Zimbabwe govt to compensate more white farmers

Government has disclosed that it is mobilising funds to compensate former white commercial farmers for improvements they made on land that was repossessed under the hugely successful land reform programme.

The Minister of Lands and Rural Resettlement, Dr Douglas Mombeshora, told The Sunday Mail last week that his ministry had submitted a funding request to Treasury.

"It has always been our position that we do not compensate for land but only for improvements made on the farms," said Dr Mombeshora.

"We have been paying compensation for quite some time now, but the challenge is that most of the evaluations we did in the past were factored in Zimbabwean dollars so now we will have to re-do all the evaluations again to ascertain the value of the improvements in United States dollars.

"As you know, it has never been our Government's obligation to compensate these farmers, but the British government's obligation. But as Government we have decided that it is in the best interest of everyone that we come up with the money and we have already submitted a request to Treasury for the evaluations we have already done.

"We have an outstanding balance of between $4 million and $5 million that is still owing to the farmers whose farms were evaluated nationwide and we have applied for as much to Treasury.

"But not all farms have been evaluated and the programme is ongoing."

In 2009, Government invited over 1 000 former commercial farmers to collect undisclosed amounts of money as compensation for improvements made on their farms before the land reform exercise.

The payments were done in terms of Section 29B of the Land Acquisition Act. Minister Mombeshora added that his ministry is prioritising the creation of a Land Commission. The new Constitution provides form the creation of a commission which will replace the Agriculture Land Board.

"Our urgent work as a Ministry is the formulation of the Land Commission in line with the new Constitution," he said.

"We have already concluded the drafting of the Land Commission Bill and have since submitted it to the Ministry of Justice before taking it to the Cabinet Committee for Legislation."

The Land Commission will be charged with, among other tasks, ensuring accountability and transparency in the administration of agricultural. It will also conduct periodical audits of agricultural land.

Minister Mombeshora also revealed that Government will in the next five years finalise the issue of security of tenure by providing all beneficiaries of the land reform programme with 99-year leases.