Government embarked on land reform specifically to benefit landless Zimbabweans who had been displaced from the land by the colonial regime.
Much of the vast, fertile tracts of land were in the hands of a few white commercial farmers with the black people being pushed to the marginal, infertile areas.
Land reform sought to correct this colonial imbalance by empowering the majority of Zimbabweans with pieces of arable land. It must be remembered that the colonial regime constrained us to areas of poor soil fertility where much of the land was not arable.
That is how evil the white farmers were and to imagine today we have people, the beneficiaries of land reform, leasing the land back to the white former commercial farmers, is unfathomable.
It defies logic that the same whites we fought against yesterday, could suddenly become our friends today, to the extent of giving them back the land they forcibly took away from us. It is alarming!
It is the land question that saw thousands of young Zimbabweans take up arms against the colonial regime and only insane people can get in bed with the white former commercial farmers as we are seeing today.
We were denied the land resource by the same people we are today leasing to. Beneficiaries of land reform who are doing it should be ashamed of themselves. We are fully behind President Mugabe in warning farmers against the practice.
Some farmers are leasing the land via contracts with the white former commercial farmers while others are out-rightly giving the land to whites in exchange for a few dollars.
Our advice to such farmers is that they must surrender the land if they have found the going tough. There are many other people in need of farming land, who if, allocated, can easily perform wonders on the land. We also want to urge the Government to consider reducing the farm sizes, especially in cases where the farmers are failing to productively use the land. In cases, where the farmers are leasing to whites or any other person for that matter, they should be moved off the land to pave way for others with the capacity to be productive.
It is no secret that among the culprits engaging in land leasing, are some political “chefs” and the ordinary people. The “chefs” have entered into contracts with the white farmers so that they use the land and in return the “chefs” get a percentage from proceeds on the farm.
What this means is that, it is the white former commercial farmer who has taken over the land and benefiting more than our people.
We want to urge our farmers to relinquish the land if they cannot fully utilise it. The queue of people in need of land is very long and it makes us a laughing stock to return land to white former commercial farmers. We would rather have the farms reduced in size so that people are allocated pieces of land that they can use, depending on their resources.
We hope our people will heed the warning by President Mugabe to desist from such practices. We do not want to get to a point where Government would be forced to take back land from those leasing it.
Where we cannot use land, let us be honest with ourselves and surrender it to the Government for reallocation.