"No Zimbabwe Land Audit Until Sanctions Are Lifted" ZANU PF

After invading farms (above) in Zimbabwe, ZANU PF went on to dish out these farms to people with no resources to work the land, while some senior politicians from both ZANU PF and MDC managed to lay their hands of multiple farms, hoarding them in the hope that they would get title deeds and eventually sell the farms (perhaps even back to their former owners). This makes the likelihood of a Land audit to investigate productivity and those with more than one farm highly unlikely. On Tuesday, a ZANU PF Minister told Zimbabwe television that there will no land audit until sanctions on Zimbabwe are lifted

Harare, Zimbabwe, 21 January 2010

Robert Mugabe's party has ruled out carrying out a Land Audit demanded by the people of Zimbabwe, the MDC, opposition parties and donors who want to pour in aid for agriculture in Zimbabwe. And they are blaming "sanctions" for their refusal to allow an audit to gauge whether there are black farmers with multiple farms and to also see whether any of them are being productive on the farms given to them.

Speaking on Zimbabwe television, Joseph Made, one of the Ministers in charge of Agriculture in Zimbabwe and a senior member of Mugabe's ZANU PF party, said that it was "premature" to conduct a land audit right now because "New Farmers" (Zimbabwean parlance for beneficiaries of the farm invasions) have been operating under a harsh environment "characterised by illegal sanctions" over the last few years.

"The capacity that we need has been impacted upon by the imposition of illegal sanctions. You can’t build capacity under sanctions.

"We might be wrong to say that there are large tracts of land lying idle. The  new farmers need to be capacitated and sanctions need to be removed," Made said, as he justified yet another instance of the tearing up of the Agreement between Morgan Tsvangirai and Robert Mugabe.

"You need human resources, financing and so on and you can’t do that under economic sanctions," Made added, as he justified why the new farmers are failing to feed the nation, despite some of them owning several fertile farms.

One of the biggest multiple farm owners is Mugabe himself, who has several farms, including the notorious Gushungo Farm which was selling milk to Nestle and forced that company to temporarily suspend operations after they had stopped buying the president's milk.

No noise will be made about this by the MDC because they themselves have now started benefiting from the farm invasions, with MDC MPs and Ministers being given some of the farms that have been invaded after the Inclusive Government was formed. Some of these MDC Ministers and MPs are also now multiple farm owners.

As one insider put it, "The MDCs have been thoroughly compromised and will not be making much noise about this, except to hoodwink their supporters now and again."

This announcement by the Minister Agricultural Mechanisation, Joseph Made, is only a fulfillment of the resolution passed by ZANU PF delegates at their Congress in Harare in December, during which they insisted that no land audit should take place until all sanctions on Zimbabwe, including the travel bans on Mugabe ZANU PF officials, are lifted.

It appears there is not much the MDC and Morgan Tsvangirai can do about this!

I am sure that by now you have noticed that there is no movement at all towards normalising the situation in Zimbabwe, no progress on the fundamental issues that have brought the country to its knees, despite Morgan Tsvangirai trying to airbrush Mugabe's and his own failure to failures to have an impact on the lives of Zimbabweans.

The people themselves seem to have no say in this.

Tsvangirai is unconcerned with these matters, since he is more interested in ensuring that his people are put in jobs at embassies around the world.

It will take a miracle for the Land audit to finally be done as long as ZANU PF is part of the Zimbabwe government. They have been resisting this from day one and are likely to get even more intransigent as time goes on.

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