Land reform: a comparative analysis of the Zimbabwean and South African processes since democratization

English: As a process generally designed to redress colonial imbalances in land resources, address issues of good governance, poverty reduction and promote sustainable economic growth, the phenomenon of redistributing land is not peculiar to Southern Africa. Although implemented with variant methodologies and resultant implications, depending on a country's ideologies and circumstances on the ground, land reform has been previously experienced in various global countries such as Australia, Brazil, Kenya, Nicaragua, Peru, Chile and others. This research is primarily intended to explore how the process of land reform has been handled in two multi-facetedly contiguous Southern African countries, namely Zimbabwe and South Africa. The central contention of the study being that, manifold forces have propelled and hampered land reform in the two countries and that methodologies employed have intentionally and inadvertently provoked a multiplicity of problems and challenges. With a shared experience of colonial conquest, occupation, dispossession, land alienation and the need to re-gain independence through armed resistance, the land issue has always been pivotal to the continuing struggle of both countries. Over the years, prime land would change hands through discriminatory acts like the 1913 Native Land Act and its sequels in South Africa and the Land Husbantry Act in Zimbabwe. Black people would be pushed to impoverished, dry, drought stricken Bantustans, homelands, reserves and tribal trust lands. To regain their freedom and their land, wars were fought and eventually independence granted through negotiated settlement. At the dawn of independence, one of the top priorities for the black led governments was to equitably redistribute land resources. The study amply demonstrates that en route land reform itself has been fraught with all kinds of hurdles emanating from within and from without. From the onset, the negotiated settlements would control free choices of land policies for the nascent black governments. The negotiated constitutions brought with them strings attached, guarantees for the minority and ensured that the legacy of colonialism was maintained. As a result, only politically and financially cheaper approaches to land reform were employed at the expense of the urgency with which reform was needed to reduce poverty, among other needs. In Zimbabwe, in the first decade of independence, land was redistributed through the Willing Seller Willing Buyer mode (WSWB) via the market. Later, the government sought to hasten the land redistribution pace through the LRRPII and the Fast Track Programme with disastrous results. In South Africa, with the objective to restore land rights (restitution), redistribute land and reform tenure, the WSWB approach is still being used. To supplement the WSWB, affirmative action is also engaged which includes reallocating state land, drawing up additional legal reforms, availing state aid programmes and limiting large farms. There has been very limited expropriation of land by the South African government as opposed to Zimbabwe. Lately, Zimbabwe has nationalized all land and issued 99 year leases to farmers. The international community has adversely influenced land policy selection in the two countries under discussion through withdrawal of donations, exerting political pressures using sanctions and calling for regime change. Taking the colonial histories of the two countries as a point of departure, this study seeks to give an appraisal of land reform and to interrogate critically post-independence land reform methodologies and implications thereof. In its overall approach, the research endeavours to trace, state clearly and explicitly, compare, contrast and identify elements of land reform policies to find out their nature and value in order to understand and explain the programme. The research partially concludes that land reform shall go down in the annals of history as a correctional measure that has, arguably, introduced a new complex dimension in Zimbabwean politico-economics as well as influenced Southern Africa and the international world to view the region with fresh, pragmatic eyes.