TITLE:
Restitution versus Populism: Revisiting the Dominant Tropes of the Land Question in Zimbabwe
AUTHORS:
Langton Makuwerere Dube
KEYWORDS:
Land Question, Restitution, Populism, Zimbabwe, Land Redistribution
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.7 No.10,
October
22,
2019
ABSTRACT: Zimbabwe’s land revolution at the turn of the millennia cast the country
on the international spotlight for a myriad of reasons, ranging from laudatory
admiration to negative criticism and bad publicity. Narratives and doomsday
predictions of economic disaster, social upheaval and ultimately internal
implosion were awash and not off the mark
given the manner in which the political economic status quo was shaken and
restructured. The Fast Track Land Reform (FTLRP) was hailed in some quarters as
the long overdue corrective measure against historical injustices while other
sections castigated it as chauvinistic and fascist machinations of a capricious
regime battling for political survival. These ensuing contestations around land
expropriation are not an aberration in that they form part of a repertoire of
the languages of life and/or the teleology in the history and transition of post colonies with
settler heritage. Land reform continues to gain policy traction in much of the
developing South with a colonial history where
the economic logic of settlerism was the dominant mode of exploitation,
expropriation and accumulation. Widening inequality in much of the
developing South particularly in post settler economies in southern Africa has
heightened demands for greater access to land and other productive sectors
putting land as another new frontier of conflict. Therefore the question
remains, is land reform being driven by a genuine desire for restitution and a
progressive redress of colonial wrongs or whether it is just another pretext
for populist demagoguery and patronage politics? This paper posits that these
two dominant tropes are deeply interwoven within Zimbabwe’s political economics
fabric within its transition as a post colony and the matter is much more
complex and cannot be reduced to such binary terms of reference. The paper
therefore traces the trajectory of land reform in Zimbabwe since independence
until the turn of the millennia and the attendant policy contradictions,
constraints and rationalities that undergird land expropriation and
redistribution.