Whose land are you selling, Mr President?

By Phillan Zamchiya | Mar. 14, 2025

Many resettled farmers believe the state is merely holding ownership on behalf of the people.

Dear Mr President,

A STATE-driven carnage of the peasantry that might lead to a rural revolt or entrenchment of patronage as a technology of governance is on the horizon in Zimbabwe.

This follows the state’s decision to extend neo-liberal rent-seeking policies to the highly politicised land sector. It was in December 2024, when the government announced the introduction of title deeds on resettlement farms in a vague document titled Land Tenure Statement.

Adverts are now all over the media calling for all farmers with valid resettlement tenure documents to pay for the land they acquired at market price. Full cash payment will enable one to get a title deed deemed by the state to be bankable, registrable and transferable.

Title deeds will replace other forms of existing tenure such as A1 Settlement or Temporary permits [for small-scale farmers], A2 Permits, 99-year leases [for large-scale farmers], offer letters and Agricultural Land Settlement Act [ALSA] leases.

Reader, this pro-market approach is a radical policy shift given that no less than 380 000 black people acquired about 10 million hectares of land for free under the fast-track land reform, which started with violent land occupations on February 16, 2000.

About 20 000 individuals acquired large-scale farms whereas the majority got small-scale farms whom I loosely refer to as the peasantry for purposes of a popular opinion.

For many self-styled radicals, fast-track had marked the fulfilment of the anti-colonial struggle, an end to settler colonial rule, the dawn of true independence, a global defeat of a neo-liberal regime of landed accumulation and an end of the Third and final Chimurenga [war of liberation]. One book tried to capture the political moment by flagging a screaming title Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land.

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An imminent question is why has President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s administration intensified neo-liberal rent-seeking behaviour? Economic assumptions in this new tenure policy closely relate to Hernando de Soto’s now discredited book The mystery of Capital.

De soto argues that untitled land is dead capital, which needs to be unlocked to make global capitalism work.

Consequently, a feel good presumption that flows from this flawed logic is that Zimbabwe’s 10 million hectares of resettled land reflects dead capital amounting to US$20 billion at an estimated market value of US$2 000 per hectare.

This logic of capital is then complemented by the everyday logic of plunder inherent in the ruling political system. From this dual perspective six reasons dominate.

First, is a grandiose dream to put the economy back to solvency with the peasantry dominating state receipts. To this end, Kudakwashe Tagwirei, the chairperson of the parallel land tenure implementation committee, expects the project to raise US$13 billion and grow national gross domestic product (GDP) to US$ 65 billion.

Second is to raise funds to pay the national sovereign debt of US$21 billion, which includes a US$3,5 billion compensation debt for former farm owners, who were evicted during the fast-track land reform programme in order to unlock international financial assistance from the west.

Third, is an idea to create a government loan fund for farmers to be administered by selected commercial banks.

Fourth, is to set up a fund to build infrastructure. It is important to highlight that state loans have previously been looted and plundered by those connected to the ruling party with impunity and there are no signs such practices have halted.

Fifth, is an idea to raise funds to sustain the ruling Zanu PF’s political hegemony. Sixth is to make land fees the next frontier of plunder and accumulation by the core of the ruling elites and their allies.

However, can the government raise such a huge sum of money from selling occupied land? Reader, this might be an attempt to squeeze blood from a rock. Most farmers argue that they fought for and reclaimed the land through fast-track reform programme, which they partly understood as a continuation of the liberation war.

This is a narrative that the ruling Zanu PF leadership has reinforced for the past two decades and defended vigorously through patriotic history.

One of the resettled farmers rhetorically asked me: “whose land is the President selling? Whom did he consult? He did not consult the war veterans, he did not consult masvikiro enyika (the country’s spirit mediums) and he did not consult the people. We are not going to buy our own land. Land belongs to the people and not the government”.

Another farmer repeated a common cliché that “we died for our land”. A resettled chief of the Musikavanhu clan concluded that “you cannot sell land to its owners”. Others simply dismissed the policy by saying “the Zanu PF government is for the people and it cannot do that”.

One might argue that all agricultural land is vested in the state, which has the right to alienate it for value as per section 290 and 293 of the constitution.

However, from an autochthonous, political and social perspective many resettled farmers believe the state is merely holding “ownership” on behalf of the people.

In reality, this sets an ideological battle between the Zanu PF leadership with its pro-free market logic from above versus farmers with a political logic from below.

Even if the free market logic prevails, my estimate based on previous socio-economic surveys on resettlement farms indicate that only about 20% of the resettled 380 000 farmers might be able to pay the cash at current rates.

This resourced group largely sees land as property and in general do welcome title deeds initiatives. However, some of them already have strong enough political networks to acquire title deeds without even paying.

For example, most of the cabinet ministers, service chiefs, permanent secretaries, traditional leaders and captains of industry who received the first batch of title deeds on December 20, 2024 at Mnangagwa’s Pricabe farm did not pay a dime.

Most of the resettled remain “horseless” farmers as they do not exist outside a dire socio-economic environment with no bright prospects for savings. The government announced that such poor farmers will apply for mortgage from banks once modalities are in place.

Reader, in many parts of the world, income and asset-poor families earning less than US$500 a month are unlikely to get credit from commercial banks even when using land as collateral. This becomes more complex in Zimbabwe where banks cannot possess the agricultural land through foreclosure.

Yet even if commercial banks manage to lend to the farmers, payment defaults will result in the loss of land. In this context, a defaulter loses the farm to an aspiring farmer on the government’s land waiting list with enough money to pay for the land and clear the debt.

This arrests accumulation of land by banks but still necessitates accumulation by holders of capital usually connected to the ruling class.

This ultimately triggers processes of landlessness among the poor and vulnerable families with the women and children suffering the most.

Assuming the state wanted to unburden taxpayers from paying for the land, a better option would have been to ensure that families have an option to obtain ownership at the end of the leasehold.

In South Africa, the state will consider transferring ownership to redistributive land reform beneficiaries after realistic timelines of 50-year leases and Namibia is following the same logic.

Zimbabwe could also have strengthened the leasehold tenure system to make it bankable just like in Zambia and other African countries.

It is a legendary myth to suggest that only private title deeds are bankable. After all the new title deeds will still be contested internationally by former farm owners who claim title to the same land until compensation is paid.

Nevertheless, let us pay attention to the fact that farmers who cannot afford to pay for the land can be dispossessed and be absorbed as labour on the farms or in other industries. Reader, capitalist agriculture in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere on the African continent, is already failing to provide wages to sustain decent livelihoods.

On the other hand, post-colonial Zimbabwe has witnessed urbanisation without industrialisation and a rapid process of deindustrialisation and informalisation of labour, life and society.

Displacing people in the hope that they will be absorbed by an imaginary industry will only worsen the agrarian question of labour or that of the dispossessed.

Another vexing reality is that a significant population living or utilising resettlement farms do not have formal tenure documents needed to apply for new title deeds. Informal land tenure arrangements have emerged on the farms since 2000.

Other resettlement farms are now under defacto customary governance of traditional leaders. Many farms have since exchanged hands through vernacular land markets and land rentals outside the state’s legal orbit.

I have met many farmers who utilised social practises to acquire land. Some of the original land occupiers never sought documentation for the land.

Others have legitimated their informal stay through showing loyalty to Zanu PF and wave their membership cards as proof of land ownership.

Land sharing arrangements have also emerged that make it difficult for the farm to be registered in one person’s name without fuelling social conflict. In fact, there are more people living on resettlement farms through informal arrangements than estimated formal numbers.

This is messy but it is the social reality on the farms. Zimbabwe is not an exception though.

Most of the rural land in Africa is governed outside formal tenure arrangements as prescribed in policy documents. It will not be easy to evict all the farmers with informal tenure arrangements as squatters.

Reader, given that most peasants will not pay, will the state deploy the black boots (paramilitary wing of the police) or the army to evict them?

A legal impediment is that section 291 of the constitution — the supreme law — still recognises leases or other agreements as valid forms of tenure.

Law aside because it is always disregarded when it clashes with politics. Politically, the elephant in the room is that the ruling party is only left with significant electoral support from these rural constituencies.

To evict the farmers en masse will be political suicide and such bravado will mark an ignominious end to Zanu PF’s rule through triggering peasant resistance and a potential rural revolt.

Otherwise, the vulnerable peasants if subdued will be further locked in a web of patron-client relationships to justify their continued stay on the farms without paying.

Reader, in the fullness of time, this policy might eventually be dumped as practical and social realities unfold.

Zimbabwe’s terrain requires multiple, flexible and adaptable tenure regimes and no unilinear and shallow simplistic formulas.