A Zimbabwean government minister has seized one of the country’s largest citrus fruit estates and forced out the white owner, as senior government and security officials step up a fresh round of farm seizures.
Deputy information minister Bright Matonga grabbed the Lions Vlei farm near Chegutu, about 60km south-west of Harare, according to local press reports, ejecting hundreds of farm workers and putting in jeopardy a Z$7 billion fruit export project that was being implemented at the farm with help from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ).
Matonga is said to have seized the farm with help from the police, and has not yet commented. But displaced farmer, Tom Beattie, told Zim Online that the deputy minister declared himself the new owner of the farm last Sunday, and ordered Beattie to leave immediately. When Beattie demanded to see an official letter from the government authorising Matonga to take over the farm, the minister is said to have said no letter was necessary since the farm was “state land”.
Beattie told the online news-site: “He (Matonga) came and broke the security locks on the gate, started removing the furniture from the house of which the police were even assisting. This is very bad . . . we had secured a loan to do grenadillas for export worth more than $7 billion.”
Farm evictions been stepped up recently, despite public statements by vice president Joseph Msika and RBZ governor Gideon Gono that the government would not allow the few remaining white farmers to be removed from the land. The largely white Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) early this month said a number of white commercial farmers countrywide were being ordered to cease farming by supporters of President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu PF party. About 25 commercial farmers were evicted in the prime farming district of Makoni in the past four weeks while farm invasions continue to be reported in the south-eastern Chipinge farming district.
Since 2000, it is estimated that about 90 per cent of Zimbabwe’s large-scale producing white commercial farmers have been forced off their land.
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