Tuesday, February 22, 2011

No going back on land issue

Therefore, in terms of the history of the people’s struggle to regain total control of their resources, it is important to remember that those who stole African resources also stole African history or tried to destroy and deny that history in order to justify the dispossession of the African.

The Sunday Mail

AFRICAN FOCUS with Tafataona Mahoso
The Financial Gazette of February 17 2011 tucked an important story at Page 15 which should have qualified for top-page treatment. The story was entitled “Land reform not complete disaster”.
It was based on reports of a study by Professor Ian Scoones of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University in the UK which concluded that Zimbabwe’s African land reclamation and redistribution is popular, largely successful (despite illegal sanctions imposed on the country) and clearly beneficial to the once dispossessed and impoverished African majority. Professor Scoones’ study is entitled “Zimbabwe’s land reform: Myths and realities”.
As The Sunday Mail and The Herald had already reported before the Financial Gazette’s grudging recognition of the reports, there are studies carried out by Zimbabweans which reached the same conclusions as the one by Professor Ian Scoones.
One of these is by Professor Sam Moyo of Zimbabwe.
But the Financial Gazette’s reporting of the existence of Scoones’ report is important not only because of its grudging tone and its reliance on the white racist Commercial Farmers’ Union for comment; it is important because the Financial Gazette has been a leader in predicting gloom and doom for the African land reclamation movement and the land redistribution programme for the last 12 years or more.
At one time the Financial Gazette chose to rely on a report by the United States Department of Agriculture (which the paper reproduced wholesale) rather than carry out its own research or use local experts.
The Financial Gazette, the Zimbabwe Independent and The Daily News were among the local papers who dismissed Zimbabwe’s land reclamation and redistribution as “Mugabe’s last straw” and as a mere “election gimmick” intended to enable President Robert Mugabe and his party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) to win the 2000 and 2002 elections.
The message of these papers together with the MDC formations and their Rhodesian allies during the 2000 and 2002 elections was that the redistributed land would be returned to the former white settlers once Zanu-PF and President Mugabe had achieved their objective of winning those two elections and thereby holding on to power a little longer.
These papers and the MDC formations also alleged that only “Mugabe’s close cronies” actually received land, although it was not clear how the President and his party would win a majority of votes by giving land to only a few close “cronies” of the President.

On the basis of this myth, more than 1 000 whites flocked back to Zimbabwe in April 2008, when Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC-T party made them believe that they had won the 2008 elections.
The whites believed that the so-called “election gimmick” would now be reversed because it would seem to have served no purpose.
But why are the media houses which used to denigrate land reform as a temporary election gimmick trying now to revise their position?

Fruits of land reclamation
First, the fruits of land reclamation and redistribution are accumulating and improving every year since 2009. This means the ordinary citizen is reading a different local situation from that which these media predicted. This reading of the real situation by the average citizen threatens to discredit the opposition media as hopeless doomsayers and liars.

Accumulation, improving land reclamation
Second, the accumulating and improving fruits of land reclamation and redistribution are motivating more and more Zimbabweans to ask for land, to take part in the revolution. This exposes as a lie the claim by Jan Raath in The Mail & Guardian for November 28 1997 that:
“It’s official.
“The people of Zimbabwe don’t want land.
“They want jobs in a market economy, and an opportunity to work for a decent living.”
Here, Jan Raath was telling the world not only that most Zimbabweans did not want land redistribution; he was telling the world that the majority of Zimbabweans wanted neoliberal reforms such as those which have brought crisis and grief to Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, France, Albania and even the US itself.

Timing of land revolution
Third, the timing of Zimbabwe’s land revolution has been such that the best year for results, 2011, coincides with bad or inadequate harvests in Australia, Russia, Ukraine and Argentina. These bad or inadequate harvests have caused food prices to escalate, precipitating hunger and starvation around the world.
Pakistan is a special case where the grain-producing heartland the size of the UK was wiped out by floods.
This means Pakistan has to import a lot more grain than normal.
In other words, all food-deficit countries are in trouble unless they are rich in petroleum or minerals.
In other words, Zimbabwe will have enough food, in the hands of the very same people who grow and eat it, exactly at that moment when the world food situation is at its worst because of rising prices and reduced supply.
In addition, Zimbabwe’s mineral resources are also ready for exploitation and value addition by the same majority.
Zimbabwe would be even further ahead of all these other countries, including its committed detractors, if it was not for the illegal economic sanctions, if it was not for MDC-T’s deliberate efforts to destroy the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and the Grain Marketing Board, who were stopped from helping farmers by Finance Minister Tendai Biti.
The success of land reform despite these efforts to stop it is the reason why the MDC formations have always been afraid of genuine elections.
Therefore, in terms of the history of the people’s struggle to regain total control of their resources, it is important to remember that those who stole African resources also stole African history or tried to destroy and deny that history in order to justify the dispossession of the African.
The war over history accompanies the war over resources. And this war has shifted over the years, as follows:
We begin with the white racist position that Africa has no history.
According to the Regius professor of Modern European History at Oxford University, Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Spectator magazine in 1963:
“Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught African history.
“Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present the only history there is in Africa is the history of Europeans.
“The rest is darkness . . . and darkness is not the subject of history.”
However, in 1963, as Professor Trevor-Roper was pontificating about Africa at Oxford, many Africans were creating big African history. Some formed the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) which together with the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) now forms the United Zanu-PF in the Government of Zimbabwe.
Still other Africans were forming the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, which laid the foundation for the current African Union and which played a big role in the liberation of Southern Africa from British imperialism and colonialism.
As a result of these and many other African replies to white lies, the claim that Africans have no history retreated into another lie, as follows:
“Africans may have invented both civilisation and history, but they have since degenerated so much that all their liberated states are failed states.
“For this reason, Africans need white intervention in the form of recolonisation.”
This line is repeated so often that many African professors teach it to their students today.
So the myth of “the failed state” is being used to justify intervention in African affairs, with attempts being made to define Zimbabwe as such a state.
The problem is that it is strong states such as Zimbabwe which imperialism is struggling to weaken so that they fail.
By exposing the fact that it is the strong sovereign state which is singled out for attack in order to make it fail, we have also forced a retreat from that position.
So, in order to deter us from adopting a truly militant position on the revaluation of Africa and the reclamation of its assets, imperialism retreats to yet another position:
“What Africans in Zimbabwe are trying to achieve through land reclamation could be achieved more smoothly and harmoniously if they allowed international financial institutions and donors to finance a proper planning process, to design a blueprint for land tenure, to fund a land bank, and so forth, without precipitating the disruption and chaos caused by the Third Chimurenga.”
This is in fact what Jan Raath meant by waiting for the market economy to create jobs.
However, Zimbabweans by 2000 replied that they had seen too many aid offers and packages which had served to create detours by-passing the clear objectives of the First and the Second Chimurenga.
This persistence led the imperialist propagandists to retreat to yet another position: Many are called but a few are chosen.
White settlers were chosen by God to turn Zimbabwe into a breadbasket. Let them continue.
“Yes, the land was stolen from the majority by white settlers. Yes, the best farmland is in the hands of a few white farmers, but that is the trend worldwide.
“In most advanced countries, it is a tiny minority that remains on the farms. Moreover, after a hundred years of colonialism, most Africans in Zimbabwe do not want land.
“They want jobs, which they know the white settlers and foreign companies can best provide.”
So the attacks on land reform automatically become attacks on economic indigenisation and empowerment.
The land reclamation movement refused to listen to this interpretation and the propagandists were forced to abandon it and move to yet another:
“Africans may have moved on to the land in droves, but they can’t farm. They are not good farmers.”
However, since 2000, there has been clear evidence that production on the farms is steadily increasing and improving and that even those who have no farming experience are eager to learn fast.
What they lack are funds, equipment and inputs which the state could provide if it was not for illegal sanctions.
This has forced yet another retreat to a contradictory position.
“Yes, the people of Zimbabwe have shown that they really wanted their land and that they are eager to farm.
“However, this farming will not take off, will not succeed, unless and until the people first get rid of President Robert Mugabe and the Zanu-PF Government.
“This government is so corrupt and so incompetent that it is the biggest hindrance to a successful agrarian revolution.”
Put another way: President Mugabe and Zanu-PF were good only for political liberation. They must now give way to a new group who will bring economic liberation.
Again the people see through this position: That, first, it seeks to avoid the question of sanctions and their negative effects on the provision of resources for agriculture.
In the second place, this position seeks to deny the reality revealed by both Professor Sam Moyo and Professor Ian Scoones.
Most of the redistributed land went to the povo, the small producers who used to be restricted to congested and barren “tribal trust lands” of Rhodesian days.
If that is not development and economic liberation, then, what is it?
Moreover, when more than 1 000 white settlers tried to come back to reverse land reform in March and April 2008, it was President Mugabe and Zanu-PF who defended land reform against the efforts of the MDC formations to reverse the same. And when Copac went out to seek people’s views for a new constitution, the people upheld the position of President Mugabe and the liberation movement on land reform, economic indigenisation and African economic empowerment.
The position taken by The Financial Gazette is not different from the other previous retreats. Where objective professional research demonstrates a popular land revolution aiming to empower the povo as well as a resounding success in light of the illegal sanctions and droughts — the best The Financial Gazette can grant is: “Land reform not complete disaster”.
Even this had to be tucked away at Page 15! This effort to hide the light under the bushel means that the internal detractors of Zimbabwe’s land reform will be the last to admit that their interpretations of the Third Chimurenga were wrong

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