One year into Zimbabwe’s unity government, President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party is continuing its policy of confiscating land owned by white farmers. One million farm workers have also now been made both landless and jobless; 100,000 of which have found employment in farms in South Africa.

Three major estates have been confiscated by ZANU-PF since February 2009. This is in contradiction to a ruling by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) which in November 2008 declared the planned expropriation of land from 78 white farmers as discriminatory on the basis of race, and therefore illegal. This week, the Chipinge Magistrates Court ordered another four white farmers to leave their farms. Nehanda Radio labelled the ruling, ‘an act of legal vandalism of the highest order’. This comes amidst reports by Commercial Farmers Union that soldiers have been deployed across the country to pressurise white farmers into packing their bags.

When land redistribution started in 2000, ZANU-PF promised an improved standard of living for farm labourers. However, the situation quickly deteriorated. A former farm labourer described the situation: ‘some ZANU-PF youth went around hitting and raping farm workers and beating them to death. Farm labourers were thrown out of the farms with their employers and some farmers ran away without paying anything to farm workers’.
Despite promises of resettlement, 60,000 displaced persons are now living in makeshift camps waiting for the government to resettle them. The children of these of these families are receiving no education. The most disadvantaged are members of Tsvangirai’s MDC who are unlikely to receive compensation.

Landless people in Zimbabwe have called on the government to take the land from members of ZANU-PF and redistribute it to smallholders. Meanwhile, there is a small but growing call in South Africa for the government to seize land from mostly white landowners. ‘I see in South Africa, the land is currently in the hands of whites,’ said Johannesburg based academic Stephen Greenberg, ‘you need to have a move here towards taking control of the economy, and then once the economy is in blacks’ hands, move towards the land’.