APA-Harare (Zimbabwe) Zimbabwe’s three main political leaders have agreed to set up an independent Land Commission whose main task would be to oversee the implementation of a long-awaited audit to rid the country of multiple land owners, sources at the ministry of Lands and Rural Resettlement told APA on Saturday.
The sources in the Ministry of Lands and Rural Resettlement said President Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara agreed that the new commission would be led by non-partisan individuals with experience in farming and land tenure systems.
“The leaders have tentatively agreed on setting up an autonomous Land Commission but we are not sure when the body will be in place because that decision depends on other developments on the political front,” a ministry source told APA.
The commission’s key functions would be to uphold the principles of equitable, transparent and justifiable distribution of land and to advise the government and Parliament on all issues relating to the tenure, distribution and use of land as well as ensuring the orderly development and management of the natural environment for the benefit of present and future generations.
Land remains a divisive issue in Zimbabwe after Mugabe over the past decade drove most of the country’s about 4,500 large-scale white landowners off their farms which he went on to parcel out to landless blacks.
Critics say Mugabe’s cronies – and not ordinary black peasants – benefited the most from the land reforms, with many ending up with up to six farms each against the government’s publicly stated one-man-one-farm policy.
Mugabe has often rejected calls by Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) for a review of the land redistribution programme, saying those behind the calls want to return expropriated farms to their white former owners.
The 2008 political agreement between Mugabe’s ZANU PF party and the MDC that led to formation of the Harare power-sharing government calls for a land audit to establish who owns which land in Zimbabwe in order to eliminate multiple land owners.
The audit has failed to take off because of a shortage of funds and resistance from senior ZANU PF officials who are multiple farm owners.
