Describing the land issue as “emotive” Mangoma, who is a senior MDC-T member, said the coalition government had finally come to agreement that the matter should be resolved by 2010.
"The land issue is an issue, that has to be resolved and we (government) are all agreed that by end of next year, we would have settled the land issue once and for all," Mangoma said. "This (land issue) has been an emotive issue, but government has agreed that the issue has to come an end next year."
He did not say how exactly the government hoped to achieve this feat over the next 12 months especially given that the administration has not even begun auditing Mugabe’s chaotic and often violent land reform programme of the past nine years – an exercise that is a key requirement to any effort to resolve Zimbabwe’s long-running land dispute.
The coalition government was supposed to have begun auditing the controversial land reforms last September to weed out top allies of Mugabe who grabbed most of the best farms seized from white owners.
It was hoped that the audit that is part of several unfulfilled provisions from last year’s power-sharing agreement between Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Deputy Premier Arthur Mutambara would lay the groundwork for a more orderly and equitable land redistribution programme.
But the administration shelved the land audit because it did not have the US$31 million that Lands Minister Herbert Murerwa says is required to pay for the exercise.
Finance Minister Tendai Biti, also a senior MDC-T member, last week allocated Murerwa’s department the funds required to carry the land audit. But analysts expect Mugabe – who has hoarded several former white-owned farms for his family – and the security commanders who still wield much power in Zimbabwe to resist and block any attempt to expose multi-farm ownership.
Mugabe often rejects MDC criticism of the corruption, violence and human rights abuses that have characterised his land reforms as an excuse by the former opposition party to try to return land to former white owners.
Mugabe’s land reforms that he says were necessary to correct a colonial land ownership system that reserved the best land for whites and banished blacks to poor soils are blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into food shortages after he failed to support black villagers resettled on former white farms with inputs to maintain production.
In addition critics say the veteran leader’s cronies – and not ordinary peasants – benefited the most from farm seizures with some of them ending up with as many as six farms each against the government’s stated one-man-one-farm policy. – ZimOnline
