies and the alienation of most of thefertile, well-watered land to European settlersresulted in the oppression, marginalizationand impoverishment of indigenous rural peo-ple. In an effort to redress these inequities, thegovernment of zimbabwe swiftly introduced aseries of agrarian Reform measures after inde-pendence. The resettlement activities initiatedunder these measures peaked well below tar-geted levels just after the mid-1980s.

3 There-after real progress slowed and commitmentweakened to sporadic administrative and legis-lative efforts to modify the operating environ-ment for the rejection of the proposed newconstitution in the February 2000 referendum,a constitutional amendment and a modifiedLand Acquisition Act were promulgated inApril 2000 to effect land designation and com-pulsory acquisition without same bill also declared Britain liable topay compensation. The British government along with other donors had indicated a will-ingness to fund land Reform , but only if itbenefits the of land Reform have argued foran expansion of the resettlement program tohelp redress the unequal distribution of landresources, to rectify acute land scarcity in com-munal areas, and to provide economic opportu-nities in a shrinking economy.

4 Opponents offar-reaching land Reform have asserted thesuperior efficiency of the commercial farmingsector and the adverse consequences that an ex-panded resettlement program would have onagricultural output, employment and the com-position and volume of agricultural government-appointed commission of ex-perts studied zimbabwe s systems of land ten-ure and detailed possible options in its 1994report. Few of its recommendations have beenacted is generally acknowledged that the natureof international conflict has altered fundamen-tally, with intrastate civil conflicts replacingwars between states. More than 90% ofthe wars over the past decade have involved* Final version accepted: 15 June DevelopmentVol. 32, No. 10, pp. 1669 1696, 2004 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reservedPrinted in Great Britain0305-750X/$ - see front violence between adversaries at thesubstate level fighting primarily within theboundaries of a single state (Jackson, 2001).

5 In Africa, this has been the case for some 40years. Indeed, asAddison (2001, p. 1)remarks: Africa has become synonymous with conflict. Recent work suggests that many current con-flicts differ from a breakdown of normallypeaceful political , currentconflicts are often created civil disequilibria inwhich violence performs a variety of functionsin parallel, alternative systems of power, pun-ishment, profit and protection. In this view,the everyday politics of weak states providesthe soil in which many contemporary conflictsgrow. Biases in public spending, predatory tax-ation, and bad or shortsighted policy encourageconflict by reducing the real incomes bothabsolute and relative of groups in society thatsuffer this discrimination. In this way, weakstate politics inflames ethnic, economic andregional tensions thus helping demagoguesrecruit and retain their followers.

6 Addressingconflict within rather than between states re-quires new conflict management rapidly growing literature in this areasuggests that new modalities of dealing withconflict need to be oriented toward the recon-struction and reformulation of weak state polit-ical practice and aimed not so much at themanagement of conflict as at its foundation that underlies the papers inthis collection is the role of land Reform intransforming conflict in agrarian economiesin southern Africa, specifically in the economyof zimbabwe . Originally, the focus was the roleof land Reform inpreventingconflict. When theanalyses here were being formulated in late1999, it seemed evident that the slow rate ofprogress on land Reform in zimbabwe couldnot continue. Numerical targets for the num-bers of households to be resettled had beenchiselled into political granite in the early1980s.

7 Almost two decades later, however,nothing like the target numbers had been reset-tled. Yet lip service was regularly paid to landreform in the period just before every parlia-mentary and presidential election after inde-pendence. But few of the promises made inthese political campaigns were kept. After anauspicious beginning in the early 1980s, land re-form moved at a snail s pace for some 15 another parliamentary election due in2000, it seemed obvious that zimbabwe s rulingparty ZANU-PF would again herald itscommitment to providing land to the was less apparent this time was whetherthe people would accept another round ofempty promises from a government that wasrapidly losing its credibility and perspectives help explain why thepapers in this section have been written.

8 Therewill be those who will read it solely as a re-sponse to Robert Mugabe s political megalo-mania, to his cynical manipulation of the landissue as an election-winning tool. There is valid-ity in this perspective. The long history of bro-ken promises over land posed a clear threat tocivil order in a setting where economic condi-tions were deteriorating rapidly also. From thisperspective, it seemed sensible to try to make acase for zimbabwe s government to talk lessand do more about land Reform . But equallyas valid is the view that the case for land reformneeded to be reinforced because of the failure ofZimbabwe s friends and sponsors the multi-lateral and bilateral agencies especially to per-suade Robert Mugabe that land Reform was tooimportant to be an agrarian Reform pro-gram before 2000, but current debate is domi-nated by the nature of the multiple complexcrises that face the country.

9 The papers in thissection therefore draw upon data spanningmore than 20 years in a search for understand-ing about what took place during zimbabwe sGolden Age of resettlement, before the govern-ment lost its conviction in the central role ofland redistribution in alleviating poverty. Thetwin themes are what was and what couldbe. We focus little on the history, underlyingresentments and the trigger mechanisms thatunderlie the current conflict. Similarly, weavoid most aspects of the unfolding crisis ex-cept certain ones that tell us how the door tothe past was closed. There is a growing bodyof literature that is highly variable in both qual-ity and the coverage of substantive issues, butthe definitive account of land in Zimbabwehas yet to be paper seeks specifically to do two , in an attempt to test the intentions of theearly program and implicitly to allow a con-trast with the present one, the paper identifiesthose who received land in earlier years.

10 Sec-ond, the paper seeks to answer questions aboutwhat happened to those resettled in the early1980s. Before turning to these two empiricaltasks, however, some background is presentedto the broader issue of land Reform and conflictin DEVELOPMENT2. THE MAKING OF AN IMPASSE: LANDAND POLITICS AT THE MILLENNIUMThe 11 decades since the first colonial intru-sion have seen the creation in zimbabwe ofmultiple tenure ghettos. The pattern of landdistribution at the turn of the millennium hadits roots in the 1890s, when an enforced racialdivision of land was first implemented. Thisdivision was formalized in 1930, when thecountry s land was divided roughly equally be-tween the African majority and a relative hand-ful of European settlers. The fact that theEuropean population never constituted asmuch as 5% of the total population illustratesthe great disparity in the amount of land avail-able to each independence, zimbabwe , on thestrength of the historical record of high agricul-tural productivity, was assigned the food secu-rity portfolio in the then Southern AfricanDevelopment Coordination Conference.