Self-exiled former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Walter Mzembi, has suggested that ZANU PF has been hijacked by imperialists and neoliberals who are now forcing rural people off State land.
Mzembi said the ruling party would not evict landless people even if they occupied State land illegally and would instead, regularise the irregular settlements as happened with the Fast-track Land Resettlement Programme around the year 2000.
He made the comments in response to the Government’s ongoing “No To Land Barons and Illegal Settlements on Land” operation which has resulted in more than 3 700 arrests countrywide.
Posting on X, Mzembi said the law can easily be amended to align with the situation on the ground, adding that nothing stops President Emmerson Mnangagwa from putting the evictions to an end. Said Mzembi:
ZANU PF will not evict the landless even if they are on State land illegally, unless it has been hijacked by imperialists and neoliberals.
Fast Track Land Reform in itself was an illegality according to the laws of the land of the time.
Law is a product of a political process, so it was made legal by the political objectives of addressing skewed land ownership of the time.
So we have a revolutionary precedent that prevents abuse of the landless in the name of the law.
President Mnangagwa is symbolically what the King is in England except we are a Republic but he can stop this bureaucratic nonsense on instruction.
According to human rights lawyers, hundreds of villagers across the country have been evicted from their ancestral land by the Government for allegedly occupying gazetted land without lawful authority.
Some of the villagers have been in occupation of their land for more than 40 years and made tremendous improvements to their land.
Critics have dubbed the ongoing evictions “Murambatsvina 2” alluding to Operation Murambatsvina which was a large-scale, slum clearance operation in urban areas which was conducted in 2005.
An estimated 700 000 people lost their homes and/or livelihoods, with a further 2.4 million people indirectly affected. An estimated 92 460 homes were destroyed during the blitz.
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