White farmers seek to grab Mugabe land in SA
March 28 2010 at 10:21AM
By Peta Thornycroft
White Zimbabwean farmers dispossessed by President Robert Mugabe’s government will take another big step this week towards seizing Zimbabwean government-owned properties in Cape Town.
The sheriff will visit four properties in Zonnebloem, Kenilworth and Wynberg to attach immovable property after a writ of execution of the property was issued in the North Gauteng High Court on Friday. On March 11 the sheriff attached movable property at the four places.
The dormant law is also stirring in Zimbabwe itself where, for the first time in 10 years, Zimbabwe’s beleaguered Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU) has gone to court to seek compensation for the thousands of farmers evicted from their land so far and to stop the dispossession of the very few who still remain on their land.
The move to seize the Cape Town properties is an attempt to enforce a landmark judgment by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal in November 2008 that Mugabe’s takeovers of white-owned farms were racist and therefore illegal.
Mugabe dismissed the tribunal’s ruling as nonsense and of no force in Zimbabwe. But at the North Gauteng High Court last month the farmers successfully applied for the judgment to be enforced in South Africa, and
now they are carrying that out.
Attaching the properties will give the farmers’ lawyers legal control over them and they can put them up for auction. They are estimated to be worth several million rands.
Their representatives have identified at least 11 properties in the country which are owned by the government of Zimbabwe, but most are connected to the Zimbabwean embassy and are therefore protected by diplomatic immunity. But the four in Cape Town are not.
The Zimbabwean farmers are being represented in South Africa by Afriforum, a farmers’ interest group within the Solidarity trade union.
The attorneys say this is a groundbreaking development, as they are not aware of any precedent for government-owned properties being seized in pursuit of a civil judgment.
The SADC tribunal has yet to set an amount to be paid in compensation for the farms seized, but the lawyers say they are already able to seek the seizures to recover costs in connection with the court hearing in South Africa, estimated at R130 000.
Willie Spies, the lead South African lawyer in the case, said it would be almost impossible for the Zimbabwean government to appeal against the seizures, as it had not contested the North Gauteng court ruling.
The South African government was not party to the proceedings, he added, and while technically it could apply for judicial review, it would be in a “moral predicament” if it tried to do so, as in a separate case last year it
had formally agreed to “honour and uphold” the SADC tribunal verdict.
He said it would be a test case for the independence of the South African judicial process.
Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe the CFU has asked the Supreme Court, which also acts as a constitutional court, for a moratorium on all ongoing prosecutions against the few hundred white farmers who survive on small portions of their original landholdings. The application also seeks to end seizure of movable assets from farmers during subsequent evictions.
Deon Theron, president of the CFU, said: “A major part of the application will show the government has more than addressed the ‘racial balance’ upon which it has based the purpose of its land reform in the past 10 years.”
* This article was originally published on page 4 of Tribune on March 28, 2010