Minister flouts Mugabe's 'one man, one farm' policy
In an apparently blatant violation of a decree by President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's Justice Minister, Patrick Chinamasa, has seized a second farm for himself within nine months.
Chinamasa is one of several high-ranking Zanu-PF members who have stubbornly clung to their properties. In February, Chinamasa sent Zimbabwean police to arrest farmer Peter Baker for refusing to vacate his farm, Rocklands, in Marondera. Baker had successfully challenged Rocklands' seizure in court and refused to leave the property. Upon receiving news of his impending arrest, he went into hiding. Police searched for him for two months but no charges were ever filed. Eight months after the seizure, the farm's water supply has been exhausted , undermining the property's future and that of neighbouring farms.
"Having taken and destroyed my farm, the minister was obviously looking for a new property," Baker said this week, commenting on Chinamasa's seizure last weekend of Richard and Cally Yates's Lawrencedale 3 Farm in Headlands, 150km east of Harare.
This week, Chinamasa was still defending his latest acquisition and said: "I was allocated the Headlands farm in July this year to become my first since the land reform programme started. My wife, who is an ex-detainee, agreed to surrender the Rocklands farm in Marondera, which she was allocated last year, so we remain with one farm." But Chinamasa's latest acquisition clearly contradicted a ruling by Mugabe earlier this year that senior officials in the ruling Zanu-PF party must conform to his land reform programme's "one man, one farm" policy.
In July, the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported that Mugabe wanted any extra farms to be relinquished within two weeks. However, some officials, especially senior military officers, said they would not surrender extra farms they had fought for. Others, like Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, have denied owning more than one farm and claimed other properties linked to them were owned by relatives. In the case of the Yates farm, there were no legal grounds for Chinamasa to seize the property. According to a Telegraph report, Yates had accepted a government offer in July last year to subdivide his farm between himself and state-appointed "settlers" in return for being allowed to stay. "I had a good working relationship with the settlers . . . and we all managed to produce a successful harvest," he said. Yates believed he had made his compromise and that his future was secure.
- The Telegraph, Sunday Times Foreign Desk