President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s administration has announced that white commercial farmers would be given 99-year leases from the limited five-year contracts they had under the Mugabe administration.
The CFUZ said its members should be given priority under the new policy and it believes that the country has a potential to recover.
“I think what was expressed by the President was a need for national healing and we look for that process too. We would rather see a Zimbabwe that heals than one that continues to suffer from the hurts of the past,” said Gilpin. A farmer and rights activist Ben Freeth said he was concerned that oppressive laws remained in place.
“Nothing has really changed, there’s been a right noise made and obviously the Smarts-family going back to their land that’s one case. But in the vast majority of cases the situation is normal, it has been the same like in the past years.
“We need a return to rule of law in this country, we need a scrapping of laws that are adverse to investment, adverse to production, adverse to employment. And until those laws are scrapped nothing has changed,” he said.
The 99-year lease programme and Mnangagwa’s pledge to compensate white commercial farmers for improvements made to seized land may represent a policy shift.
But Freeth said many were still unclear how everything would work. – eNCA
