Claims of land reform ‘success’ negated
By Alex Bell
SW Radio Africa
03 June 2013
Claims by international academics that ZANU PF’s land grab campaign was a
success, have been negated by a leading Zimbabwean economics professor, who
has criticised these attempts at normalising the situation.
Professor Tony Hawkins was responding to recent publications, including a
book, which attempt to paint the land ‘reform’ programme in a positive
light. The book, Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land, was written by three
scholars, including UK based Joseph Hanlon.
The research in the book and the subsequent articles Hanlon has authored is
based on an assessment of three farms in Mashonaland Central during one
month last year.
The research pays little attention to the inhumanity of the land grabs,
ignoring the human rights abuses that took place and the illegality of the
process. Instead the authors spoke to the ‘fast-track’ owners of the seized
farms they visited and looked at their ‘successes’. The book details how
black Zimbabweans have successfully “taken back their land,” and farms are
returning to the positive production levels seen in the 1990s.
But these details are being criticised as an attempt to ‘sanitize’ what
happened during the land seizures that began in 2000, as part of a wider
campaign to clean-up ZANU PF’s image.
Professor Hawkins has since also countered what he called this “misleading
and dangerous” information, in a paper published last month. He argues that,
crucially, “the success or otherwise of land resettlement in Zimbabwe cannot
be judged by how many people are on the land now, but by what is produced,
what incomes are earned and whether the economy as a whole benefitted.”
Describing Hanlon as “an apologist for ZANU PF’s chaotic politically-driven
land programme,” Hawkins explains how Zimbabwe’s agricultural production has
all but collapsed since the land grabs began. And 13 years on the country’s
food import bill is well over $600 million a year, despite it being self
sufficient before the farm takeovers started.
Hawkins criticises Hanlon and the other academics’ research for failing to
mention “these inconvenient truths,” and instead focusing on “extremely
dubious employment and farm occupation data.” Hawkins argues that the
analysis by Hanlon “ignores the spillover effects of land resettlement
elsewhere in the economy.”
“The fact is that – regardless of how many people found poorly-paid jobs in
agriculture – land reform sparked a 40 percent decline in Zimbabwe’s GDP,”
Hawkins states.
The economics Professor told SW Radio Africa that it is this key fact that
cannot be overlooked and which emphasises how destructive the land ‘reform’
has been for Zimbabwe. He explained that it was not just the farms that
suffered, explaining that the collapse in farm output “is mirrored by
Zimbabwe’s de-industrialisation.”
“Hanlon’s failure to even mention the devastating impact of land
resettlement on industrial production and thereby on value-addition,
highlights his political and racist myopia,” Hawkins said.
He added: “There was also a total refusal to deal with the institutional
side it, the whole question of corruption and lack of accountability and
lack of transparency and so on, which everyone knows happened in the land
reform programme. And to pretend it didn’t, seems to me misleading and
dangerous. Particularly now that we have moved on to another form of land
reform (that) has been applied to mining and elsewhere.”
Professor Hawkin’s original paper was published in the May 2013 issue of
Welt-Sichten, Germany