Zimbabwe has revealed plans to compensate thousands of white Zimbabwean farmers who lost their lands in the early 2000s under the then racist late President Robert Mugabe’s regime.
According to the Head of Debt Management at the Ministry of Finance in Zimbabwe, Andrew Bvumbe, some 1,300 white farmers whose land was seized under Mugabe have signed up to receive compensation.
He said those who qualify will be paid in 10-year treasury bills. The compensation deal is expected to cost $3.5 billion over the 10-Year period.
According to him, “We now have to go through the process of vetting them and confirming the amounts that they are owed.”
He added that: “With these 1,300, we want to move as quickly as possible. Maybe by the end of the third quarter of this year we want to get this out of the way.”
It would be recalled that under a deal signed in 2020, the Government of Zimbabwe accepted to compensate some 4,000 white farmers whose land was seized by state-backed militants.
However, the President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s administration has repeatedly failed to meet payment deadlines.
History of land reform in Zimbabwe
Historical information shows that land reform in Zimbabwe officially started in 1980 with the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement, as a program to redistribute farmland from white Zimbabweans to black Zimbabweans as an effort by the ZANU-PF government to give more control over the country’s extensive farmlands to the black African majority. Before the implementation of these policies, the distribution of land in what was then known as Rhodesia saw a population of 4,400 white Rhodesians owning 51% of the country’s land while 4.3 million black Rhodesians owned 42%, with the remainder being non-agricultural land. The discrepancy of this distribution, as well as the overall dominance of the white population in the newly-independent but largely unrecognized Rhodesian state was challenged by the black nationalist organizations ZANU and ZAPU in the Rhodesian Bush War.
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