Mugabe: The Unintentional Economic Freedom Fighter

Robert Mugabe was not an economic freedom fighter. He was always a political freedom fighter seeing himself as key to the political future of Zimbabwe. In the quest for political freedom, he was imprisoned for 10 years at Hwahwa prison for fighting to overthrow the brutal and barbaric Ian Smith colonial government.

 Thousands of young men and women took arms against the vicious British rule which denied Africans of land ownership. Africans had always been land owners and landlords so the idea that they couldn’t own land was an abomination. They fought to take back their land and ownership of that land and to take back their sovereignty. Mugabe is famous for vowing that Zimbabwe would never be a colony again after facing retaliation from the British government for land reform.

Unfortunately, when Mugabe was negotiating with the British to end cruel colonialism at Lancaster, he did not make land a central tenant of the agreement. He betrayed millions of Zimbabweans when he agreed to wait 10 years for land redistribution. In 1990, he again betrayed his people by not pursuing economic freedom for Zimbabweans. It was only 20 years later, when villagers known as the Svosve grew impatient about continuing to farm on rocky land while white foreigners owned hectares of land. They invaded the farms and began to take back their land.

When land invasions first started in Zimbabwe, Mugabe called on the military police to arrest the Svosve people and remove them from the land.

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During this time, many middle and working class urban dwellers had also become frustrated by the Mugabe regime. A new opposition political party, the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) began to emerge and ordinary Zimbabweans began to support this new political party. The Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) which had always been backed by Mugabe began to fund the MDC. This action angered Mugabe who felt betrayed by the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union whom he had protected when he did not return land back to its rightful owners.

It was the collusion of these 3 stakeholders that led a paranoid Mugabe now desperate to retain power to allow Svosve people to take back their land as they saw it fit. The result was that thousands of Zimbabweans ventured to the land they knew once belonged to their ancestors and began to farm on it. Their rational was that according to Zimbabwean law it is a crime to buy stolen goods so if the foreign white farmers bought land that had been stolen from African then they had broken the law.

At the same time UK Prime Minister Tony Blair reneged on the Lancaster House agreement where UK had agreed to compensate white farmers. The UK was responsible for colonialism and land theft in present day Zimbabwe. In 1930, the colonial government instituted a law known as the Land Apportionment Act.  That law forbade Africans from owning land but in 2000, Mugabe gave Africans their land back.

In 1980 at independence, foreign whites owned 95% of the land.

In 2000, when land reform started; foreigners still owned more than 70% of the arable farmland and this was 20 years after independence.

It is estimated that black Zimbabweans now own 96% of the agricultural land. This excludes company, church and corporate estates (2,041 million hectares) and transitional/unallocated land (2,684 million hectares) (Zimfact.org)

In 2000, 4,000 white farmers produced 85% of the tobacco.

 In 2017, 81,000 African farmers grew tobacco.

2018, a whopping 110,000 African farmers’ bumper harvest created the second largest export for Zimbabwe.

It was the Svosve people; the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change; Tony Blair’s government that forced Mugabe’s hand to deliver land to the people. Mugabe then became an unintentional economic freedom fighter.