From 2000, the war veterans led militia onto farms owned by white commercial farmers and forcefully removed around 5,000 of them under the guise of resettling land-hungry Zimbabweans.Which worked about as well in Zimbabwe as it has elsewhere;
The study that was carried out around Masvingo found out that war veterans were underutilizing the land they received, with only 18 percent of the farmland being put to use.Guess who is blamed;
The ZLP [Zimbabwe Liberation Platform] said the underutilisation of the land was due to a variety of factors, among them poor support from government.
“The current small-scale farmers face a host of difficulties in farming. Most respondents talked of lack of support from government…and difficulties in securing inputs and commodities needed.Funny that those 5,000 farmers who were operating on the land before, didn't have those problems. Is there a lesson to be learned from this?
“What these tentative findings point to is that there are current beneficiaries of land reform who are not particularly happy on the land and are looking for alternative forms of livelihood. Such admissions have interesting policy implications.
“For example, if the state was to offer these people some return for the land they currently occupy, and these packages were accepted, land could be made available for others to farm or lease, be they commercial entities or other land hungry populations, rural or urban,” said ZLP.Doesn't sound as though the Zimbabwean-powers-that-be will.
Update: Been down so long, looks like up to some;
ZIMBABWE is the most repressed economy in sub-Saharan Africa and in the bottom five worldwide due to government intervention, policy inconsistency and corruption, according to the 2015 Index of Economic Freedom which, however, notes recent gains in monetary freedom and state spending.Still, the only countries less free than Mugabeland are North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.
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