The Government of Zimbabwe is planing to establish a fund to compensate white farmers dispossessed of their farms during the country’s decade-long land reform program, Lands Minister Herbert Murerwa said Friday.
Murerwa told the privately-run Radio VOP that the proposed compensation fund would help pay more than 4,000 former commercial farmers who had their farms taken away for resettlement purposes since 2000.
“We are currently coming up with the total package and will release the finer details later after some meetings with Cabinet,” Murerwa said.
The minister however reiterated the Zimbabwe government’s position that it would only compensate for infrastructural developments made on farms acquired for resettlement.
“We are working on this with international consultants such as Professor Mandivamba Rukuni to help us come up with a way forward and a figure to give the farmers, some of whom are now destitute,” he told the radio station.
President Robert Mugabe has previously said that his government has no obligation to compensate white commercial farmers who lost their land during the land reform program.
The long-serving leader, who has used the often-violent land reforms to appease his restive supporters, says the responsibility to pay lies with the country’s former colonial power Britain.
Mugabe insisted that the government’s position was that the British must pay for the colonial obligations as agreed at the Lancaster House conference in 1979 that paved the way for Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.
Once a net food exporter, Zimbabwe has since 2002 faced severe food shortages that critics blame on the veteran leader’s decision to displace established white farmers and replace them with either unskilled or inadequately funded black farmers.
Mugabe said the reforms were necessary to correct a colonial land ownership system that reserved the best land for whites and banished blacks to infertile soils.
He blames poor weather and Western sanctions he says have hampered importation of fertilizers, seed and other farming inputs.
But critics say Mugabe’s cronies – and not ordinary peasants – benefited the most from farm seizures, with some of them ending up with as many as six farms each against the government’s stated one-man-one-farm policy.
Source African Press Agency
African News from NetNewsPublisher.com
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