We want farms, Zanu-PF youths tell Robert Mugabe

August 27, 2017
| Report Focus News

Harare – Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF youths have reportedly urged President Robert Mugabe’s government to seize the last few remaining white commercial farms and distribute them to the landless.

According to the state owned Herald newspaper, Zanu-PF’s national youth chairperson Kudzai Chipanga said that the current generation of young people were too young to have benefited from the country’s chaotic land reforms when it started in the early 2000.

Chipanga said this while speaking to hundreds of young people gathered at the Midlands inter-district meeting in Gweru.

He said that they were many farms that were unused and could benefit many young people if they were repossessed.

“We know there are some farms that government did not repossess because they served a critical sector like dairy farms. We have no problem with such farms, but there are those that still lie idle with the owners still holding on to them because they have connections with chefs. As youth we say no, let’s get those farms reallocated so that the majority can benefit,” Chipanga reportedly said to loud applause.

This was not the first time that the Zanu-PF youth called on the government to eject the few remaining white farmers.

Controversial land reforms

In June Chipanga called on the remaining white commercial farmers to relocate to Harare’s leafy Borrowdale suburb “where they can relax and play golf”.

Chipanga said that most Zanu-PF party youths remained landless even after the country’s controversial land reforms.

Thousands of white commercial farmers and their employees were displaced and left without sources of income during the fast-tracked agrarian reforms that were masterminded by Mugabe’s administration in 2000.

Mugabe himself recently threatened to embark on fresh land grabs targeting the few white commercial farmers that still remained in the country.

The nonagenarian was quoted as saying that white commercial agronomists who still remained on the farms should be removed from their properties because most Zimbabweans were in need of land.

Said Mugabe: “We are going to take those farms and re-distribute them to our youths, some of whom did not benefit from the land reform programme but the land would not be enough for everybody. We are also going to take away the land from small scale purchase farmers who are not utilising those farms for re-distribution.”